andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

Some more random photos from my past.

March ‘04. Lucinda Westerman and that woman I replaced - what was her name? - in the Department of Human Services, Melbourne, Australia

February ‘03. Myself and Caroline at my mother’s exhibition launch

I know, I know, it’s been a while, and worse still after my deciding to try extra hard to post stuff to this site regularly, several times a week. The last post sort of made up for it by being a three-day read, but that’s not the same as posting frequently, is it?

Well, for what it’s worth, I have a notebook full of stuff to write about:

• Living with the girls
• Work and having a blog
• David Donohoe’s new website
• Web browsers and what I do for a living
• Having a blog
• Where’s my software at
• Idea for a marriage
• Foundations 06
• My 2005 (with photos)
• More about Romanians
• Travel plans
• Panda fucking (no, really!)
• Heaps of assorted rubbish

That’s akin to telling the teacher I wrote loads and loads and loads of stuff but… I left it all at home. Not good, and not very helpful at all, because you can’t read the incoherent scribbles in my notebook which are in any case usually there to prompt memories of the witty nonsense I come up with in my head.

Incidentally, the manatee story (where I tell the unsuspecting that I own a manatee) is really getting coverage. It’s a winner.

(edited for extras three entire hours later)
Forgot these, earlier:

• CockPoint Initiative! Cock for communities
• Core - the 2005-2006 Hot Word!
• Capitalists understanding Open Source - an exercise in outright comedy

I should just start writing, and not stop until someone prises my cold, lifeless hands from the keyboard of my dead laptop. Or, I should start running in a North-Westerly direction until I hit the ocean. After that, I’ll start improvising.

You know the way ‘They’ say, on food packaging, ’serve while piping hot’? It’s too hot to eat then! They’re morons! It’s not relevent to anything, I know this, but I had to get it off my chest. It was bothering me.

It’s time for linkage! That’s right, after not posting for weeks on end, I return from the darkness only to irritate everyone with links to stuff they’ve already seen elsewhere three weeks ago, and it was a lot funnier then too! Oddly enough, people actually started asking me what was up, which suggests I may have more than two and a half readers out there. I’ve been beavering away (You like that, huh? Beavering away? Beaver? Makes you think of something else, right? You dirty scumbag!) and up to all sorts of things, which I surely promise I will explain with tedious attention to detail in a follow-on post for my long suffering, moderately loyal readers (Really, if it’s bothering you then check out Dave’s blog. His RSS feed seems to be broken but he makes jokes and seems to do some cool stuff. Just ask Tony.) Yes, I’ve been pretty busy, and some big, interesting things are afoot in my life, but we shall speak of them no more at this time. There are dark forces at work, and we must be wary of them…

Incidentally, this is my second time writing this post. It’s bigger and improved. I lost that last one due to some silly modifications I made to my Firefox browser which I use at work. I still recommend Firefox as the way you view the internet (instead of, for example, Internet Explorer), and some of the extensions are great but be careful. You can really fuck things up with them too.

Many of this weeks links have been filched from Memepool, which is a great place to find weird shit.

Life and nightlife (working and going out) in Harbin, China.
Exactly what it says on the tin, all delivered in pithy prose learnt in Celbridge!
http://haharbin.wordpress.com/
Dylan used to work in Parallel IT, where I work now, but during the rough and tumble of the post-dotcom boom when it all went pear-shaped for a while he founf himself doing a bit of this, a bit of that and made the fateful decision to go and teach English in China. We’ve always kept in touch though, and traded stories (and I still can’t get over his story about him walking in to his local Chinese store on a visit back to Celbridge not so long ago). I discovered a while ago that he actually reads my blog; in fact, I might have inadvertently planted the seeds of an idea, to write about his experiences, when I asked him to write something on this site; instead he went off and set up his own site! So go check it out, it is well written, entertaining and informative.

The best blonde joke on the Internet
The funniest, bestest blonde joke on the Internet, ever!
http://weblog.burningbird.net/2006/01/12/the-joke-is/
Follow the link to get to the best blonde joke on the internet ever.

Random Garfield cartoon generator
Garfield as zen philosophy!
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/natetrue/gar.html
Remember Garfield? Of course you do, Garfield is the poster-child of inane drivel, publisher as a syndicated cartoon the world over; it’s a bit slower these days but there was a time when is was practically a cult. The thing is, Garfield was actually funny once, when the cartoon started (I still have the first three books in the series, before Jim Davis got into a tedious formula) but there’s only so much you can do with a cat before it all gets repetitive. I checked out the website; they’re a real money-making machine with this drivel.

Anyway, the point of this link is that you can, with a random generator, create your own Garfield cartoons. Since it is repetitive, meaningless drivel, it actually works quite well.

Google video selection
The craziest, insanest video collection ever!
http://homepage.mac.com/pockyrevolution/Personal25.html
As some of you are aware, Google recently started putting up videos, and within a short space of time a vast amount of… stuff… was uploaded to their servers, converted to Flash video, and you can go and browse it, such as here. Some of it is, in some people’s eyes, pure gold and the link above is a ‘best of’ compilation by some guy of stuff that really did it for him. Saves you the trouble of having to browse it all yourself.

Incidentally, this whole video venture is Google getting into the ring with Apple and their iTunes Store to see if they can do a better job of selling videos. By all accounts, so far it’s not going very well. Time will tell.

Car Stuck Girls
Scantily dressed girls with cars that are stuck in stuff!
http://www.carstuckgirls.com/
Let’s not mince words here. It is porn. Sick, evil porn! Bad! Evil! But fun.

Right, I better start writing meaningful stuff soon, or people will get irritated.

(edited 21.12.05)
That didn’t work very well, did it? This is a re-edit of an accidental posting I made using the Flock browser which is based on Firefox but has some fancy features for working with blogs. However, it’s apparent that it doesn’t do it very well despite seeming to be able to, and so I ended up putting live a test post. It just goes to show that I shouldn’t try to muck about with pre-release software, as exciting as it all seems.

I’d have taken it down, only now people have commented so it’s too late. Poo.

More adventures to be written about later, we had the company Christmas party on Friday and today I was in the UK on a business trip, all very exciting, and Friday (my first day of Christmas holiday) I’ll be in hospital for some sort of examination. Nothing too serious, but doubtless I’ll be walking funny for a few days. Let your feeble imaginations run riot with that one. Also, there have been many more entertaining posts over on www.ideasforcheapstuff.com with the ever-delightful Tee and her girleens so get over there and check it out.

If any of you, my loyal and ever diminishing readership, want to come over to Los Blancheles for a drink over Christmas, or to meet up for a pint in Dublin, let me know; you’re not only welcome, I invite it.

(edited 21.12.05)
This might come in handy: http://www.andcurve.com/wordpress/contact/

Right, a quick little post about some h0t chixx0rs! That’s right, hot women, and from abroad at that. Now, I know loads and loads of hot women, I’ve dated and had relationships with some of them, and I tell myself this a lot in order to stave off the relentless waves of insecurity and self-loathing. Anyway, as many of you are aware, I was in Romania in Summer of 2003, in Timisoara, and it was one of the more interesting episodes of the last couple of years. I made a few friends there and on Monday night I managed at some point to chat to all of them.

The main square in Timisoara. It’s somewhat Italian, with a hint of Dun Laoghaire

I got there enroute to Serbia (at that stage I still harboured some vague notions of hitting Albania, and maybe looting a few shops or starting a pyramid scheme or something) but I was determined to see where my friends Vlad and Diana were from. Let’s be honest here; in Ireland, until recently, Romania was seen as a very distant country, a grim, nuclear wasteland inhabited by ‘Big Issue’-wielding Gypsies and ruled by Communists. You weren’t likely to meet any ‘Romanians’ in Ireland other than those Gypsies. And then, one day, this guy starts working in the company. He’s dark, latin and somewhat brooding, in a conflicted way. He looks a little bit like Keanu Reeves after a hard night on the town and could do with a shave. He doesn’t say much. And then we find out he is Romanian! A real, live Romanian, who isn’t looking for small change for his poor baby, and in fact doesn’t look as if he’ll start stealing anything! He’s called - get this - Vlad! You know? Vlad the Impaler! From Transylvannia! Dracula! So, that was impressive, and instantly put paid to a lot of stereotypes caused by years of selling a lousy magazine by Roma Gypsies (whose roots are in India, originally). I didn’t know that Romanian was a latin language, or that the country is a very young one, while being a very old nation with it’s roots directly traceable to Roman times… It was every bit as eye-opening as when I first got to know Petr and then Pavel, and learnt about Czech history, lanuage and culture.

Vlad and Diana, Romanians at play. They play a lot, and then discuss it

So, I got there on the train from Budapest in Hungary, and immediately you could see that these were a different race of people altogether to the reserved and subdued Hungarians. They were like Italians, relaxed, animated at times… Latin. Now, I had a series of adventures there right from the outset but that’s not what I’m getting at here; it’s the connections between people. I had a set of numbers for contacts to call, a certain Ilca (I later discovered by trial and error that his first name is Marius and Ilca is his second name. That is Vlad for you.) and Roxana, a friend of Diana’s. Also, there was Horea, who knows both of them, more or less. Marius was off on holiday by the Black Sea, but organised a friend of his to go and meet me - a girl by the name of Oana - something which Horea, once I’d met him and explained the situation, found intriguing and mystifying (which made me wonder if she was a nutcase or something). Actually, I’d say that Marius was hedging his bets; on the off-chance I found Horea hard work, then I was very unlikely to find Oana hard work. I doubt anyone would. As it happened, Oana also brought her friend Michelle and I brought gaggle of Americans I’d met in the hotel I stayed in earlier that day. We all hit it off and I even got my head around Horea’s sharp sense of humour, and they all spoke fantastic Engleza. Something I noticed, in fact, was that by and large almost all younger people there spoke very good English; I don’t neccessarily see it as a good thing, or a cultural advantage, but it was very helpful. Romanians are generally good at language, possibly because Romanian has a Latin base but also has smatterings of Slavic, Germanic and Hungarian in it.

So, that is how I met Oana, who I was chatting to several nights this week. It seems she switched on Yahoo! Messenger for one reason or another last Monday, and lo and behold! I’m on all the time, myself, thanks to the miracle of broadband. We hadn’t talked in quite a while, but we’ll probably chat a lot more now, since we can waffle away online.
Oana (on the left) and Adina eating famous Tiramisu. They were the Popular Girls, and that was quite a night.

Anyway, I stayed in Horea’s (tiny) apartment that night, and caused all sorts of mayhem thanks to a devastating mix of alcohol and dehydration. He headed off on his holidays the next day, leaving me to fend for myself… I also had to catch up with Roxana who was just back from a Hungarian pop/rock festival, and Oana was going to put me in touch with someone who had a place to stay. Also, her friend was having a party that night, which I’d have to go to.

I met up with Roxana, and we hit it off and hung out, after I tried a MacDonalds. Athough I generally boycott the Mac, Vlad had assured me that they’re wayyyyy better in Timisoara. They’re not. They’re just as crap there as here, even though the service is marginally snappier. We went out on the town, rounded up Roxana’s friend Sorin, and went to Oana’s friend’s party…

Roxana at a recent concert, doing her thing. She does that a lot. Concerts, I mean.

As it turned out, Oana knew Sorin too! Whoa. Small world. She’d never met Roxana before though. Great night was had there, it was a lot of fun, Sorin jumped into the pool, some people drank a lot of tequila, and there was a lot of crazy dancing and great music. I used to chat to Roxana a lot online, since we were both at work at more or less the same time, and both somewhat bored. However, I have removed such things from my PC now, and Roxana roams Romania doing French-Romanian interpreting for some people studying factories or something.

Like I said, Oana put me in touch with a guy who had a place to stay. I really didn’t want to stay in the hotel again because although it wasn’t too expensive for me, it’s not what I wanted to experience as part of the travel, and Timisoara’s only hostel had been closed for the summer for some reason. That guy was Faust, who Oana knew somehow (I heard more about that from Faust later, but I’ll keep that to myself for now). Faust talked in a Chicago accent; I initially figured that he’d learnt his English and indeed his manner from watching too much MTV, but as I got to know him better, I realised that he was actually over for a holiday from Chicago, where he was hanging out with the locals. I’d go so far as to say that he was a black guy in a white body… He rented me his grandparent’s apartment for €10 a night (which didn’t go down very well with anyone else, but he needed the money for his holiday in the Black Sea so he could bang some chick his girlfriend didn’t know about) which was fine for me.

Anyway, after variously hanging out with Roxana or Oana, I went for drinks with Faust one afternoon, and while we were sitting in the cafe (Papillon, for anyone who’s been there) some girls were trying to get Faust’s attention. Fabulous, beautiful girls… Faust ignored them. Then, after about 20 minutes of us talking, Faust decided we’d go and sit with them for a bit, which is how I met Ramona.

Ramona, demonstrating the art of Romanian glamour. She has a small cat, too.

After a few minutes (where Ramona’s friend flirted with me; I have beautiful eyes!) Ramona decided I needed a tour of Timisoara, and to explain some of the local history and culture. This is, of course, how I got to know Ramona. We didn’t have too much contact until earlier this year, when she finished college (the same course that Vlad did, I believe) and got broadband at home, so we’ve been chatting a lot since then.

It goes to show the whole ‘6 degrees of separation’ principle, and how close people are to each other without realising it… Neither Oana nor Ramona know Vlad or Diana, and Ramona’s connection to them is through Oana via Faust, even though Ramona doesn’t know Oana. So, when all three of them were online within an hour, well, it was a strange but good feeling which inspired me to relate the story about Kevin in Timisoara, and was a fantastic excuse to post photos of stunning h0t chixx0rs.

And thanks again to Oana, Roxana and Ramona for helping me out, showing me around and generally making sure I had a good time (and thanks also to Horea, Marius, Faust and last but definitely not least, Vlad and Diana). This is the short, five minute version, but it’ll do

(footnote: added 16.12.05)
Romania: in case I wasn’t clear about it, Romania is a fantastic place. Yes, it is poor, it needs work but it’s also changing rapidly. It’s like Ireland was only a few decades ago, but people really seem to be trying to move things forward. I know I wasn’t there long but it left a good impression on me.
Engleza: Yes, I’m labouring the point. But I haven’t gotten my head around that fact that Roxana (for example) speaks English better than I do. Oana looks like coming a close second, my jaw was flapping loosely at some of her constructions the other day. And Diana, well, you can tell that she’s not a native speaker because her English is far too good, it’s technically flawless, which always a give-away. Vlad and Ramona are good too, but Vlad is more interested in body language and words for peculiar and probably illegal sex acts; I’d say his collection of words is pretty good now. He speaks buna engleza when he needs to.
h0t chixx0rs: I came across this phrase while looking some article on the web. It’s cool. I made the Romanian adventure before I lost my cherry, so I wasn’t actively trying to chase women, I just (as I explained above) met lots of them. What a waste you may think, but I made good friends and that’s what matters at the end of the day.

Help yourself to questions and if anyone wants to add or correct any part of that, please do…