This is a slightly different take on a familiar story. Employees hassle their boss for a pay rise. He doesn’t pay. They hassle further. He still doesn’t pay. People get angry, a gun is produced someone goes on the rampage and two people end up dead.

Except in this case it is the boss that goes loco and shoots the employees. Traditionally isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

Sometimes I wonder why I look at the news at all. It appears office printers are killing us, Google is wasting too much of everyone’s electricity by being in white and then I didn’t win the lotto.

The last one is particulary annoying as I had my new house in Dalkey picked out, Laura had selected a boat, we ha agreed on high tailing it immediately to New York for a “we have just quit work break”, and I had decided I was going to take a few weeks in Chamonix to find an Alpine pad there. And then because of some screw up with the Lotto computers the prize went to a family in Cork instead. Sod.

Now how do I tell Laura that I spent all of this month’s mortgage payment on lottery tickets?

I am taking next week off work. I don’t really have much to do so I will be pottering for the week. I might make it out to the west for a few days and if Laura can get the time we will do some sailing as well.

When you are getting ready for holidays I think you flip into one of two states. Either mental busy as you try and get things sorted before you go. Or a turgid malaise as you can’t be bothered doing any work as you are already out the door sitting on the beach. I think I am closer to the latter at the moment.

What are your feelings on cats? Over the years I have mellowed a bit and would describe myself as neutral on them. But here is a story about a cat that probably scares the living shit out of people when they see it coming.

Catherine posted a comment on the yacht picture I have below (which I will reshow here):

She tells me that the boat is Soufriere a Spirit 54. More interestingly this is James Bond’s yacht. I am not sure if Catherine meant this was the same boat, or just one of that class.

It still is a beautiful boat though.

Now pottering around the Spirit Yachts site I discovered that the much smaller Spirit 46 is stg£250,000. They have a Spirit 56 as a brokerage sale for stg£750,000.

So what they hell are MI6 paying their spies that they can afford to take early retirement and head off pottering on boats like this?

Soufriere is owned by Stephen O’Flaherty, of the O’Flaherty family. They own Motor Distributors Limited which (up until recently anyway) has the Irish franchise for Mercedes, Audi and Volkswagen. A quick Google shows that in 2005 the O’Flaherty’s made €20m from MDL. Stephen can certainly afford to buy a Spirit Yacht. But if he is getting one second hand from James Bond I would make sure it has a very thorough survey first.

The latest study says the same thing people in the know have been saying for ages. People that claim to suffer from “Electrosensitivity” are fooling themselves. Their symptoms are real, but they are self generated.

Reading the article I saw this statement:

“the HPA research did not consider the effects of waves (my emphasis) from phone masts, as most of the studies looking at electrical sensitivity were carried out before they were widely introduced.”

I work in the telecoms industry, I have 2 third level engineering qualifications, and I have an active interest in science and physics. I have no idea what that statement means.

It could be electromagnetic waves, but what sort of mobile phone mast ever worked without EM waves?

With all the travel I do I manage to get through a lot of books. Unfortunately they all seem to pile up a bit. There are boxes and shelves full of history, current affairs, sci-fi, novels and a few other eclectic genres of reading material.

Most I enjoyed, and a few I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. But I can only really keep a few to be re-read. Mostly the history books, and some of the good science ones. The rest need to be sent out into the real world to get new owners.

I was looking at putting them up on Amazon’s marketplace. But they will only let you post if you are in the UK. I would rather not drop the lot off in a second hand bok shop as I wouldn’t get much of a price for them in bulk.

So does anyone know of a good outlet for second books that Irish people can use?

If/when I win the €12m lottery jackpot this evening I would intend to remain at work.

I want to see how long it take until I get fired for gloating, being insufferably smug and damaging everyone elses morale.

All around Dublin there are billboards encouraging people to conserve water. They ask the particular question “Is your garden soaking up Dublin’s drinking water”.

The question I immediately thought of when I saw this is – why are people being given drinking water for their gardens?

In other parts of the world there are separate water supplies. One is potable, i.e. for drinking. And then there is another non-potable one for industrial use, gardens, car washing and so on.

It seems crazy to be giving people a relatively expensive and difficult to produce high quality water supply for them to then dump it on their shrubs.

The sooner we bring in consumption based water charging the better.

Pottering around Dell’s site last week I discovered that my ill PC still had 28 days of warranty left. There’s great timing. Having figured out that it was the graphics card that was on the fritz I then rang them last Wednesday to arrange a replacement.

I was very very surprised to be talking to a live human within 90 seconds of dialing. I talked through my problem. The guy on the phone saw I knew what I was talking about, I had done the sensible checks and I had pretty much nailed what was broken. He agreed to send out a new graphics card. As I was on a training course at the end of the week we agreed the delivery was to happen today. The whole call took 22 minutes. And today the man from UPS dropped the card off 5 minutes ago.

I am stunned at the huge improvement in Dell’s customer service. The last time I had to deal with them I remember spending over 90 minutes on hold, delays, and swearing at the frustration and incompetence I got from them. The really seem to have got their act together. Kudos Dell.

I just hope the new card works now…