donal's blog

so i was in trinity for graduation yesterday (sinéad was graduating, not me!). boy, was it boring! i know these things can be naturally boring but trinity do know how to suck the fun out of what should be a joyous occasion. so yeh - if you like listening to latin for an hour or so trinity graduations are the place to go. if not, avoid!

first off - i'm not a manager, don't really have a desire to be a manager in the traditional sense managers conjure up and don't have many managerial skills (imo). However, more and more I'm having to manage people, projects and tasks. Cokane mentined this website a few months back and I listened to a few of the podcasts in the following weeks: http://www.manager-tools.com/ Some of the stuff mentioned I won't ever use, but a lot of the things mentioned I agreed with and I find I use the methods in my day-to-day work already. So it's nice to know that I'm doing some things right. ;) now to check out some of the newer podcasts on the site - the coaching one seems interesting.

so i tend to do this a lot: [command to grab output] | awk '{print $1}' | xargs to get a list of space seperated items. this is fine but something always niggles at me that i should just do this with awk. ;) so i found i can do this: [command to grab output] | awk '{printf $1" " this is fine but it doesn't add a new line at the end. so i can do this: [command to grab output] | awk '{printf $1" "} END {print ""}' so i have what i want... but now xargs is still shorter! is there a simpler solution?

so I just booked another flight today so I can get back to dublin in time for a dentist appointment and the christmas party. I see far too much of dublin airport in this job! Anyway - on my last trip back to dublin I was running a little late! It probably didn't help that i was sitting in a pub drinking beer with less than 2 hours before the flight took off (8.45 != 8.15 it seems!). thankfully the city had good public transport so I could still make. quick dash back to the hotel to pick up my bag. hit the train station. where does one buy tickets? lots of ticket dispensing machines but none seem to do the right tickets! anyway - find a helper dude and get a ticket. grand - 1.25 hrs left to make the flight. get to the platform and a train arrives. nice! the train is wedged and there's no chance of getting on it. damn! wait another 7 mins and another train arrives. no people on this one so i'm on my way. arrive at the airport's train station and suddenly realise there

so the last time i started this blog it was to test out how useful it would be for bands to use. As usual i found it quicker to write some quick scripts to do what i want then conform to a particular product (getting other products to work with an existing template is always hard!). Anyway - let's see if i can keep this one current!