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Someone should explain the concept of a "christmas wreath" to the staff I think, those aren't wreaths......
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Someone needs to tell Spar what an xmas wreath is....
I saw this in my local Spar on friday when I was looking around for some stuff.
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Someone should explain the concept of a "christmas wreath" to the staff I think, those aren't wreaths......
Someone should explain the concept of a "christmas wreath" to the staff I think, those aren't wreaths......
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Prague
Well, we finally made it. About 6 months after we booked it, and after a few weeks where we didn't know whether Aer Lingus were going to go on strike and either strand us there or stop us going at all, we're just back from our few days in Prague. So, the xmas shopping is pretty much all done and dusted now!
For once, there wasn't a delay in Dublin, even tho we were flying out of the Ryanair prefab, and we got to Prague about the time we expected to. Was a bit of a shock when we got there - it was warm! Well, not exactly t-shirt weather, but 1-2 degrees, just like back home. After weeks of taking the piss out of Michelle, saying she was going to freeze to death there, it was almost disappointing not to be in -10 degrees! The hotel was pretty damn good, it was in a quiet back street in Male Strana, and the room we got was huge! Was nearly the size of our apartment, with gilt everywhere and a four-poster bed! Hell, even the bathroom had a chandelier! there was only one problem tho: their computer system was on the fritz when we arrived so they couldn't code a keycard for our door. Meant any time we left and wanted to go back into the room, we had to get the receptionist to come up with us and leave us in with the master key :-)
So, after settling in it was still early, about 4pmish, so we headed out to wander around town. I still pretty much remembered the way to go, so we headed for the main market in Old Town Square. Once we got there, it definitely looked the part anyway, very picturesque. First order of business tho, food! So we wandered around the stalls seeing what sort of edibles there was. Pretty soon we found something that was very much to Michelle's taste: a pastry thing called trdelnik, which is wound around a wooden roller, cooked on the spot and eaten still warm and rolled in sugar. After that, it was time to take a look at the market itself.
To be honest, I was a little disappointed in the marketplace. It was very nice, and looked very nice, but there wasn't a huge amount of stuff to get there. There was kitchy handmade xmas decorations, and various types of food and drink, and loads of stalls selling prague souvenirs, but not a huge load else - and stuff was repeating itself about every 4th or 5th stall! The markets that I was in in Brussels and Leuven 2 years ago when I was over visiting Sara actually had a lot more to offer goods-wise. But hey, at least we were there and not at home!
Next thing, as we were heading down towards Wenceslaus square to see the other market, it started raining. That wasn't what we came over for, we can get that at home! The rain pretty much settled in for the night, so after the markets were winding up and we were fed and stuff, there wasn't much motivation to go off exploring for a nice night-spot in the rain, so was back to the hotel. Turns out the hotel bar had something in common with our room - we couldn't get into either on our own! So, was an early night.
The next morning, we decided to do a bit of touristy stuff before we started the real business of the trip, so we went up to the castle. the rain had turned to snow overnight, but the ground was wet so it wasn't sticking, it just made things a bit more slippery. In the castle I found myself pretty much retracing the same paths I'd gone the last time I was there - is funny how things come back to you. We could have taken a funicular to the top of the nearby hill to a sort of mini-eiffel tower called Petrin, but as it was still a bit snowy and overcast the poor visibility wouldn't have made the trip worthwhile, so we set about the main reason of the trip - shopping for xmas pressies! :-)
Contrary to our expectations before we went over, the shopping wasn't done a little bit here and a little bit there - because there was a lot less on the market than we'd thought, I think we got pretty much everything in one of the stalls and one of the shops off the main square! It was also somewhat curtailed by the fact that the bedroom safe had locked shut on us that morning and the hotel staff had had to call in whoever made the safe to open it for us while we were out, so the only money we had was the walking-around money I'd put in my wallet the night before - or about 1/3 of what we'd brought over with us! By the time we got back to the hotel to find the open safe, we'd pretty much bought all that we reckoned we were going to buy, so the rest of the day was just spent wandering around at random with no particular objective or destination in mind - I think we ended up sitting in some cafe with a baileys coffee (for Michelle) and a beer (for me), watching the world go by.
The next day we had an afternoon flight, so there wasn't really any time to do anything before we had to pack up and go home. Turns out that we got to teh airport stupidly early - I'd estimated it'd take about 35-40mns to get to the airport by taxi, and it only took 20 in the midday traffic, and then the flight was at 3:15 when I'd thought it was at 3. So, we were there close on 3hrs before the flight! And then, naturally, just as we were wandering towards the gate after killing as much time in the duty free as we could, the flight was almost inevitably delayed! The flight coming in was late, we were boarding when we should have been taking off, we lost more time de-icing the wings and eventually took off about an hour late! Ah well, it wouldn't be a trip abroad without a delay somewhere would it?
So, that was the lats of our big pre-planned trips out of the way, have to start thinking about the next one. So, would I go back to Prague? Probably, during the summer. Would I go back to the xmas market there? Probably not.
For once, there wasn't a delay in Dublin, even tho we were flying out of the Ryanair prefab, and we got to Prague about the time we expected to. Was a bit of a shock when we got there - it was warm! Well, not exactly t-shirt weather, but 1-2 degrees, just like back home. After weeks of taking the piss out of Michelle, saying she was going to freeze to death there, it was almost disappointing not to be in -10 degrees! The hotel was pretty damn good, it was in a quiet back street in Male Strana, and the room we got was huge! Was nearly the size of our apartment, with gilt everywhere and a four-poster bed! Hell, even the bathroom had a chandelier! there was only one problem tho: their computer system was on the fritz when we arrived so they couldn't code a keycard for our door. Meant any time we left and wanted to go back into the room, we had to get the receptionist to come up with us and leave us in with the master key :-)
So, after settling in it was still early, about 4pmish, so we headed out to wander around town. I still pretty much remembered the way to go, so we headed for the main market in Old Town Square. Once we got there, it definitely looked the part anyway, very picturesque. First order of business tho, food! So we wandered around the stalls seeing what sort of edibles there was. Pretty soon we found something that was very much to Michelle's taste: a pastry thing called trdelnik, which is wound around a wooden roller, cooked on the spot and eaten still warm and rolled in sugar. After that, it was time to take a look at the market itself.
To be honest, I was a little disappointed in the marketplace. It was very nice, and looked very nice, but there wasn't a huge amount of stuff to get there. There was kitchy handmade xmas decorations, and various types of food and drink, and loads of stalls selling prague souvenirs, but not a huge load else - and stuff was repeating itself about every 4th or 5th stall! The markets that I was in in Brussels and Leuven 2 years ago when I was over visiting Sara actually had a lot more to offer goods-wise. But hey, at least we were there and not at home!
Next thing, as we were heading down towards Wenceslaus square to see the other market, it started raining. That wasn't what we came over for, we can get that at home! The rain pretty much settled in for the night, so after the markets were winding up and we were fed and stuff, there wasn't much motivation to go off exploring for a nice night-spot in the rain, so was back to the hotel. Turns out the hotel bar had something in common with our room - we couldn't get into either on our own! So, was an early night.
The next morning, we decided to do a bit of touristy stuff before we started the real business of the trip, so we went up to the castle. the rain had turned to snow overnight, but the ground was wet so it wasn't sticking, it just made things a bit more slippery. In the castle I found myself pretty much retracing the same paths I'd gone the last time I was there - is funny how things come back to you. We could have taken a funicular to the top of the nearby hill to a sort of mini-eiffel tower called Petrin, but as it was still a bit snowy and overcast the poor visibility wouldn't have made the trip worthwhile, so we set about the main reason of the trip - shopping for xmas pressies! :-)
Contrary to our expectations before we went over, the shopping wasn't done a little bit here and a little bit there - because there was a lot less on the market than we'd thought, I think we got pretty much everything in one of the stalls and one of the shops off the main square! It was also somewhat curtailed by the fact that the bedroom safe had locked shut on us that morning and the hotel staff had had to call in whoever made the safe to open it for us while we were out, so the only money we had was the walking-around money I'd put in my wallet the night before - or about 1/3 of what we'd brought over with us! By the time we got back to the hotel to find the open safe, we'd pretty much bought all that we reckoned we were going to buy, so the rest of the day was just spent wandering around at random with no particular objective or destination in mind - I think we ended up sitting in some cafe with a baileys coffee (for Michelle) and a beer (for me), watching the world go by.
The next day we had an afternoon flight, so there wasn't really any time to do anything before we had to pack up and go home. Turns out that we got to teh airport stupidly early - I'd estimated it'd take about 35-40mns to get to the airport by taxi, and it only took 20 in the midday traffic, and then the flight was at 3:15 when I'd thought it was at 3. So, we were there close on 3hrs before the flight! And then, naturally, just as we were wandering towards the gate after killing as much time in the duty free as we could, the flight was almost inevitably delayed! The flight coming in was late, we were boarding when we should have been taking off, we lost more time de-icing the wings and eventually took off about an hour late! Ah well, it wouldn't be a trip abroad without a delay somewhere would it?
So, that was the lats of our big pre-planned trips out of the way, have to start thinking about the next one. So, would I go back to Prague? Probably, during the summer. Would I go back to the xmas market there? Probably not.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Iarnrod Eireann: Punctuality and the small print
I was standing around the train station in Athenry this afternoon, with a few minutes to kill while I was waiting for the 13:30 from Galway, and as you do, I got bored and started reading the advertisements. One of them is that "Timing is Everything" ad where they tell you how close the service is to being on time, every time. For the Dublin-Galway line, this is apparently "100% Reliability", 91% Punctuality". Then tho, having the time to do it, I did something that not many people probably do: I noticed the asterisk on the word "punctuality" and then read the small print at the bottom which tells you what that means. Apparently, for Irish rail, punctuality means "arriving at the destination no more than 10 minutes late". TEN minutes? On the continent if a train is more than 2-3 minutes late you get all sorts of apologies! Irish Rail aren't exactly setting themselves a stretch goal here are they? And what's worse is that on the galway line, they don't even meet this rather generous timeline, of being in less than 10mins late on a 3hr journey. So 1 time in 10, they overshoot by 3% of the journey time and it's OK. I wish my boss was this lenient on my deadlines!
And what exactly does "100% Reliable" mean as well? They always get to the right place? So what they're saying there is that "The train that is supposed to go to Galway actually gets to Galway, as opposed to say accidentally ending up in Cork or Limerick, every time!". You'd be sort of fucking worried if it didn't wouldn't you? Or is it that "the train that is supposed to leave platform 2 in Galway station at 5pm that has a sign up saying it's going to Dublin can be 100% relied on to go to Dublin at some stage"? Again, we're not talking about heart surgery or a mission to Mars here, this sort of reliability should be a given as opposed to them boasting about it! Is sort of like boasting "our staff manage to get their shoes on the right feet first time every morning, aren't they great?"
And what's worse is that I've seen this "X% Reliability, X% Punctuality" signs on DART stations before, and they don't manage the 100% punctuality every time. I didn't pay this much attention before, but now I know what it is, bloody hell! So say the trains to Tara St are 98% punctual. That means that a service that's supposed to run every 5-10 minutes is late by more than 10mins 2% of the time. So basically, 2% of they time they're effectively skipping 1 or 2 whole trains! Where are these missing trains going? And what about their passengers? So as well as the Dublin DART Doppler Effect (where the pronunciation of a train heading south goes "deert, deert, daart, daart, dart, dart, dahrt, dahrt, dort"), we have a "DART Triangle", where trains just go missing? Where are Mulder and Scully when you need them?
And what exactly does "100% Reliable" mean as well? They always get to the right place? So what they're saying there is that "The train that is supposed to go to Galway actually gets to Galway, as opposed to say accidentally ending up in Cork or Limerick, every time!". You'd be sort of fucking worried if it didn't wouldn't you? Or is it that "the train that is supposed to leave platform 2 in Galway station at 5pm that has a sign up saying it's going to Dublin can be 100% relied on to go to Dublin at some stage"? Again, we're not talking about heart surgery or a mission to Mars here, this sort of reliability should be a given as opposed to them boasting about it! Is sort of like boasting "our staff manage to get their shoes on the right feet first time every morning, aren't they great?"
And what's worse is that I've seen this "X% Reliability, X% Punctuality" signs on DART stations before, and they don't manage the 100% punctuality every time. I didn't pay this much attention before, but now I know what it is, bloody hell! So say the trains to Tara St are 98% punctual. That means that a service that's supposed to run every 5-10 minutes is late by more than 10mins 2% of the time. So basically, 2% of they time they're effectively skipping 1 or 2 whole trains! Where are these missing trains going? And what about their passengers? So as well as the Dublin DART Doppler Effect (where the pronunciation of a train heading south goes "deert, deert, daart, daart, dart, dart, dahrt, dahrt, dort"), we have a "DART Triangle", where trains just go missing? Where are Mulder and Scully when you need them?
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Slough
Well, I've finally made it to Slough anyway. Since I joined the project, the mention of Slough has been sort of like the boogey-man: "if you screw up on somethign we'll send you over to Slough for a few weeks". Now that I've been there, it isn't apparenly all that bad. From what the lads had been saying, I was expecting the O2 office to be stuck out in the middle of an industrial estate outside of town, but it was actually pretty close in, directly opposite the main train station in fact. That puts it one up on Vodafone UK, where the office was a good mile or so outside Newbury! I didn't see all that much of the town itself, only what I saw out the taxi window, but it was at least on a par with the last place I got stuck - there was one shopping center there that the lads were complaining about, saying it shut too early in the evening - but at least it's there in the first place! Is one up on Newbury right there. And I don't know what the Travelodge that they stay in is like, but it can't really be any worse than that Fawlty Towers-type place I was stuck in when I was working in Vodafone!
To be honest, I don't really see the point of the trip over. Was up at 7am, in the airport at 9am for a 10am flight (which actually took off at 10:30, that's dublin airport for you), got to Heathrow around 11:45ish, made it to the O2 office around 12:30, had a sandwich in the canteen for lunch, had a meeting from 1pm to about 3:30pm, got the taxi to Heathrow about 4:15 and were stuck there til our 7:45 flight took off (on time!). We spent more time in Heathrow than we did in the meeting! I suppose the customer was just looking for that nice warm fuzzy feeling of being looked after, that we care enough about them to send 3 ppl over for a day to listen to their problems. Hey if they're paying for the flights, we'll go! And at least it got me out of the day as well, that's always good.
And now I can also scratch "Seeing Slough" off that list I have of things I have to do before I die :-P
To be honest, I don't really see the point of the trip over. Was up at 7am, in the airport at 9am for a 10am flight (which actually took off at 10:30, that's dublin airport for you), got to Heathrow around 11:45ish, made it to the O2 office around 12:30, had a sandwich in the canteen for lunch, had a meeting from 1pm to about 3:30pm, got the taxi to Heathrow about 4:15 and were stuck there til our 7:45 flight took off (on time!). We spent more time in Heathrow than we did in the meeting! I suppose the customer was just looking for that nice warm fuzzy feeling of being looked after, that we care enough about them to send 3 ppl over for a day to listen to their problems. Hey if they're paying for the flights, we'll go! And at least it got me out of the day as well, that's always good.
And now I can also scratch "Seeing Slough" off that list I have of things I have to do before I die :-P
Monday, December 01, 2008
Google has you!
This is somewhat funny, somewhat unnerving. I was showing someone in work today where I was doing my xmas day swim by opening up the location in google earth, and there was a picture of the beach tagged to it that someone had uploaded. So, on a whim I decide to see what Bonmahon looked like. Imagine my surprise when I see the following pic!
That house just to the right of the middle is my house! My house is up on google earth! Is there anything that google doesn't know? :-)
That house just to the right of the middle is my house! My house is up on google earth! Is there anything that google doesn't know? :-)
Well, it had to happen eventually........
This day has been coming for a while now, but I guess I can't put it off any longer. The customer I'm working for wants some face-to-face meetings (capacity planning for christmas), so I'm off over to Slough on weds, over in the morning and back in the evening. At least it isn't overnight job I suppose!
What will make this trip even more fun is the fact that apparently some chemical plant is after exploding over there today. Great, chemical fires, will have to have meetings in hazmat suits! I love the comment on the sky news website's page tho: "From what I have heard about Slough this explosion could cause millions of pounds worth of improvements!" :-)
What will make this trip even more fun is the fact that apparently some chemical plant is after exploding over there today. Great, chemical fires, will have to have meetings in hazmat suits! I love the comment on the sky news website's page tho: "From what I have heard about Slough this explosion could cause millions of pounds worth of improvements!" :-)
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
On probation
A few days ago, I was thinking "you know, my 6-month probation in work has to be up around now, right?". I took a look to find my contract and to my surprise, I'm here 7 months today! I thought the end of probation thing was supposed to be a bit of a big deal! I remember in CAPE my end of probation meeting was just Marco coming up to me with a signed letter from Phil Sharpe and saying "Well, looks like we can't get rid of you now", but at least it was something.
So, I contacted HR to see what the story was, and found out that they told my boss that I was finished probation and she was supposed to verbally notify me, but didn't. Also, the CEO hasn't signed off on the formal end of probation letter yet as he's been too busy! Well, is nice to feel appreciated isn't it?
Am eligible now anyway for the benefits, they pay into my PRSA and I get a discount on a VHI subscription. What I want to know is will they pay the month's arrears on the pension, seeing as I should have gotten this last month. Have to find out as well the price diff between VHI and the BUPA package I'm paying for now will make it worth my while to switch. Also, apparently "You might be entitled to share options too but I don't know if you will get them in this round" - shares, yeah, no thanks, last time I looked my $120 SUNW shares were worth about $3...... How's about giving me the money instead?
So, I contacted HR to see what the story was, and found out that they told my boss that I was finished probation and she was supposed to verbally notify me, but didn't. Also, the CEO hasn't signed off on the formal end of probation letter yet as he's been too busy! Well, is nice to feel appreciated isn't it?
Am eligible now anyway for the benefits, they pay into my PRSA and I get a discount on a VHI subscription. What I want to know is will they pay the month's arrears on the pension, seeing as I should have gotten this last month. Have to find out as well the price diff between VHI and the BUPA package I'm paying for now will make it worth my while to switch. Also, apparently "You might be entitled to share options too but I don't know if you will get them in this round" - shares, yeah, no thanks, last time I looked my $120 SUNW shares were worth about $3...... How's about giving me the money instead?
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Broadband! :-)
Well, my parents finally have broadband in at home :-) No more coming home for the weekend and feeling like I've lost a limb, struggling for 5mins to download 50 emails (49 of which will turn out to be spam anyway) and only being able to look at one web-page at a time 'cos loading more than one is just too slow! Also means I can actually work from home after xmas - before I was looking at getting up at stupid o'clock on Stephen's morning and taking the train up to Dublin 'cos I'm on call the 26th-28th December and I couldn't do it over dial-up, but now I can stay at home and wait for o2's network to go tits-up from here! :-)
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Bloody Aer Lingus!
Saw this in today's paper:
"TRAVEL agents are advising customers against flying with Aer Lingus this Christmas amid threats of a "devastating" all-out strike in a fortnight.
With bookings poised to plummet and the airline expected to announce €20m losses today, Transport Minister Noel Dempsey called on both sides in the dispute to restart talks on plans to outsource almost 1,300 jobs.
..........
The chief executive of the Irish Travel Agents Association said customers were in confusion even though disputes between Aer Lingus and SIPTU, in particular, had a "track record of heavy posturing and empty commitments".
"My members are trying to find solutions for their customers and are giving priority to alternatives to Aer Lingus," said Simon Nugent. "They are backing away from Aer Lingus flights because there is a higher risk of disruption to them."
Well fuck them anyway. I booked my flights to Prague months ago for the 11th december, and now I'm potentially either not going to get there or will get stuck there because the usual fecking suspects in the management and the unions can't get their shit together and are rehashing the same old fucking fights as ever? Seems to be in their contracts that they have to threaten to go out on strike at least once a year, just to remind people that they're there, like. Have been caught out on flights at least twice before with these feckers walking off the job. What are they, French or something?
Screw them, time to see what other flights I can get. Think Ruinair have a sale on.....
(Later..)
Just after checking the Aer Lingus site re: their policies on refunds. Well, is pretty simple:
Fuckers. So looks like unless I want to take a €220 hit, we're stuck with Aer Fungus.
"TRAVEL agents are advising customers against flying with Aer Lingus this Christmas amid threats of a "devastating" all-out strike in a fortnight.
With bookings poised to plummet and the airline expected to announce €20m losses today, Transport Minister Noel Dempsey called on both sides in the dispute to restart talks on plans to outsource almost 1,300 jobs.
..........
The chief executive of the Irish Travel Agents Association said customers were in confusion even though disputes between Aer Lingus and SIPTU, in particular, had a "track record of heavy posturing and empty commitments".
"My members are trying to find solutions for their customers and are giving priority to alternatives to Aer Lingus," said Simon Nugent. "They are backing away from Aer Lingus flights because there is a higher risk of disruption to them."
Well fuck them anyway. I booked my flights to Prague months ago for the 11th december, and now I'm potentially either not going to get there or will get stuck there because the usual fecking suspects in the management and the unions can't get their shit together and are rehashing the same old fucking fights as ever? Seems to be in their contracts that they have to threaten to go out on strike at least once a year, just to remind people that they're there, like. Have been caught out on flights at least twice before with these feckers walking off the job. What are they, French or something?
Screw them, time to see what other flights I can get. Think Ruinair have a sale on.....
(Later..)
Just after checking the Aer Lingus site re: their policies on refunds. Well, is pretty simple:
Fare Rules
Cancellations
* NO REFUND AT ANY TIME EXCEPT FOR BUSINESS CLASS
Fuckers. So looks like unless I want to take a €220 hit, we're stuck with Aer Fungus.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Skiing is booked - finally!
Well, I've finally booked my ski trip for Feb now anyway. I say "finally" because 2 weeks ago I mailed one of the lads to see what the story was with the ski trip, only to get a reply that said "Dude! Were you not cc'd on that?". Seems everyone else organized and booked everything at the beginning of September, but someone forgot to include me on the mailing list! So, I've spent the last 2 weeks teasing out the flight/accommodation details that have already been booked and trying to find myself something similar. At least this year's trip is earlier than last year, the beginning rather than the end of Feb (31st Jan -> 7th Feb), but seems to be a bit more scattered in terms of planning: the destination is the same for everyone (Zermatt in Switzerland) but there seems to be 3 separate airports in 2 countries that ppl are flying into. I managed to get the same flights as some of the lads but after that we have a 3hr train journey to Zermatt, and I didn't manage to get the same accommodation.
What makes the return trip awkward is that the flight back is at 9am on the sat from Zurich, which means either getting up at stupid AM from Zermatt (like the first 2 trips) or leaving Zermatt on the fri evening and staying overnight in Zurich. Problem I found was that I could book a 7-day stay (sat-sat) with almost no problems but a 6-day (sat-fri) was over €200 dearer! So I went for the 7-day option and will figure out closer to the time what I'll do about getting to the airport.
Now all I need to do is book my gear.....
What makes the return trip awkward is that the flight back is at 9am on the sat from Zurich, which means either getting up at stupid AM from Zermatt (like the first 2 trips) or leaving Zermatt on the fri evening and staying overnight in Zurich. Problem I found was that I could book a 7-day stay (sat-sat) with almost no problems but a 6-day (sat-fri) was over €200 dearer! So I went for the 7-day option and will figure out closer to the time what I'll do about getting to the airport.
Now all I need to do is book my gear.....
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Well fuck this!
Just got an email from my boss, after asking her about how much time I was due off for doing all that work over the weekend. Here was the reply: "In relation to the time in lieu there isn't any for on-call unfortunately.". So, in other words, I worked about 13hrs on the on-call problems on Sunday, about 9hrs on the bank holiday Monday, another 2.5hrs Mon night/Tues morning (midnight to about 2:30am), and I'm getting fuck-all for it. The on-call rate is €50 a day for the week/weekend and €75 a day for the bank holiday - and that's before tax. So, €50 for 13hrs work and €75 for 11hrs work on a bank holiday.
Well screw that. Given my current salary after tax, €50 on-call money gets you about 3hrs of my working time (less if you take the tax off the €50). So, I'll do that much work, and anything after that, if the on-call phone starts ringing, it can just keep on fucking ringing!
Well screw that. Given my current salary after tax, €50 on-call money gets you about 3hrs of my working time (less if you take the tax off the €50). So, I'll do that much work, and anything after that, if the on-call phone starts ringing, it can just keep on fucking ringing!
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
leaving work in the dark
I hate this time of year. I didn't get to see daylight at all yesterday so I didn't notice when it was gone, but today was the first day I've left work at 5:45ish and it was completely dark. Am not sure why we bother with Daylight Savings time, you're just prolonging the inevitable anyway. Give it a few more weeks and we'll be both going to work in the morning and coming home in the evening in the pitch black! :-(
On Call
Wow, what a shitty weekend.
I'm finally on the on-call roster with work, and unlike in my previous job, the phone goes off a lot. Quite a lot! When I was on call in CAPE, I only ever got 2 calls - and one of them was a wrong number. Not here!
Was quiet enough during the week, only got 3 calls (which is still one call more than I got in CAPE tho!). Then however, everything really kicked off at the weekend. The phone started going off around 2pm sunday and just didn't stop. Every time there's a problem on the network, I get a text message on the on-call phone, and I had to empty the message memory twice 'cos it was too full to get any more alerts! I was working 2pm to 3am sunday pretty much non-stop, trying to keep things up and running. Then I got 3 more calls during the night, one at 5am, one at 6:30am and one at 7:30am. Got up then about 10:30am and was working solid from 11am to 8pm last night - I didn't even see the outside world yesterday. Then, just to top it off, the phone started going off again about midnight and I was working on stuff til 2:30am! Thank god I was able to hand the phone off to someone else today!
Am quizzing the boss now to see how much time off in lieu I can get for all this..... :
I'm finally on the on-call roster with work, and unlike in my previous job, the phone goes off a lot. Quite a lot! When I was on call in CAPE, I only ever got 2 calls - and one of them was a wrong number. Not here!
Was quiet enough during the week, only got 3 calls (which is still one call more than I got in CAPE tho!). Then however, everything really kicked off at the weekend. The phone started going off around 2pm sunday and just didn't stop. Every time there's a problem on the network, I get a text message on the on-call phone, and I had to empty the message memory twice 'cos it was too full to get any more alerts! I was working 2pm to 3am sunday pretty much non-stop, trying to keep things up and running. Then I got 3 more calls during the night, one at 5am, one at 6:30am and one at 7:30am. Got up then about 10:30am and was working solid from 11am to 8pm last night - I didn't even see the outside world yesterday. Then, just to top it off, the phone started going off again about midnight and I was working on stuff til 2:30am! Thank god I was able to hand the phone off to someone else today!
Am quizzing the boss now to see how much time off in lieu I can get for all this..... :
Thursday, September 25, 2008
malta: impressions.
Here's just some general impressions of Malta, for ppl who might be thinking of going there.
Malta is lovely - was a lot warmer than here. Was about 27-28 degrees every day, altho we had spits of rain occasionally. Managed to get pretty badly sunburned, but then again that's par for the course on hols when you're Irish. Are a few beaches that you can go to lie out on if you want, but there's a good bit of other stuff to go see as well - can do a boat trip all around the island, and there's loads of historical stuff to go see as well. Is easy to get around too, there's rickety old buses that go all around the island, altho you have to really not be in a hurry to rely on them, as some of them only go once an hour (which sucks a bit when you're stuck on the south side of the island like we were at one stage), and the service gets a bit more spotty after about 4pm!
Another good thing about Malta is that it's so cheap! I went over with about €500 spending money for the week, expecting to have to go to the bank machine at some stage (as you normally do on hols), but the only reason I didn't come back with €150 of that still in my pocket was that I went a bit mad in the duty free in the airport on the way back! ;-) Costs €1.16 to get a bus from one end of the island to the other, and most trips are only 47c. A meal for two, including starters, mains, dessert and a bottle of wine, was about €33 - the most I paid out for a full 3-course meal for two was €65 (incl tip), and that was a place where the likes of Madonna & Guy Ritchie and Daniel Craig go when they're there.
Malta is lovely - was a lot warmer than here. Was about 27-28 degrees every day, altho we had spits of rain occasionally. Managed to get pretty badly sunburned, but then again that's par for the course on hols when you're Irish. Are a few beaches that you can go to lie out on if you want, but there's a good bit of other stuff to go see as well - can do a boat trip all around the island, and there's loads of historical stuff to go see as well. Is easy to get around too, there's rickety old buses that go all around the island, altho you have to really not be in a hurry to rely on them, as some of them only go once an hour (which sucks a bit when you're stuck on the south side of the island like we were at one stage), and the service gets a bit more spotty after about 4pm!
Another good thing about Malta is that it's so cheap! I went over with about €500 spending money for the week, expecting to have to go to the bank machine at some stage (as you normally do on hols), but the only reason I didn't come back with €150 of that still in my pocket was that I went a bit mad in the duty free in the airport on the way back! ;-) Costs €1.16 to get a bus from one end of the island to the other, and most trips are only 47c. A meal for two, including starters, mains, dessert and a bottle of wine, was about €33 - the most I paid out for a full 3-course meal for two was €65 (incl tip), and that was a place where the likes of Madonna & Guy Ritchie and Daniel Craig go when they're there.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Malta: a quick catch-up
Agh, I always do this: I go away on a holiday for a week and when I come back I blog about the first few days and then I lose interest and never do the rest. Well, here's a quick-and-dirty update of the rest of the malta trip, before I forget it all!
On the tues we decided to go to Gozo, the other island. By now we were pretty used to the buses and so got to Cirkewwa to catch the ferry without too much difficulty. Once we landed in Mgarr, the fishing village on the other side, we were mobbed by taxi drivers looking to give us a tour of the island for a mere €70 each, or wanting to bring us into Victoria, the island's capital. When we said we'd take the bus the answer was "No! No bus for another hour!". This would have been a little bit more believable if we didn't see a bus pulling into the stop right behind yer man as he was arguing with us! :-) Once we got into Victoria, we took a look around the citadel, a sort of mini version of Mdina, where we'd been the day before, got something to eat, and headed back to the bus terminal to do some more tripping around, as we were by now used to doing on Malta. One snag: it was about 3pm at this stage and the next buses to the Gigantja temples and the Azure Window, the two places I wanted to go, were at 4:30 and 5 respectively - and we had to be heading back to catch the ferry for around 6:15pm as the last bus from Cirkewwa to Sliema went at 7:15! So, we ended up getting a taxi to Gigantja and forgetting about the other place. Ah well, next time!
On weds we went to Marsaxlokk, a fishing village on the south of the island which was supposed to have an open-air market (like the one we'd missed in Valetta on sunday). Am not sure what I was expecting, but it was mostly just the same kind of knick-knacky tourist crap that you could get in any of the shops in Valetta or Sliema. After wandering around that for a bit, we decided to go to see could we find this "Peter's Pool" that I'd read about. The guy who'd given us the directions had told us it was only a 15min walk form Marsaxlokk. Well, maybe he was getting "walking" and "driving" mixed up - it took us 45mins to get there! ;-( Once we did tho, it was lovely. Unfortunately there were no real shallow bits there, and Michelle can't swim, so she just sunned herself while I went into the water. Makes a nice change jumping into water without having to stifle the scream when it hits you! I had a good bit of a splash around anyway and then we headed back. The only problem was I'd sort of forgotten the small insignificant fact that swimming washes off sunblock - by that night I was quite a fetching shade of bright red! :-)
On the thurs we headed south again to the Blue Grotto, a series of sea caves that you can do a boat tour of. The tour itself was very nice, altho I don't think that Michelle was overly impressed :-) After that we decided to head to the stone age temples at Hagar Qim, just up the coast. So, we headed for the bus stop, fending off the usual taxi drivers and their warning of "no bus for one hour!". Unfortunately, they were right! 45 very hot, very boring minutes later. we were joined at the bus stop by an american girl, asking were we waiting for the bus to Valetta. We replied no, that was the other side of the road, we were going to Hagar Qim. "But that's only 10, maybe 15mins walk up the road, I'm just after walking down from there myself". D'oh! So, me, Michelle and Sabrina, the austrian girl we'd been waiting at the bus top with, walked up. Just as we got there, the bus pulled up behind us! I know I wasn't exactly expecting to see Gandalf there, but the temples were slightly less then impressive (altho the oppressive afternoon heat could have had something to do with that). After that it was another 30min wait for a bus back to Valetta, where we all wandered around for a few hours doing nothing much in particular bar chilling before heading our separate ways again.
On the fri, we didn't really have very many plans so we just headed back out to Mdina and Rabat to see all the stuff that we'd missed thanks to our time-sharing friends. So, we wandered around Rabat a while, did the catacombs, the dungeons and St. Paul's Cathedral, where St. Paul originally brought christianity to Malta (well, the cathedral was on the site, he didn't exactly preach from the pulpit! :-P). at least the cathedral museum there was better than the one in Mdina! After having a nice lazy day there, we headed back to Sliema to finish off the pressie shopping for the ppl back home.
The last act of the trip pretty much was a BBQ on the rooftop of the hotel on the friday night, all you can eat for just €15 each. As it was a BBQ, the inevitable happened: just as we were sitting down and waiting for the food to cook, it started raining! :-) Not to be deterred, we pulled up a few of the big sun parasols to cover us and had the BBQ anyway!
The next morning, it was all over. Nothing to do but pack and head to the airport, back to cold, rainy Ireland!
On the tues we decided to go to Gozo, the other island. By now we were pretty used to the buses and so got to Cirkewwa to catch the ferry without too much difficulty. Once we landed in Mgarr, the fishing village on the other side, we were mobbed by taxi drivers looking to give us a tour of the island for a mere €70 each, or wanting to bring us into Victoria, the island's capital. When we said we'd take the bus the answer was "No! No bus for another hour!". This would have been a little bit more believable if we didn't see a bus pulling into the stop right behind yer man as he was arguing with us! :-) Once we got into Victoria, we took a look around the citadel, a sort of mini version of Mdina, where we'd been the day before, got something to eat, and headed back to the bus terminal to do some more tripping around, as we were by now used to doing on Malta. One snag: it was about 3pm at this stage and the next buses to the Gigantja temples and the Azure Window, the two places I wanted to go, were at 4:30 and 5 respectively - and we had to be heading back to catch the ferry for around 6:15pm as the last bus from Cirkewwa to Sliema went at 7:15! So, we ended up getting a taxi to Gigantja and forgetting about the other place. Ah well, next time!
On weds we went to Marsaxlokk, a fishing village on the south of the island which was supposed to have an open-air market (like the one we'd missed in Valetta on sunday). Am not sure what I was expecting, but it was mostly just the same kind of knick-knacky tourist crap that you could get in any of the shops in Valetta or Sliema. After wandering around that for a bit, we decided to go to see could we find this "Peter's Pool" that I'd read about. The guy who'd given us the directions had told us it was only a 15min walk form Marsaxlokk. Well, maybe he was getting "walking" and "driving" mixed up - it took us 45mins to get there! ;-( Once we did tho, it was lovely. Unfortunately there were no real shallow bits there, and Michelle can't swim, so she just sunned herself while I went into the water. Makes a nice change jumping into water without having to stifle the scream when it hits you! I had a good bit of a splash around anyway and then we headed back. The only problem was I'd sort of forgotten the small insignificant fact that swimming washes off sunblock - by that night I was quite a fetching shade of bright red! :-)
On the thurs we headed south again to the Blue Grotto, a series of sea caves that you can do a boat tour of. The tour itself was very nice, altho I don't think that Michelle was overly impressed :-) After that we decided to head to the stone age temples at Hagar Qim, just up the coast. So, we headed for the bus stop, fending off the usual taxi drivers and their warning of "no bus for one hour!". Unfortunately, they were right! 45 very hot, very boring minutes later. we were joined at the bus stop by an american girl, asking were we waiting for the bus to Valetta. We replied no, that was the other side of the road, we were going to Hagar Qim. "But that's only 10, maybe 15mins walk up the road, I'm just after walking down from there myself". D'oh! So, me, Michelle and Sabrina, the austrian girl we'd been waiting at the bus top with, walked up. Just as we got there, the bus pulled up behind us! I know I wasn't exactly expecting to see Gandalf there, but the temples were slightly less then impressive (altho the oppressive afternoon heat could have had something to do with that). After that it was another 30min wait for a bus back to Valetta, where we all wandered around for a few hours doing nothing much in particular bar chilling before heading our separate ways again.
On the fri, we didn't really have very many plans so we just headed back out to Mdina and Rabat to see all the stuff that we'd missed thanks to our time-sharing friends. So, we wandered around Rabat a while, did the catacombs, the dungeons and St. Paul's Cathedral, where St. Paul originally brought christianity to Malta (well, the cathedral was on the site, he didn't exactly preach from the pulpit! :-P). at least the cathedral museum there was better than the one in Mdina! After having a nice lazy day there, we headed back to Sliema to finish off the pressie shopping for the ppl back home.
The last act of the trip pretty much was a BBQ on the rooftop of the hotel on the friday night, all you can eat for just €15 each. As it was a BBQ, the inevitable happened: just as we were sitting down and waiting for the food to cook, it started raining! :-) Not to be deterred, we pulled up a few of the big sun parasols to cover us and had the BBQ anyway!
The next morning, it was all over. Nothing to do but pack and head to the airport, back to cold, rainy Ireland!
Monday, September 15, 2008
Time Share!?!?
Well, our 3rd day didn't exactly get off to the type of start we were expecting for it, that's for sure! After being late for quite a few stuff the day before, we decided to get u a little bit earlier - 8am instead of 9am, so we could be on the road that bit earlier and so not get stuck with getting places just as the sun was at its hottest and everything was shutting around us for the siesta. So, up early and out of the hotel by 9:30, all set for the day - or so we thought.
We were just after literally crossing the road from the hotel when we were approached by a guy who said he was working for the Malta tourist board and wanted us to fill in a questionnaire. After we did it, he gave us a few scratch card type thingies as a "thank you" for doing the survey. I got a bottle of wine on mine, and Michelle got a free holiday!
Then the fun bit started. Apparently to collect this prize we had to pretend to be married, as it only applied to married couples, and we had to go collect it at a hotel down the road, where yer man told us we'd probably have to take about an hour of listening to them trying to sell us time-share in the hotel before we could get out with the goods. So, we headed down to collect our winnings, thinking "an hour isn't all that bad for a free holiday!" :-)
FOUR HOURS LATER we were leaving the hotel. The first hour of the meeting was ok, we were asking the rep guy about all the things to see/do on the island, how to get there etc, and he was giving us bus numbers and times. One thing we hadn't realised was that one of the main bus terminii(?) for the island was only 5mins walk away from us on the Sliema waterfront, we'd thought that to get anywhere we'd have to go to the main bus terminus in Valetta first. After that though, it was the hard sell for 3hrs. Apparently what they were doing wasn't a timeshare scheme, oh no, you just paid your money up-front and then you had your own room in a 5-star hotel, pre-booked, for a particular week every year, for 37 years. For a small change fee tho, you could change the week of the year, or change to a different hotel in the chain, and at the end of the 37 years you got your initial fee back. And all this for a mere €12,000, payable in one lump sum or a series of easy instalments (plus interest of course). No mention naturally of the fact that your €12,000 now isn't likely to be worth anything like €12,000 in 37 years time..... Plus you had to decide on the spot, no thinking about it, no waiting around, sign the paper and pay the deposit or "lose this fantastic opportunity"
Everything was pleasant enough until we told them we weren't likely to sign up for it, at which point the hard sell really started, with varying degrees of higher management dudes being brought out to try to convince us by dropping the rate, planning more flexible payments etc. When eventually they got the message we managed to get out, me with my bottle of wine and Michelle with a pamphlet on all the places we could get out free holiday in, with a promise that they'd ring us a few weeks after we got back from hols to see when and where we wanted to go. At that stage it was nearly 1:30pm, so we headed out to find the bus we wanted to get to Mdina, our original plans for the day. Only problem is, when we got there around 2:30 and finally got something to eat, we discovered that we didn't have enough time to do everything we wanted to there as most things (like the cathedral museum and the dungeons) closed at 4:30 or 5. What we saw was nice enough tho, the view from the citadel walls covered pretty much the whole island, but it would have been nice to see more of the museums and stuff.
Well, at least I got the wine I guess, which turned out to be not too bad...... Am not going to hold my breath on those dudes ringing us asking which holiday we want tho! ;-)
We were just after literally crossing the road from the hotel when we were approached by a guy who said he was working for the Malta tourist board and wanted us to fill in a questionnaire. After we did it, he gave us a few scratch card type thingies as a "thank you" for doing the survey. I got a bottle of wine on mine, and Michelle got a free holiday!
Then the fun bit started. Apparently to collect this prize we had to pretend to be married, as it only applied to married couples, and we had to go collect it at a hotel down the road, where yer man told us we'd probably have to take about an hour of listening to them trying to sell us time-share in the hotel before we could get out with the goods. So, we headed down to collect our winnings, thinking "an hour isn't all that bad for a free holiday!" :-)
FOUR HOURS LATER we were leaving the hotel. The first hour of the meeting was ok, we were asking the rep guy about all the things to see/do on the island, how to get there etc, and he was giving us bus numbers and times. One thing we hadn't realised was that one of the main bus terminii(?) for the island was only 5mins walk away from us on the Sliema waterfront, we'd thought that to get anywhere we'd have to go to the main bus terminus in Valetta first. After that though, it was the hard sell for 3hrs. Apparently what they were doing wasn't a timeshare scheme, oh no, you just paid your money up-front and then you had your own room in a 5-star hotel, pre-booked, for a particular week every year, for 37 years. For a small change fee tho, you could change the week of the year, or change to a different hotel in the chain, and at the end of the 37 years you got your initial fee back. And all this for a mere €12,000, payable in one lump sum or a series of easy instalments (plus interest of course). No mention naturally of the fact that your €12,000 now isn't likely to be worth anything like €12,000 in 37 years time..... Plus you had to decide on the spot, no thinking about it, no waiting around, sign the paper and pay the deposit or "lose this fantastic opportunity"
Everything was pleasant enough until we told them we weren't likely to sign up for it, at which point the hard sell really started, with varying degrees of higher management dudes being brought out to try to convince us by dropping the rate, planning more flexible payments etc. When eventually they got the message we managed to get out, me with my bottle of wine and Michelle with a pamphlet on all the places we could get out free holiday in, with a promise that they'd ring us a few weeks after we got back from hols to see when and where we wanted to go. At that stage it was nearly 1:30pm, so we headed out to find the bus we wanted to get to Mdina, our original plans for the day. Only problem is, when we got there around 2:30 and finally got something to eat, we discovered that we didn't have enough time to do everything we wanted to there as most things (like the cathedral museum and the dungeons) closed at 4:30 or 5. What we saw was nice enough tho, the view from the citadel walls covered pretty much the whole island, but it would have been nice to see more of the museums and stuff.
Well, at least I got the wine I guess, which turned out to be not too bad...... Am not going to hold my breath on those dudes ringing us asking which holiday we want tho! ;-)
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Acclimatization!
Hmph. the one bit I hate about travelling is the, well, actual travelling part of going to places. I'm definitely going to ave to think more about planing my flight times better, to get to Malta we had to get up at 4:45am - which meant after finishing packing the night before and all, was about 5 1/2hrs sleep! We managed to sleepwalk our way to the airport for our 7:45am flight anyway, made our way out to the Ryanair prefab and took off only about half an hour late (not bad for a flight from Dublin airport!). Three and a half hours later, we finally saw a patch of land under the wing - Malta!
In our half asleep state, we had a little bit of a shock to the system - the weather. When we left Dublin it was 12 degrees and spitting rain, but in Malta, we hit 32 degrees and about 75% humidity. This felt like quite a pleasant change as we made our way to the hotel, but once we were settled in and decided to go out exploring, it started to hit us hard. Our hotel was located on the waterfront in Sliema, across the harbour from Valetta (hence the name: "The Waterfront Hotel" :-P), and as we walked along in search of something to eat, the sweat was pouring out of us (well, out of me definitely anyway).
At this point the decision to go at stupid o'clock in the morning as it was cheaper option turned out to be a not quite so good one: we were zonked out, and it was only 2pm! We took the option of least resistance: starting off with a harbour tour, offered by the many kindly gentlemen positioned about every 50 feet along the boardwalk. Unfortunately at that stage the heat, the early start and the lack of sleep started to take their toll: by about half-way around the 2hr trip Michelle was starting to doze off and I wasn't all that much better! The tour was pretty good, we were jut not in a really good mood to appreciate it. So, the saturday we arrived turned out to be a bit of a non-event, we pretty much bummed around Sliema for the rest of the day and got an early night.
The sunday started bright and early outside - unfortunately we didn't. We woke up around 9am, got breakfast, showered and dressed and were out and about by 11am. We soon discovered that by sheer accident we were in a pretty damn spot location-wise, about 200 yards from the hotel was the ferry acrtoss to Valetta, and only a little but further up the road was the main bus terminus for the west of the Island! So, we took the ferry across (for a whopping 93c each!) and started touring around Valetta. As we got off the ferry, we saw signs for "The Malta Experience", a sort of potted history of the island, 4,000 years in 30mins video sort of thing, so we decided to do that. Unfortunately we discovered that the Malta tourist board had seemingly arranged the signs pointing to this attraction with a view to giving you a tour of the city along the way - it took us ages of wandering around to find it!
After the tour we decided to take the horse-drawn carriage tour back down to the front gates of Valetta where the marketplace was supposed to be on (the signs for he Malta Experience had eventually brought us out to the tip of the peninsula), so we could maybe start the pressie shopping! Unfortunately, the market closed at around 1:30-2pm, so by the time we got there everything was shut. And then we discovered that so was everything else. We knew that Malta did the spanish-style siesta between 12 and 2, but what we didn't realise that the country was religious enough to really take the "day of rest" thing seriously - on sundays, pretty much nothing opened again after the siesta! Shops, museums, everything was shut - even some of the churches, which I thought was a bit strange on a sunday!
And then, much to our surprise, it started raining! Rain, the very stuff we went on holidays to get away from! Luckily though, rain in Malta doesn't mean the same thing as rain at home - it only lasted about 10mins and was almost pleasant (I never knew you could have warm rain before)! Once the rain was over, we managed to find one museum that was open (the archaeological museum) and so spent a bit of time wandering around that before we headed back to Sliema to bum around for the evening.
In our half asleep state, we had a little bit of a shock to the system - the weather. When we left Dublin it was 12 degrees and spitting rain, but in Malta, we hit 32 degrees and about 75% humidity. This felt like quite a pleasant change as we made our way to the hotel, but once we were settled in and decided to go out exploring, it started to hit us hard. Our hotel was located on the waterfront in Sliema, across the harbour from Valetta (hence the name: "The Waterfront Hotel" :-P), and as we walked along in search of something to eat, the sweat was pouring out of us (well, out of me definitely anyway).
At this point the decision to go at stupid o'clock in the morning as it was cheaper option turned out to be a not quite so good one: we were zonked out, and it was only 2pm! We took the option of least resistance: starting off with a harbour tour, offered by the many kindly gentlemen positioned about every 50 feet along the boardwalk. Unfortunately at that stage the heat, the early start and the lack of sleep started to take their toll: by about half-way around the 2hr trip Michelle was starting to doze off and I wasn't all that much better! The tour was pretty good, we were jut not in a really good mood to appreciate it. So, the saturday we arrived turned out to be a bit of a non-event, we pretty much bummed around Sliema for the rest of the day and got an early night.
The sunday started bright and early outside - unfortunately we didn't. We woke up around 9am, got breakfast, showered and dressed and were out and about by 11am. We soon discovered that by sheer accident we were in a pretty damn spot location-wise, about 200 yards from the hotel was the ferry acrtoss to Valetta, and only a little but further up the road was the main bus terminus for the west of the Island! So, we took the ferry across (for a whopping 93c each!) and started touring around Valetta. As we got off the ferry, we saw signs for "The Malta Experience", a sort of potted history of the island, 4,000 years in 30mins video sort of thing, so we decided to do that. Unfortunately we discovered that the Malta tourist board had seemingly arranged the signs pointing to this attraction with a view to giving you a tour of the city along the way - it took us ages of wandering around to find it!
After the tour we decided to take the horse-drawn carriage tour back down to the front gates of Valetta where the marketplace was supposed to be on (the signs for he Malta Experience had eventually brought us out to the tip of the peninsula), so we could maybe start the pressie shopping! Unfortunately, the market closed at around 1:30-2pm, so by the time we got there everything was shut. And then we discovered that so was everything else. We knew that Malta did the spanish-style siesta between 12 and 2, but what we didn't realise that the country was religious enough to really take the "day of rest" thing seriously - on sundays, pretty much nothing opened again after the siesta! Shops, museums, everything was shut - even some of the churches, which I thought was a bit strange on a sunday!
And then, much to our surprise, it started raining! Rain, the very stuff we went on holidays to get away from! Luckily though, rain in Malta doesn't mean the same thing as rain at home - it only lasted about 10mins and was almost pleasant (I never knew you could have warm rain before)! Once the rain was over, we managed to find one museum that was open (the archaeological museum) and so spent a bit of time wandering around that before we headed back to Sliema to bum around for the evening.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Malta
Well, I'm off to Malta in the morning. Finally a bit of sun! Haven't seen a decent bit of weather since I was in S Africa - if this is Global warming I want my money back! Only problem is, the flight is at 7:45am, so have to get up at stupid o'clock! :-(
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Darkness
I hate this time of year. This is the first morning this year that I noticed that I had to turn on the light in the bathroom when I was getting up. So, that and the barely perceptible nip in the air definitely means that we're heading into winter! Then again, with the way the weather has gone the last few months, the only difference between summer and winter is that in the winter we have less daylight hours to be able to watch the rain out the window!
Then again, I got to put winter off for a least another week anyway - am heading to Malta for a week on Saturday :-)
Then again, I got to put winter off for a least another week anyway - am heading to Malta for a week on Saturday :-)
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Only the fecking Irish!
Well, here we go, another Olympics, another horse doping scandal in the Irish Olympic team. The best part about this one though was the first comment by the head of the Irish Olympic committee on hearing that one of the horses was tested positive for banned substances
"Well, that's a bitter pill to swallow"
"Well, that's a bitter pill to swallow"
Friday, August 15, 2008
Aussies are just strange
I was hunting around the kitchen in work yesterday morning to try to find where the cleaners had hid the black mug that they keep taking off my desk (it's a morning tradition at this stage), when I came across something a bit strange:
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Salt 'n Vinegar flavoured salt? What the hell? What's wring with just using traditional old-fashioned salt and traditional old-fashioned vinegar?
Then I looked at the back, and it all fell into place: "Made in Australia". The country whose other contribution to world cuisine has been biscuits that you suck your tea up through.
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Salt 'n Vinegar flavoured salt? What the hell? What's wring with just using traditional old-fashioned salt and traditional old-fashioned vinegar?
Then I looked at the back, and it all fell into place: "Made in Australia". The country whose other contribution to world cuisine has been biscuits that you suck your tea up through.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
You have got to be kidding me!
It seems that SpamAssassin is on the side of the Georgians in the ongoing conflict in the Caucasus: I tried to send a Register article about google map's little "russians invade georgia" error to some friends of mine, and it seems that if you try to send a mail with the word "russians" then you get the following error:
I asked our admins about this and they swear blind they didn't do anything: it seems our mails are checked by SpamAssassin before they go out though, so it could be them that are doing it.
I asked our admins about this and they swear blind they didn't do anything: it seems our mails are checked by SpamAssassin before they go out though, so it could be them that are doing it.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
New Trains, at last!
Well, finally Iarnrod Eireann are after rolling out the new trains on the Waterford line. After watching for the last year while the super-fast, new, shiny Cork train has whizzed in and out of Heuston while the rest of us mere mortals climbed onto the same old orange pieces of crap as we always have, it's our turn. Finally I'm travelling on inter-city transport that isn't older than me! Irish Rail has dragged itself kicking and screaming into the late 20th century at last! I say "late 20th" rather than "21st" because now we're getting the type of trains that our brethren on the Continent have probably taken for granted since the 1990s - and people in the likes of Japan & Korea have probably had since before then even.
It seems that once they catered for the special people in Cork by giving them their special trains (I'm surprised they didn't paint them red), they're replacing the rolling stock on the lines in order of seniority, which means that even Galway got the new trains before us. Then again, they needed them. Up until recently, if you were going to Galway and were getting off in one of the intermediate stops like Athenry where my friends live, you had to go to the door, pull the window down, reach out and open the door handle from the outside. Takes a bit of getting used to!
So, what are the trains actually like? Well, when you see them, the first thought is "shiny". They're silver and green as opposed to the faded orange and black of the old ones (and at least they look like they've been painted this decade). When you get onboard, the first impressions are "new" and "clean", the seats are in blue and grey colors and the ceiling is white with recessed lighting instead of the old florescent panels. The toilets are the same as on the Cork train, all electronic buttons, automatic sinks and airline-style flushing loos except without the annoying automated announcements for everything (yes, I know I've just closed the door, you don't have to tell me mr. robot). These have a bit of a disadvantage over the old-style toilets tho, at least on the old ones the locks were mechanical, if you don't hit the button properly on these, or don't remember to hit "lock" as well as "close", someone can walk in on you. One of the other disadvantages of the new trains is that the engine is part of the carriage like on the Arrows rather than being a separate unit, so to get a long train you have to stick pairs of these back-to-back. This means you can't get on the back and walk the length of the train to get a seat like you used to be. Then again, if they got everything right first time, it wouldn't be Ireland! :-) At least the seats are relatively comfortable, not like on the Cork train. There, you're glad that the new trains are faster and it's only a 2 1/2hr trip, 'cos your as is definitely gone numb before you've hit 2hrs!
So, progress anyway! Now all we have to hope is that they don't break down as often as the old ones! :-
It seems that once they catered for the special people in Cork by giving them their special trains (I'm surprised they didn't paint them red), they're replacing the rolling stock on the lines in order of seniority, which means that even Galway got the new trains before us. Then again, they needed them. Up until recently, if you were going to Galway and were getting off in one of the intermediate stops like Athenry where my friends live, you had to go to the door, pull the window down, reach out and open the door handle from the outside. Takes a bit of getting used to!
So, what are the trains actually like? Well, when you see them, the first thought is "shiny". They're silver and green as opposed to the faded orange and black of the old ones (and at least they look like they've been painted this decade). When you get onboard, the first impressions are "new" and "clean", the seats are in blue and grey colors and the ceiling is white with recessed lighting instead of the old florescent panels. The toilets are the same as on the Cork train, all electronic buttons, automatic sinks and airline-style flushing loos except without the annoying automated announcements for everything (yes, I know I've just closed the door, you don't have to tell me mr. robot). These have a bit of a disadvantage over the old-style toilets tho, at least on the old ones the locks were mechanical, if you don't hit the button properly on these, or don't remember to hit "lock" as well as "close", someone can walk in on you. One of the other disadvantages of the new trains is that the engine is part of the carriage like on the Arrows rather than being a separate unit, so to get a long train you have to stick pairs of these back-to-back. This means you can't get on the back and walk the length of the train to get a seat like you used to be. Then again, if they got everything right first time, it wouldn't be Ireland! :-) At least the seats are relatively comfortable, not like on the Cork train. There, you're glad that the new trains are faster and it's only a 2 1/2hr trip, 'cos your as is definitely gone numb before you've hit 2hrs!
So, progress anyway! Now all we have to hope is that they don't break down as often as the old ones! :-
Monday, July 21, 2008
Sun Shares costing me money again!
Well, if I didn't need it before, I'm just after getting more validation of my rule never to accept stock options from a company ever again. I thought the time that Mercer sent me the check for 2 cents after selling some shares for me was bad enough, or the time that they offered to sell $27 worth of shares for me and charging me $30 handling fee for the privilege, but this one takes the fucking cake!
I'm just after getting a letter from Dolmen stockbrokers, who AFAIK for their sins took over from Mercer on the Sun account:
"Please be advised that the annual account fee for the period July 2008 to June 2009 is due for application now, and we are also taking this opportunity to ascertain whether prior year account harges hev been fully discharged"
Ok, so far so good. Here's what I owe:
Portfolio balance as at 9th July: €10.93
Account fee due to July 2009 Inc Vat: €54.45
What the Fuck? I owe them €55 for looking after €10 of stock for me? Screw that! But it gets better.
Account fee due to July 2007 Inc Vat: €48.40
Account fee due to July 2008 Inc Vat: €48.40
Seems I must have not bothered opening a few other letters once I saw they were from Dolmen. So, seems I owe them just over €140!
The letter goes on:
"If Dolmen does not receive your remittance by latest, 18th August 2008, we will ahve no choice but to apply Section 13 of our Terms and Conditions which permit Dolmen Stockbrokers to dispose of any investment held for you to reduce ie eliminate the relevant liability. the proceeds of sale (net of sell out cost of €30) will be applied to your acount."
Oh no, you meam I'm not going to be able to pass on this $10 of stock to my grandchildren? I say "grandchildren" because it'll probably take that long before the stock is worth slightly more than fuck-all again.
Now comes the threat:
"In the event that you have insufficient stock to discharge the liability, Dolmen will dispose of the investment to reduce the liablility and close the account"
FINALLY they say something I agree with! Yes, by all means, close the account, enjoy the €10 of Sun stock for the short time before it goes down to €8. This will also help them do their bit for the environment by not having to waste paper sending me out these stupid fucking balance letters any more! I just wish Solomon Smith Barney would do the same......
I'm just after getting a letter from Dolmen stockbrokers, who AFAIK for their sins took over from Mercer on the Sun account:
"Please be advised that the annual account fee for the period July 2008 to June 2009 is due for application now, and we are also taking this opportunity to ascertain whether prior year account harges hev been fully discharged"
Ok, so far so good. Here's what I owe:
Portfolio balance as at 9th July: €10.93
Account fee due to July 2009 Inc Vat: €54.45
What the Fuck? I owe them €55 for looking after €10 of stock for me? Screw that! But it gets better.
Account fee due to July 2007 Inc Vat: €48.40
Account fee due to July 2008 Inc Vat: €48.40
Seems I must have not bothered opening a few other letters once I saw they were from Dolmen. So, seems I owe them just over €140!
The letter goes on:
"If Dolmen does not receive your remittance by latest, 18th August 2008, we will ahve no choice but to apply Section 13 of our Terms and Conditions which permit Dolmen Stockbrokers to dispose of any investment held for you to reduce ie eliminate the relevant liability. the proceeds of sale (net of sell out cost of €30) will be applied to your acount."
Oh no, you meam I'm not going to be able to pass on this $10 of stock to my grandchildren? I say "grandchildren" because it'll probably take that long before the stock is worth slightly more than fuck-all again.
Now comes the threat:
"In the event that you have insufficient stock to discharge the liability, Dolmen will dispose of the investment to reduce the liablility and close the account"
FINALLY they say something I agree with! Yes, by all means, close the account, enjoy the €10 of Sun stock for the short time before it goes down to €8. This will also help them do their bit for the environment by not having to waste paper sending me out these stupid fucking balance letters any more! I just wish Solomon Smith Barney would do the same......
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Working late
Well, here we go, am 5 weeks into the company and this is my 2nd day going home from the office at 6am - and the second day in a row actually! This better not be the start of a trend! This is one of the problems of working with a large telco as a customer (or any large customer-facing organization), the only time they can take their big-ass databases off-line for maintenance is overnight. So, I did a full day's work on tues, came back into work at 11:30pm, left around 6:45am weds, was back in again around 11, did another day's work, came back in last night at 11:30pm again, and I should be leaving here in the next few mins provided nothing goes tits-up.
So, by 9am tomorrow morning, out of the last 48hrs I will have spent 29 of them in the office, and only 6 of the others asleep (well, that would be if I was actually getting into work at 9am, which ain't fucking happening!)
The worst part of it is I wasn't actually busy most of the time. I had a busy first hour shutting down al the services and setting everything up, a busy last 30mins starting everything back up again, and most of the rest of the time was just monitoring stuff every now and then to make sure nothing had keeled over! I could have done it from home but I don't have a VPN account yet so had to come into the office :-( At least I was able to being in my home laptop with my game/movie collection!
So, by 9am tomorrow morning, out of the last 48hrs I will have spent 29 of them in the office, and only 6 of the others asleep (well, that would be if I was actually getting into work at 9am, which ain't fucking happening!)
The worst part of it is I wasn't actually busy most of the time. I had a busy first hour shutting down al the services and setting everything up, a busy last 30mins starting everything back up again, and most of the rest of the time was just monitoring stuff every now and then to make sure nothing had keeled over! I could have done it from home but I don't have a VPN account yet so had to come into the office :-( At least I was able to being in my home laptop with my game/movie collection!
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Pics from Edinburgh
Here are some of my pics from Edinburgh.....
http://www.flickr.com/photos/miles-away-from-home/sets/72157605456554293/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/miles-away-from-home/sets/72157605456554293/
Foreign Reserves
After the last trip, I was putting my UK pounds back into my foreign change wallet, when I decided it might be an idea to see how much I actually had lying around. So, here's what I've managed to pick up around my travels:
And this isn't including the currencies I have here that don't actually exist any more, which are pretty much just souvenirs now:
- 10 Macau Patacas (79c)
- 11 U.S. Dollars (€7.05)
- 50 Danish Kroners (€6.70)
- 80 Polish Zloty (€23.64)
- 85 British Pounds(€106.73)
- 100 S. African Rand (€8.18)
- 130 Singaporean Dollars (€61.04)
- 200 Czech Koruny (€8.12)
- 237 Chinese Yuan (€21.87)
- 680 Hong Kong Dollars (€55.86)
- 2,000 Japanese Yen (€12.11)
- 2,700 Hungarian Florints (€11.07)
- 116,000 Indonesian Rupiyah (€8.01)
And this isn't including the currencies I have here that don't actually exist any more, which are pretty much just souvenirs now:
- 35 Dutch Guilders (€15.88)
- 1,200 Belgian Francs (€29.75)
- 2,000 Spanish Pesetas (€12.02)
- 104,000 Italian Lira (€53.71)
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Ya gotta love Michael O'Leary
Saw this in the paper this morning:
HARD-pressed funeral goers are Ryanair's most profitable customers, chief executive Michael O'Leary revealed unapologetically yesterday.
His comments came as Ryanair unveiled record annual profits of €481m and detailed plans to ground up to four Dublin planes this winter.
"The best yields (fares) are VFRs (visiting friends and relatives) going to funerals," Mr O'Leary announced. "They book late because they don't tend to have much notice, and they tend to be price insensitive because they have to travel."
.....
Mr O'Leary's comments came in response to a question from a London-based analyst, who congratulated Ryanair on its "balanced customer base".
"I'm not sure who told you we had a balanced customer base but they were bull-shitting you," the Mullingar man replied. "We don't care whether you're (travelling for) business, leisure, or visiting friends and relatives.
"All we want to know about our customer base is that they've booked and we have their credit card number."
Well, is nice to see a top exec in a company admit it: "we're only out for your money, we don't give a crap about you after that". makes a refreshing change from all that "we care about our customers" crap you get off other companies. Then again, you'd sort of expect this from O'Leary, he's not exactly shy in speaking his mind...... :-)
HARD-pressed funeral goers are Ryanair's most profitable customers, chief executive Michael O'Leary revealed unapologetically yesterday.
His comments came as Ryanair unveiled record annual profits of €481m and detailed plans to ground up to four Dublin planes this winter.
"The best yields (fares) are VFRs (visiting friends and relatives) going to funerals," Mr O'Leary announced. "They book late because they don't tend to have much notice, and they tend to be price insensitive because they have to travel."
.....
Mr O'Leary's comments came in response to a question from a London-based analyst, who congratulated Ryanair on its "balanced customer base".
"I'm not sure who told you we had a balanced customer base but they were bull-shitting you," the Mullingar man replied. "We don't care whether you're (travelling for) business, leisure, or visiting friends and relatives.
"All we want to know about our customer base is that they've booked and we have their credit card number."
Well, is nice to see a top exec in a company admit it: "we're only out for your money, we don't give a crap about you after that". makes a refreshing change from all that "we care about our customers" crap you get off other companies. Then again, you'd sort of expect this from O'Leary, he's not exactly shy in speaking his mind...... :-)
Monday, June 02, 2008
Edinburgh
Well, I've finally been to Scotland. With all my years of travelling, going to the other side of the world and (near) the bottom of the world and all, it's been sort of funny that I've never been to one of the countries that is closest to me. Well, now that particular gap has been filled, with a weekend in Edinburgh, courtesy of my g/f who booked it as my 30th b'day present (well, when I say "booked it", I mean I booked the flights she told me about on my credit card. She got the hotel tho :-P).
This trip was actually an unusual one for me in that the plane took off on time from Dublin Airport and we got into Edinburgh airport a bit ahead of time! I reckon the only reason we actually got into Edinburgh airport proper was that there's no other airport close enough nearby that Ruinair could call "Ryanair Edinburgh" with a straight face. So, no need to pay them the extra €10 each to take their bus into town, we could rely on public transport. Problem was, there were roadworks going on in the street that the Airport Express normally drops you off so the stop was in a different spot to where the maps said it was - and the girl in the airport tourist office told us it was in a diff spot from where it was! So, was a bit of confusion with finding the hotel, but we got there in the end anyway.
Saturday morning started off lovely and fine and sunny, and then got hotter - almost too hot. Deciding that I wasn't going to end up looking like a tomato on this hol, I finally got sense and put on sunscreen before I started to crisp! We started the day by climbing the Walter Scott monument, all 270-odd steps of it, and then went on the bus tour. There's a fair difference all right between the old town and the new town, and who would have guessed that the lovely park we'd had lunch in had previously been a sewage-encrusted loch? The rest of the day was spent mostly wandering around the castle, before heading out for dinner to a Mexican restaurant several people had mentioned was really really good. They also said it's normally so busy that if you don't book you're not getting in, so we went more in hope than in expectation. We walked in the door, got a table straight away (the last table in the place), and spent the entire evening watching the manageress turn people away who hadn't a booking, saying the place was too full! ;-)
Later in the evening, we decided to do one of the ghost tours that Edinburgh was famous for, so we went on the Witchery tour. The tour was good, but it lacked a certain something. A ghost tour should really be done on a dark and preferably foggy night, but we unfortunately picked the wrong time of year: the tour was at 9:30pm, but it didn't get dark until about 11ish! The tour was very tongue in-cheek, and after the 2nd time the "jumper" jumped out on us we were on the look-out for him and it became a bit of a running joke. Was good fun tho. After that, we were pretty knackered after being up and about and walking around since about 10am, so we just went back to the hotel and to bed.
The next day was not quite as nice as the sat had been. In other words, it was pissing rain all day! Luckily, all the outdoorsy stuff had been done on sat so we spent the day doing the indoor stuff like the Camera Obscura, the Whiskey Museum or a tour of one of the old, now underground, tenement buildings. There were plans for doing one of the ghost tours as well, but it was a little bit too damp for wandering around town! Our flight back was on monday, but was an afternoon flight so there wasn't very much time to do anything, so the only thing that got done on mon was the obligatory present shopping for ppl back home!
All in all, a nice city, wud definitely go back. am thinking of trying to organize something for Hogmanay..... :-)
This trip was actually an unusual one for me in that the plane took off on time from Dublin Airport and we got into Edinburgh airport a bit ahead of time! I reckon the only reason we actually got into Edinburgh airport proper was that there's no other airport close enough nearby that Ruinair could call "Ryanair Edinburgh" with a straight face. So, no need to pay them the extra €10 each to take their bus into town, we could rely on public transport. Problem was, there were roadworks going on in the street that the Airport Express normally drops you off so the stop was in a different spot to where the maps said it was - and the girl in the airport tourist office told us it was in a diff spot from where it was! So, was a bit of confusion with finding the hotel, but we got there in the end anyway.
Saturday morning started off lovely and fine and sunny, and then got hotter - almost too hot. Deciding that I wasn't going to end up looking like a tomato on this hol, I finally got sense and put on sunscreen before I started to crisp! We started the day by climbing the Walter Scott monument, all 270-odd steps of it, and then went on the bus tour. There's a fair difference all right between the old town and the new town, and who would have guessed that the lovely park we'd had lunch in had previously been a sewage-encrusted loch? The rest of the day was spent mostly wandering around the castle, before heading out for dinner to a Mexican restaurant several people had mentioned was really really good. They also said it's normally so busy that if you don't book you're not getting in, so we went more in hope than in expectation. We walked in the door, got a table straight away (the last table in the place), and spent the entire evening watching the manageress turn people away who hadn't a booking, saying the place was too full! ;-)
Later in the evening, we decided to do one of the ghost tours that Edinburgh was famous for, so we went on the Witchery tour. The tour was good, but it lacked a certain something. A ghost tour should really be done on a dark and preferably foggy night, but we unfortunately picked the wrong time of year: the tour was at 9:30pm, but it didn't get dark until about 11ish! The tour was very tongue in-cheek, and after the 2nd time the "jumper" jumped out on us we were on the look-out for him and it became a bit of a running joke. Was good fun tho. After that, we were pretty knackered after being up and about and walking around since about 10am, so we just went back to the hotel and to bed.
The next day was not quite as nice as the sat had been. In other words, it was pissing rain all day! Luckily, all the outdoorsy stuff had been done on sat so we spent the day doing the indoor stuff like the Camera Obscura, the Whiskey Museum or a tour of one of the old, now underground, tenement buildings. There were plans for doing one of the ghost tours as well, but it was a little bit too damp for wandering around town! Our flight back was on monday, but was an afternoon flight so there wasn't very much time to do anything, so the only thing that got done on mon was the obligatory present shopping for ppl back home!
All in all, a nice city, wud definitely go back. am thinking of trying to organize something for Hogmanay..... :-)
Monday, May 26, 2008
Coke need to rethink their belgian marketing strategy
I was in Zaventem Airport just outside of Brussels the other week, and I saw this on a coke machine:
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Now I know that the Mannekin Pis is one of the tourist icons of Brussels and is probably it's most famous image (and also probably one of the few tourist attractions in the world where you can get a souvenir bigger than the original), but when you're going to get a Coke, do you really want the mental image of a little boy pissing into your bottle before you get it?
.jpg)
Now I know that the Mannekin Pis is one of the tourist icons of Brussels and is probably it's most famous image (and also probably one of the few tourist attractions in the world where you can get a souvenir bigger than the original), but when you're going to get a Coke, do you really want the mental image of a little boy pissing into your bottle before you get it?
Sunday, May 25, 2008
New Job
Well, the new job starts in the morning. Am not sure how I feel about it. Apparently in the new place they are big into dropping you in the deep end, so we'll have to see how that goes. Hopefully I won't be mad busy already by tomorrow evening! At least I wont be on my own, is already one CAPEy there, and another guy that I know from college, plus a few more CAPEys following me in the next few weeks. Will be a lot different at lunchtimes anyway, I'll be able to come back and have my lunch in the flat if I want.
I know one thing I WON'T be doing anyway, and that's giving the ppl at work the URL of this blog! :-P
I know one thing I WON'T be doing anyway, and that's giving the ppl at work the URL of this blog! :-P
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Pimp my Helmet!
I was at the Star Wars exhibition yesterday when I was in Brussels (it's doing a tour of europe), and at the very end of it they had a pretty cool display. apparenly they'd gotten a load of Darth Vader helmets and given them to local artists to "pimp up" as they saw fit.
These are some of the results!
The Green Bay Vaders
"El Vador", the Sith Luchador
Darth Moule
El Diablo!
These are some of the results!
The Green Bay Vaders
"El Vador", the Sith Luchador
Darth Moule
El Diablo!
Ruinair again!
Well, you have to hand it to Ruinair, they sure know how to give their victims customers that wonderful warm fuzzy feeling of being loved. As well as charging more on taxes than you pay for your ticket and charging you for bringin luggage, leaving you play musical chairs for your seat, you also get their wonderful customer experience when you're getting on the plane.
A few months ago, they opened up the new multi-million-euro pier in Dublin Airport, Pier D. It looks lovely and shiny and new and pretty - hell, it looks like an airport in a real developed country! And where are the Ryanair gates in this wonderful new pier? Down in the same fecking prefabs they were in before the pier was open! You walk down this wonderful new building, and you get to the sign for gates D74 to 78, pointing down a stairs, You look out the window, and you see the prefab, tacked onto the side of the Peir like a lean-to shed on the side of a Bel Air mansion.
And then when you get in there: "Air conditioning? Shur what do you need that for, this is ireland!". Is only 800-odd people crammed into a prefab with no opening windows and an outside temp of about 19 degrees (hey, it's hot for ireland). Then, just to make things worse, a full 10mins before we were due to board (well, the time it said on the boarding pass anyway) and a good 45mins before take-off, someone decides to stand in the queue, the herd mentality kicks in and I have to stand with the rest of the sheep to avoid being last on board and have nowhere to put me bag. There wasn't even any sign of the plane at that stage! And because I hadn't remembered to bring my passport into work with me so that I could check in online, I was at teh end of the pleb's queue and had to watch all them "priority" passengers get on ahead of me.
A few months ago, they opened up the new multi-million-euro pier in Dublin Airport, Pier D. It looks lovely and shiny and new and pretty - hell, it looks like an airport in a real developed country! And where are the Ryanair gates in this wonderful new pier? Down in the same fecking prefabs they were in before the pier was open! You walk down this wonderful new building, and you get to the sign for gates D74 to 78, pointing down a stairs, You look out the window, and you see the prefab, tacked onto the side of the Peir like a lean-to shed on the side of a Bel Air mansion.
And then when you get in there: "Air conditioning? Shur what do you need that for, this is ireland!". Is only 800-odd people crammed into a prefab with no opening windows and an outside temp of about 19 degrees (hey, it's hot for ireland). Then, just to make things worse, a full 10mins before we were due to board (well, the time it said on the boarding pass anyway) and a good 45mins before take-off, someone decides to stand in the queue, the herd mentality kicks in and I have to stand with the rest of the sheep to avoid being last on board and have nowhere to put me bag. There wasn't even any sign of the plane at that stage! And because I hadn't remembered to bring my passport into work with me so that I could check in online, I was at teh end of the pleb's queue and had to watch all them "priority" passengers get on ahead of me.
The last day
Well, tomorrow is my last day in WeDo. It's pretty much all over bar the shouting now, I've had my exit interview and my going-away piss-up as well, and I brought home all the crap from my desk this evening. The going-away do was a good long session, we went to the pub at about 5:30 and I got home (from Copper Faced Jacks, oh the shame!) at about 4am-ish. The exit interview was a bit strange, we didn't really talk about the usual stuff ("why are you leaving", "is there any way you think we can improve things here" etc), I sort of went through all that in the last 1-1 with Darina the HR head, was more like just a regular chat about random crap.
Feels a bit strange to be leaving. I won't miss some of the muppets we have for customers, but it was a very good learning experience regardless, and I'll miss all the ppl I work with (well, those that are left in the place).
So, so long WeDo, hello Newbay!
Feels a bit strange to be leaving. I won't miss some of the muppets we have for customers, but it was a very good learning experience regardless, and I'll miss all the ppl I work with (well, those that are left in the place).
So, so long WeDo, hello Newbay!
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Gooooool!!!!!!! :-)
If by some miracle we found out that my granny was from Brazil instead of Wexford, and if I had any soccer talent worth a damn, this is what my Brazilian football shirt would look like :-P
See what your one would be! :-)
See what your one would be! :-)
I can't believe this is still up and running!
I'm heading to Belgium this weekend, and my friend over there is thinking of organizing a trip to Ypres for the day. I've been there already, so I put in my €0.02 on what to go and see, then I remembered that I might have a few pics up on the web from my last trip. So, on the off chance that my old IOL page was still up and running, I decided to throw the URL into the browser and see does it work. Imagine my surprise when instead of a 404 error, I got:
I haven't paid for this account in about 8, 9 years! I wonder is my mail still working. Imagine, 9 years of spam, is like a time capsule! I wonder if I can remember what the password was........ :-)
I haven't paid for this account in about 8, 9 years! I wonder is my mail still working. Imagine, 9 years of spam, is like a time capsule! I wonder if I can remember what the password was........ :-)
Monday, May 05, 2008
Pimp My Vista
Well, I have a new laptop - again. I finally got sick of every single game I tried saying "You need an Nvidia card to play me" and sticking two fingers up at me, so I'm selling my "old" (as in 5 months old) laptop to my flatmate and now I have myself a new HP Pavillion 9565ea. As well as an Nvidia card, it has a built-in webcam, TV tuner and fingerprint reader, so to login I don't even need to type a password any more. It also has 2 120GB HDs so plenty of space to put my pr0n movies, and something called a lightscribe writer on the DVD drive which means as well as burning blank DVDs, if you have a certain kind of DVD it can actually print the face of the DVD for you too!
Only problem is, as it's a new laptop, it's running Windows Vista. And Vista is, well, slow and clunky. Last time I got a laptop I tried sticking with Vista for a few weeks and then got sick of it and threw XP back on, but this time around it seems HP have gotten wise to that sort of thing and not put the XP drivers for things like the lightscribe, fingerprint reader and webcam on their support site. So, I may have to stick with Vista until I find all that good stuff!
I've already found a website called 99 Windows Vista Tips and Tweaks, so I can use as many of those as I can to pimp up Vista to see can you actually make a decently performing OS out of it! I'm already after managing to turn off that annoying "User Account Control " dialog that asks you "are you sure?" every time you try to do something, which is good. it's supposed to be to stop computer newbies from accidentally doing something stupid, but I reckon I know my way around a computer well enough now not to need it. I reckon as well that my old Alienware laptop doesn't really need as much RAM any more as no-one will be using it, so I might try to up the new one from 2GB to 4GB (altho I think Vista can't actually use any more than 3.2GB). So, let's see if we can't actually make use of this damn OS!
And, as well as that, I'm going to hunt for as many of the XP drivers for the laptop as I can find, just in case :-)
Only problem is, as it's a new laptop, it's running Windows Vista. And Vista is, well, slow and clunky. Last time I got a laptop I tried sticking with Vista for a few weeks and then got sick of it and threw XP back on, but this time around it seems HP have gotten wise to that sort of thing and not put the XP drivers for things like the lightscribe, fingerprint reader and webcam on their support site. So, I may have to stick with Vista until I find all that good stuff!
I've already found a website called 99 Windows Vista Tips and Tweaks, so I can use as many of those as I can to pimp up Vista to see can you actually make a decently performing OS out of it! I'm already after managing to turn off that annoying "User Account Control " dialog that asks you "are you sure?" every time you try to do something, which is good. it's supposed to be to stop computer newbies from accidentally doing something stupid, but I reckon I know my way around a computer well enough now not to need it. I reckon as well that my old Alienware laptop doesn't really need as much RAM any more as no-one will be using it, so I might try to up the new one from 2GB to 4GB (altho I think Vista can't actually use any more than 3.2GB). So, let's see if we can't actually make use of this damn OS!
And, as well as that, I'm going to hunt for as many of the XP drivers for the laptop as I can find, just in case :-)
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Well there it is.......
I'm not in my 20s any more. Apparently some time around 4pm today (or is it 4:30?) I'm officially 30. So there it is, I've just jumped a decade. Apparently everything is downhill from here on in now, as everyone here is gleefully informing me - next stop 40! :-(
So, time to take stock?
So, not bad I suppose.
[update]
OK, just a call from my mother: the official time of getting old was 4:35. There we go so. It's done.
So, time to take stock?
- I'm starting a new job in a few weeks, more money, more holidays etc - and a 5min commute!
- I'm still living in the same place I was 8 years ago - but seeing as that's city center and 5mins walk from anywhere, why would I move?
- According to an app I found on facebook, I've seen 9% of the world, which doesn't sound like a lot until you take into account that it's a big-ass world.
- I'm probably the most unfit I've ever been in my life, which isn't good.
- Unlike a lot of ppl I know who live pretty much from paycheck to paycheck, I have a bit of money in the bank.
- For the first time in about 10 years, I can use the term "my girlfriend" in the present tense and be actually referring to a real live person ;-P
So, not bad I suppose.
[update]
OK, just a call from my mother: the official time of getting old was 4:35. There we go so. It's done.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Gotta love Vodafone.....
Well, it seems that Vodafone.ie have set up a lovely spiffing new web interface for things like webtext. Is only one problem: it doesn't work. Now when you want to send a message to someone in your contacts list, you're supposed to click a check-box beside their name and their number automatically gets added into the "send to" box. Only problem is, it doesn't - at least not on Firefox. You click the check box go to send the message, and you get an error saying you have to pick a number to send it to first.
Then, another wonderful feature they have is a feedback form - once you send a message you have a little form on the right of the page asking you did sending the text work, and if not, you can fill in a little form to say why not. Problem is, if you try to use it, you get:
So, the form that you use to complain about something that isn't working, isn't working! :-)
Then, another wonderful feature they have is a feedback form - once you send a message you have a little form on the right of the page asking you did sending the text work, and if not, you can fill in a little form to say why not. Problem is, if you try to use it, you get:
So, the form that you use to complain about something that isn't working, isn't working! :-)
Friday, April 18, 2008
All Done and Dusted
Well, I finally handed in my notice anyway. I got a new job last week, and got the contract signed on tues, but I was holding off on handing in the notice as it looked like Work (as in, the current one) might be sending me to Cairo for a week. My new job starts on the 26th May so handing in my 4 weeks notice now means I get a week off in between jobs, but the cairo trip looked like it was coming up the week of the 19th, so I was holding off on the notice for a week so that my last week would be spent off abroad one more time! Turns out the customer wants to hold off until the end of May tho, so that's me out - so no point in hanging around here the extra week! :-)
It was surprisingly easy to get the new job actually. Unlike last time where I was fruitlessly searching for 2 years and had god knows how many interviews (including the one where the muppet recruitment agent sent me to the wrong interview!), I got this on on my second try! The first interview was for a job that I didn't really want anyway, a 2nd line support job with Eircom which was a bit too close to the bits I didn't like in my current job - I was doing it more for the experience and to get back into the rhythm of interviewing than naything else. I dind't get offered it, and even if I had I would have turned it down. The interview was full of the HR type stuff like "where do you see yourself in 5 years time" or "what would you consider your main strengths/weaknesses to be" or "how would you say you perform under stress?", with techy questions few and far between, and needless to say it was this HR crap I apparently fell down on.
My second interview was a lot better - well, I got it, didn't I :-)? Was pretty much all techy stuff, and was more like a chat than an interview (I was bouncing as many questions off him as he was off me). It started at 3pm, I was out by 3:45 and by 4:15 the nice girl in the recruitment agency (and by "nice" I mean "hot") was on to me saying the company wanted me to give then references to check. Here was the first hurdle: they wanted one from CAPE and one from Sun! The CAPE one was easy, just banged off a txt to my manager who'd left a few weeks before and got an immediate "no probs", but the Sun one was more tricky. Seeing as my former group in Sun had all been laid off about 3 months after I left, I dint' have any contact info that I knew woud work! I ended up chancing my arm with a few emial addresses and eventually got a repy from two of them - Tom, my ex boss in Dublin who had survuved the department's demise (I thought he'd been let go too), and Shinobu, my former project lead in San Francisco. Up til the point where I heard from them, I'd been trying to remember what the last name was of my host manager in Beijing so I could send him a message! The reference info was duly sent off anyway, and in short order a reply came back: I had the job.
So anyway, the role is with an Irish company who do mobile phone content provision (I'm not naming names, amde that mistake before and got stung for it!). The role is as a "Deployment Engineer" which is pretty much the same thing I'm doing in my current job - I'm the guy who sets up the customer's systems and throws the software on them. There'll be some travel, but not much - at least they're honest about that, the reason I took my current job was 'cos they said I could be spending as much as 1 out of every 3 months abroad, and lok how far that got me! It's 4 grand more money anyway, 4 days more holidays, and hte best bit is it's only 5mins walk from my apartment, which is just as good as another €700 a year to me as it means I won't have to take the DART to work any more!
So, how will it turn out? Will my current place get out of the slump and start hiring ppl instead of losing them? Only time will tell.....
It was surprisingly easy to get the new job actually. Unlike last time where I was fruitlessly searching for 2 years and had god knows how many interviews (including the one where the muppet recruitment agent sent me to the wrong interview!), I got this on on my second try! The first interview was for a job that I didn't really want anyway, a 2nd line support job with Eircom which was a bit too close to the bits I didn't like in my current job - I was doing it more for the experience and to get back into the rhythm of interviewing than naything else. I dind't get offered it, and even if I had I would have turned it down. The interview was full of the HR type stuff like "where do you see yourself in 5 years time" or "what would you consider your main strengths/weaknesses to be" or "how would you say you perform under stress?", with techy questions few and far between, and needless to say it was this HR crap I apparently fell down on.
My second interview was a lot better - well, I got it, didn't I :-)? Was pretty much all techy stuff, and was more like a chat than an interview (I was bouncing as many questions off him as he was off me). It started at 3pm, I was out by 3:45 and by 4:15 the nice girl in the recruitment agency (and by "nice" I mean "hot") was on to me saying the company wanted me to give then references to check. Here was the first hurdle: they wanted one from CAPE and one from Sun! The CAPE one was easy, just banged off a txt to my manager who'd left a few weeks before and got an immediate "no probs", but the Sun one was more tricky. Seeing as my former group in Sun had all been laid off about 3 months after I left, I dint' have any contact info that I knew woud work! I ended up chancing my arm with a few emial addresses and eventually got a repy from two of them - Tom, my ex boss in Dublin who had survuved the department's demise (I thought he'd been let go too), and Shinobu, my former project lead in San Francisco. Up til the point where I heard from them, I'd been trying to remember what the last name was of my host manager in Beijing so I could send him a message! The reference info was duly sent off anyway, and in short order a reply came back: I had the job.
So anyway, the role is with an Irish company who do mobile phone content provision (I'm not naming names, amde that mistake before and got stung for it!). The role is as a "Deployment Engineer" which is pretty much the same thing I'm doing in my current job - I'm the guy who sets up the customer's systems and throws the software on them. There'll be some travel, but not much - at least they're honest about that, the reason I took my current job was 'cos they said I could be spending as much as 1 out of every 3 months abroad, and lok how far that got me! It's 4 grand more money anyway, 4 days more holidays, and hte best bit is it's only 5mins walk from my apartment, which is just as good as another €700 a year to me as it means I won't have to take the DART to work any more!
So, how will it turn out? Will my current place get out of the slump and start hiring ppl instead of losing them? Only time will tell.....
New Shiny Shiny
Well, I have meself a nice new phone here. Seems it's company policy that everyone has a company phone, so I took the opportunity to use the company discount to try out a Nokia for the first time in about 5-6 years. So, my new Nokia E51 has just landed on my desk. It looks nice anyway - about the same length and breadth as my K800i but about half as thick. I can't play with it til I get a full charge on it now, but I have a good 2 1/2hrs to play with it on my way home on the train this evening :-)
Friday, April 11, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
New Passport! :-)
Well, I can travel again now. I have my new passport! That was quicker than I thought, I knew they said "10 working days" but this is Ireland so I was expecting it to be another week maybe. Plus I got the old one back with a big-ass "CANCELLED" stamp across the pic page, so at least I get to keep my entry visas from China etc as souveniers.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Going-away parties.
Well, I was out at another going-away party with work last night. One of the girls from our group was leaving - which brings us down to 5 from a team of 14. As one of the girls is relatively new, there's only 4 of us who'll be able to take the support phone foe a good while. So, one week a month I'll be on call!
So for we're still maintaining the record of not having a week this year where there hasn't been a going-away party for someone - and a lot of the more recent weekend do's have been for 2, sometimes 3 people at a time. We were figuring out the numbers last night and realised that we've gone from over 140 in the Dublin office at its peak (before the takeover) to just a tad over 40 now. That's a lot of people gone! At this stage I don't even really bother reading the names on the going-away cards, just sign "all the best", and the having to put a fiver in each card has pretty much negated that bonus I got last month!
So for we're still maintaining the record of not having a week this year where there hasn't been a going-away party for someone - and a lot of the more recent weekend do's have been for 2, sometimes 3 people at a time. We were figuring out the numbers last night and realised that we've gone from over 140 in the Dublin office at its peak (before the takeover) to just a tad over 40 now. That's a lot of people gone! At this stage I don't even really bother reading the names on the going-away cards, just sign "all the best", and the having to put a fiver in each card has pretty much negated that bonus I got last month!
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Passport
Well, at least now I know for definite that work isn't going to be sending me off anywhere for the next two weeks anyway: I don't have a passport any more! I'm just after sending off my application to get a new passport, and I had to include my old passport to get canceled as well. So, I can't leave the country for the next 10 working days!
Man, I can't believe that it's nearly 10 years since I got a passport. I can remember being so excited about my first trip abroad (to Brussels to see my uncle) that I barely slept the night before. Now I'm so blasé about it that my 2nd last trip to Brussels I left work at about 4pm to get back to the flat to pack my bag and find my passport for my 7pm flight! (the last trip to Brussels I went straight from work, and I'd taken 10mins to pack my bag that morning). Since then, according to them applet thingies on my facebook account, I've been to 9% of the countries in the word - 79 cities in 21 countries. And a few of them (like Belgium, Italy, America and Spain), I've been to a few times. Not bad I guess eh?
Man, I can't believe that it's nearly 10 years since I got a passport. I can remember being so excited about my first trip abroad (to Brussels to see my uncle) that I barely slept the night before. Now I'm so blasé about it that my 2nd last trip to Brussels I left work at about 4pm to get back to the flat to pack my bag and find my passport for my 7pm flight! (the last trip to Brussels I went straight from work, and I'd taken 10mins to pack my bag that morning). Since then, according to them applet thingies on my facebook account, I've been to 9% of the countries in the word - 79 cities in 21 countries. And a few of them (like Belgium, Italy, America and Spain), I've been to a few times. Not bad I guess eh?
Power Cuts
Well, it was fun yesterday evening in work when we had a power cut around 3:30 - no-one could do anything, and just as it came back in, it was time to leave for the evening - but now this morning there was a power cut in my apartment building as well. I was just getting out of the shower and the light in the bathroom went off. I thought it was a blown bulb until I noticed there was no sound of the water heater pump when I ran the hot tap (it's not loud but it's noticeable). Sure enough, when I went out the all the lights were off, and when I looked out the window the traffic lights were out and the building across the road was dark too.
Yesterday in work we were blaming the guys digging a big hole in the footpath outside the building for hitting the wrong wire, but I can't do that for this morning. Maybe some overzealous employee in ESB decided we didn't celebrate Earth Hour enough? Or maybe it's me? Maybe I've started emitting some strange electromagnetic radiation that turns off the power? That'd be cool.......
Yesterday in work we were blaming the guys digging a big hole in the footpath outside the building for hitting the wrong wire, but I can't do that for this morning. Maybe some overzealous employee in ESB decided we didn't celebrate Earth Hour enough? Or maybe it's me? Maybe I've started emitting some strange electromagnetic radiation that turns off the power? That'd be cool.......
Monday, March 31, 2008
Hee Hee
I was in town yesterday, and when I was passing by the Great Outdoors I noticed that they had a big "SALE" sign in the window, so I decided to go up and take a look. I saw pretty much the same type of ski boots as I have at a slightly different price - €199, or still €50 more than I paid for mine! :-)
On another note, you can tell that the winter is over and summer isn't that far away, when you see the arrival of the annoying little foreign students. When I was passing by Trinity College, there they were, a big group of about 20 or so spanish (I think) kids in matching backpacks and chatting at full volume, blocking the whole path. A few years ago, we came up with a collective noun for them: a "babble" of spanish students. So, from now on, we'll have to batter our way past them every time we want to go past Trinity, the GPO, and any McDonalds in the city.....
On another note, you can tell that the winter is over and summer isn't that far away, when you see the arrival of the annoying little foreign students. When I was passing by Trinity College, there they were, a big group of about 20 or so spanish (I think) kids in matching backpacks and chatting at full volume, blocking the whole path. A few years ago, we came up with a collective noun for them: a "babble" of spanish students. So, from now on, we'll have to batter our way past them every time we want to go past Trinity, the GPO, and any McDonalds in the city.....
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Flights
Well, I'm just after booking my 6-monthly trip over to see Sara in Brussels here. I decided to do it a bit differently than usual - I'm flying out with Ryanair and back with Aer Lingus. Is costing about €78 return, which is cheaper than going both ways with either airline - a return with Ryanair on the same days would be €95 before adding on their stealth charges (so probably about €100) and with Aer Lingus it'd be €126. Most of the flights here are taxes -t eh ryanair flight allegedly costs €3.99 before taxes etc (€30 after) and Aer Lingus was €10 before taxes (or €48 after).
The strange thing is that the Aer Lingus prices seem to vary quite a bit. I got the single flight for €10, but apparenly if I was getting it as the return leg of a two-way flight, it'd be €6.....
The strange thing is that the Aer Lingus prices seem to vary quite a bit. I got the single flight for €10, but apparenly if I was getting it as the return leg of a two-way flight, it'd be €6.....
Thursday, March 20, 2008
The pubs are never opening again!
Well, that seems to be the attitude of Irish people around this time of the year. Twice a year, the pubs close for a whole day and off licenses etc aren't supposed to sell drink (Good Friday and Xmas day), and both times you see people the day before coming out of the supermarkets with trollies packed to the brim full of booze. There's more drink bought on Holy Thursday and Xmas Eve than I'd say in the 2-3 weeks before each put together, and more alcohol probably drank on those days than when the pubs are actually open. Sort of misses the whole point of "day of fast and abstinence" doesn't it really?
It's like primitive man sacrificing animals at midwinter so the sun will come up again, people seem to be afraid that when the pubs shut this evening, they won't ever open again.......
It's like primitive man sacrificing animals at midwinter so the sun will come up again, people seem to be afraid that when the pubs shut this evening, they won't ever open again.......
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Skiing in the dark
On our last night, Eugene, the Irish guy whose place we were staying in, decided we were going to start drinking up at the middle station and then drink our way down the mountain. He took a bit of a shine to us I think, because he was on a leave of absence from CIE and there were two of the guys in the group from there, so we got maybe preferential treatment to other groups (including the discount on the boots) :-) He knew a little gasthaus that hardly any of the tourists ever went, which was on a blue run off to the side of the final run down to the village (which incidentally was a black run), if you didn't know about it you'd miss it every time. So, the plan was to drink a bit, ski a bit, drink a bit more, ski a bit more and end up in there at around 5pm for dinner and more drinks. The dinner was absolutely fantastic - roast pork, roast potatoes and dumplings, probably the best meal we got in the whole trip! After the meal there was a bit of a singsong, and we wound that up around 9pm. Then came the interesting part: the only way back to the village was to ski down. A black slope. In the dark. With about 5, 6 pints on everyone. Fun! The only light we had was from a piste basher a bit up the slope. Strangely enough, it was probably some of the best skiing most ppl did: if you can't see the black slope, you can't be scared by the fact you're skiing down a 75- or 80-odd degree angle, and the alcohol got rid of any residual nerves anyone had! Everyone made it down with no injuries at all, even the beginner skiiers. So, for future reference, the best way to tackle a black slope is half cut :-)
Monday, March 03, 2008
Nocturnal events: apres-ski in Zell.
Well, no-one goes on a ski holiday to ski, that'd just be silly. The nightlife is as much of an attraction as the slopes, and I've known ppl who've spent more time on the piss than on the piste!
We started off quite well, with the Ireland V Scotland and England V France matches in the Irish pub pretty much as soon as we arrived. The forst match went well, but then we hit an uncomfortable situation for the second match: for Ireland to have a chance at the Grand Slam, France had to lose, so we had to shout for England. Alcohol helped numb that particular pain, and the night ended well apart from the very end: the trek up to the guesthouse. We were staying about 300m up the mountain from the village and the slope up to it was nearly steeper than anything we had to ski! Walking back up there was often more knackering at the end of the day than anything else we'd done earlier.
As the week went on, we took the measure of all of the alcohol serving establishments in the village. The irish bar we tried to avoid, as, well, it was an irish bar and there's too many of them at home. A few of the guys had been in Zell a few years before and had fond half-memories of a bar called "Deiler", but this year that seemed to always be full of 17- and 18-year-old dutch kids and you nearly felt like a paedophile just looking at the dancefloor. The music was brutal as well, so we abandoned that place for a bar called "Crazy Daisys", which didn't always hit the spot music-wise (this is a ski resort in austria I guess, their taste in music died with Mozart) but had a better atmosphere. And once that place shut at 4am, there was always Viva, which was a shite club that only played techno music but stayed open serving alcohol til the last person left or 8am, whichever happened first.
So, there were quite a few mornings where we weren't quite able to catch the first chairlift of the morning at 8:30 :-)
We started off quite well, with the Ireland V Scotland and England V France matches in the Irish pub pretty much as soon as we arrived. The forst match went well, but then we hit an uncomfortable situation for the second match: for Ireland to have a chance at the Grand Slam, France had to lose, so we had to shout for England. Alcohol helped numb that particular pain, and the night ended well apart from the very end: the trek up to the guesthouse. We were staying about 300m up the mountain from the village and the slope up to it was nearly steeper than anything we had to ski! Walking back up there was often more knackering at the end of the day than anything else we'd done earlier.
As the week went on, we took the measure of all of the alcohol serving establishments in the village. The irish bar we tried to avoid, as, well, it was an irish bar and there's too many of them at home. A few of the guys had been in Zell a few years before and had fond half-memories of a bar called "Deiler", but this year that seemed to always be full of 17- and 18-year-old dutch kids and you nearly felt like a paedophile just looking at the dancefloor. The music was brutal as well, so we abandoned that place for a bar called "Crazy Daisys", which didn't always hit the spot music-wise (this is a ski resort in austria I guess, their taste in music died with Mozart) but had a better atmosphere. And once that place shut at 4am, there was always Viva, which was a shite club that only played techno music but stayed open serving alcohol til the last person left or 8am, whichever happened first.
So, there were quite a few mornings where we weren't quite able to catch the first chairlift of the morning at 8:30 :-)
Skiing without snow (nearly)
I remember on my first year skiing I had a bit of trouble adjusting to having to walk around in the village on that cold white "snow" stuff; on our way to the pub the first night and for the few days afterwards I was slipping and sliding all over the shop until I got my "snow legs". I needn't have worried about it this year. Once again, we arrived into a snowless ski resort. It was a little bit better than Kitzbuhel last year in that you could ski all the way down to the village, but only just about better. The day we arrived there wasn't even any attempt to get on the white stuff though, as it was just about getting dark when we arived and there was an ireland match to be watched anyway (strangley enough, same as last year!).
We had just about enough time before the match to get sorted out with gear, and I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a pair of ski boots. Last year, I'd been looking at the sales in the Great Outdoors in Dublin and at the end-of-season clearance sale the boots were down to about €300. Here, the boots started at about €250 and even then I got them reduced to €150 because there were a few of us getting them together and because the shop owner had a deal with the guy we were staying with. So, €150 for a pair of boots I'll wear maybe one week a year, am I mad? No, paying €400 for a pair you'll wear one week a year, that's mad! ;-p
So, sunday morning we headed up the ski slopes. Straight away, we noticed something. It was warm. very warm. Too bloody warm in fact! Normally when you go skiing, you get the expensive ski jacket and pants for a reason: the temp is normally in the minus figures. Minus 5 degrees is nice weather for skiing, anything lower is maybe a bit chilly. Here tho, it was plus 5 degrees - at 9am! By early afternoon, I'd seen a thermometer on one of the ski lifts reading an air temp of 15 degrees! This was nice in one way as you could ski in just your base layer or a fleece instead of being wrapped up like an arctic explorer (altho you couldn't lose the ski pants which got a bit toasty), but bad in that the snow conditions got messy real fast in the afternoon. High temps and lots of ppl sking combined to make the slopes pretty slushy and bumpy by about 2pm, and there were no piste bashers in evidence around to smooth things out again. By later afternoon, some of the slopes were less ski runs and more obstacle courses as you had to navigate around bumps and moguls that had been carved out gradually during the day.
This unfortunately was somehting that didn't change as the week went on: it got a bit cooler but never went below zero during the day, which meant that they couldn't use the snow cannons to make more snow (it needs to be below zero for that to work). Add to that the fact that we pretty much didn't see any snow falling on Zell til the last run of the last day (and even then only on the top of the mountain, any lower than 2000m and it was rain) meant that the snow we had at the start of the week was the snow we were stuck with til the end of the week. The mornings were ok, as the snow had a chance to refreeze overnight and hte piste bashers went in after it got dark, but by the afternoons it was a slushfest again. The worst run was on the last day, a 1km(ish) red run down to the village which by the time we went on it was just pure muck to ski on. Was as much ice and slush as actual snow, you couldn't turn worth shit, was bumpy as feck and even the experienced skiiers with us were wiping out. Everyone was knackered and soaked by the time we got the whole way down.
Then again, it could have been worse. I feel sorry for anyone who was arriving on the day we left - it was pissing rain all morning and as we were dropping our gear off in the shop the assistant told us they were after closing all the lifts as the ski conditions were just so bad - and this was just before lunch! So, if you arrived in Zell on the 1st March, I hope you were into hill-walking 'cos you sure as shit weren't going to be doing any skiing!
We had just about enough time before the match to get sorted out with gear, and I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a pair of ski boots. Last year, I'd been looking at the sales in the Great Outdoors in Dublin and at the end-of-season clearance sale the boots were down to about €300. Here, the boots started at about €250 and even then I got them reduced to €150 because there were a few of us getting them together and because the shop owner had a deal with the guy we were staying with. So, €150 for a pair of boots I'll wear maybe one week a year, am I mad? No, paying €400 for a pair you'll wear one week a year, that's mad! ;-p
So, sunday morning we headed up the ski slopes. Straight away, we noticed something. It was warm. very warm. Too bloody warm in fact! Normally when you go skiing, you get the expensive ski jacket and pants for a reason: the temp is normally in the minus figures. Minus 5 degrees is nice weather for skiing, anything lower is maybe a bit chilly. Here tho, it was plus 5 degrees - at 9am! By early afternoon, I'd seen a thermometer on one of the ski lifts reading an air temp of 15 degrees! This was nice in one way as you could ski in just your base layer or a fleece instead of being wrapped up like an arctic explorer (altho you couldn't lose the ski pants which got a bit toasty), but bad in that the snow conditions got messy real fast in the afternoon. High temps and lots of ppl sking combined to make the slopes pretty slushy and bumpy by about 2pm, and there were no piste bashers in evidence around to smooth things out again. By later afternoon, some of the slopes were less ski runs and more obstacle courses as you had to navigate around bumps and moguls that had been carved out gradually during the day.
This unfortunately was somehting that didn't change as the week went on: it got a bit cooler but never went below zero during the day, which meant that they couldn't use the snow cannons to make more snow (it needs to be below zero for that to work). Add to that the fact that we pretty much didn't see any snow falling on Zell til the last run of the last day (and even then only on the top of the mountain, any lower than 2000m and it was rain) meant that the snow we had at the start of the week was the snow we were stuck with til the end of the week. The mornings were ok, as the snow had a chance to refreeze overnight and hte piste bashers went in after it got dark, but by the afternoons it was a slushfest again. The worst run was on the last day, a 1km(ish) red run down to the village which by the time we went on it was just pure muck to ski on. Was as much ice and slush as actual snow, you couldn't turn worth shit, was bumpy as feck and even the experienced skiiers with us were wiping out. Everyone was knackered and soaked by the time we got the whole way down.
Then again, it could have been worse. I feel sorry for anyone who was arriving on the day we left - it was pissing rain all morning and as we were dropping our gear off in the shop the assistant told us they were after closing all the lifts as the ski conditions were just so bad - and this was just before lunch! So, if you arrived in Zell on the 1st March, I hope you were into hill-walking 'cos you sure as shit weren't going to be doing any skiing!
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Getting there is NOT half the fun!
Well, I'm just back from my ski trip in Austria. Next time we go on a ski trip, I think I'm definitely going to try to convince the lads to fly into the same country as we're actually skiing in! To get to Zell Am See in Austria, we flew into Munich in Germany. I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning to catch an 8:30am flight. Normally I don't mind doing that if I'm going somewhere on the far side of the globe, but Germany? You're barely out of your own timezone there, is way to early in the morning to be doing that! The majority rules tho, and in our group, the majority said we fly early :-
The plan was to get to Munich at around 11:30, hop on the bus we'd hired for a "quick" 2 1/2 hour trip to Zell, settle in and have a couple of hours to spare before we headed down to the irish bar to watch the Ireland Scotland rugby match at 7 to grab our gear, get some food and generally settle in. What we didn't realise before we set out tho was that the week we were going coincided with mid-term break in Holland, and it seems if you're Dutch, the thing to do on mid-term is to head to Austria skiing. So, the whole of Holland seemed to be heading in the same direction as us, the autobahns were choc-a-block with NL-plated cars, and at one stage on the radio we heard there was a 16km long tailback outside Munich! Luckily our bus driver knew the score,and we spent the whole trip on back-roads and side-roads, seeing a lot more of rural Germany than normal tourists do (and I can see why they don't bother with it). The only time we got on the autobahn we took 20mins to get 1km between intersections! So, what on a normal day would have been a nice easy 2, maybe 2 1/2hr trip turned into a 3 1/2hr odyssey.
On our way back, we discovered that Newton's 1st law also applies to traffic: just as for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so for every mass Dutch migration to the ski slopes there is an equal and opposite mass migration home at the end of the week. And once again we got caught in the middle of it. At least on the way out we didn't really have a deadline to keep, but on the way back we had a flight to catch! So, we arranged for the bus to pick us up way way in advance of what we thought we'd need - 1:45pm for a 7:40pm flight. This time though, some of our tulip-growing pot-smoking cousins seem to have gotten wise to the fact that the autobahn was a recipe for creeping disaster, and so transferred some of the traffic jams and tailbacks onto some of our back roads. It also didn't help that there'd been a big-ass storm the night before so a lot of the roads the driver was planning on taking were blocked by fallen trees, forcing us to take detours. As a result, we arrived at Munchen airport just in time to catch the tail end of the check-in queue! At least we made it I guess.
Having said that, we could have easily taken our time a bit more. I read a statistic somewhere the other week saying that on average about 30% of flights take off late from the major european airports, and this was one of our chances to add to those statistics. We started boarding at about the time we should have been taking off, which is generally par for the course on any flight, but then when we were all nice and comfy and had buckled up and noted the location of our nearest emergency exits (bearing in mind that the nearest exit may be behind us) and ready to go..... nothing. We get an announcement from the cockpit that we'd lost our take-off slot and had to wait for the tower to give us another one - which would be at least a half-hour delay. Half an hour later(ish), we started moving, and eventually got into the air, where we immediately seemed to hit a headwind which stayed with us most of the way over. As a result, what should have been a 9:30pm landing into Dublin turned into an 11:15pm one, and I crawled into my flat just after midnight.
Next year, if we're going to Italy, we fly into Italy and not Switzerland 'cos the flight happens to be €40 cheaper!
The plan was to get to Munich at around 11:30, hop on the bus we'd hired for a "quick" 2 1/2 hour trip to Zell, settle in and have a couple of hours to spare before we headed down to the irish bar to watch the Ireland Scotland rugby match at 7 to grab our gear, get some food and generally settle in. What we didn't realise before we set out tho was that the week we were going coincided with mid-term break in Holland, and it seems if you're Dutch, the thing to do on mid-term is to head to Austria skiing. So, the whole of Holland seemed to be heading in the same direction as us, the autobahns were choc-a-block with NL-plated cars, and at one stage on the radio we heard there was a 16km long tailback outside Munich! Luckily our bus driver knew the score,and we spent the whole trip on back-roads and side-roads, seeing a lot more of rural Germany than normal tourists do (and I can see why they don't bother with it). The only time we got on the autobahn we took 20mins to get 1km between intersections! So, what on a normal day would have been a nice easy 2, maybe 2 1/2hr trip turned into a 3 1/2hr odyssey.
On our way back, we discovered that Newton's 1st law also applies to traffic: just as for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so for every mass Dutch migration to the ski slopes there is an equal and opposite mass migration home at the end of the week. And once again we got caught in the middle of it. At least on the way out we didn't really have a deadline to keep, but on the way back we had a flight to catch! So, we arranged for the bus to pick us up way way in advance of what we thought we'd need - 1:45pm for a 7:40pm flight. This time though, some of our tulip-growing pot-smoking cousins seem to have gotten wise to the fact that the autobahn was a recipe for creeping disaster, and so transferred some of the traffic jams and tailbacks onto some of our back roads. It also didn't help that there'd been a big-ass storm the night before so a lot of the roads the driver was planning on taking were blocked by fallen trees, forcing us to take detours. As a result, we arrived at Munchen airport just in time to catch the tail end of the check-in queue! At least we made it I guess.
Having said that, we could have easily taken our time a bit more. I read a statistic somewhere the other week saying that on average about 30% of flights take off late from the major european airports, and this was one of our chances to add to those statistics. We started boarding at about the time we should have been taking off, which is generally par for the course on any flight, but then when we were all nice and comfy and had buckled up and noted the location of our nearest emergency exits (bearing in mind that the nearest exit may be behind us) and ready to go..... nothing. We get an announcement from the cockpit that we'd lost our take-off slot and had to wait for the tower to give us another one - which would be at least a half-hour delay. Half an hour later(ish), we started moving, and eventually got into the air, where we immediately seemed to hit a headwind which stayed with us most of the way over. As a result, what should have been a 9:30pm landing into Dublin turned into an 11:15pm one, and I crawled into my flat just after midnight.
Next year, if we're going to Italy, we fly into Italy and not Switzerland 'cos the flight happens to be €40 cheaper!
Monday, February 11, 2008
The Lisbon Treaty
I was flicking around today on a few of the irish groups on facebook, and came across this article posted about the Lisbon treaty.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2773
Is about the only thing I’ve read so far on the treaty. This is obviously not an unbiased opinion methinks, but is more detail than I’ve seen on it so far.
The govt here is doing the same thing they did last time around, not bothering to tell us anything about it. I think that they’re not allowed to do the whole “trust us, it’s good for you, now be a good sheep and vote for it” that they did last time we had an EU treaty to ratify, thanks to some supreme court case which said they weren’t allowed come down on one side or other of an argument like this. This time tho, we haven’t even gotten any factual information about what’s in it, devoid of spin or no.
To my mind tho, one of the best reasons to vote for it is that the shinners are dead set against it........
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2773
Is about the only thing I’ve read so far on the treaty. This is obviously not an unbiased opinion methinks, but is more detail than I’ve seen on it so far.
The govt here is doing the same thing they did last time around, not bothering to tell us anything about it. I think that they’re not allowed to do the whole “trust us, it’s good for you, now be a good sheep and vote for it” that they did last time we had an EU treaty to ratify, thanks to some supreme court case which said they weren’t allowed come down on one side or other of an argument like this. This time tho, we haven’t even gotten any factual information about what’s in it, devoid of spin or no.
To my mind tho, one of the best reasons to vote for it is that the shinners are dead set against it........
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
....and off again.
Looks like Cairo is off. Project management problems mean that I'm not flying on Monday like I thought I was. The whole trip is apparently off but I'll have my gear ready to pack anyway, these things have a habit of changing at the last minute, I'm not safe til I leave here fri evening.
Well, if they want to delay things by a week and then get me over there, they get me for 2 weeks not 3 - I don't care, I'm going skiing the end of next month regardless!
Well, if they want to delay things by a week and then get me over there, they get me for 2 weeks not 3 - I don't care, I'm going skiing the end of next month regardless!
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Off again......
Well, never mind what I said the other day about Ecuador, it looks like my next destination is Cairo. At least I got about 2 weeks warning on this one - plenty of time to put the light clothes in the wash & get them ready! Looks like it's going to be about 20-25 degrees over there. Nice. Thing is, I'll be back on a sunday and the sat after I'm flying out to Austria to go skiing. More temperature shock!
Friday, January 11, 2008
No dogs, no irish......
You know, every time you go though Heathrow airport, it's very easy to get the feeling that as an Irish person, you're still treated as a second-class citizen. After you check in and go though security, you look up at the board and see:
* Edinburgh: Gate 62
* Newcastle: Gate 79
* Dublin: Gates 80-90
* Shannon: Gates 80-90
In other words, "No! You irish scum don't need to know where you're going. We'll tell you when we bloody well feel like it!".
Then, when you finally get to the gate, it looks awful. You have to go out a long passageway to get to it, and then when you get there it looks like a prefab, a big long tube made from what looks like corrugated iron, tacked onto the side of the main terminal building. Apparently it was put up back during the Troubles to sort of quarantine would-be terrorists coming over from Ireland - so if they blew up the gate it wouldn't cause much damage to the main building. And we're still coming in though there. Yup, thanks guys.
Then, when you are flying into Heathrow from Ireland, or taking a connecting flight through Heathrow going back to Ireland, you have to go though another set of metal detectors, just like the ones you went through getting on the plane in the first place. So, after going through the previous set of security, we're somehow after picking up guns or bombs in the departure area. Very trustful of the UK authorities eh?
Lads, the IRA declared a ceasefire over 10 years ago. We're not the ones trying to blow you up any more. If you're worried about terrorism then maybe put the flights to/from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan through Terminal 1.
Oops, I can't say that, can I? That would be racial profiling based on the country you're coming from.....
* Edinburgh: Gate 62
* Newcastle: Gate 79
* Dublin: Gates 80-90
* Shannon: Gates 80-90
In other words, "No! You irish scum don't need to know where you're going. We'll tell you when we bloody well feel like it!".
Then, when you finally get to the gate, it looks awful. You have to go out a long passageway to get to it, and then when you get there it looks like a prefab, a big long tube made from what looks like corrugated iron, tacked onto the side of the main terminal building. Apparently it was put up back during the Troubles to sort of quarantine would-be terrorists coming over from Ireland - so if they blew up the gate it wouldn't cause much damage to the main building. And we're still coming in though there. Yup, thanks guys.
Then, when you are flying into Heathrow from Ireland, or taking a connecting flight through Heathrow going back to Ireland, you have to go though another set of metal detectors, just like the ones you went through getting on the plane in the first place. So, after going through the previous set of security, we're somehow after picking up guns or bombs in the departure area. Very trustful of the UK authorities eh?
Lads, the IRA declared a ceasefire over 10 years ago. We're not the ones trying to blow you up any more. If you're worried about terrorism then maybe put the flights to/from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan through Terminal 1.
Oops, I can't say that, can I? That would be racial profiling based on the country you're coming from.....
Says it all really......
Saw this on my way back though Heathrow Airport last night, on an ad for Aer Lingus. At least they're admitting it now!
I suppose the main diff these days between taking an Aer Lingus flight (or any "low-cost" short-haul airline) and getting a taxi or a bus is you don't have to get to the taxi rank 2hrs in advance and take your shoes off going though a metal detector before you get in your taxi/bus. You get the same quality of service, and just like a taxi, these days if you have any more than one bag with you on the plane, you get charged for it.
Heathrow airport is great though, it really is. I love the way security at airports is so consistent these days - going out through Dublin, you have to take your laptop out of its case and put it though separately, but you can keep your shoes on. Now in Heathrow, you have to keep your laptop in its case but you have to take your shoes off. Also, now in some airports in the UK you're allowed take on 2 pieces of hand luggage but in others you're not. Keeps the terrorists on their toes I guess......
I suppose the main diff these days between taking an Aer Lingus flight (or any "low-cost" short-haul airline) and getting a taxi or a bus is you don't have to get to the taxi rank 2hrs in advance and take your shoes off going though a metal detector before you get in your taxi/bus. You get the same quality of service, and just like a taxi, these days if you have any more than one bag with you on the plane, you get charged for it.
Heathrow airport is great though, it really is. I love the way security at airports is so consistent these days - going out through Dublin, you have to take your laptop out of its case and put it though separately, but you can keep your shoes on. Now in Heathrow, you have to keep your laptop in its case but you have to take your shoes off. Also, now in some airports in the UK you're allowed take on 2 pieces of hand luggage but in others you're not. Keeps the terrorists on their toes I guess......
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Be careful what you wish for.....
Remember how a few months ago here on this blog I was complaining that the company weren't sending me anywhere? Well, you know the old saying, "Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it!". I'm currently typing this sitting in a hotel room in a place called Newbury, about 10 miles from Reading in the UK.
Like the last trip I was on, I got about 3 days notice on this one. I was sitting at my desk on thurs evening, minding my own business when the boss comes over and says "Can I have a word with you out in the hall for a sec?". Now when this happens it normally only means one thing, and sure enough, someone has to go and firefight somewhere. So, fri morning I got my flights and accommodation booked and here I am!
I got in about an hour ago here, and about the only thing I can say about Newbury is "quiet". I took a bit of a wander around the town after I got checked in and there's nothing open but a Dominos pizza and 2 pubs - and the pubs look like they're shutting up for the night. It sort of reminded me of the night I flew into Shanghai, where I was wandering around with the streets pretty much all to myself (and I'm sure that this is the first and last time in its history that Newbury will be compared to Shanghai)!
So, at this stage there's pretty much nothing to do here bar head to bed! Maybe tomorrow the place will be a bustling hive of activity!
Oh, and while on the subject of "be careful what you wish for", I was talking to one of the project leads before I left, and apparently there will be someone needed on-site in Ecuador for a week some time near the end of January, with a choice of 3 ppl to go. So, my ideas of hitting all 6 continents before my 30th birthday may be one step closer! :-)
Like the last trip I was on, I got about 3 days notice on this one. I was sitting at my desk on thurs evening, minding my own business when the boss comes over and says "Can I have a word with you out in the hall for a sec?". Now when this happens it normally only means one thing, and sure enough, someone has to go and firefight somewhere. So, fri morning I got my flights and accommodation booked and here I am!
I got in about an hour ago here, and about the only thing I can say about Newbury is "quiet". I took a bit of a wander around the town after I got checked in and there's nothing open but a Dominos pizza and 2 pubs - and the pubs look like they're shutting up for the night. It sort of reminded me of the night I flew into Shanghai, where I was wandering around with the streets pretty much all to myself (and I'm sure that this is the first and last time in its history that Newbury will be compared to Shanghai)!
So, at this stage there's pretty much nothing to do here bar head to bed! Maybe tomorrow the place will be a bustling hive of activity!
Oh, and while on the subject of "be careful what you wish for", I was talking to one of the project leads before I left, and apparently there will be someone needed on-site in Ecuador for a week some time near the end of January, with a choice of 3 ppl to go. So, my ideas of hitting all 6 continents before my 30th birthday may be one step closer! :-)
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