Miles Away From Home

Beijing

2010-02-06T22:09:00.001Z

So, this time 4 years ago I was just settling into my new office and apartment in Beijing. 4 years, fuck, where did the time go?

Bye Bye Sun.....

2010-01-27T16:50:00.002Z

Oracle: Sun Acquisition A Done Deal

Well, I can't say that it was always happy days working there (got to the point where the only time morale went up is when they announced more layoffs), but is still sad to see it go. Spent 7 1/2 years of my life there, straight out of college.

All that remains for Oracle to do now is to send me out my cheque - they're apparently buying out the shareholders at a price of $9.50/share - a lot better than the $2.50/share it got down to at one stage, but a lot less than the $124/share I got my options at back in the Dot-Com days.....

Damn.......

2010-01-26T15:24:00.004Z

I saw an update from one of my friends this morning that they'd been married 3 years today (congrats Mick & Vicky BTW :-P), and that got me thinking, is coming up to 4 years now since I went to China. I took a look back at my first few blog posts here, and I found out that yesterday 4 years ago is when I picked up my Chinese entry visa!

4 years eh, damn, still feels like it was only a few weeks ago! That trip to China was probably one of the most interesting 2 months of my life. For most of it I was waaay out of my comfort zone but it was scary in an exhilarating way! Plus I got to see stuff that I'd never have thought of going to see myself, and all at Sun's expense! :-) Would still love to go back at some stage, but would be a heckuva difference going back as a bog-standard tourist....

Shit, am reading back over my old blog posts on my Beijing trip here, and am starting to get nostalgic. Now I wanna go back! :-(

Last Day

2009-12-15T08:45:00.006Z

Friday dawned, the last day of our trip, and the first day of the local weekend. As it was the only day that Enda would be free to show us around, we were heading out to the desert for the day. But first, we were going to try something that we hadn't done yet: go to the beach. We headed off early fromt eh hotel on the complimentary shuttle bus, and were at the beach by 10am. Already it was 30 degrees! Michelle doesn't swim, so we rented a sunshade for her to sit around under while I went in for a dip. The water wasn't as warm as I was expecting: it wasn't nearly as chilly as my xmas day dips, but there was still a bit of a shiver when I walked in - nowhere near as warm as the water off Bali or Singapore. Then I re-discovered how much the sun really doesn't like me - I'd managed not to get burned so far on the trip by liberal applications of factor 40 sunblock, but in the 15mins I was in the water and getting dried out after, my shoulders and back were already starting to go a bit pink! Sometimes I think I must be part vampire or something....

After our little sojurn in the sun, we hopped in a taxi and headed over to Enda & Joanna's place. Before we headed off, we decided to go for brunch in a local cafe that they frequented. Like most places in Dubai, there wasn't an emirati in sight, all the patrons were ex-pats and all the staff were indian or filipino. Good food tho! Fortified for our journey, we hopped in Enda's big fancy jeep, and headed off.

Contrary to what the movies would have you believe, most deserts aren't just big huge sand dunes, and on the way out we saw the various kinds, scrubland, rocks, and yes some sand (but of various colors). Our destination was on the eastern side of the peninsula, a place called Hatta in the mountains, where there are a series of pools (it seems Enda has a set itinerary for everyone that comes visiting, and this was the desert destination....). About 90mins out of Dubai tho, we hit a bit of a snag. The border between the UAE and Oman isn't straight, and on the way to Hatta you dip in and out of Oman a few times. Normally this is no problem, the only way you know what country you're in is by the flag on the flagpole of whatever little village you go into on the way, but occasionally the 2 countries have a bit of a diplomatic spat (or as enda called it, "a dick-swinging contest") and they close off the borders. So, at one point between one patch of sandy nowhere and another patch, we got stopped by a roadbock manned by a few bored-looking army dudes with M-16s and a humvee with a roof-mounted M60 manned by another equally bored-looking soldier. They were checking IDs, which was a bit unfortunate as, not expecting that we'd need htem, we'd left our passports in the hotel and Enda & Joanna had let their local ID cards back in the house. We could get through that roadblock no problems, but the guard told us that while he could let us though, we'd have problems with the guards on the other side of the road when we got back, and we mightn't be able to get back in without IDs. This wasn't all that good, as Joanna's visa had actually expired 2 days before, and so if we got stopped she was screwed. When it comes to zero tolerance, the emiratis make the NY cops look like irish gardai, and while she was ok so long as she was in the UAE and had her ticket home, if she went out and they checked her on the way back in she wasn't getting back in, period. So, we decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and we did a u-turn and headed back to Dubai.

On the way back Enda decided that we'd go back a bit more of a scenic route, so that we could get a better view of the Dubai skyline. So, we turned off the main road and took a detour through the desert. Along the way, we saw a herd of camels so we took veered off into the desert so we could get a closer look. I had my new big shiny camera, but Joanna, being a fashion designer, had an even bigger one, so we both started snapping away while the other 2 looked at us as if we were mad. After that, the next stop was to see the skyline, which we were seeing at right-angles to the way we came in from Abu Dhabi so we got to see it all, as all the big-ass skyscrapers pretty much was along the side of Sheihk Zayeid Road. Even from this distance, the Burj Dubai was head and shoulders above all the rest, nearly twice as tall as any of the other ones.

Once we got back into the city, we headed for The Palm Jumeira, the man-made islands in the shape of a palm tree. You were allowed drive out on it as far as the Atlantis hotel, the big 5-star hotel at the end (about a mile out from shore), but if you were a resident there, you were able to take the monorail - the bloody palm has its own public transport system! Thing is, once you're on it, it doesn't actually seem like it's any different from any normal island, the only way you can see the shape of it is from the air. After seeing the Palm, we headed out for Jumeira Beach, which was as close as you could get to the Burj Al Arab as you could get without paying. The place is so bloody exclusive (well it would be being a 7-star hotel and all), you can't just walk in and take a look around, you have to book a meal or "afternoon tea" - and at 80 quid a head for afternoon tea, we decided to give it a miss (even if it was an all-you-could eat buffet, which sounded like a good challenge to me - could I eat 80 quid's worth of buffet food?). We got to the beach just as the sun was setting, so the view was quite impressive - and the beach was cool enough to walk on, even better! :-)

After that, we headed back to Enda & Joanna's place to change and go out for dinner. On the way out, my parents had given me their leftover dirhams from when they were over (about €100 worth), on the understanding that I used some/most of it to bring "Little Enda" and his fiancee out for a meal. So, we grabbed a taxi and headed back to the Madinat Jumeira, a huge shopping/eating/entertainment complex near the Burj Al Arab. Place is so big and swanky they don't have streets, they have canals and water taxis to bring you from shop to shop and restaurant to restaurant! We weren't sure whether we'd be able to get into the hotel bar, place was one of those ones where if you're not one of "the beautiful people", you're probably not getting in, and while we weren't exactly scruffy looking, we didn't have a designer label between us. We blagged our way in tho (the trick is to walk fast and look bored apparently), and soon found the down-side of the "good life" - over €35 for a round of 4 drinks, 2 of them being beer!

After our lovely posh drinks, we wandered around the souk, a very up-market version of the souks in the old town, and Enda showed us the infamous stall where my mother had managed to haggle the stall owner into giving her a lantern at what was probably below cost price the year before (she'd thought she got one for Dh35 the day before at that stall, so she wouldn't give in until she got it at that price, turns out after she'd got it for Dh70... Never haggle with my mother!). Unfortunately there were no lanterns there that I could bring her back, but there was a shop around the corner which was selling xmas decorations so we got a few in there for the ppl back home. We also got some bars of camel chocolate - chocolate made from camel milk, which is apparently extra-creamy!! Once the shopping was done, we decided to go for food. Problem was, there were too many choices! We sort of narrowed it down to a Mexican place, a Cajun place, and an Italian place. We tried the mexican, but they were full up - we could have waited for a table, but we'd be waiting something like 45mins! No-one bar me was really brave enough to try the Cajun place, so we decided to go for the safest option, the Italian. Food was fairly OK, nothing overly spectacular but adequate. Afterwards, we hung around for another drink and then decided to leave, as me & Michelle had to be up at around 4am to catch out 5am bus to the airport. So ended our little adventure in Dubai!

Getting out of Dubai

2009-12-10T14:52:00.001Z

On day 4, we decided to do something a bit different: my cousin had mentioned that you could get to the neighbouring Emirate, Sharjah, by taxi. But first, I had a little bit of business I wanted to take care of. So, we headed out shopping again! First stop was the Wafi Mall. This is a smallish (by Dubai standards, huge anywhere else) boutique shopping center. The translation of "boutique"? Bloody expensive! Imagine a shopping center with an Egytpian motif (i.e. shaped like a pyramid with fake-egyptian heiroglyphs and statues all around the outside), where the cheapest shop there would be along the lines of Chanel or DKNY. I've been on some of the most expensive shopping streets in the world, Rodeo Drive in LA and Via Condotti in Rome, but this was like someone decided to take these streets and turn them into a 200-outlet shopping mall. The easiest way to gauge how upmarket it was is that there were no price tags on anything - the old "if you had to ask, you couldn't afford it" syndrome! Another way to gauge it was the parking: when we pulled up in our taxi, the valet parking area beside us had porsches, bentleys, rolls royces and propping up the bottom of the price pile, a BMW jeep (must have been the janitor...). As Michelle put it, it was "a whole shopping centre that makes brown Thomas look like Penneys" (Irish ppl will get this analogy) :-)

After browsing in Wafi for a bit (because we ain't going to do anything else there, like actually shopping!), we headed back to the Dubai Mall. As we had a fairly decent idea of the layout this time, we split up again and went off to do out own thing. I really only had on target in mind tho: the Sony centre, where I decided to pick up that camera I'd seen on my last trip, a Sony Alpha 230 DSLR. It's not the biggest and fanciest and most feature-rich of the entry-level digital SLRs, but it's one of the cheapest, the lightest and, as I was getting it with a second lens, 4Gb memory card and a carry case, it was about €100 cheaper than I'd get it at home!

After meeting back up with Michelle (who also had a pretty productive shopping experience), we headed back to the hotel. After plugging my camera in to charge, we went outside and hopped in a taxi to Sharjah. herein came the first little glitch, that no-one had mentioned: as the taxi would be going outside Dubai into a different emirate, there would be an automatic Dh30 added to the fare. Well, isn't too much we figured, so why not? So, we headed off!

Now, the impression I got from Enda and from our guidebook was sort of a small, rustic little hamlet of a place, the sort of small middle-eastern town like you'd see in the movies. Wrong! If anything, it was more built-up than Dubai, but with all cheaper, slightly run-down looking apartment blocks. The only way we knew we were actually outside of Dubai was when the taxi meter clicked up an extra Dh30 and we passed a sign saying "Welcome to Sharjah"! We were thinking that the taxi driver was taking us a bit of a scenic route, as it seemed a few times like we were doign big loops to end up a bit further down a road wed already seen before. then, to make it even better, we passed the bus station and he idly informed us that if we wanted we could get the bus back for about Dh5! This at the end of a Dh150 taxi ride! :-(

We'd asked the taxi driver to take us to the heritage museum, as from the map that pretty much looked like the center of all the touristy things, so he dropped us at the side of what he called "the historical area", which apparently had a load of museums etc in there. We deiced forst tho to head to the Al Hisn fort, which was a few streets over to see that first. When we got there, it was obvious that all of the pictures we'd seen of it had either been extremely well-positioned or just out-and-out photoshopped - the fort was in the center of a traffic roundabout and surrounded by 10-or-more-story apartment blocks! Well, we were there, so we might as well go in, eh? Oops, big sign on the door: "Closed for renovation from July 2008" - agh! So, we went back to the historical area, which we soon found out was about as interesting and as full of stuff to do as the heritage village in Dubai! There were hardly any signs up on any buildings as to what they were, and the few things we did find were closed (and not for lunch, this was about 4pm). About all we found was the covered souk, where we soon discovered that (a) the stalls had nothing but the usual tourist tat and (b) we were the only ppl there that didn't look like they worked there! No pressure to buy anything there, like! After beating a hasty retreat, we eventually found the heritage museum - it seems that while we'd asked our taxi driver to drop us off at the museum, he had dropped us off at the far end of the "historic complex" to it, and we were coming at it from the back! After going in, we again discovered we were the only tourists again - and looking at the visitors book, we were the first visitors in a few weeks! No wonder the receptionist dude looked so happy to see us!

After that, we decided to find our way to the bus stop rather than sending another taxi driver's kids to school, so we started walking. Thing was, we had a vague idea where the bus station was, but not how far it was, and there weren't a huge amount of taxis around to get us there. So, I had to ask some old dude sitting outside a shop for directions. The conversation went something like:

"Sorry, can you tell me is this the way to the bus station?"
"Bus station, yes"
"How far is it from here?"
"far?"
"How long to walk there, 5 mins?"
"5 mins, yes"

So, that could either be them agreeing that yes we were going the right way and that we were fairly close, or them not actually understanding English and just repeating the last few words of whatever I said (which is a trick I've done myself when abroad). Luckily for us, it was the former :-)

So, we got on the bus and headed back, and yes it was a lot cheaper than the taxi, and yes we realised pretty much straight away that the taxi driver had indeed taken us the scenic route.......

As soon as we got back to the hotel, we pretty much had to jump straight in the shower and head out to Enda's place, where we were supposed to have dinner with them before heading on to a table quiz in their local pub. As we were running a tad late due to the bus, dinner was a slightly less than leisurely affair if we wanted to get in in time for the quiz! The pub itself was your typical english pub abroad, complete with wood panelling, fake london bus/tube signs, shite music and an obnoxious DJ. The beer at least was genuine though - not a bad feat for a country where you're supposed to have a license to drink alcohol, and where the police can and do raid pubs and nab anyone drinking without a license! We managed, all beer aside, to come a fairly respectable joint 3rd (which would have been just 3rd if we'd won the argument with the DJ about one of our answers), and wandered back to the hotel around 2am - not a bad night out for a dry country!

Dune Bashing and Belly Dancing.

2009-12-03T09:54:00.002Z

Day three started out pretty easy, Michelle wasn't in the mood to do very much so I headed out to try to find the electonics souk I'd seen on the map, as I was in search of a cheap iPhone and a new digital camera. So, I boarded the abra and headed back across to Deira where I got happily lost in the little windy streets for a while before I found my intended destination. Unfortunately, when they said "electronics" they meant exactly that, it was all electronic parts & hardware shops, with a few mobile phone shops thrown in for good measure (but no cheap sim-unlocked iPhones) and no camera shops. After finding my way back to the hotel, we had lunch in the hotel restaurant and then got ready for the main event of the day: the desert safari! We'd booked this the previous day after seeing an ad for a safari in a leaflet in the back of a taxi that was nearly Dh100 cheaper than the one the hotel were trying to flog us.

Unusually for these kind of things, our driver was actually early - we wandered down at about 1:45 to see where we could wait for him, and he pretty much arrived in the door just as we got there! We got in the jeep, and after a little bit of haggling over the price, we set off to collect the other people in our group. These turned out to be a Brazilian couple on their honeymoon, who had arrived in Dubai the night before at 9pm and were leaving for 2 weeks in Thailand at 2am the next morning. Talk about a whistle-stop tour! They had pretty much "done" Dubai that morning, had spent it racing around in taxis seeing all the sights they could (which was more sights than we'd managed to see so far!). So, our little party was now complete, and off we went into the desert.

It took us about an hour to get out where we were going, and one spot of sand looking pretty much the same as any other to us, the only way we knew we were there is when the driver suddenly veered off the road into the sand. We only went in about 500m into the desert, where we met up with 2 other jeeps, and we stopped for about 20mins while we waited for another jeep to meet up with us and while the drivers let some air out of the tires. Naturally, everyone spent pretty much the whole time taking pictures. After that, off we went!

After a while it became obvious that the guys weren't just haring around the desert at random, they had a definite track that they were following. Nonetheless, it was quite an energetic ride! We were the third jeep in line in our little convoy, and about half the time you couldn't see the jeeps in front as you were either staring at the sky as we ramped up the side of one dune, or staring at the sand seemingly rushing up to meet you as you slid down the other side (sometimes nearly sideways on some of the bigger dunes). Definitely not a ride for someone who suffers from motion sickness! You were thrown about the place in the back of the jeep as we zoomed around, and as I had the center seat all I had was a lap belt so I had to wedge my knees in the backs of the seats in front of me to avoid being thrown around like that dude in the Road Safety ad that was on TV a few years back.

Follow the leader...

After about an hour of this roller-coaster ride (about only 5 mins of which was spent with the jeeps traveling straight and level) and just as the sun was starting to go down, we arrived at our encampment for he evening - a "bedouin village" where we were going to get our BBQ and night's entertainment. Apparently the entertainments on offer were camel rides, quad bikes, watching a desert sunset, dune boarding, sheesha pipes, a BBQ with unlimited (soft) drinks and a belly-dancer. Sounds pretty good eh? Well, the first thing on offer was the camel rides, but we decided against this after seeing that (a) you went around in a circle about 100m wide and (b) you had to pay Dh50 each for the pleasure. So, instead, we decided to watch the sunset. As the encampment was in a dip between several sand dunes, we had to climb the dunes to see it. Unlike at home, there's no twilight to speak of, the sun starts going down
and then 5 mins later, its gone - you can actually see it moving as it goes down. Last time I saw that was down in S Africa. Me & Michelle were nearly the only people to bother watching this tho, as all the other tourists were still getting their pictures taken with the camels :-)

Sunset

After the initial camel-induced frenzy was over, there was about an hour where nothing happened - apart from them opening up a few stalls full of touristy crap in the hope that we'd be bored enough to buy something! While we were waiting, me & the brazilian dude from the jeep decided to try the dune boarding - which consisted of grabbing the snowboard left lying up against one of the huts, picking a steep enough sand dune, and trying to figure out out for ourselves - in the dark :-) Only fell once, which wasn't too bad, until I realised that now my hair, pockets, etc were all full of sand.... After that, we were able to get dressed up in traditional bedouin garb and get pictures taken with a falcon, which I did. There was also a bar, which surprisingly enough was selling a full selection of alcoholic drinks (you got the soft drinks for free, but had to pay for the booze). Then, eventually, the entertainment started.

The first thing on was a couple of whirling dervishes - guys who pretty much spun around in circles while doing mad acrobatic stuff with umbrellas and various colored skirts that they had tied around their waist. That was fairly impressive - I would have lasted about 1min of spinning without wanting to fall over and probably puke, but they kept it up for a good half an hour non-stop and managed to do an entire well-choreographed routine as well! After them was a girl doing that usual spin-two-balls-around-yourself-on-a-rope thing that you see ppl doing in the crowd at pretty much any music festival you've ever been at, except she was dressed up and was spinning balls of fire on the end of chains, so I suppose that makes it traditional. Then, there was a break for the BBQ, which consisted of a couple of lamb kebabs, chicken skewers, some sort of possibly-vegetarian curry with rice, and some othe stuff i couldn't recognize. Tasty enough, even if the chicken was a bit on the black & crunchy side. After that, was the belly dancer. Was a pretty good show, apart from the bit near the end where she grabbed some "volunteers" from the audience. Much to Michelle's amusement, I was one of the ppl dragged up. Let's just say I won't be changing careers and taking it up professionally any time soon..... Turns out as well that the dancer was from eastern europe! :-) At the very end tho she got a bit more than she bargained for, she tried to get up a few ppl up, and ended up with a few slightly (or more than slightly) drunk indian guys who pretty much decided to do their own thing, and they were joined by a few more ppl (coincidentally, the ones that had partaken of the booze at the bar), and I don't think any of them even noticed when the bellydancer finished up!

Me, blending in

After the belly dancing was over, the lights went out and things wound up for the night. We all got in the jeeps and headed back. I though that we might go a bit slower over the dunes as it was pitch black out, but no! The driver just turned on his lights and went hell-for-leather like before! It was only about 1km to the nearest road/dirt track tho, so wasn't too bad - but I'd called shotgun on the way back so I got to see how close we actually came to all those bushes and rocks along the way.... We stopped off once on the way back at a service station so that they could re-inflate the tyres (and coincidentally so the station owner could hawk us more tourist crap), and were back at the hotel for about 10pm. On the way I got chatting to the driver and it turns out that not only was he a local (pretty much the first we'd met!) but he also was only volunteering for the desert driving for the fun of it - the company we booked though only paid his petrol costs and that was it. For the last bit of the day, we decided to take a detour before we went to the hotel: the brazilians we were with had said that the only thing they hadn't managed in the day was to go across the creek on the abras, and as the abra station was only about 200m from our hotel, we decided to show them where it was (and where the souks were, if they wanted to do some shopping). So, after that, it was back to the hotel, and bed- it had been quite an eventful day!

Dubai, the Old Town and the New

2009-12-03T09:35:00.005Z

Before we knew it, our alarm clock was going off and our first full "proper" day in Dubai was beginning. We'd decided that as we'd paid for breakfast that we might as well get up early enough to get it, so the alarm was set for 8am to give us plenty of time to wake up, get showered and ready and get breakfast before it closed at 10am. And quite a nice breakfast it was as well, once you get over the slight strangeness of the "sausages" being chicken and the "bacon" being veal - well, we were in a Muslim country, what are you going to do? After breakfast, we decided to head down to the Heritage Village, at the mouth of the creek, while the day was still cool enough to be able to go out walking (a "mere" 28-30 degrees at 10am!). So, we walked the kilometer or so down by the creek-side to the Heritage Village and the neighboring Diving Village. Well, what can I say, they're free in and they're still not worth the price of admission. Maybe in the afternoon there may have been something going on, but at 10:30 in the morning they were ghost towns, apart from us there were 2 guys repairing a wall and 3 very bored stall-owners who couldn't even get up the motivation to hawk us their tourist crap. So, if you have the Lonely Planet guide to dubai, you can pretty much skip the last third of their "Heritage & History in Bur Dubai" walking tour, you ain't missing anything :-P

All was not lost however, on the way back we still had the Sheikh Al-Maktoum house, the Sheikh Bin Thani house and the Architecture Museum to go to. We deliberately had left those until the way backas it meant we'd be inside in (hopefully) air conditioning on the way back when it would be starting to get hot! The Sheikh Bin Thani house was an islamic center, which could pretty much be summed up as "See, Islam isn't that scary, it isn't that much different from the Bible really, and the Qu'ran got a lot of sciency bits right that scientists are only figuring out now". The Sheikh Maktoum house then was mostly a photography exhibit of what Dubai looked like back in the 50s before the building boom took off. Place made Waterford look like a metropolis! The architecture museum, well, pretty much does what it says on the tin really. After browsing around in those for a while, we sauntered back to a restaurant near the the Bur Dubai abra station for a spot of quite tasty lunch (which we picked at random from the menu as we hadn't a clue what anything was!) before heading back to the hotel to regroup before the afternoon's exertions.

Dubai in 1952

In the afternoon, we decided to see the "other" side of Dubai, so we hopped in a taxi and headed out to the Dubai Mall, what is probably the biggest shopping centre in the world. Imagine 1200+ shops, an ice skating rink, an aquarium and 2 waterfalls, all under the one roof! You almost expect someone to greet you on the way in, giving you your complimentary map, compass, and sherpa guide! On the way there you also get to appreciate the Burj Dubai, the world's tallest tower at 160 stories. Is so tall that it still looks big 15km away, in the old city center! But back to the shopping. When we got in, we wandered around a bit and then decide that I'd just be cramping Michelle's style, so we separated and agreed to meet up back at the skating rink in an hour. Thing was, an hour would just about give you enough time to get your bearings in the place and figure out roughly where things were, never mind do any actual shopping! Place has more shops than Dublin city, and is about the same size as Dublin City Center from Parnell St down to Stephens Green - but on 3 floors and all under the one roof!

The aquarium in the mall

As we were meeting Enda again, we just went for a bit of food and then wandered around a bit more before heading out with hm to watch the fountain show. Maybe by now you might have gotten the idea that everything has to be bigger and better in Dubai, well, this even applies to the water fountains! Between the Dubai Mall and the Burj Dubai, there's an artificial lagoon, which has a dancing fountain. If you've seen "Oceans 11", you'll remember the dancing fountain at the Bellagio hotel at the end of the move, well, this being Dubai, its like that only bigger and better (the highest water jets in the world, naturally). Is quite impressive, I'll definitely say that!

The dancing fountain (click to play)

After the water show, we headed to the rooftop bar in the Assembly Hotel, a puny building of a mere 60 floors situated beside the Mall. Or rather we tried to, the prick bouncer wouldn't let us in with sandals on (some things are universal no matter where you are, and bouncers being assholes is definitely one of them). Luckily, Enda lived around the corner so we headed back to his gaff, me & Michelle borrowed some shoes, and we headed back again :-) So, we got to see Dubai by night from the bar (quite nice), the dancing fountain from above (looks better than at ground level), and despite being 60 floors up, we still had to crane our necks to see the top of the Burj Dubai across the lagoon! Seeing Dubai by night from above sort of reinforced that wierd felling I had about the place when I was coming in on the bus: it's all big buildings and bright lights and modern shiny things, but as your eyes travel out to the horizon, it's like someone drew a line and just erased everything beyond it: unlike most cities which just sort of gradually straggle out to the outskirts so you can't really see where the city ends, with Dubai there a definite line where the city ends and the desert begins again. Or maybe that was the mojitos talking. Anyway, after a hard day's touristing and shopping, it was back to the hotel to get ready for the next round - the safari!

Dubai - getting there is half the fun

2009-12-03T09:22:00.005Z

Well, I promised myself I wouldn't do with the Dubai trip like I did the Warsaw trip and procrastinate on updating my blog to the point where I don't want to bother writing it any more, so here we go :-)

As usual, whoever said getting there is half the fun never took a long-haul flight. We decided to go direct with Etihad rather than having a 4hr stopover in either Heathrow or Amsterdam, but that meant leaving at 8pm on saturday night and getting in around 7:20am on sunday morning. So, we lose one whole day of our 7 days, and we also miss the weekend in Dubai (their weekend is friday and saturday). We could have had a 5pm flight on the friday which would get us in early on saturday, but that would have meant taking another half day and Michele didn't have the hols to take that. The flight itself was an eye-opener after flying for so long with the likes of Ryanair and Aer Lingus: first we didn't have to pay for our bags and we had a 23Kg allowance, then when we got on the plane, we got free food and as many drinks as we wanted, the food was actually tasty (I've had far worse Lamb Koftas in restaurants over here) there was an in-flight entertainment system, and the hostesses were actually attentive and friendly! The only issue I'd have is that with all the stuff you got, the flight was almost too short at 7 1/2hrs: You took off, you got fed after a while, you watched one of the many movies on offer, then you only had about 3hrs to try to get some sleep before they woke you up for breakfast. I'd almost prefer a longer flight, as I only got about an hour's sleep! :-)

We arrived into Abu Dhabi airport anyway, roughly on time at around 7:20am and with only an hour's sleep under our belt.

When I got in, I discovered I had a problem: my phone didn't work, so I had no way to contact my cousin Enda to let him know we were in, so that he could meet us off the bus! I'd had an idea that this would happen, so I went off looking for a kiosk that I could be a pre-pay local SIM card in. Bit of a problem: the kiosk that used to sell them was closed down, and the shop that was open was only selling bill-pay SIMS that'd take a day to activate! Luckily, we figured out that it was the network I was roaming on - bit of advice if you're going to Dubai and roaming with Vodafone: don't let your phone automatically pick the network, manually select Du over Etisalat.

After that little kerfuffle was sorted out, we got on the complimentary Etihad coach for the 1 1/2hr trip to Dubai anyway at 10, and set of. Michelle promptly fell asleep on my shoulder, but once I'm awake and it's bright out that's it for me sleep-wise, so I just got to stare out the window at the passing scenery. Was my first time seeing "real" Desert, and my first reaction was "wow, tide's gone really far out hasn't it?" :-) Eventually in the distance I started seeing tall buildings, and then finally after about 45mins on the bus we got to Dubai. My first impression wasn't very favourable I'm afraid, there were lots of really nice really huge skyscrapers, any of which would be a landmark building in any other city (especially here, where our tallest building is a puny 16 stories) but they were just sort of plonked there on either side of Sheikh Zayeid road with nothing else around them - with some of them, if you looked at the gap between the buildings you could see the desert starting again about 100-200 yards back. So, it sort of almost had a movie set feel, or that it wasn't a city as such but more like someone decided to start a collection of really tall buildings with no real interest in giving them a proper setting.

Dubai from the road

Enda collected us off the bus anyway, and brought us in to our hotel. We'd definitely picked a good location: in the center of the "old city", directly across the road from the Dubai Museum and about 2 blocks from Dubai Creek. There was only one small problem: despite the fact that I'd specifically asked for an early check-in, our room wasn't ready, and wouldn't be ready until 2pm (and this was around 11am). So, Enda decided to take us on a quick whistle-stop tour of the area before he had to go back to work. So, we went on a very quick walk through the Bur Dubai souk, the Hindu Temple, down by the creek and ended up in a little restaurant in Bastakia, the former Persian quarter which now consisted of renovated buildings acting mostly as restaurants and art galleries. Here, I was introduced to what would become my drink of the holiday: fresh mint lemonade. We needed the drink and the sit-down, it was about 36 degrees and we were still dressed for irish weather! After Enda headed back to work (complete with his "care package" of rashers, sausages and black pudding), we pretty much just sat in the hotel lobby and tried to stay awake until our room was ready, which it finally was around 1:30pm.

Once we hit the room, we pretty much collapsed on the bed for a 2hr "power nap" before showering and heading out for a more leisurely stroll around the city (Enda had sort of forgotten that we were fresh off the plane and had been awake for nearly 20hrs straight and had set a rather brisk pace). This was one of the reasons I'd have preferred to arrive in the evening: our first day was pretty much a wash-out as we were too knackered and disoriented (and hot!) to so anything really. Around 7pm, we met up with Enda again, and his fiancee Joanna. They took us out on a tour of the souks, the textile and the tourist souk in Bur Dubai (the area we were staying in), then across the creek on board the little water ferries called abras. They were interesting: imagine a rickety little 15-foot boat with a bench down the middle and a bit of an awning and the "pilot" standing up in the middle. They pulled up to the dock, didn't bother tying up, you climbed on board, sat on the bench facing out the way, paid your 1 dirham (about 20c) and ye set off. There was a fair bit of competition for berths so occasionally you'd have a few abras bumping off each other or off the dock while they jockeyed for position, like a water taxi version of bumper cars - not for the faint-hearted but quite fun!

One of the abras on the creek

On the Deira side of the creek, Enda & Joanna took us up through the spice souk (which looked like one of the Harry Potter films should have been set there) and the Gold Souk (entire streets looking like a Mr.T costume party) before getting some food at a street vendor. I was actually a tad bit disappointed with the souks, I'd imagined they'd be a sort of cross between the stalls I was used to from the Silk Market in Beijing and the slave market scene from "Gladiator", but it was all nice and clean and proper, with proper shops on the side of the streets. After that, we sort of had to call it a night as we were knackered, so we headed back across the creek in the bumper-car abras and were unconscious pretty much as soon as our heads hit the pillows.

The Bur Dubai souk

LA Story

2009-11-26T15:45:00.003Z

This time 9 years ago, I was on the road to LA, barreling down Highway 5 from San Francisco in our rental car with U2 blaring on the stereo. Me & Bones were over working in Sun HQ in Mountain View and we had a long weekend to kill, so we flipped a coin to see where we'd go for it: heads LA, tails Las Vegas. It came up heads, so we booked a hotel and off we went. My first (and last) ever thanksgiving dinner was in a restaurant opposite Mann's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Over the weekend we almost went to Disneyland (too expensive and wud take a whole day of the 3 days we were there), Universal Studios (closed just as we got there), and did get to the Hollywood sign, Rodeo Drive, Hollywood Boulevard, La Brea Tar Pits, and Malibu Beach, along with getting lost along the way a good few times (bloody first generation in-car GPSes.....). I wouldn't call it he highlight of that trip to the US, but was a fairly good weekend.

Man, where did the time go eh? Is 9 fecking years ago......

here we go....

2009-11-07T16:24:00.001Z

Just heading off to the airport now. Yay! Goodbye 8-10 degrees and rain, hello 30+ and sunburn! :-)

Yay Vodafone - again....

2009-11-03T15:30:00.005Z

Well, here I am again, more fun & games with Vodafone and my new(ish) phone. I'm heading off to Dubai on saturday, and I won't be able to use my Vodafone SIM card over there as for some reason while Vodafone have roaming agreements with post-paid customers in Dubai, they don't have it for pre-pay (as my parents found out last year). So, I need to buy a pre-pay SIM card in the airport when I go out there and use it for the week. One slight problem tho: my phone is sim-locked so I can't put in a non-Vodafone SIM card.

So, I go to the web page to get the network unlocking code, look up the IMEI, put it in, and get told NAC code cannot be found for IMEI entered (MM-NAC-14). Well, this is Vodafone Ireland, it'd be silly of me to expect it to work first time out, right? So, I try to ring up the cust care. Miracle of miracles, I manage to get a human after about 30secs and only 2-3 "please press 1 for blah" menus! So, I tell her what I was seeing on the web page and stuff, I give her my IMEI, and she tries to look for my unlock code. Guess what? She can't find it, she's getting the same error I am! So, what can I do? Well, they can get the unlock code from Samsung, but it'll take 10 working days. Not much good to me seeing as I'm flying on saturday is it?

So, with my lovely new Samsung phone, I can bring it on hols and take pictures with the 8Mp camera, and I can tell where I am using the GPS (provided I have a map with me so I can interpret the latitude and longitude, as google maps still works by the cell info), but I can't actually do such trivial things as make calls or send txts on it. I mean, why would you want to do stuff like that on a mobile phone? Think I might see how much a sim-free iPhone is in Dubai's tax-free shopping....

Pics from Warsaw

2009-10-03T19:00:00.002+01:00

Hmm, have been a bit remiss in updates here recently haven't I? Normally I put up a few posts describing my last holiday, but I seem to have totally forgotten it for Warsaw. Well, can't remember all the nuts and bolts of it now, but for a bit of info, here's My Flickr Album.

That's Plac Zamkowy, in the heart of the Old Town BTW :-)

Strangely enough, these pictures have been the holiday pics source of pretty much everyone that was there, as me and Michelle were the only people to (a) get up earlier than 2pm any day and (b) go out, do touristy stuff and take pictures of it :-P

Down the Quays

2009-08-27T17:25:00.013+01:00

In part of my effort to get semi-fit (or at least to not get any unfitter), I try to do a long-ish walk at least 1, 2 evenings a week. Normally I take the DART out to blackrock and walk back in, either via Ballsbridge (about 8.3km, 1h20m) or via Strand Road/Irishtown (about 7.5km, 1h15m). Sometimes tho I don't want to take the dart out, as that adds maybe another 20mns onto the walk time, so I walk down the quays as far as the O2 (formarely point depot), cross the East-link bridge, down by Ringsend and come back down by Grand Canal Dock, for a walk of about 5.5km.

Anyway, while I'm doing so I occasionally take a few pictures with my mobile phone, as it's not a walk you'd do very often. So, I've decided to throw a few up here, for no particular reason (descriptions underneath):

Am not sure of the name of it, but it's an Argentinian sail training vessel that was moored on the quay for the docklands festival a few weeks ago. The ship in the foreground is the Cill Airne, a floating restaurant/bar on the quays.

The new Samuel Beckett bridge, just before they actually put it across the river.

The view upriver from the Eastlink bridge, just before the new bridge was put up.

The Jeanie Johnson, an old famine ship which is moored on the quay as pretty much a permanent exhibition (altho I've never actually seen it with ppl aboard...)

The new Beckett bridge in place, looking out towards the mouth of the river.

Looking back upriver from the Eastlink bridge, with the Beckett bridge in place.

The new ~~Aviva~~ Lansdowne Rd Stadium under construction, as seen from the bridge at Ringsend. I dunno about you, but to me the shape of the new stadium's roof always reminds me of the front of the Battlestar Galactica from the new series...

There we go, not too bad for a camera-phone camera, eh? Are reduced from the original 2048x1536 resolution as well. Will maybe add in more here as I take them.

New Laptop

2009-08-15T13:27:00.003+01:00

I finally heard back from the computer shop yesterday, after I dropped in my laptop there about 3 weeks or more ago. The news isn't really good. As I was suspecting, the graphics chip is shagged. Unfortunately, the gfx chip is soldered onto the motherboard, so I need a new motherboard. And that ain't cheap. Combined with parts & labour, it'll probably cost me about €600, maybe €700 to get it repaired. It seems that when it comes to HP & Compaq laptops, the build quality isn't exactly the best, they have a habit of subcontracting to parts manufacturers who may not be exactly overly concerned about quality control. They've had to do a few recalls of laptops in their 6xxx, 8xxx and 9xxx series (mine's a 9500 series, wasn't any recall on them), and in quite a few other cases, ppl have had laptops die on them just after the warranty expired, with similar problems to mine. Some have gotten HP to extend their warranty and so didn't have to pay for it, most didn't.

So, my options are not very appealing:

1) I get it fixed by the guy who has it now, which will take a few weeks, cost €6-700, and I'll have no real guarantees that the same problem won't happen again with the new card.
2) I get it back from him, send it off to HP, have them charge me €300 for just looking at it as it's out of warranty - and then probably have them charge me as much as the other guy for parts & labour.
3) I keep using my 7 year old Alienware laptop running OpenSolaris (so no games, videos) whose DVD drive works when it wants to, whose PCMCIA slot doesn't work so I can't use wireless (is the last-gen laptops before wireless came in as standard), which reboots spontaneously every now and then, whose battery life is about half an hour, and whose display flickers on and off if you have the screen tilted at the wrong angle.
4) I say "screw it" and go out and buy a new laptop with the money that I would have to spend on the repairs, and just use the old banjaxed laptop for parts (RAM, HD etc)

I reckon I'm definitely leaning towards option 4 at the mo. I know one thing for sure tho, if I do get a new laptop, it won't be a HP......

And I thought vodafone phone support were bad......

2009-06-26T12:28:00.003+01:00

Well, I just rang up HP tech support to try to arrange to get my laptop fixed. Jesus christ! I tried to avoid doing this in the first place by trying to use their email support, but the only reply I got on that was "yeah, your laptop's pretty much screwed, contact our out of warranty people to arrange a pick-up" at which point I got directed to the UK cust care web page to get the number. So much for email....

So, in my misguided attempt to avoid talking to the UK, I go looking up the irish site. So, I ring the irish cust care number for out of warranty support (a 1550 number so I'm being charged 80c a min). First thing I hear is a voice with a British accent telling me I'm being charged 60p a minute for the call - so great, their Irish number automatically redirects to the UK anyway. Next thign I get a guy with an extremely thick accent which I can barely make out (and I'm normally good at working around accents), who after I explain that I need to get the laptop picked up for repair, forwards me to the tech support team. So, after about 4-5mins on hold, I get a guy with a Sitt Iffrikan accent (so is 50-50 whether I'm still onto the UK), to whom I have to explain things again. As soon as he hears that it's out of warranty, he says "ok, you have to talk to the special out of warranty team", and passes me over. This time I'm definitely talking to Mumbai. So, I explain the problem yet again, and then I get told that they have a standard rate for an out-of-warranty repair of £257.61 and I'll need to ring this other UK number to get a pick-up arranged!

So because I'm about 3-4 weeks out of warranty, I have to pay €301 (or just under 1/3 the price I paid for it in the first place) to get it fixed and talk to yet another 2-3 helldesk drones to arrange it! Think I'm going to try to find someone else who'll fix it......

Well, that's my laptop fucked.......

2009-06-17T20:03:00.003+01:00

OK, have tried a few things here with my laptop, and it looks like it's totally hosed. Whatever that windows update did, it was bad. It looks like it was trying to do a firmware upgrade and fried the graphics card, 'cos even the bios screen is screwed up. Tried getting into the system restore partition, and was no good, couldn't see it. Tried putting in an opensolaris liveCd and still couldn't see anything, so I know it wasn't just windows. If you can't see your bios screen tho it's a pretty good indication that you're screwed. And to make it even more fun, I took out the HD and put it in another laptop, and now it seems that with all the constant restarts that were happening 'cos of the graphics card being screwed, the windows partition was screwed up as well! Luckily, most of my important files are on the 2nd HD.......

So now I have to go looking for the receipt for the fecking laptop now, and hope the shop I got it in does repairs - if not I have to rely on the tender mercies of HP's customer care dept! Have the machine about 13 months as well so is just out of warranty too :-(

It's so true.... :-)

2009-06-16T16:56:00.001+01:00

Nvidia users, beware windows update!

2009-06-15T13:49:00.002+01:00

Here's a word of warning to anyone out there using a HP Pavillion laptop running an Nvidia graphics cards: beware of "automatic updates" on Windows Vista!

I was running a manual update yesterday (I don't trust M$ enough to let them update automatically, they've buggered up too many machines on me), and one fo the updates that windows was telling me I should install was the "NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller". Foolishly I let windows decide that it knew what sort of hardware drivers should be on my machine and checked it for install. Next thing, after I did the obligatory "windows has updated a trivial non-critical piece of software so you must restart" reboot, I realised I had a problem. Windows started no probs but nearly immediately after logging in, my display went crazy, the usual kind of shit you get when a graphics driver has gone screwy. tried rebooting but then got a bigger shock - even the BIOS screen was screwed up! My screen at the moment is a sort of mustard color with a few pixels flashing in the background in a slightly different shade of mustard, in the sort of pattern that indicates it's trying to display about 12 desktops at the same time.

Normally in this situation I'd just curse microsoft under my breath and roll back to the last system restore point before the update, which I've had to do many times before. This time tho it's different: even the BIOS start-up screen is shagged so I can't even see to get into safe mode! Hell, I can't even see the options to activate the system restore partition that comes with the laptop (my only easy way to do a reinstall as no manufacturers ship CDs any more)! System is totally fucked! Am going to have to go off and try to find an install CD for something that lets me access my HD to hose out the fecking bad driver! :-(

Shoud've just gotten a new number to begin with...... :-(

2009-06-10T15:14:00.003+01:00

AAAGH!!!!

There's a chinese phrase that I use occasionally, "Ku xiao bu de" (哭笑不得), which translates as "not knowing whether to laugh or cry". Well, that's where I am with vodafone at the moment!

Last update I had here was that I was having problems accessing the voadfone.ie website. Well, that was only the tip of the frickin' iceberg. I tried setting up that "calls and texts to 087 for free" thing on the phone (which the muppet in the shop never told me I had to do, he just said I'd get it automatically) by sending "FREE" to 50222. What did I get back? "I'm sorry, you must be a Vodafone prepay customer to use this service". Eh? Funny, I thought I was, seeing as I was adding and using credit on my account! Ok, rang up the helldesk again, asked them what was going on. Guess what, I wasn't actually a proper vodafone customer! Seems port out #4 failed, so I was still sort of on the O2 network. So, what did I have to do? Go back into the shop and ask for the port-out again!

Right then, off in I went last Friday week. Explained the situation to yer man in the shop (I should just write it down and hand it to them at this stage) and so I got a new SIM Card and told it'd be activated in about an hour. Guess what? It wasn't. Strange that. So, waited until Monday and rang up cust care again (I know the number off by heart now). Guess what? It hadn't gone through! Meanwhile, I couldn't get into the website either, so I asked them about that too. Yer man did a bit of investigating and told me that my account was apparently coming up on different systems as (a) a bill-pay account (b) a pre-pay account and (c) an O2 account, depending on where he looked! Guess what I was told the solution would be? Yup, you guessed it, go into the shop and ask them to do the port-out again. So I did so, and told them "ignore whatever it is you are seeing on your screen, it's a port-out from o2 pre-pay to vodafone pre-pay". So, I left them to it, and went back to work.

That night I got another "welcome to Vodafone prepay" text, so I thought, maybe it's fixed. I go to the website and sure enough, I could get in now! There was one problem tho: according to the website, I was still a bill-pay account, and moreover, I had a bill saying I owed them €38.15 on what looked like 2 pre-pay accounts! So, I go ring them up again, and my account is still in the shagged state it was the day before. I get the usual advice about going into the shop and refused, as it's be the 4th or 5th time I did it (I've lost count at this stage) so the nice foreign girl said she'd put in the call herself and I should see the results in an hour or two. Guess what? No change!

So, I decide to go the route of email, as quite frankly I was pissed off talking to the helpdesk and not getting anywhere. So, I bang off a rather testy email on the website "contact us" form on Friday last. I get a reply about 24hrs later: "Can you provide us with your mobile number?" What? of course, I didn't actually give it to you because I foolishly assumed that as I was logged into my vodafone account and it looked like the number was automatically attached to the "contact us" mail page, that you'd know who I was! I sent it off, and heard nothing back.

So, I tried ringing up on Monday again (the 8th June, or approx 3 weeks since I started having all these problems). Got one guy who seemed to be making progress on getting a fix - and then I was disconnected while I was on hold while he was talking to the port-out team. Rang up again and got someone else who seemed to actually have a clue. After a bit of digging, she realised that the reason I looked like I still had a billpay account was because I still had - the bill on the website was the last line rental on my previous account, which I had foolishly assumed that they'd included on the last month's bill that they'd sent me after I'd already disconnected. The pre-pay account wasn't set up properly as well - whoever had set it up had apparently not given me a customer number, so the system couldn't register me for stuff like he free texts, webpage etc. So, she got me to give her the number from the back of the SIM and set it up for me, and said the registration for the webpage would take about 24hrs but could be done sooner. So, a few hours later I tried it and it worked! I had a pre-pay setup and could see my balance and send web texts and all! Alleluia, it was all fixed! :-)

And then we come to around 6pm last night.

So, I was leaving work, and was txting Michelle to say I was heading out to Blackrock and would be back around 8ish, but for some reason I couldn't login to the webpage, kept getting "Sorry, logon services are currently unavailable (SRV-WL-57).". OK, Vodafone have screwed up their website again, normally happens around once every 2-3 days. So, tried sending the txt from my phone. "Sending failed". Eh? Kept trying, and it kept failing. Tried checking my balance to see how much did I have, and got "service unavailable". Tried ringing 1741 and got "we are experiencing technical difficulties". Tried making a call and just kept getting a busy tone. Thought it might be that the network had totally gone tits-up, but when I got home, M's phone (also 087 pre-pay) was fine.

So, rang them up earlier this morning. After a bit more faffing around, I got an answer. It seems that despite what everyone had been saying for the last 3 weeks, my account was coming up invalid and coming up as only created on Monday. As my account was invalid, some automatic process must have reefed me off the system. Meanwhile, Vodafone still thought that the number was owned by O2, and O2 were still saying that they didn't own the number. Apparently Vodafone's porting team were refusing to just fully set up my account as without o2 giving their blessing on what should have been the port-out, it would be "illegal to do so". WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T THEY SAY THIS 3 WEEKS AGO?

So, that's it. I fucking give up. I wanted to keep my old number as I've had it for about 11 years, and I didn't want to go though the hassle of letting everyone know of the change, updating the contact info on my bank accounts, credit card accounts etc. I'm sick of banging my head off their tech support people tho, however much hassle it is updating everything and letting everyone know, it is infinitesimally less hassle than actually trying to get the fucker fixed. The original cock-up can probably be blamed on a combination of o2 and Vodafone, but the sheer incompetence of the Vodafone helpdesk/tech support in figuring out the problem over the last 3 weeks is pretty much fucking mind-blowing. Actually no, I'm not blaming the helpdesk people, they seemed to actually want to try to fix it for me, it's the numptys in the porting team and the 2nd/3rd line tech support are the incompetents. I work in 3rd line tech support, and I know if I had a case going on as long as this for a user who tried ringing up to get it fixed as many times as I have, I'd have been shot for it by now.

Given a choice, I'd be dropping Vodafone like a hot brick at this stage, but seeing as there is zero coverage for Meteor or O2 in my house in Waterford, I'm stuck with them. Have just gone into the shop and gotten my new number, and even managed to get the €15 that was still on my old account before they nuked it transferred over. Now to go updating all my accounts and letting everyone know I have a new number......

Funny thing is, I was in the Vodafone shop getting my new SIM card, and there was another girl in there trying to port over from O2. Sales assistant was saying to her "well, this might take a day or so, but don't worry, you'll have no problems porting over from O2 pre-pay to us". I was tempted to run over, grab her by the shoulders and shout at her, "Run! Run now, while you can! they'll fuck up the transfer and you'll be stuck in limbo until you want to beg for sweet, sweet death, but you wont be able to, your number is doomed!"

Election posters

2009-06-06T17:49:00.004+01:00

I was walking up Westmoreland st yesterday and I saw a few rather interesting posters for the elections:

Translation: "If we get into government we'll fire all the friends and relatives of the last government that they put into the civil service, and we'll replace them with our own friends and relatives!"

And:

I somehow doubt that this is a genuine Fianna Fáil election poster! Either that or they're boasting: "Yeah, we did all this, we know you don't like us but we don't care, this is only a local & eropean election so you can't get rid of us anyway, nyah nyah!"

MORE Vodafone muppetry!

2009-05-25T10:41:00.005+01:00

Well, here we go again. More vodafone problems. Now the problem is with their web page.

I decided to login to the web page today to see what the options you get with pre-pay are. So, assuming that after I'd cancelled my last account that they'd deleted my web account as well, I tried to set up a new one. Hmm, nope, got told This number is already registered. Have your password resent by clicking on the 'forgot your password' link below ". Did this and got sent the same passwd that I had before. Ok, no probs so far, I'll just login as before. Ah, this is Vodafone tho, that'd be easy! Every time I try, I get

There was a problem with your account, please contact Customer care (SRV-WL-03).

Well, I don't really have the strength nor patience at this stage to ring up their helldesk, so I decide to just email them. So, I go to the "help & support" page, is no option in the FAQ for "my account won't let me login". Right, ok, so I'll go to the "contact us" page. there's a link there for "email us" under the pre-pay section. Where does it take me? To the fucking login page! if I could login, I wouldn't have to report a bloody error would I?

These guys are really pissing me off. I'm going to have to take several dozen deep breaths here before I try the cust service number (which I now know off by heart). Is no point in reefing some poor sales drone out of it because the rocket scientists in charge of the back-end can't get their shit together.... :-(

New Phone

2009-05-23T15:37:00.003+01:00

Well, I've had the new phone up & running & working about a week now, so I might as well give my impressions of it, seeing as it took so much fucking hassle to get it!

Well, first bit I suppose is the touch screen. I've used the iPhone a bit before, and while it's maybe not quite as intuitive as that beastie, it's still pretty good. The icons are pretty big & easy to click, the fonts are pretty legible, you can flick the screen to scroll (and of you don't like that, the volume keys also let you scroll thru menus), and the screen is pretty legible even in bright(ish) light. Well, ok, we haven't had any scorching hot bright days, but it's been a bit sunny and I had no problems seeing the screen. this is apparenly an improvement on previous Samsungs - one of my friends had the Omnia and got rid of it 'cos the screen was terrible. The UI has a sidebar which you can put some of your most commonly used widgets/apps on for easy access, and then to make things even easier, you can drag the widgets to the "desktop" for even easier access. So, at the moment I'm one click away from writing a new message or reading my txts. One niggle with this is that you can't just put anything on the sidebar, just a limited subset that samsung seem to have decided you'll use the most. Is still handy tho.

One of the reasons I got the phone was the camera - is an 8 megapixel, so is 2Mp higher than my sony cybershot! Megapixel count tho is only really a way for camera makers to practice biggerdickism with their devices: at 8Mp I can print photo quality up to an A1 page, how many times am I going to do that? The picture quality is pretty good, about as good as you're going to see on a phone - the only better one may be the Sony Ericsson C905, but I didn't really like the look & feel of that one. I haven't done a huge amount of pic shooting yet but what I have done is pretty decent. The phone doesn't come with wi-fi but I figured I used the wi-fi maybe 2 dozen times tops on my last phone in the year and a bit I had it, so no great loss. the music player is decent enough, and plays most formats, and has a dolby-like option which reall puts a bit of "whoomph!" into your songs - I want to try this out with my Sennheuser headphones! The radio is pretty good too, and has a rather unusual feature that allows you to record off it, altho I haven't tried that yet. The video player on it is able to play DivX movies, I tried it and it works pretty well, and the sound quality is excellent too. Only problem tho is that all bar one of my movie collection on my laptop are XVid-encoded not DivX! The phone ships with the ususal other crap, alarm clock, calendar, calculator etc, and all are adequate enough, and for some reason they are selling it as a "gael fon", so it has an irish-english dictionary built in. Eh? :-P

And now onto the niggly little bits. One of the big selling points of the phone was apparenly that it has built-in GPS, but that's just a gimmick. All the reviews I read of the phone said that there were some built-in apps that took advantage of it, but it seems Vodafone in their wisdom took all them out on their version, so the only thing that uses it is the camera for geo-tagging pictures. I tried installing google maps, but even that seems to use base station triangulation rather than the GPS to find out where you are. In the phone settings you can get the GPS to get your location but it's fairly flakey, about 3 times in 4 it fails to find the satellites. So, if you're looking for a phone that has working & useful GPS system, don't get this one.

This is also the only touch-screen phone on the market that has an actual keypad as well, which slides out at the bottom of the screen. it seems tho that Samsung have fallen into the trap of all mobile phone manufacturers and put all the function keys wherever they want rather than in a commonly agreed place - space is on the # key, caps is on the *, punctuation marks/symbols are on the 1 which is normal enough, but t9 options are on the 0. The layout of the keypad means as well that the keys are out to the very edge of the phone, so if you're one-hand texting with your thumb, the space key is uncomfortably close to the base of your thumb, you're nearly stretching your thumb back to get to it. So, most of the time I just use the on-screen touch keypad not the physical one. Also, there's no actual delete key or any direction keys - delete is a soft-key on the touch-screen and to change the cursor position you tap on the screen where you want to go. You also can't select a word you already wrote to change the spelling, you have to delete the word and start again. so, if you type "he" and you wanted "if" instead, you can't just select it and use '0' to change the spelling, you have to delete it and go again. Having said that, the touch-screen typing is pretty fast, faster than I'd manage on my old phone - so long as you don't make a typo and have to go back and change spelling, for the reason I mentioned a sec ago. Also, the T9 dictionary is a bit flakey, it comes up with some "interesting" spelling options. One nice thing tho (which I just discovered today) is it autocompletes punctuation, so to type "can't" you just type "cant". This all just needs a bit of practise I guess, and the phone has at least passed the "drunk test": I was out for a few pints last nigth and was able to text easily enough about 5-6 pints into the evening! :-P

And now onto making calls: The phonebook only holds one number per entry, which is a bit awkward for ppl with multiple numbers, and for some reason when you make a call from teh phone book and hang up, you're left back at the phone book entry rather than at the "desktop" like on pretty much any other phone, so you ahve to exit out of it to get back. Also, there seems to be a lot of "spillage" of sound out of the earphone, when you're on a call you can turn the phone around backwards and nearly hear the other person as well as you could the right way around! There's great sound out of the headphones in a call, and if you don't like the Smasung headphones there's a normal headphone jack on the speaker part where you can plug in your own - the connection to the phone itself tho is a Samsung proprietary one which also doubles as the power port. It has a cover over it but instead of a sliding cover it swivels around and sort of sticks out when you ahve the 'phones plugged in, I can't see it lasting a huge amount of time without being smapped off.

All in all I guess, it's a pretty nice phone, worth the money I eventually paid for it (altho a little less vodafone-related hassle wud have been nice), but there are a few arez it does fall down on a little - apart from the GPS it sort of has the feel that as well as skimping on wi-fi, Samsung went to make a great multimedia camera device, and forgot to put very much effort into the actual "phone" features of the device like calls & txts....

Dirty windows

2009-05-20T21:05:00.003+01:00

Am not totally sure what got into me this evening, but I decided to clean the windows on the door leading out to the balcony on our flat - is a good while since they were done and I thought they looked a little bit mucky. A little bit!

I did one window first and the difference between that and the one I hadn't done was pretty gruesomely obvious.

Guess which one is the clean one eh? here's a closer look out through them, that last shot isn't the best:

And now the view from the outside looking in:

I'd sort of forgotten that you should be able to see a reflection in a window!

This is what you get when you live over a busy city center street. I can't remember how long it is since they were done, but the amount of shit that came off them, especially when I wiped down the frame! :-(

Well, maybe next time I won't leave it as long. Only problem now is, the other flat windows, the one where there's no convenient balcony to stand on when I'm cleaning them, look really awful......

The Phone Saga - over at last!

2009-05-18T15:14:00.006+01:00

So, last time I left this little problem was last thurs night, when O2 had pretty much turned around and said "well, sucks to be you, we'll maybe call O2 and ask them pretty please to give us the number". Friday morning, I decided to try ringing them again to see was there any more progress. Despite the fact that the previous day, the last person I'd asked said they'd get onto O2 again to release the number, the helldesk person I got this time pretty much told me the same thing the dude had told me the day before, they'd tried 3 times and failed, and someone was going to contact o2. I asked him exactly what I could do here, and he suggested I try to put in the number change as a new request again, seeing as o2 were after blocking the same request ID 3 times in a row, tehy were harly likely to let it though again.

Ok, no problem, I decided to try that. Asked the guy would it help if I rang O2 and got them to release the number, and he told me I wouldn't have to do that. So, I went into the vodafone shop on fri to sign up again. Slight problem: I forgot that for a pay monthly account I needed ID and a bill. Well, there goes that plan. So, I decided to wait until monday to get it done again, as even if I signed up online I'd still have to wait to get the SIM in the post. On Sunday, just to be sure, I rang up O2 and asked them to release the number., What was I told? "Well, your number is a pre-pay one so there shouldn't be any problems with porting it over to Vodafone, should happen straight away". Eh? Isn't what Vodafone were telling me!

I finally got to go into a vodafone shop at lunchtime today. Went up to the counter, said "I'd like to set up a pre-pay account thanks, I want to port this number over from o2". The reply? "certainly sir, what's the number?" and that was it. Number was working before I got half-way back to the office with my sandwich! This begs the question, what the fuck were those muppets who were giving me the run-around on weds and fri trying to do with the bloody number? Then again, is maybe not surprising that they'd fuck something up, given the fact that the helldesk guy I was talking to on fri wasn't aware that the 1800 number had been having "technical problems" that meant you couldn't get through to a human on it for 3 days - "oh right, thanks, I'll pass it on"!

So, the phone is working now, all I have to do is get used to using a touch-screen - pretty much means you can't just txt with one hand now, as it's too awkward using the touch-screen one-handed. Also, I decided to switch to pre-pay instead of bill-pay - if you top up by €20 a month you get free calls & txts to other vodafone numbers and with bill-pay you're paying €19.95 for 50 free txts and calls a month that don't roll over from one month to the next, so for the same price as your contract on bill-pay you get more free stuff, plus you still get to spend the €20 on calls. Besides, I've seen how well they reward their loyal bill-pay customers......

Well, we'd better hope for all our sakes now that there isn't anything wrong with my phone in the next few weeks, 'cos if there is I'll probably be going into the Vodafone shop with a trenchcoat and a shotgun!

Class Reunion

2009-05-18T08:43:00.002+01:00

Well, I'm now definitely officially old. I'm just after having my 10-year college reunion. 10 years, Jesus. Where did the time go?

Was a fairly good event, as these things go. Met up with Eamonn in Town for lunch, then headed out to the college a bit early so we could take a look around. The atrium and the canteen pretty much looked the same as it did when we were there, but after that, it looked like a totally different place. when we were there, there were 2 buildings in the college, plus the gym & the Dome (the campus bar) Now there are 6. And even of the two we had, one was unrecognizable. What used to be the library is now more lecture rooms, and the D corridor is now admin offices for the school of business rather than the computer rooms we used to spend our time in. We pretty much had the whole place to ourselves wandering around, as it was the last day of the exams and the place was deserted.

The official reunion itself started at 4 with a drinks reception in the Tourism & Leisure building, which now occupies what used to be a football pitch in my time. Me & Eamonn were one of the first in there, so we settled in with a drink and watched ppl come in. Apparently there were a lot of reunions on, for 10, 15, 25 and 30 year classes (obviously the 20-year ppl never bothered replying), so there were maybe 200 there in total. Out of our graduating class of about 80 tho, there were only 6 that turned up, including myself.

Once everyone was in and settled with at least a few drinks under our belts, there was a small bit of speechifying, followed by a quick tour of a few of the new bits of the college (which I'd seen already). Our "tour guide" was Paul Barry, who used to be head of our department but was now something big in the applied mathematics dept. After the tour, we had a surprisingly decent meal in the Gallery restaurant, one of the new bits of the college. Place is a far cry from the canteen we used to have to put up with - even had a pizza/pasta counter and a smoothie bar! After the meal, we all repaired over to The Dome, which was also twice the size it used to be (which was disappointing, it didn't feel like the place we were so used to). After a few pints in there, it ws into town to Geoffs, which we'd figured out was the only bar we used to go to that wasn't either renamed, remodeled, under new management or (in the case of 2 places) had been totally razed to the ground and rebuilt! So, we stayed there for a few more pints and went our separate ways again around 1am.

It was a good day, but was a bit depressing in ways It was good to be able to wander around the college and recall stuff like "remember when mick duggan brought the pint of guinness into the computer room during rag week?", but it was a bit of a shock to the system to see how much the place had changed. Also, the turn-out was a bit disappointing, 6 pl out of 80? I knew when I'd signed up for it back in early april that there weren't many going, and I know everyone has their own lives to lead and all, and that some ppl were living too far away to be able to make it, but still, a 10 year anniversary isn't something that crops up every day, and I know of at least 5-6 people from the class that are still around waterford that could probably easily have made it. Also, the people that did turn, up, with the exception of Eamonn, weren't really people I would have hung out with much in college, they were in different classes to me in 1st & 2nd year and most had done the commercial stream rather than the industrial stream when the classes split in 3rd year. I'm not saying that we didn't get on, but there were ppl I would have seen a lot more of in college that didn't come.

Well, at least it wasn't a secondary school reunion - altho if we have those, it'll be 15 years next year. The only reason I'd go to one of those would be to see how many of the fuckers I went to school with have ended up stuck on the family farm, in prison or as single parents on the dole. I could count the no of ppl from my Leaving Cert class that I wouldn't mind seeing again on the fingers of one hand, just about.

(update)

I was tidying out my press there today as well, and I found this tucked inside an old college prospectus....

Damn, that brings back memories! Am not sure what happened my face tho....

New Phone

2009-05-14T23:13:00.000+01:00

Well, I have my new phone at last. There's only one problem with it: I can't actually use it. :-(

I finally figured outhow to get around the Vodafone problem of getting a new phone without paying full price and still keep my same number. Seems that while I couldn't go from one account to another on Vodafone and keep my number, I could switch to o2 and keep my number - and then switch back. So, that's what I did, mostly.

So, I rang up vodafone and told them I was leaving to go to O2, and could they cancel my account. Guy on the other end of the phone told me it'd take maybe 2 days to port my number over to O2, but I decided to try it anyway. So, at lunchtime that day, I headed up to grafton st, went onto the 2 shop and asked them could I get as pre-pay account and keep my vodafone number on which I'd just cancelled the account. I told the sales dude waht Vodafone had said about how long it'd take and, he laughed and said that they always said that and it'd be a lot quicker. Sure enough, after I left the shop I decided to drop into the Bagel Bar on Dawson St to grab lunch to bring back, and before I'd even gotten my bagel, beep beep on my phone, "welcome to O2". Easy peasy!

So, I had just bought a O2 pre-pay SIM for €10, and had €10 credit on it, all I had to do was wait til my last vodafone bill cleared and I used up my free tenner's o2 credit, and back I go. THe Vodafone bill duly arrived, so I decided to get my new phone. And this is where Vodafone started to spanners into the works of what was up until then a prefectly simple plan. I ordered the phone online on monday, the new Samsung Tocco Ultra, touch-screen, 8Mp camera, GPS, real fancy like, plus free bluetooth headset, for €99. THen the trouble started. While I could have the phone by tuesday, the web page wouldn't let me swap the numbers over until weds at the earliest. Fair 'nuff, I thought, I have enough credit left til then (I actually got an extra €2.50 off O2 for registering online), so I chose to have the number ported over between 8am and 10am. The order went though, but in the email confirmation I was warned that "We'll strive to switch you to Vodafone at your preferred tine, but on the rare occasions when this is not possible we'll ussually complete the switching process later on your preferred day.". Ok, fair enough.

The new phone arrived early on tuesday afternoon, all shiny and new, so I was all eager to get it up and running and playing with it. Slight snag tho: no signal on my new Vodafone SIM, and the phone is SIM-locked so I can't use my o2 on in it! So, while I could play with it and get used to the menu system, using a touch-screen phone etc, I couldn't actually use it. Is a nice little entertainment system, has a decent enough music player & radio, camera is pretty good as well, but it isn't actually a phone yet. That had to wait until I'm not an O2 member any more.

So, yesterday morning 8am arrived, so any time now I should be back on vodafone. Problem tho: no "beep beep, welcome to vodafone". 10am arrived, still no port out. I decided to ring them at around 3pm, to see was I one of the "rare occasions" and when could I expect it to be done. First thing, to get support on the Vodafone helpline, you have to enter your vodafone number. Oops, didn't really have one yet. Got though to a human after having to wade though several menu options and listen to several "We are pleased to announce vodafone have brought out several new offers X, Y and Z, which you won't have any choice but to hear us talk about, your call may be recorded if you ever get through, but your call is still important to us" messages, I got a human. So, I explained that I was still waiting to be welcomed into the Vodafone fold, and got put on hold a few times while she figured it out. Apparenly Voda had tried to get the number off O2 but o2 had refused to release it as I had only been a customer a short while. Instead of letting me know, Voda had decided to sit on it and do no more about it for a while! I told them to tell O2 I was a genuine port out, and she promised someone would get back to me soon.

That was around 3pm on weds, it's now about 11pm on thurs night and no word. I tried to get through earlier but depending at what stage in the menus I got to, I was told either "All our operators are busy" or "we are experiencing technical difficulties, please call again later". So, I now have 2 useless phones as I'm at my parents house and there's fuck-all signal for anyone except vodafone here, and besides, I'm down to about 20c O2 credit as I was expecting to be swapped over by now and I don't want to buy more as I could be transferred over at any time (yeah, right). So, am going to have to make some rather unfriendly phone calls tomorrow (from a land-line) to get this sorted.

Vodafone pt II: "All customers are equal......"

2009-04-21T10:00:00.003+01:00

"...but some are more equal than others.

Well, I rang up Vodafone like I said I was going to do, to see could they do anything about the upgrade for me. Nope! According to the support guy I got (who was actually Irish, I was nearly shocked not to hear an Indian voice), the way they used to determine upgrades was how long you were a vodafone member, but back around December they moved to a new system which adds in a whole load more qualifications. Now, your eligibility is determined by stuff like how long you've been a member, whether you pay on time, whether you pay by direct debit or not, what price plan you're on and how much you spend on it. Am all good there apart from the last one - apparently since the new system went in, no-one who's been on the lower price plan (perfect fit 50) for less than 18 months has ever gotten an upgrade. Seems ppl on that plan don't spend enough according to Vodafone...... Guy even asked his supervisor could they push the upgrade through anyway, but the new automated system doesn't even allow them to do that

So, given my current account, I won't be able to get a new phone for at least another 6 months. So, I'd need to set up a new account. Asked the guy would I be able to do that and transfer over my existing number to use that. Apparently I can't, the only way to do that wud be to move my existing number to pre-pay, set up a new account to get the new phone, and keep the old number as a backup. Now I know that last year when I got this phone, I got the number transferred from my old account to a new account, and then back again - but then again it was a company phone so the new account was a business account, so vodafone probably bed over backwards for those guys.

So, according to Vodafone, the easiest way for me to get a new phone and keep my existing number is to move to O2! You'd think that these days that any company would want to keep their existing customers if they possibly can, especially given that the turnover in accounts with mobile phone companies is quite high. Apparently Vodafone tho don't think my business is important enough to them to allow exceptions, despite the fact that they've been getting my business since I left college. Well, is off to ebay etc for me for my new phone so, and if I can't get a good price there, Vodafone will not only be losing the potential €120 from my upgrade, they may be losing a customer too!

Vodafone: "your call is important to us - but not your loyalty"

2009-04-19T22:57:00.002+01:00

Well, as if I needed it, another indication that once you sign up for something with one of the big companies, they don't care about you any more. I decided I wanted a new phone for my birthday, so I picked one out (Samsung S8300, the new 2Tocco Ultra") and went into the vodafone shop. Phone is €429 SIM-free but only €129 on Perfect fit 50, which is the price plan I'm on. So, I go up to the counter, say "I want XYZ phone", dude asks me if I'm already a vodafone customer and I say yes. So far so good. Next thing tho, I get told "sorry, you're not eligible for an upgrade". I ask how much the phone wud be if I wanted to get it, and he said €429, or the full whack. The only way to get it at the discount price is apparently to get a new account with a new number.

So, despite the fact I've been with vodafone for about 10 years, pay my bills by direct debit so I never miss a payment, and have my existing phone a year already (literally, was apparently a year yesterday, dude in the shop said), I'm not enough of a "good customer" to warrant getting an upgrade. Come to think about it, in the last 10 years I think I've only been eligible for an upgrade 2, maybe 3 times - most of the times I get my phones myself. Apparently a "good customer" is one who spends lots of money with them, and I keep my bill pretty low by using the 300 free web texts a month that I'm entitled to as a customer, and make most of my phone calls from work.

If however I was someone who wasn't on vodafone and decided I wanted to drink the kool-aid and be enfolded in their warm embrace, I'd get the phone at the cheaper price. Then again, even if I was like that, I still couldn't get the phone I really wanted: vodafone ireland, in their infinite wisdom, seem to have decided that the Sony Ericsson C905, which every other network in Ireland have had out since before Xmas, is still too new to offer to the their customers. So, instead, they're still trying to plug as their #1 high-end phone the Blackberry Storm, which no-one who has a choice in the matter actually wants, and those who have to have it (i.e. office types) don't like. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to change network: both my parents and my g/f are on vodafone and have free calls & texts to me, which they wouldn't have if I switched to say O2. so, I'm stuck with vodafone.

So, what do I do, suck it down, and pay the full price? Yeah, right, screw that. Ebay is an option, but the last time I did that with my Sony Ericsson w800i, I had no end of trouble when the phone went tits-up and I had to get it repaired. I could cancel my account and sign up as one of the new customers that vodafone seem to favour over me. Problem with that is I'll prob lose the number I've been using these last 10 years, and I don't want to go having to let everyone in my phone book know and then memorize a new number just for vodafone's convenience. So, will try ringing the customer support line tmro and hopefully if I get someone who can actually speak english, I'll try to see if I can get the upgrade, or at least switch accounts and keep my existing number. I'm not doing it tho because I love vodafone and can't imagine life without them, but because I'm not being given any other choice.

Sobriety - one month to go!

2009-04-01T22:41:00.003+01:00

Well, I've been off the drink now since New Years Day. The only time I've had a drink since was on my ski weekend in the beginning of Feb, and the few special occasions I also allowed myself like birthdays (and most of my friends have b'days in september/october - bastards). I said at the beginning that I'd stay off til my birthday at the end of april, so I'm most of the way there now. This time next month I'll be back on the booze! Is a good job too, am not saying I'm an alco or anything but nights out are a bit boring and I'm getting sick of 7up and orange juice!

Bit of a change

2009-03-28T19:20:00.001Z

Well, I got a bit sick of the look & feel of the blog, so I decided to change it a bit. So, now the text actually goes the whole way across the page! :-)

Microsoft - muppets!

2009-03-26T11:05:00.007Z

Well, curiosity got the better of me yesterday, and I decided to see what Windows 7 looked like. So, I downloaded a beta copy to try out. Rather than fucking up an actual computer by installing it and have it fuck up (this is microsoft after all - and even worse, a microsoft beta!), I decided to give it a go on a virtualbox VM. This is what I got.

I kicked off the install and got to the window where it asks for the registration code. Having got this build off bittorrent, I didn't have one, but though "no problem, normally you get 30 days trial before you have to put in the key". Nope, not with the beta, even tho it says you can when you're at the registration page. You get through the rest of the install (which half the time tells you you're installing vista, half the time windows 7), you get to the point where you have a user created and are logging in, and then you get told that the license that you never entered has expired and you need to enter it or get a new one.

If you click "access your computer with reduced functionality", then you might be expecting to be logged into some crippled version of the OS where you can do some stuff but not everything - but it's still usable and browsable. Nope, you forgot this is Micro$oft you're dealing with! All you get up is a browser window asking you to buy a license. Or rather you should, but some of the time MS can't even seem to find their own webpage!

So, I looked around a bit on the web, and found that if you have a windows live account then you can sign up and get a beta license key. I have one of those (never use it), so I signed up and got my beta key. Guess what? Like everything else to do with this beta, it didn't work!

There ends my experiment with Windows 7, I just couldn't be bothered putting in any more effort trying to get the damn thing working any more. Microsoft - telling you one thing, doing something else since Windows 95!

Photos from Zermatt

2009-03-05T08:38:00.002Z

I realised a little bit ago that I seem to have forgotten to put up anything from my ski trip earlier in the month, so here are my pictures:

Zermatt 2009

and here are some pictures from one of the other guys - naturally he never bothered taking any with me in it (mainly tho 'cos they have 5 years skiing experience on me and I was always lagging behind!)

here's me with the Matterhorn behind me, relaxing after rather a tough day on the mountain:

And here's the scene of my most epic wipe-out on the trip - that little black dot in the snow you might be able to make out is the ski I left about 50m up the slope from me.....

Am still limping a bit after that one actually, 4 weeks later.....

The Spanish Invasion

2009-03-01T19:51:00.002Z

Well, it's happening already. Was out shopping today and saw a few gangs of what looked like spanish and italian kids hanging around outside the English college on grafton st and sheltering from the rain at the entrance to Stephens Green Shopping Center. Were doing the usual, standing around blocking the path, chattering at the top of their voices and ignoring anyone trying to get past them. this is a worrying tend; most years the invasion of annoying little kids didn't start til around Paddys Day, then subside a bit til about may/june. Is starting early!

So, seeing as ye're arriving early, here's a bit of advice to our southern european cousins coming over to make their trip to Ireland a little bit more pleasant - for the rest of us:

- Big Groups are bad. We know that there's apparently safety in numbers and there has been occasions where some of you have gotten the shit kicked out of you by scumbags when you were foolish enough to venture into fairview park or down by dun laoighre by yourselves, but it is actually possible to go around in gangs of less than 20 or 30. You draw less attention to yourself that way.
- learn to make room for people. When you're hanging around in your cast-of-thousands groups outside McDonalds, Trinity or the GPO, try moving in a bit to allow other people to pass you. We live here, you're visitors: we own the pavement not you. I don't care how bad your english is (see below), someone walking up to you and stopping right beside you for 10-20 secs, moving from side to side all the time translates as "I want to get past you, please give me room" in any language. Rather than standing there acting dumb and not moving, try making room for us before our ingrained politeness is overcome by our urge to shove you out into oncoming traffic.
- Learn to shut up, or at least tone it down a bit. I've been to Spain and Italy, and I've lived with Spanish and Italians. Ye aren't all that loud all the time. Well, maybe ye> are, at home, and that's why your parents are getting rid of you for the summer. Really though, we don't need to be able to hear your conversations from 25 feet away - is not like we'll understand it anyway. This goes double on public transport: the bus or DART is a confined space and your voices are amplified, plus the rest of us can't get away from you for some quiet no mater how much we want to.
- Speak English. Allegedly you're here to learn English, so maybe it'd be good if you practised every now and then. It might make life easier when ye all go into McDonalds - the same person doesn't have to keep going up for everyone.
- Buy stuff occasionally. You may have heard that there's a recession at the moment. So, rather than going into some cafe/restaurant/fast food place and having 10-15 of you sitting around one can of coke, try buying a few more or even (gasp, shock) a drink each! I know your parents probably didn't give you much pocket money and things are expensive here, but the cafe owners need to make money too, and you're taking up the space of someone who actually might want to buy something.

So, "students", follow these simple little rules and we'll all get along fine until you learn to cop on a bit. For the rest of us, this does actually happen eventually - I half-jokingly asked my Spanish flatmate one time "so at what age do ye Spanish kids stop being irritating little fuckwits?", and she said "oh, about 17 or 18". So there is hope on the horizon! :-)

Wii Fit

2009-01-23T12:35:00.003Z

Well, I was always a bit dubious about getting a games console, but after all the abuse and pressure I've been getting lately of some people (hi mum) to lose weight, I decided for the new year I was actually going to put in an effort. As my options were get a Wii with the Wii Fit or go to the gym, I decided to go for the Wii. The gym has always struck me as being just downright boring, all you're doing is running on the spot watching sky news on a TV in front of you with the sound turned off, listening to crap "thunka-thunka" dance music. At least with the Wii, I can play games as well. I'm managing to get about 15-20mins in every morning while I'm waiting for the shower, and so far I haven't missed a morning yet that I've been here.

What can I say, it does work. When I started on the 4th Jan I weighed 84.5Kg and had a BMI of 30.30, which put me a hair's breadth over the obese level (30 and over is obese). Not totally sure did I agree with being called obese, but now I'm down to 81Kg and a 29.04 BMI. Not bad I guess in just under 3 weeks. It helps as well I guess that I'm also doing what I used to do when I worked in Blackrock - walk back into town. These days I take the dart out to Blackrock on the evenings Michelle has college (twice a week) and walk back in. Is about 8.5km and takes me about an hour and a quarter. Not too bad! And as soon as the ski trip is over, I'll be back to playing footy on a thursday as well.

So, fitness here I come, slowly but surely! :-)

Congratulations America!

2009-01-20T17:18:00.000Z

Vodafone: we don't care who you are, here's a SIM card!

2009-01-19T19:15:00.002Z

Well, I always had an idea that Vodafone were a fairly useless lot, but now I know for sure. My SIM card gave up the ghost over the weekend there, so I had to go into Vodafone to get a new one. I went in primed with some ID, my most recent bill and the numbers that I'd ring/txt most often, so that I could prove that I was me, but when I asked the girl behind the counter could I get a new card, all she asked me was my name, number and address! And she didn't even ask for a bill to confirm it! I could have been any frickin' body going in to get a SIM card!

So, if anyone wants to play a trick on someone, all you have to do is get their name, number and address, and go into to get a new SIM card. The one they have will be disabled and you can rack up all sorts of bills on them before they cop what's going on!

Someone needs to tell Spar what an xmas wreath is....

2008-12-21T11:01:00.004Z

I saw this in my local Spar on friday when I was looking around for some stuff.

Someone should explain the concept of a "christmas wreath" to the staff I think, those aren't wreaths......

Prague

2008-12-14T18:31:00.000Z

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.

Iarnrod Eireann: Punctuality and the small print

2008-12-07T20:00:00.000Z

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?

Slough

2008-12-03T22:56:00.000Z

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

Google has you!

2008-12-01T17:39:00.002Z

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? :-)

Well, it had to happen eventually........

2008-12-01T15:08:00.003Z

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!" :-)

On probation

2008-11-26T12:48:00.003Z

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?

Broadband! :-)

2008-11-22T11:53:00.002Z

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! :-)

Bloody Aer Lingus!

2008-11-11T15:06:00.003Z

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:

  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.

Skiing is booked - finally!

2008-10-31T16:38:00.000Z

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.....

Well fuck this!

2008-10-29T17:08:00.003Z

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!

leaving work in the dark

2008-10-28T19:00:00.003Z

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

2008-10-28T11:21:00.002Z

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..... :

malta: impressions.

2008-09-25T17:07:00.001+01:00

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.

Pictures from Malta

2008-09-23T15:36:00.003+01:00

Well, I finally have my pictures from Malta uploaded to flickr. So, here they are!

Malta: a quick catch-up

2008-09-21T22:43:00.000+01:00

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!

Time Share!?!?

2008-09-15T21:56:00.009+01:00

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! ;-)

Acclimatization!

2008-09-14T20:46:00.006+01:00

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.

Malta

2008-09-12T22:12:00.002+01:00

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! :-(

Darkness

2008-09-09T09:21:00.002+01:00

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 :-)

Only the fecking Irish!

2008-08-21T16:15:00.001+01:00

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"

Aussies are just strange

2008-08-15T08:29:00.004+01:00

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:

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.

You have got to be kidding me!

2008-08-12T14:36:00.002+01:00

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.

New Trains, at last!

2008-08-10T22:27:00.001+01:00

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! :-

Sun Shares costing me money again!

2008-07-21T18:55:00.001+01:00

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......

Working late

2008-07-10T06:12:00.002+01:00

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!

Pics from Edinburgh

2008-06-05T22:00:00.001+01:00

Here are some of my pics from Edinburgh.....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/miles-away-from-home/sets/72157605456554293/

Foreign Reserves

2008-06-05T20:24:00.011+01:00

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:

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)

Have a few more quid than I thought! About €331.25!

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)

Ya gotta love Michael O'Leary

2008-06-04T10:02:00.002+01:00

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...... :-)

Edinburgh

2008-06-02T21:13:00.011+01:00

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..... :-)

Coke need to rethink their belgian marketing strategy

2008-05-26T19:28:00.000+01:00

I was in Zaventem Airport just outside of Brussels the other week, and I saw this on a coke machine:

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?

New Job

2008-05-25T23:50:00.002+01:00

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

Pimp my Helmet!

2008-05-15T23:20:00.004+01:00

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!

Ruinair again!

2008-05-15T22:43:00.003+01:00

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.

The last day

2008-05-15T22:15:00.002+01:00

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!

Gooooool!!!!!!! :-)

2008-05-08T12:58:00.007+01:00

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! :-)

I can't believe this is still up and running!

2008-05-08T11:31:00.002+01:00

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........ :-)

Pimp My Vista

2008-05-05T12:28:00.003+01:00

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 :-)

Well there it is.......

2008-04-30T15:53:00.003+01:00

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?

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.

Gotta love Vodafone.....

2008-04-28T11:54:00.005+01:00

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! :-)

All Done and Dusted

2008-04-18T16:30:00.002+01:00

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.....

New Shiny Shiny

2008-04-18T14:00:00.003+01:00

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 :-)

Some more pics of the ski trip in austria

2008-04-11T16:05:00.003+01:00

...courtesy of Clement

New Passport! :-)

2008-04-10T14:31:00.002+01:00

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.

Going-away parties.

2008-04-02T09:30:00.002+01:00

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!

Passport

2008-04-01T16:20:00.003+01:00

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?

Power Cuts

2008-04-01T09:05:00.002+01:00

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.......

Hee Hee

2008-03-31T21:16:00.003+01:00

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.....

Flights

2008-03-23T13:28:00.000Z

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 pubs are never opening again!

2008-03-20T10:48:00.002Z

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.......

Skiing in the dark

2008-03-04T22:02:00.001Z

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 :-)

Nocturnal events: apres-ski in Zell.

2008-03-03T21:59:00.000Z

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 :-)

Skiing without snow (nearly)

2008-03-03T18:52:00.003Z

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!

Getting there is NOT half the fun!

2008-03-02T14:23:00.001Z

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 Lisbon Treaty

2008-02-11T13:48:00.001Z

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........

....and off again.

2008-01-23T17:01:00.000Z

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!

Off again......

2008-01-15T10:04:00.000Z

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!

No dogs, no irish......

2008-01-11T11:16:00.000Z

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.....

Says it all really......

2008-01-11T10:27:00.000Z

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......

Be careful what you wish for.....

2008-01-06T21:30:00.000Z

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! :-)

New Years

2008-01-01T08:16:00.000Z

Well, so this is 2008. Doesn't look, smell sound or feel any different to 2007 so far anyway. I guess tho that it's New Years resolution time. Ok, here goes so:

Number 1 is the resolution I've made every year and have manged to keep it every time so far: I resolve not to die during the coming year :-)

I'm defintely now more unfit than I've ever been, so have to do something about that. I'm not going to set a target like "lose 5 kilos that I know I'm not going to keep, so an going to make incremental targets: eat out less, walk to/from work more, get back into playing soccer more.

It's a few years since I did my "no alcohol for X months" thing, but seeing as I have a ski trip in feb and a friend's wedding in 2 weeks time that wud be a bit too hard to follow. I'll modify it to "drink less" so.

Properly learn a language, or at least start it. I sort of half know french and have a smattering of italian and spanish and was doing chinese before I headed for Cape Town, but I want to get good at one of them before getting to half-know some other language.

At least this year though I don't have to make the old "get a girlfriend" resolution for once! ;-)

dial-up

2007-12-30T16:58:00.000Z

Well, for the last week I've bene back down in my parent's place in Waterford. In other words, I'm back down in 56k dial-up land for my internet connection. And all I can say about it is: "ecxruciating!". I'd forgotten what it was like to have to wait ages for pages to load, used as I was to my 6Mb connection in the apartment and the even faster connection at work. Now though, I'm back down to earth with a bang!

At the moment my surfing is limited to checking my email and seeing do I have any messages on my facebook/myspace accounts - because trying to do anything else just takes too damn long. I've goven up on one of my email addresses as I know that of the 200+ mails I get a day on that acount, 198 or 199 are going to be spam. And I'm not wasting 15mins of download time just to get all those "cheap mortgage"/"hot busty chicks gagging for action"/"generic viagra from canadian pharmacies" mails - if I didn't want their services the 1st time, I don't want them the 100th time. I have better things to be doing with my time/bandwidth, the spam can build up ont eh mail server for when I have a fast enough connection to dump it properly.

One page though that I go to that really really doesn't like dial-up is gmail. Every time I go on toi check my mail, I get:

This seems to be taking longer than usual.

If you are using a slow Internet connection, you can wait a bit longer for this page to finish loading, or just use basic HTML view for now.

If you are using your normal Internet connection and you usually get past this loading step without any problems, please refresh this page in your browser. If you continue to have trouble loading your account, please visit the help center for troubleshooting information."

Yup guys, I know it's going to take longer, I'm on the end of a 20-year-old phone line. If you wouldn't use goddamn cookies for your "basic HTML view" page and let me bookmark straight to it rather than having to wait the 2-3mins for you to realise I'm not on broadband and give me the link, life would be a lot easier for me. I could look up my mail on my mobile phone faster, if only I had GPRS coverage on my phone!

heading home

2007-12-16T02:40:00.000Z

Well, it's all over now. Am all packed and am up ridiculously early to get to the airport in plenty of time do I can try to sweet-talk the check-in girl not to charge me full whack on the overweight bag full of wine! Liza better appreciate this bloody wedding pressie!

Last day didn't quite go as planned; was thinking of going whale watching, but is too late in the season to go from Cape Town, would have to have gone from Hermanus down the coast which would ave meant getting up at 7amish to get there, and since I got to bed at 3am after hitting the bars in Long st, that wasn't happening! Plan B then was to go on that "combat mission" helicopter flight, so I booked that for 5:30pm, but at 4 I got a call saying tehy didn't have enough numbers to do the flight so they were cancelling it. M other plan then was to do the red bus tour around the city center (which I didn't do before), but by the time they cancelled the helo tour, it was too late to take the last bus tour of the day! . So, all there was to do was sit outside on the quay, drink cold beer and soak up the last sun I'll see for about 6 months!

So, next stop: home!

Last day in work!

2007-12-14T08:13:00.000Z

Well, here I am, the end of the line. Is my last day in work here. Things are ticking along nicely here for the last few days, we went live with the product yesterday (as in, we finally set it loose on some live production data), and while I'm not exactly taking it easy, I'm winding down. Am passing most of the work over to the guy who's replacing me on-site under the guise of "training" for him :-)

So, I have the last day of touristy stuff tomorrow, then home on Sunday. Sunday should be fun, up at 5am to get to the airport for my 8am flight, hitting Heathrow about 7pm local, back in Dublin at around 9ish, all going well and no flight delays. Long day! Am straight into a training course then at work on mon, could be a week long, I'm not sure yet (only got reminded of it yesterday).

I now also have to bring a half-dozen bottles of wine with me, as I was going to ship them home for a friend's wedding, but the shop will only ship cases of a dozen or more. So, the wine weighs about 9kg alone, my luggage was 14kg on my way over and the weight allowance is 23kg. Am lucky that all the rest of my gifts for people are low weight!

Am going to absolutely freeze when I get back - is about 26-30 here most days, is about 7-10 degrees at home! :-(