The President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, is in the Pacific Northwest this week, and this evening, she will be making a visit to Redmond, where she will meet with Irish ex-patriots working at Microsoft.

I'll be going along myself to listen to her speak and perhaps meet with her afterward. There's a good chance there will be tea and biscuits on offer but it's unlikely that she'll be carrying around a large tray of Ferrero Rocher with which to spoil us.

UPDATE:

Well, it was a great event and a good opportunity to meet up with various other Irish 'softies, even if the assembled throng did remind me of a typical Saturday night in Fado. Our host was Jeff Raikes, and although you're not likely to find him anywhere near Pioneer Square on a Saturday night (except when strolling from his private box at a Mariners game, of course), he'd probably be a very interesting person to share a pint with.

"Madam President" (as Jeff called her) gave a brief but rousing speech to all present, spending almost as much time detailing the industrial and economic successes of Ireland as she did slagging off people from Cork. The pictures below were taken by my colleague Orlagh Brown, and although neither of us is from Cork, at least one of us seems to have had a bad effect on Madam President.

It's St. Patrick's Day today. I'll be heading to Fadó in downtown Seattle later with some friends to celebrate some Welsh slave who condemned a healthy Pagan culture to centuries of guilt and abstinence from simple pleasures that would later form the basis of celebrations in his name. He also got rid of the snakes. Good job, too.

Get in the mood today with some choice Irish phrases.

Beidh mé ar meisce anocht!

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Comedian Dave Allen dies aged 68

Irish comedy legend, Dave Allen (born Tynan O'Mahoney) has died and the world is a much less funny place. I will always remember late evenings in front of the TV, watching him sitting on a high-stool, with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, regaling us with biting observational humour (before it was known as such) about the Catholic church, families, tourists and of course, the Irish.

"Good night, and may your God go with you."

BBC NEWS | England | Beds/Bucks/Herts | Biscuit-eating dummy tests crumbs

McVitie's, one of Europe's leading manufacturers of biscuits (that's "cookies" for the Americans") has created a mannequin with plastic teeth to test how many crumbs a biscuit creates when chewed.

Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network has a new show premiering this Sunday - Robot Chicken. If you check out the posted trailer, you'll see that it lives up to its description - "stop-motion animation [that brings] pop-culture parodies to life in a modern take on the variety/sketch show format".

A modern take it may be, but it's definitely not original. The exact same idea (to use action figures and other small toys in parodies of well-known movies) was brought to the small screen on Channel 4 in the UK by Adam and Joe over five years ago. Their show is described as "inspired toy animations and anarchic assaults on the world of pop-culture", which sounds curiously similar to the premise of Robot Chicken.

One of the best they ever did was a spoof of Larry Clark's "Kids", called "Toys", which showed assorted soft toys and teddy bears over-indulging in sex and drugs and suffering the consequences.

It still looks entertaining, though...

I've just arrived in San Francisco for RSA Conference 2005. I'll be in the Microsoft pavilion on the Guidance pod, demonstrating our free security e-learning clinics and hands-on labs, and talking about other Microsoft Learning security resources.

I don't think I'll be able to attend Bill Gates' keynote tomorrow because I'll be registered as an exhibitor rather than a delegate, but I've heard there will be a couple of cool announcements.

Incredibly, the weather in San Francisco is worse than it was when I left Seattle this morning...

It's official. Monday January 24th will be the worst day of the year. Postal workers worldwide are being asked to stay home or at least leave their weapons at home.

Follow-up: some more optimistic ideas for how to spend Miserable Monday.

The Annual Wacky Warning Label Contest has ended with first prize going to a toilet brush bearing the caveat: "Do not use for personal hygiene".

My own personal favourite was a US TV commercial about a year ago that showed two female hikers getting across a river by walking on the roof of a submerged 4x4. At the bottom of the screen it said "Not designed for underwater driving". I really am not making that up.

Well, my girlfriend, Kami, and my sister, Jeanette, both remembered my birthday (I'm 22h today) so that's good. The biggest surprise of the day so far has been the balloons from Kami (below right), but almost a bigger surprise was that My MSN also remembered my birthday (below left). Thanks, MSN!!

Off now for birthday beverages at Daniel's Broiler in Bellevue.

This is very cool news from Michael Connolly from the MSN Spaces team...

Quote

1.5 Million, Baby!

That leads me to my second piece of news: the MyMSN team is about to deploy a new version of MyMSN that supports arbitrary RSS feeds.  That opens up a whole new way to catch up with all the Spaces you read.  Since all public Spaces have RSS feeds associated with them, you can add a Space’s RSS feed link to your MyMSN page, and read what is going on at Jay’s Krib right next to the New York Times!

We’re working on a more elegant link that we can include on a Space, so it’s brain dead simple to add the Space you are viewing to your MyMSN page.  But for now, you can click here to check it out.  The URL looks something like this:

http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://spaces.msn.com/members/emcee/feed.rss&ru=http://spaces.msn.com/members/emcee

I don't know whether it's because of the election results, the stress of keeping New Year resolutions, or the popularity of CSI: New York, but the biggest mover on MSN Search has me worried (see screenshot below). It beats the pants off Brad and Jen. Of course, who wouldn't want to get Brad and Jen's pants off?

I've added some pictures of my Christmas trip to Dublin. My brother Harry, his wife Frances, and their kids, Conor and Maev, were all in Dublin too, having traveled from Palo Alto.

On Christmas Eve, we travelled into the city centre on the Luas, which is Dublin's new light-rail transit system. Dubliners have taken to calling it "The Daniel Day", because we've always felt the need to have our own rhyming slang, just like Londoners do. And by some strange stroke of luck, we all ended up in a pub, drinking pints of Guinness. Well, except the kids.

Hello Kitty is 30 today. Feel free to add Japanese Schoolgirl comments. 

So the time has come for me to jump on yet another bandwagon that has already left the station. It's not that I'm greatly behind the times when it comes to the latest Internet fads and fashions. I just never saw the appeal of writing a bunch of stuff that a bunch of strangers might find interesting.

But who knows, right? Let's give it a shot. If there were some way to avoid clearing a football-sized field of Internet rainforest while sharing these thoughts, I would do it, but the page has already been created so I'm too late. It's like buying a nice pair of leather shoes you see in a shop window, or ordering the Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger (Combo #6) from Jack in the Box. The cow is already dead, so it would be a bigger shame to let it go to waste.

Good holiday spirit.