Bringing it back to the general theme of the blog for a moment...

.....which (when it started) was running, in case you hadn't realised - can't think why...

As mentioned in a few previous posts, whilst in New York last month I competed in the Homecoming Scotland 10K with my good friend Gav - it coincided with our trip over to see him and was a good excuse to pull my gutties on in anger again after nearly a year off.

The course is essentially a full lap of Central Park - what better place to drag one's aching limbs around at 9am on a Sunday morning? Beats the hell out of a dark Wembley industrial estate in a thunderstorm, that's for sure.

My time wasn't great, which was to be expected given my lack of training, head cold and general levels of excess during the preceding week, but I think I managed to style it out for a photo as I ran past our cheer-leading duo on the home stretch and the black & white photography cunningly disguises the worryingly red rings round my eyes at the end. 

Quitting smoking is easy. I've done it hundreds of times.

I've always liked the above quote from Mark Twain, it sums up everything non-smokers need to know about the difficulty with which we self-afflicted junkies kick the habit.

Whilst not into the hundreds yet, I'm currently in the throes of what I believe is my 6th attempt in 2 years to quit the demon weed. This time around it's going pretty well - the only time I've done better was my first attempt back in spring 2009 when I gave up for 6 months before starting again in Sicily "because I was in Italy and all Italians smoke". I've had one cigarette in 6 weeks, and that was only because I got over excited talking to Jimeoin the other night. 

Tomorrow marks a downgrade from Elephant-strength nicotine patches to something akin to a Silk Cut once every couple of hours. With it will come short-temperedness, moodiness, aggression and sulking. Whether anyone will notice the difference is open to debate.

Olym-not-picked

Well, according to the 2012 Olympics, today should have been the day that money should finally have left my account, if I were to prove successful in the ticket ballot. Despite one of my friends securing some U23 football action, and another (slightly concerning) mate off to the Rhythmic Gymnastics, my bank balance remains resolutely no closer to its overdraft limit than it was two weeks ago.

It seems I somewhat underestimated the demand for session 4 of the men's preliminary handball qualifying, whilst it should have been a no-brainer that a midweek session of women's volleyball would be equally over-subscribed. I'm disappointed. Like all regular lottery players, I've spent the last month lazily contemplating my application for £20.12 tickets to the opening ceremony being pulled out of the hat, safe in the knowledge that at least my decision to head to two lesser watched sports (at least in the UK) would prove sufficient backup. Not to be.

As it stands, I'm heading into the second round of ticket sales like an X Factor contestant singing to stay in the show. I'll take table tennis. Archery. Modern Pentathlon. Anything. As long as the tickets are no more than £20, obviously.

Bit drunk. Leaving do. Lots of Peroni. I wouldn't normally concern you with this triviality but I just downloaded the Blogpress app.

Never again will a lack of computer prevent me from sharing reams of inane wittering. If nothing else, the iPhone's spell checker may make for some amusing typos

bringing sexy back

I love the way that hits on my blog have been steadily decreasing since I started posting again. Nothing gets the creative juices flowing like feedback like that. A complete absence of content is better than anything I choose to share with the world. Cheers Google analytics.

On a more positive note, I drafted some communications blurb at work last Friday afternoon, having left approximately 45 minutes to do so - to which the Comms manager responded that she thought it was extremely well written! She 'really likes my style', apparently. Who knew I could even make software implementation sound sexy? See? Even just saying the words, on this blog, in this style.... "Software implementation".... Admit it, you're just a little bit moist now, aren't you?

With great power, etc etc

Shaved my beard off on Saturday morning, c.6 months after growing it.

No one's noticed.

Supajam

I got sent a link yesterday by a mate, from a company called Supajam. In return for completing a couple of details, I apparently have been given a free day pass to the London Feis - an Irish festival in Finsbury Park next month featuring legends of the celtic world such as The Waterboys, Van Morrison and, umm, Bob Dylan.

All seems a bit too good to be true. Day tickets are pretty expensive (I know because I was checking them out a few weeks ago, although when I went to the homepage a few minutes ago it had crashed due to the number of people trying to access it - not overly encouraging), and I had to provide the closest amount to nothing of information. And yet, an email sits in my Hotmail as we speak, stating thus:

My assumption is that the 'free ticket' will be in much the same way as provided by the BBC and other TV companies to entice audiences to programme recordings - more tickets are 'won' than available on the day, working on the assumption that not everyone will turn up (the perils of giving people free things, even if it is for a full day's worth of quality entertainment). See also EasyJet as a case in point - I believe it to be true, rather than urban legend, that they always overbook their planes, relying on no-shows which are apparently 100% guaranteed for every flight. Or 99% guaranteed, which is why it occasionally gets out into the media, when a disgruntled passenger gets stopped from boarding their plane because everyone else actually turned up before them for once.

But I digress. The emphasis in the email is on 'getting there early' to get the tickets - so the assumption is that around 1,000 of us have been 'lucky enough' to win one of the 500 tickets. It certainly sounds like a good enough reason to trundle up to Finsbury Park in a few weeks time though, just in case. If anyone has had any dealings with Supajam in the past, let me know how it went.

Someone sounds funny

Must say thanks to Jimeoin for a quality Friday night's entertainment in the form of his Something Smells Funny show at the E4 Udderbelly on the South Bank.

Udderbelly have rigged up a most agreeable venue with a couple of bars, food stalls and tables & lanterns in amongst the trees. It's a very nice alternative to the limited areas to have a drink on the south side of the Thames, which weirdly only has about 5 pubs between London Bridge and Westminster.

My girlfriend and her mate pounced on the star of the show at the burger van after his performance, and before the poor guy knew what was happening he was being led back, burger in hand, to sit with us at our table for a while.

Thankfully, he's a thoroughly nice, down to earth chap and spent about 30 minutes chatting to us about anything and everything, barely even flinching as I wheeled out another fact about him that I'd gleaned from checking Wikipedia before the show started.

Turns out he's from Portstewart, just up the road from Ballymena - upon hearing I hailed from there he mentioned that one of the guys in charge of security was from my neck of the woods. So far, so stereotypical, albeit this time the "I know someone from your town, do you know him too?" chat was being perpetuated by a fellow countryman. Of course, I responded with the "well, you know, it's quite a large town in Irish terms" and that was that - until Jimeoin spotted the guy in question and beckoned him over to meet me; turned out I'd been in the year below him in school, our sisters used to be best friends and we used to see each other around Glasgow 10 years ago! 

The other thing that sticks in my mind is that he often has Australian people coming up to him to say their kid is called Jimeoin - because the parents wanted an "Irish" name. Which they have got, albeit a highly unusual one - given his mum made it up as an amalgamation of a couple of male relatives' names. Must be weird knowing there are people running round the antipodes named after you.

Anyway - cheers Jimeoin. Top bloke, good company and a funny bugger to boot. Highly recommended if he's playing in a venue near you.

You try to be clever, and look what happens

So, roughly 24 hours ago I was all chuffed, having forked out the princely sum of approximately £7.50 for the ownership of seethattattierun.com. It felt like I had my own website. The rush of excitement proved too much. What if someone else called Tattie Chomper decided tonight was the night to register tattiechomper.com? At $10 for the privilege, it was a chance I couldn't afford to take.

So I dived back in to Blogger, went through the process again and emerged, triumphant, from the other side metaphorically grasping tattiechomper.com in my sweaty little palm. Result! If I ever need two embarrassing-sounding website addresses to infect the internet with my ponderings, I'm sorted!

Except. Well, except when I bought the second web address, Blogger kind of decided that it will be the one associated with the blog. I say 'Blogger decided' - I may have accidentally told it to do it. So in the future, if you try to go to the current see-that-tattie-run.blogspot.com address (God, that's a long and convoluted name to write), you'll be automatically redirected to tattiechomper.com.

No biggie, I guess, given it's also the name I use on Flickr, Twitter and a variety of other websites. But what has become of seethattattierun.com, I hear you cry? Well, at the moment it appears it has done the equivalent of Woody Allen's mother in New York Stories, and disappeared into the ether. It's floating about inside the internet somewhere, wondering what's going on.

I still own the domain, and can log into the dashboard. But when I key the address into my browser, I get a 'not found' message (the process of setting up the new address can take a couple of days, but tattiechomper.com is working fine already). When I try to change the target address of the blog back to seethattattierun.com, I get a message saying that "another blog is already registered to this address". I know! This one! I dunno what's going on. Looks like I've potentially banjaxed it and lost a couple of quid into the bargain. There are probably ways and means of recovering it, but Google's help pages are far from straightforward on that front and to be honest, I don't care enough to learn about what's going on. So, err, welcome to tattiechomper.com.

Udderly brilliant

Tomorrow we're off to take in the delights of Norn Irish boy done good, Jimeoin, at the Udderbelly on the South Bank. It's a rare foray into "proper London" on a Friday evening ("a quick pint" x6 after work most weeks notwithstanding), and where better to spend it that inside a large purple cow listening to some top notch comedy?

It's only going to be the 2nd comedy gig I've been to since moving to London - a frankly rubbish rate of return on 8 years in the nation's capital. I always seem to favour music gigs when thinking about buying tickets - but have been keen to see Jimeoin since last year; I wanted to go to his show at the Udderbelly then, but we were somewhere in Eastern Europe at the time, en route to Mongolia.

I only saw him once on TV when I was younger (I think he's mainly based in Australia these days) but the guy with the local accent and his amusing, surreal take on life clearly made an impression. About 18 months ago, I was searching on You Tube to show my girlfriend and her mate a fine example of local humour, and this guy is who came to mind. It clearly had the desired effect; it is with those two lovely ladies that I shall be attending tomorrow night's performance. Not only is it in a cow, it's in a cow with an al fresco bar outside, and I've not had a beer since last Saturday. It's all coming together nicely - provided I don't overshoot on the pre-performance merriment and end up being dragged out by a bouncer for drunken heckling with my trousers round my ankles . We can but wait, pray, and hope.

Look at me, all shiny and professional

If you scoot your eyes upwards (and are reading this approximately 24 hours after I posted it), you will perhaps notice that the long, unwieldy URL address for the blog is no more. It's now the altogether shorter seethattattierun.com, which is still a mouthful but less so than the old one - see-that-tattie-run.blogspot.com. Even I got bored typing all that gumph into the address bar.

I was toying with going for "STTR.com" or "tattie_chomper.com" but decided to stick with the name of the blog for the time being. May still go down the tattie chompin' route though, given it's a mere $10 a year. Makes me feel like I've got a 'proper' website now!

Pepsi-Cola sign, Long Island city

Pepsi-Cola sign, Long Island city, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

This picture has just pipped the other one (posted on Sunday) to become my most viewed Flickr photo of all time - thanks to the same, metronomic 35-40 views today as have been occurring for the past week.

Just wish I knew where the regular trickle of punters was coming from!

Flexing my fingers & cracking my knuckles

The wholesale revamp of the blog this evening and the posting, en masse, of photos from our trip, would imply that I am in the throes of yet another attempt to start blogging again. I want to. More so than before. The advent of Twitter kind of distracted me there for a couple of years, along with other minor inconveniences like planning 8,000 mile trips to the other side of the world.

Twitter, however, is partially responsible for my renewed vow to make more of an effort. Whilst watching Dulwich Hamlet FC in the Rymans League (Division One South) the other week - which is, I suppose, my local team - I made a comment about the fact that it was somewhat fitting (given the relative wealth of the area) that their shirts appeared to be inspired by Hackett and had "The Hamlet" written in gastropub font on the back.

This was duly picked up by another supporter - @vornstyle - and retweeted. Curious as to who had decided it worthy of sharing, I took a look at his timeline and liked what I read, and began to follow him.

Vornstyle also blogs, at http://sportingdeviance.wordpress.com/, and this evening having picked up a few of his tweets during the day, I idly clicked on a link and read some of his stuff. I got sucked in by the content, and his tribute to his girlfriend saw me following the link to her website as well (http://www.seaneenmolloy.co.uk). An hour later I've come up for air.

There's no doubting that they're both talented writers - moreso than me by a significant distance - and have much more of interest to say (including, y'know, the opinions on 'stuff' which I've never quite developed). I didn't expect to find myself becoming so engrossed in their blogs though, and it's kind of inspired me to keep plugging away when I get the chance, even if it's just something that I can look back on in years to come.

And the new design does look kinda sexy, eh?

Band at Death by Audio

Band at Death by Audio, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

And here is the band referred to in the previous post... As you can see, they proved a big draw for the locals....

Toilet at Death by Audio

Toilet at Death by Audio, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

I wanted to go to a proper Brooklyn dive bar or back-room club to hear some authentic New York rock (and perhaps the next Strokes or Yeah Yeah Yeahs). So it came to pass that Gav, fulfilling our wishes yet again, led us down a darkened street to an old industrial unit in Williamsburg, where we paid $3 entry and bought cans of Pabst from a dude behind a desk.

Death by Audio didn't disappoint on the decor or atmosphere front - shame the same couldn't be said for the band we watched, who played a 9 minute instrumental called "Paranoid Cat" and then made a highly topical joke about Eric Clapton's son.

Fuck Me. Chair sitting in the street in Williamsburg

Fuck Me. Chair sitting in the street in Williamsburg, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

A chair. Sitting on a street. With a rude request sprayed in something or other on it. If I was more pretentious I'd claim I thought this was 'artistic' and had some kind of message. It's actually just an excuse to swear on the blog (sorry mum)

Looking over the railing

Looking over the railing, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

I was aiming to get the Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building in focus on this one, but my woefully amateurish aim resulted in my focusing on the fence railings instead. Which in hindsight, I'm very bloody happy about.

Inside the Guggenheim

Inside the Guggenheim, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

You're allowed to take photos inside the Guggenheim from ground level only. Any attempts to take a shot from the top, no matter how subtle, will be met with an embarrassing telling off by a stern, loud, but polite security guard.

Trust me on that one.

Stephen P Driscoll Memorial Pipe Band

Stephen P Driscoll Memorial Pipe Band, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

It was the annual Tartan Day parade on 5th Avenue on the Saturday of our trip. Scottishness, American-style.

Empire State Building

Empire State Building, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

It really is 'everywhere' in New York. It became a standing joke when we were there that every time we saw it, we would ask each other what it was. Funnier if you were there. Actually, probably not.

Flatiron Building

Flatiron Building, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

taken on a rare sunny day during our visit

Statue of Liberty, viewed through the Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridges

Statue of Liberty, viewed through the Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridges, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

Not actually one of mine, but a Justyna special. She battled to the front of our boat to get a shot of the Statue of Liberty as we sailed back towards the bridges

Lost in a world of neon, Times Square

Lost in a world of neon, Times Square, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

Gav and Justyna, pausing to gaze in wonder at the neon blitz in Times Square. I'll never look at Piccadilly Circus quite the same way again.

Man waiting to cross 5th Avenue

Man waiting to cross 5th Avenue, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

Probably my favourite photo of the whole trip, if I can work out how to use Photoshop to make the blacks a bit, well, blacker.

Walking down past the New York Public Library, en route to the Empire State Building, we had to take a right onto 5th Avenue. This is one of a set of about 30 photos of the Chrysler Building taken in the space of about 5 minutes as I attempted to get one I was happy with.

It was the last.

Mike's Art Gallery Clearance Sale

Mike's Art Gallery Clearance Sale, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

This is our host with the most, and one of my oldest and best friends, Gav, stood in the doorway of a souvenir shop near the Empire State Building.

I don't know why I like this photo - it just looks very American to me...

Manhattan by night

Manhattan by night, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

Flickr have introduced a handy posting mechanism so I can add photos to the blog direct from their website. So what the hell, here's a few more of my favourites from our trip.

This is the view north from the Empire State Building. In front is the GE Building, aka '30 Rock' or 30 Rockefeller Plaza, and behind, the big dark square is Central Park.

UN HQ & Pepsi sign, from the Empire State Building

UN HQ & Pepsi sign, from the Empire State Building, originally uploaded by tattie_chomper.

In the space of a week, this photo, from our recent trip to New York, is about to become my most viewed on Flickr of all time.

That honour currently belongs to a pretty poor photo of Dominican college in Portstewart, taken in early 2006. But that's the weird thing. It's had 246 views in 5 years.... This one has had 178 in 5 days.

The most frustrating thing is that I can't even tell where people are clicking to it from, as Flickr can only class it as an 'unknown source'. It's something Pepsi related - close behind it in the rankings is the same sign, from the water, the following day.

Curious.

Cheeky Russians part 2

I've been getting a load of hits from 'unknown sources' on my Flickr account of late, which the forums suggest may be down to people directly linking to my photos from blogs.

At a loose end this evening, I decided to search for references to my photostream, and the first that popped up was this shot of Khovd that I took from our campsite in Mongolia:

Nice as it was to see that they appreciated what I thought was a pretty mundane shot of some goats (or at least, as mundane as views ever get in Mongolia), for the life of me I couldn't see where they had acknowledged it was one of mine.

Ah yes, there it is. I've circled it in red to highlight it, but you may still have to view the full size picture to see it.

TourNavigator.Ru - sailing close to the boundaries of cheeky behaviour....