Dublin City Marathon 2009 – Under my belt!
I was shooting for a 4hour finish in the Dublin City Marathon on Monday, but I somehow managed to do better than that… I completed it in 3.44 – not bad at all for my first Marathon!
It was the most amazing experience ever and I enjoyed every single millisecond of it.
It was a lot easier than I was anticipating actually and that surprised me. I didn’t get hung up on mileage, I just knew I had to sustain a decent pace for about 4 hours and I focussed on that. The weather was perfect; sun shining down for the duration of it, yet it was crisp enough that you didn’t overheat. I felt like a wild monkey at times because children were feeding me jellies from the sidelines on little plates. When I ran past them, I grabbed such handfuls that their plates toppled and the remainder of their jellies fell onto the ground, as I stomped away stuffing them in my mouth… the people standing at the sidelines cheering us all on really makes the world of difference. I found I ran faster in the designated cheering zones than anywhere else and it’s cuz they were shouting encouraging things and making us feel good about ourselves. Encouragement does wonderful things for the psyche begorrah…
Whilst I was limping to the airport like an old woman, I got an email from my friend Tom, who informed me that I might qualify for automatic entry to the London Marathon, based on my time, sex and age. Without further ado, I looked into it and it looks like I just might… The cut off time was 3.45 and I did it in 3.44 and 54 seconds. If I finished another 6 seconds later I wouldn’t qualify! I then remembered the point where I was running through a cheering zone and I got an almerciful burst of energy; with 2.2 miles to go, I just started sprinting like a madwoman thinking I could sustain that until the end. I heard people say “Jeeze yer wan is flying it!” ha! I managed to keep it up for 2 minutes and then I went back to my usual pace, feeling a bit wobbly. I think if I didn’t do that then, I would have come in later than 3.45
I am confused about one thing though and that’s the times. Mine are as follows:
My results
I started my own watch timer as I crossed the black mat (the official starting point). When I finished, my watch said: 3.43, the Marathon Timer Clock said 3.47.
The race website said my finish time was 3.44 and my chip time was 3.47. Surely they have the chip time and the finish time mixed up, do they? How could your chip time be higher than your finish time? I can’t get my head ’round it at all…
Anyway, well done to all of you who ran…
Doggy in the window…
I whizz past this house every evening and usually this fella is looking out the window. He always clocks me and I wave at him so we can have some interaction.
He always looks confused when I wave… You know when you see someone you think you know? And you say hello to them… and then they look at you strange and you realise it’s not the person you thought it was…Well, that’s how he looks at me… He’s kinda snobby. I like him though… I wanna make friends with him…
A hospital visit for my pride and joy…
Well this is it.
My laptop is going into hospital tonight.
It is lying on my bed as I type and it’s in it’s bag ready to be airlifted at 4.30pm this evening. I would love to be able to bring it in right now but unfortunately I had to come to work, this enables me to pay for the care and attention it will receive at the hospital y’see, that’s how it works. I am getting off an hour earlier though to bring it in.
I won’t stop for something to eat, I will grab my laptop and go.
My laptop has cancer.
Cancer of the graphic chip.
It’s in a lot of pain and it’s got a dangerously high temperature, which is common for it’s breed. I didn’t sleep a wink last night worrying about it. I have bombarded my brothers phone with constant texts asking him questions. I have bored everyone within earshot about my worries and fears. I have dreamt about it on Friday night and again on Saturday night. It’s all I have thought about all weekend. I have researched it’s symptoms online and have come away frightened by chatting with fellow forum-mites who tell me it’s fit for the scrap heap.
I am afraid it will be a terminal illness but the man in the repair shop sounded hopeful. His name is Steve. We had a little diagnostic chat about it’s symptoms and I told him about what the man in the shop said and he kinda got annoyed with me and told me not to listen to those guys as they ‘don’t have the knowledge’. Steve said he has special thermal paste, I am not sure what that’s for but he even invited me to watch a bit of the operation and to look at the machines. I said I would be very interested in that.
Anyway, I have to find a way to make the next four hours go quickly.
I will let you know the outcome of this grave situation.
Laptop is banjaxed…
About 15 months ago I purchased a lovely Sony Vaio VGN-FZ21Z Laptop. It was my pride and joy and from that moment on I must have spent at least six hours a day looking at it. It had a year warranty which expired just three months ago and like clockwork, it started giving me gyp. I am unable to bring it back to the shop now so I would like to diagnose whether it is a hardware or software issue so I can decide what to do next.
I have the CD which enables me to revert it to its factory settings, I don’t want to have to take this route as I will have to re-install all of my programs etc.
Another option would be to buy a hard drive and swap it with the one I have in my laptop, which would determine if it was a hard drive issue immediately and I wouldn’t run the risk of losing all my programs.
However, something tells me it is not a hard drive issue as there has been no freezing or crashing and everything is fully functional.
Here are the symptoms:
My laptop has major graphics distortion. Multi coloured Zig-zags, stripes, patterns, fuzzy lines are displayed and the resolution has been altered also, so everything is massive! I try to get the resolution back to normal but it completely ignores my command. I shut it down & restart it but it doesn’t change a thing…
If I switch it off using the off button and then turn it on again, this sometimes brings it back to normal. It is working perfectly at the moment; I don’t expect it will stay that way for long though. In the good ole days, this is what my normal login screen looked like…
And now look at it!
Honestly, this is really traumatic! I feel like I am about to lose a limb…
Last night after tinkering with it and trying to bring it back from it’s serious illness, I kinda felt like I was ill too…
Here are some other shots of it acting completely mental. I don’t know why it is doing this to me, we were such buds.
What the hell is this all about:
And this carry on:
Snowdrops!
And now it’s giving me lip and being all uncooperative about stuff:
And why is it enlarging it’s text so much, like it thinks I am half blind or something.
So I went out last night in a panic and bought an external hard drive and copied everything over to it.
I then deleted everything from my Laptop. I am running Cyberscrub Privacy Suite right now which erases previously deleted files beyond recovery. I am doing this in case i have to hand it into the Laptop hospital to have an operation (I have turned into a psycho-paranoid freak when it comes to data).
It came with 2GB of Ram but I upgraded it to 4GB, even though it is unable to utilise the full 4GB. I think it can only use up to 3GB or something like that.
It has a built in graphics card which I am told is built into the motherboard. I am inclined to think it may be a graphics card corruption or something, but who knows? After I have wiped my entire laptop I am going to revert it to factory settings, so if you don’t hear from me, it means it completely ruined it altogether and I have been blown out of cyber space entirely.
Goodbye Cruel CyberWorld…
Foxes in the witching hour
I was woken up by the strangest noise at three o clock this morning
My curtains twitched and I had a good gawk out.
The culprit was standing under my bedroom window in the form of a four legged ginger haired dog, they call a fox.
I grabbed my camera from where it hangs from a strange protruding thing that comes from the wall (I never quite figured out what the hell that thing was anyway, some sort of pipe that was amputated and now its a gammy stump anyway, its a grand place to hang my camera), all my life I’ve had really strange things like that in my bedroom. I shove my camera out the window, the settings were bad and I ended up blinding him with this photo so I turned off the flash.
The poor auld fella…
He sat in the patch of grass outside my flat for another 10 mins but there was no further reply from the far off fox, I felt sad for him because he was really trying to hard to communicate with him and he had been waiting for him there for ages.
heard him in Croydon so I hope nothing bad happened his friend because there was nothing but silence in the distance thereafter.Then about five minutes later, an absolute tub of a knackered looking fox came walking over to him from a different direction and sort of lingered around for a split second to see what all the fuss was about, he pissed on a small tree close by and then wandered off into the dead of night.
He disappeared down a side street and I wondered where the hell he was off to and where do the all the urban foxes live… Anyway, eventually the fox out front gave up and walked off uneasily, I was really sad for him. I went back to sleep thinking of him and when I woke up I had to look at my camera to see if it was real or a dream!
Man Eats Sandwich
I was walking through London Bridge Station there with a couple of pints in me and there was a fella eating his sandwich and I looked at him and jesus he was so funny. He was really offended when I laughed at him, there he was sitting on the bench stuffing a sandwich into his face quicker than his teeth could process it.
Why that made me laugh, Jesus I dunno… It’s just that that sandwich didn’t have a chance! It kinda made me nervous. It looked so helpless, like a lamb to the slaughter it was, and it being shoved into his mouth helpless… Feckin hell I am glad I am not a sandwich!
Fishy thinkin’
I went to sleep at 8pm last night because my head was like an overcrowded fish tank and all the little fishies, my thoughts; circling round and round, dashing and darting with no way out and no resolve. Woke up this morning and they’re all still there, ready and waiting for another day of around and around and around…
Hunting high and low
I bought a bar of chocolate as a Christmas present for my friend and I hid it out of my sight in case I would be tempted to rip its clothes off and throw it down me gullet.
Now I can’t find it anywhere… I would really like to eat it now…I would have bought another one for my friend…
….
London by Twilight…
I had the most glorious morning so far… I hopped on my bike at an almerciful hour and proceeded to cycle through the crack a dawn and out the other side and into the day.
Cycling through London at that hour is like going on a little adventure, there’s something magical about the moment before the crack a dawn I tellya.
Anyway, I was going to put a bag a rubbish in the wheelie bin before I left, when I stopped in my tracks cuz there was a massive spider and he had created a huge web in between me and the bins (that reminds me, I dreamt of a furry kinda half-animal-half-bumblebee thing getting trapped in a cobweb last night, and I freed him using a ruler anyway, that’s beside the point) so I didn’t bother putting out the rubbish for two reasons, one being that his web was so impressive, it was a mansion of a web, I would hate to be the one to tear it to pieces by walking through it. The second reason is because I am terrified of spiders and wouldn’t risk the leggy fella climbing on top of me…
So I threw the bag a rubbish in the front door and put my leg over the bike and zoomed off into the day. I have been leaving at the same time each morning and isn’t familiarity a great thing cuz there was a couple of mornings this week where I had more than one encounter with the same animal on my route to work. A black Cat crossed my path three times this week, in the exact same spot and the exact same time! I warned him out loud this morning to watch himself on the road; I really would hate to see some black cat pizza concoction on the road when I come back that same route on Monday.
I also have met a fox crossing the road in front of me, again, the same spot at the same time, I just know it was the same fella… y’know when you just know, dontcha…
I dingled my bell at the fox. I did that cuz I kinda thought that would keep him on his guard and make him feel like I am the enemy. The foxes are getting too relaxed around people… they will get beaten up if they continue like this so I wanted to keep him on his toes (claws). I secretly liked him though, he was so cute.
I flew down the hill at breakneck speed after my encounter with the fox, it was lovely and no car or no person or anything in my way, I thought of this line from Patrick Kavanagh’s Poem:
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
When it’s like that I like to cycle in the middle of the road. It’s such an exhilarating experience, cycling a bike… not all the time, but every so often I have moments where everything is just right… and I think I have one over all the people in the bus. Because of this feeling, I had a huge urge to wave at people but there wasn’t anyone in any of the buses that passed by so I went to work bursting with unspent waves.
Anyway, when I got to the path along the Thames, my morning peaked… cuz the sky and the view across the river was just breathtaking I had to stop and take a photo for you…
Rage against the Machine
Right, I have a coupla veins hanging out the side of my head. Because of Rage. Red blooded, Bubbling, Boiling Red Hot RAGE!
On Saturday Night I purchased SimCity Online at a MegaOnline Corporate E-Store (EA Store). I downloaded it anyway and started playing it away happily.
I was in my glory, building houses & playing Ruler of the City. I had built an incredible city where all my Sims were ecstatic and I had millions in the bank, when the floggin’ thing crashes on me. Fair enough, you expect it to happen now and then, but it proceeded to crash every 10 minutes thereafter. I was so fed up with it that I went online to see if I could get a refund, the website said I was entitled to a refund up to a month after purchase, great stuff.
So I click onto the Customer Service Area of the Site. I click on the Request a refund link, it doesn’t work, it brings me back to the Home Page, repeatedly, every time I tried this, I got more and more frustrated.
I click on the Contact Us tab, it asks me for my User Name, eh, I wasn’t provided with a User Name nor did I create one when I opened the account the previous day.
So I click on “Request a reminder for your User Name” and I get an email which should give me it. I open up the email and it thanks me for being a valued customer, and goes on to say, here is your User Name:
- Followed by a blank!
Ah you’re taking the piss now.
I really couldn’t believe what was unravelling before my very eyes. I respond to the email like an Anti-Christ saying something like gimme the god damn User Name wilya? And I get an immediate response saying:
“Greetings,
The e-mail address you have written to is unable to receive incoming messages. Your response is important to us……” blah blah blah
So I desperately comb the website for a phone number of any kind. No joy! Can you believe it?
At this point it’s the early hours of the morning and I am way too wound up to go to sleep. I was knackered at work today because I only got 4 and three-quarters hours sleep because of this.
So I start googling options to try to find the floggin’ number, I then discover to my horror that I am not alone, half the nation are on forums foaming at the mouth because of this company.
I swear ta God, I am taking this all the way. I am not letting them get away with this…
