Gavan Reilly

I’ve been thinking a little bit this week about when your time runs out, or what it must feel like to know that your end isn’t far away.

My dad’s grandfather, on his dad’s side, lived in times when medicine wasn’t what it is today; when a problem would be diagnosed more as a means to peace of mind than with a view of solving it. When he was beginning to have chest pains, and they diagnosed a chronic cholesterol problem, it wasn’t with a view to helping him get any better. He died, of a heart attack, at 54.

I’ll never forget the day his son, my grandad, had his first heart attack. We were sitting at home, on an average midweek evening, when Dad got a phone call, listened silently, hung up and promptly, silently, bolted from the house. My grandad was 61 at the time. A year to the day later, I bolted similarly from my bed, excited at a school tour – and not even reading too much into the fact that Dad was already absent from the house, and that the TV was turned off. “Noelie’s not well” was all I was offered. That was fair enough. It was only when I got home, and Mum came up to me in my room to break the news, that I knew it immediately. A year to the day exactly afterward. He’d gotten up, as normal, and my gran had been rooting around a medicine cabinet in their bedroom only to turn around and find him collapsed upon his bed.

It’s probably fair to say, so, that there’s a history of heart disease in my Dad’s side of the family.

Well, Dad (as an aside) has had problems with infections in his fingernails for a couple of years; every time he goes to a doctor, he gets a course of antibiotics and it clears them up, but they’re not about coming back. So recently, when going for another course, his doctor asked him to do a blood test, to make sure there wasn’t an underlying problem stopping a recovery being permanent.

Without divulging too much detail, something’s come up that makes you wonder about it all.

I don’t know how I feel about it. Maybe I’m not meant to react at all. All I know is that the next time I smell a bacon butty I’m going to be thinking long and hard, and end up remembering that evening when I sat on my bed, absorbing the news that I’d never see my grandad again.

In sporting terms, how young is too young? When does a kid grow old enough to understand that following a football isn’t the most effective strategy for goalscoring, so much as making oneself available in empty space to advance an attack? There’s an episode of Cold Feet on in the background here where Jimmy Nesbitt’s character is training an under-8’s soccer team, making them do laps and call him ‘coach’, only for the children to completely destroy his Mourinho-esque tactical genius by swarming around the ball.

At work recently it’s been something that’s been on my mind a little bit. At what point does a kid become old enough to sacrifice short-term gain for more medium-term success? When does a child begin to comprehend the benefit of staying in position, or of doing that bit of extra homework, or keeping someone sweet for more medium-term explotation?

What’s the first time you can remember of you being able to comprehend the benefit of a degree of sacrifice?

A very quick thought… last night, Questions and Answers wrapped up with a one-on-one interview with Brian Cowen by John Bowman, bringing the curtain down on an Irish political institution.

An Spailpín Fánach says a lot of what needs to be said quite brilliantly, but one thing that I thought went softly laden was the fact that although the show was filmed with a studio audience, those in attendance weren’t given the chance to, you know, ask questions.

Surely the best way to make the final show memorable – instead of rolling out clip after clip of Sinn Féin reps refusing to condemn murders – would have been to celebrate the only ever visit by a sitting Taoiseach by allowing the audience the chance to question him the way they no doubt would have wanted?

The premise of the show was about getting public figures into a room and essentially holding them accountable. It will forever be a shame that the final guest, the most powerful the show could ever get hold of, was allowed to break that mould.

I have mixed experiences of Dell and their customer support. Having been a Dell owner since college required me – literally – to get hold of one, I’ve had to be in touch with them on a few occasions, whether it’s to buy a new battery simply because the last has gotten wonky or whether it’s a full-blown motherboard replacement (once on each of my two machines at the time of writing).

Well, three weeks ago, after a day of regular use, I woke up one morning and found that my Inspiron 910, a Christmas gift from the parental units, was refusing to turn on. So, after a day of Googling for DIY repairs – learning that the newer the laptop, the lesser the chance that a randomer elsewhere in the world has catalogued their own problems with it – I bit the bullet and went to Dell themselves for help.

Now, I must say that the online chat feature, available to Inspiron and Latitude owners, is pretty excellent. You can say what your problem is, take live suggestions (rather than navigating through tedious troubleshooting kits that assume you don’t know how to turn the machine on in the first place) and generally it’s a nicely interactive – and free – way of getting a problem solved, especially if you’re still within your warranty, as they can arrange collection of faulty hardware with you on the spot.

Where they fall down is actually working on the machines, post-courier. After explaining via the Chat feature that a software glitch wasn’t to blame – the machine literally wouldn’t turn on, you’d think it would be a simple matter to rule it out – and having seen off the courier on the 9th of June, I heard nothing for a while. So back onto the phone I go, to ask when there might be any sign of the laptop coming back. Luckily I had my original Latitude D505, ‘Sushi’, newly reghosted albeit five years old, to see me through while the netbook (inventively titled ‘Sushi II’) was in repair.

“They usually take one week, sir, so you should expect it on Friday the 19th or Monday the 22nd of June.” Fair enough. I call again on Tuesday the 23rd, still Sushi II-less. I am told my details are taking quite a while to appear on the screen, so they offer to take my phone number and call me back later.

I never get the call. Luckily, I am pacified by the machine actually returning the following day – Wednesday the 24th – and indeed now being in a rather improved condition, given that it turned on. So far, so good (-ish). Attached is a small factory note from Dell themselves. “Motherboard replaced and Windows reloaded. All perfect working order. Dave Maguire.”

Except that once I turn the laptop on, and try to charge the battery (assuming that it had been emptied during repair), I discover that the battery doesn’t in fact charge. This is the same battery that was fully functional when I handed it over, and which had been isolated as not being a factor in the initial problems. So back to the Chat I go.

06/24/2009 04:46:06PM

Agent (Americas\abhijeet_deb): "I have discussed the case and we 
will send out a new battery. May I have your address where we 
need to send it?"

06/24/2009 04:46:22PM

Gavan: "Sure"

I hand over my work address, agree to hand in the broken one as exchange, and indeed the following morning I am delivered a replacement – even though I’m away from my desk, and don’t get a call asking me if I’ll be present to hand over the dead one, meaning that the courier leaves without it. Great stuff. Admittedly it charges slower and decharges quicker than my first one, but it’s a battery nonetheless. Small quibble in the grander scheme of things.

So Saturday morning comes around and I hop online to get some coverage of the Lions match that afternoon. I open a stream. No sound. Hmm. I reinstall the sound drivers and check all the software settings. No luck. I try headphones. Ah, success. The speakers themselves, it seems, are busted. Sigh. Maybe I can live with it.

I go to Twitter to try and talk about the rugby. I try to use the hashtag #Lions. Only then, pounding away at the # key and the ones around it, do I discover that my newly-repaired laptop not only returned with a dead battery, but with broken built-in speakers and with five keyboard keys being totally unresponsive.

Darren had warned me that when Dell do repairs, they have a habit of using refurbished parts which aren’t in the best physical condition. Figuring that the Inspiron Mini 9 was only six months old – and had no recorded Google history of ever breaking down – I thought the chances were slim. Indeed, they probably still are.

So why Dell chose to take one laptop, with one problem, fix that problem and create three more, I don’t know. Dave Maguire, you have a lot to answer for.

The story just trundles on. AC/DC played Punchestown last night – in a gig that seems to have been sold out since Jesus was knee-high to a grasshopper – and somehow MCD manage to cock up the bus situation again.

Peter blogs over on Culch.ie:

The problem? It baffles me how it existed. I don’t know how it took a bus almost 4 hours to get ***near*** Punchestown. I then walked ran approximately 3 kilometres along with so many others who had missed the entire support acts [plural], afraid we would miss ACDC as well. So at least I got to see ACDC you say….? Yes that still remains. And always will. Never mind the 20 minutes Q to get a pint of beer.

Whatever about the 20-minute queue – I missed almost the entire Prodigy hour-long set at Slane in the queue – it’s good to see that MCD are keeping up traditions by learning from none of their mistakes. Thank Christ I’m not going to Oxegen.

Edit: Adding a link to the Boards.ie thread on the subject. Hasn’t quite reached the gargantual proportion of the Slane thread but that’s not to say it still won’t…

Edit 2: Ian Healy also has his two cents.