a funny thing happened on the way to town.

things that made me smile, giggle, or otherwise express amusement:

• A van (Nor'n Ireland registration plates) painted up with the slogan, "MAN & VAN".
• A guy crossing himself as he passed the church by Pearse Station. On a bike.
• Nobody knowing where the Dalkey Shuttle bus was coming from or going to.
• Meeting a whole lot of people and not knowing them, again.
• Being recognised as "the guy with that website".
• A red-haired Italian guy.

A fun night, obviously, was had by waider.

drinkin' buddies

So we're in a karaoke bar (what the hell am I doing in a karaoke bar? Oh, yeah. cherchez la femme) and we get talking to these two Italian guys sitting next to us. One of 'em's got flaming red hair, an artifact of some Irish ancestry, and the other looks a bit like Jeremy Irons. I get talking to Jeremy Irons guy and it turns out he's a music producer. I've just now googled, because, you know, you can't believe everything you hear in a bar, and lo, I was indeed drinking with the guy behind Robert Miles, Planet Funk, Spiller's Groovejet, and hugely influential in the '80s and '90s DJ scene in Italy. Yeesh. Should've asked for a business card or something...

life imitates art

Italian guy discovers buried Roman villa through Google Maps - wasn't this part of the setup for some book or another? The vague details I recall involve the site being revealed as shadows in an overhead shot, but utterly invisible from on-site unless you stood at just the right place at the right time. And there was something about sealed jars in catacombs containing some sort of virus, too. I initially thought I might be thinking of Crichton's Congo, but it's not that.

still somehow not getting the point

I'm obviously not stating this point clearly enough for interested parties to understand:

The Sony Network Walkman devices that I have reverse-engineered file formats for support MP3 files natively. If you use the cunningly named MP3FileManager application, which is small enough to keep on the device, you get native MP3 support. It obfuscates the files somewhat, but it does not transcode or otherwise modify the actual audio data.

Every time Engadget or Gizmodo or whoever mentions a Sony player, this stupid point comes up again and again and again from people who wouldn't know an MP3 file if it bit them in the ass, and I'm tired of reading it. Especially when I try to gently correct the mistaken impressions through helpfully pointing out that I can read the damned files and convert them right back into the MP3s they came from with nothing more than a file pointer and a XOR operator. I think Sony are idiots for not making it more native, i.e. a mountable device with actual MP3 data stored "raw", but I think people should actually know what they're talking about when they bitch about this sort of thing.

That is all.