Wow.  After eleven years as Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern is to resign next month. He said that it has nothing to do with the ongoing investigation of his finances to see if he took backhanders hen he was in office. "I know in my heart of hearts I have done no wrong and wronged no-one." said Ahern today.  All I know so far is from the BBC, but I wonder what the real reason is?

So, I had a spam email this morning from PayPal informing me that I may have recieved potentially fraudulent funds.  I was just about to delete it when I noticed that the amount it referenced was the same as the payment I had just received for a sale on ebay.  It also didn't look much like your typical scam.  There were no links in it, and it told me to log on to the PayPal site (again, without a link) and check.  Sure enough, the transaction was marked as "Pending Reversed".  So now I've lost the £10 postage I used on the package, and may have a shit name with PayPal.  Welcome to Saturday.

Columbia is gone, and George Bush gave a moving speech yesterday. That speech disturbed me, because he appeared to be genuinely moved, sensitive to, and caring of his subject matter. I haven't felt that from anything he has ever said before, even going back to September 11th 2001. That his speech did affect me gives me cause for concern... could it be that in a few days time he'll use his new-found acting abilities to persuade us that a war on Iraq is the right thing to do? Or could it be that he really was as upset as he appeared, in which case I applaud him for being human. Who knows. Right now, I don't care that much, as I have to go to the hardware shop and get a pipe for the washing machine.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

I've been crap at updating again... sorry. Work is crazy at the moment, and the rest of the time I've been playing E&B or working on an items database site I've been building to complement one of my characters. I've just been promoted to level 75, and joined a guild. More later... maybe ;-)

Today was the day I met Raymond E. Feist. I had known for a while that he was going to do a speaking and signing event in Borders, but hadn't really gotten that excited about it until this evening when we were waiting for it to happen. There was another author there, and they were going to have a joint discussion about the creation of fantasy fiction, and then do a signing. Ray has just released the first book in his new series (the third Riftwar), and co-incidentally the 20th annivresary edition of Magician is just about to hit the streets too. When myself and Dave got to Borders, about two hours early, there were seven copies of Magician there. We immediately bought four of them, and then debated just how unfair it would be to the other people there if we bought the other three and sold them on ebay ;-) The guys in the shop said that they were going to be fairly rare - rare enough that those seven copies were maybe the only ones they could get their hands on in total. So you can imagine how happy I am that I have one, and that I have it dedicated to me by the Master himself! When Ray finally arrived, I was overcome by the kind of buzz I've had at concerts performed by groups I've REALLY loved. It surprised me how powerful it felt, as I hadn't expected such a serious case of hero-worship when meeting him. Anyway, the talk was great. Ray is a fantastic speaker, with a lot of presence, and a very ironic wit which you only glance in his work. He surprised me by saying that his emotions bled into his work more than I had suspected... after his divorce he wrote several pages of one of his books, along the lines of "the bitch must die... the bitch must die", and when he met his new girlfriend eighteen months ago, there were several pages of "women are fantastic and great and we must love them". I'm going to see if I can track down where, if any, there bits are in the books he wrote. Could be interesting ;-) Anyway, it was a brilliant evening. I came home and must have said to Anna about a hundred times so far...
"I met Raymond Feist tonight!"

This has to be one of the best things I've ever seen printed on a "respectable" news site : Five fire crews rushed to the scene of a fire at a scrapyard on the docks in Dublin city centre today.
A fire broke out the yard on Pigeon House Road in the city at lunchtime. The fire services have said the fire is not serious and no premises are in danger.
An ireland.com reporter, at the scene, said the smoke is billowing from the fire, and there are ambulances and a helicopter have arrived.
"The fire has caused a lot of smoke but no premises, industrial, commercial or private are at risk. Nobody has been injured," a spokesman for the fire services said.
- From Ireland.com

A couple of cool things happened today. I was on the tube coming home from work, and there was a guy sitting beside me, reading a printout of the AOL 6.0 help file. I asked him what he though of it, and he said it wasn't brilliant, so I said "Thanks... thats MY helpfile you're talking about!" (Actually it was John, but what the hell). We got talking, and I told him he should upgrade to 7.0, so he went away happy. That was my good deed for the day. The other cool thing was that I was reading Wired on my PDA on the tube, and I came across an article about this new piece of art which has been built in Dublin. Its an interactive cloud which is projected in 3D above the new hopstore bar in Dublin. The piece was done by a local artist called Grace Weir, whom I've worked with on a previous piece she did... which is mentioned in the article :-))) If you read it, look for the bit about the piece cast in concrete on a wall in Dublin - there's a mention of using computer aided design to superimpose a relief of clouds over a star map over a viking ship. I was the lucky one who did the CAD work for that - layering three images on top of each other, rasterising them, and then blowing it up to print out on sheets of A1paper covering about 10x3 meters. Each sheet was used as a template to make concrete blocks with different shades of concrete showing the different elements. It looks pretty good, its wrapped around a corner of one of the buildings up at the top of Temple Bar where the old Viking wall is :-)

Another plane has crashed in New York. It was an America Airlines A-300 from JFK to Santo Dominigo. No more information is available yet, check the full story at CNN.