Feckoff.net

Yes indeed, at midnight tonight it will be illegal for retailers to sell packs of cigarettes smaller than a 20 pack. Kind of. They’re getting a fuzzily defined grace period to get rid of their existing stocks of 10s. Benson & Hedges, ever the cunning tobacco industry dogs, now sell 20 packs with two 10-boxes inside. Cunning. I know the idea is to deter young people from smoking by making cigarettes more expensive to acquire, but this ain’t gonna work. They’ll just do one of two things: Go halves with a friend, or (*shock*) save up the massive €6.something that a 20 pack costs and smoke ‘em over the same period they’d smoke two packs of 10!

I’m a non-smoker and don’t like being surrounded by smelly cigarette smoke (thank you smoking ban!), but this is just retarded. That said, aren’t Ireland and the UK the only places where cigarettes are available in 10 packs? I’ve never seen anything but 20s overseas.

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Much to my dismay, Fianna Fáil appear to be romping home to a possible overall majority this evening, but on the up side the PD’s have been all but destroyed. Michael McDowell lost his seat a few minutes ago, and the only one currently elected is Mary Harney, and from what I can tell from RTE’s coverage, there only exists the possibility of them winning one more seat, in Galway.

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Its finally here, May 24th - polling day! Get out and vote. Now! If you don’t you have no right to whinge and moan when the next government fuck things up!

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I just saw the first episode of this new US show, Dexter, and I like it a lot. Think of it as an evil CSI Miami, without the bling bling. Of course, when I say “new” I mean “new here”. The first season has already finished its run in the US, and shooting of the second started this week. FX are showing it in the UK and Ireland on Sky Digital starting in July.

Highly recommended viewing

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Get out and vote on Thursday!

Spotted earlier today on boards.ie

Today I switched my mobile phone contract over from O2 to 3. I’ve been using O2 for about five years but their lack of any upgrade offer or anything else as an incentive for me to renew my contract means they’re out the door

I joined 3 on their cheapest tarriff (€19 - 100 minutes to all networks) and got a lovely Sony Ericsson K800i from them. Surprisingly I actually get 3G coverage at home. I also went for the €5.99 mobile broadband add-on which gives me 100MB worth of internet traffic per month - perfect for frequent email/news access. They offer unlimited traffic for €20 a month on top of your tarriff, though I’m sure they mean unlimited in the ridiculous Irish ISP sense of the word - i.e. unlimited as long as we don’t think you’re using it too much.

Anyways - K800i - awesome phone. I had a K750i on O2 (who are dragging their heels about unlocking it) and that was a good phone, but this is a great step up. Lovely high-res screen and 3 megapixel camera. That’s nice, but as usual with phone cams and their tiny, tiny lenses the image quality is not comparable to a proper 3MP digital camera. The K750i’s charger and accessories are compatible with the K800i also.

3’s network coverage here in Kilkenny seems pretty good, I haven’t seen any non-3G spots yet, although I’d put money on it not being available where I work. Word has it that 3 users get serviced by Vodafone’s network in areas where they have no coverage, which suits me as Vodafone’s network has always had excellent coverage around here.

The only problem I’ve had so far is that the mobile broadband add-on wasn’t working at first, but that was quickly resolved by a call to customer service, where (*shock*) I didn’t have to hold in a queue before getting served.

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Yes, mere days after receiving a 45 day prison sentence for driving whilst banned for drink driving, Paris Hilton was spotted driving her Bentley around Los Angeles. She has some kind of stupid petition going to try to save her ass from going to jail. In it she claimed that she should be spared prison time because “she provides beauty and excitement to our otherwise mundane lives”. Fuck you, Paris. Fortunately there’s a counter-petition
She should get to spend her time with the general population in prison, I’m sure she could make all sorts of lovely new friends there.

As an aside, the jail Paris petition has over 65,000 signatures at the time of writing!
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I was a huge fan of the original Sam & Max Hit the Road game back in 1993. It had great voice acting (a game with full digital audio speech instead of text was real high tech stuff for the time), twisted humour and equally twisted puzzles. It’s been a long time. Graphic adventure games have died a death over the years since. Besides the occasional Broken Sword game once every few years, it has been a pretty barren period for the genre. A much anticipated new Sam & Max game from LucasArts was canned during this time too.

Late last year Telltale Games released the first of six episodes of “season 1″ of a new Sam & Max game. This seems to have been the first good and successful attempt at affordable, episodic gaming. Fair play to them - you can buy each episode for US $8.95, or the whole lot for $34.95. They’ll even discount the price of any episode you already purchased if you want to upgrade to the full six-pack. The sixth episode was released last week. I just finished playing through the first episode last night, and it was high quality stuff. Sam & Max’s world successfully made the transition to 3D, which I can’t say for a lot of other giants of the 2D era, such as Worms. The voice acting is still great, although not done by the same people as in the original game. The only annoyance I have with the game is the fact that it does not support widescreen resolutions at all. I had to configure my graphics card to just display it with borders on the side to avoid stretching the picture.

Its an excellent game. If you like adventure games, go buy it. Now. Its cheap. It comes to less than 30 euros for the full six episodes after you add US sales tax and convert the currency. They also give you the option of receiving the game on DVD for the cost of shipping — which from the US is likely to not be all that cheap.

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AT LAST. Watching the media coverage this morning is delightful - maybe there’s some hope left for this country after all. McDowell has demanded a statement from Bertie Ahern about his hilarious financial affairs (Minister for Finance with no bank account? Only in Ireland!). Bertie is due to have a press conference at 15.00 today. The talking heads on TV and radio are really lapping it up.
Tom Parlon (PD) was on RTE news a few minutes ago and really made himself look like a gobshite.

Extensive discussion on boards.ie (one two) and politics.ie.

Media coverage:
RTE news
BreakingNews.ie
Irish Examiner
Irish Times
Plenty more.

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I saw this in someone’s signature on boards.ie today, and felt it to be a very accurate description:

“Politicians are like nappies - They need changing often and largely for the same reason.”