dial-up

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

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!

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! :-(

The Continents

I was thinking the other day; this trip now means that I've been on 4 of the 6 continents. Wonder what my chances of making all 6 are before my 30th birthday? All I need is S America and Australia to complete the set....

Climbing Table Mountain

Well, now I really know how fit I am. Not very!

As if we hadn't punished ourselves enough with our 21hr day, me and Marcin decided to go and climb Table Mountain, all 1,000m of it! So, after spending the morning in the Sunday Market down by Green Point (where every 3rd stall is pretty much selling the same trinkety crap), we hopped into a taxi and told him to head for the mountain!.

Our starting point was a place called Puttaclip Gorge, one of two ways to climb up, and the closer we got the more I wondered how the hell you get up to the top. The bottom half of the mountain is a steep enough slope, but the top half is nigh on vertical! Once we got to the bottom though, we saw that the gorge sort of cuts into the side of the mountain at an angle, so it's not vertical (just pretty damn close to it). So, we started climbing!


It wasn't "real" mountain climbing I guess, as there was a path with steps cut into it, but it was a lot of very steep steps! I also made the mistake of letting Marcin (who goes hillwalking for fun back home) lead the way, and I had the backpack with the 2 2-liter bottles of water in them! the temperature was hovering up around the 30 mark as well, which didn't suit me very much. The pain started pretty quickly as a result, and after the first few hundred meters I was having to take breaks every now and then.

Naturally we weren't the only ones on the mountain, and pretty soon we got into a sort of a leapfrogging rhythm with a few people - we'd stop for a break and they'd overtake us, and then a few mins later they'd stop for a break and we'd overtake them! Of course there were a few people as well who were a lot fitter than us who overtook us and then just disappeared up the mountain! We also ran into a few people who were literally running down the mountain - were bouncing down the steps at full speed! These folk apparently run up it as well, whereas we're busting a gut just to walk up it!

Took us about 1h45m to climb the thing, which is not too bad - they say it normally takes anything from 2h to 2h30. Was fairly puffed when I got to the top, and the 2L of water we'd brought each was just about all gone! The view from the top was great as well, we could see all of Cape Town, Camps Bay and as far south as Hout Bay. After only about half an hour on the top though, the clouds started to roll in and the opportunity for good pictures started to get a bit less. So, we decided to head back down again. This time though, we took the cable car!

Long Day

Well, that was a long Day. Up at the crack of dawn, got to bed at nearly the crack of dawn! I haven't been up at 5am for a long time, so it was not a nice feeling when that alarm clock went off! This is the price you pay I guess for going on SAFARI!

The trip itself to the park was fairly uneventful - just very long. We met the minibus at 5:30, and we got to the safari park at about 8:45. This long journey was not of course helped by the driver's taste in music - we had "The Best of Phil Collins" the whole way! :-( Luckily we were able to doze through moat of it, and finally reached out destination, the Aquila Game Reserve.

After a quick orientation and a buffet breakfast, off out we went in the jeeps before the heat of the day made the animals all disappear off into the shade. Now, most ppl will probably have a mental image of a safari being endless acres of grasslands, with herds of zebra, rhino, wildebeest and the occasional majestic lion silhouetted up against the horizon looking like Simba from "the Lion King". Well, that's Kenya you're thinking of, it's a bit different that close to the Cape. The landscape is more desert and scrubland than forest or grasslands, and pretty much none of the animals we saw (bar the springbok) were indigenous to the area, and were brought into the game reserve from outside.

We were driving around for about 3hrs, and in that time we saw 4 of the "Big 5" - Lions, Rhinos, Hippos and Buffalo (there were Leopard as well there but they're apparently damn hard to spot - so much so that we couldn't spot them). As well as the "stars of the show", we also got to see elephants, zebras, springbok, alligators and cheetahs. Is good seeing hem in the wild all right, but I was thinking as we were pulling back into the game lodge "yeah, good, but not worth the early start and the price of admission".

And then we got to the bikes. After lunch, we hopped on our quad bikes and zoomed back off out into the park for the afternoon. Now, I haven't driven anything more powerful than a go-kart in over 6-7 years, never mind anything where I had to worry about gears, so things were a bit scary until I got used to things (at one stage I'd hit the electric fence around the park - 10,000v! Was a case of "put it into reverse and don't let your foot touch the ground!"). After a while tho I got a bit more confident and was zooming around with the best of them. Once I lost the fear of death from crashing though, there is definitely something exhilarating about bombing along at up to 40km/h on dirt tracks, over rocky hillsides and skidding around corners! Things nearly came to tears a few times, not least when a couple of springbok ran right out in front of me and I had to jam on the brakes to avoid hitting them!

By the end of the ride we were all tired, dusty and very hyped up. Luckily we had the 3hr drive back to cape town and the mellow sounds of Phil Collins to bring us back down to earth!

Once we got back tho, there was a call from one of the guys from work", "come out and join us for dinner and drinks out in Camps Bay". So, we had just enough time to hop in the shower and head out for dinner! Dinner naturally turned into a few drinks, which turned into a few more drinks, and we ended up getting to bed at 2:30am, or nearly 22hrs after we'd woken up! A long and action-packed day indeed!

Safari

Well, I'm off on Safari tomorrow. Up at 5am to catch a 5:30 bus. Going to be a long blery day.....

Pictures

Well, there's not much happening during the week apart from long days at work, so here's my collection of pics from last weekend. I'll be adding to the collection as I go along.

fun & games in work

I was in the loo today on the 10th floor at work, and I saw this sign up in the cubicle:


I love the 1st point and the 3rd bullet point - this has to have been written by someone in HR! I wonder is there a similar sign in the ladies loos, or are us blokes just considered more messy than the girls?

Then, when I was washing my hands, I saw this on top of the hand dryer:



Now i know there's a big problem with AIDS in Africa, but having these in the toilets in work? Now that's one project meeting it would definitely be interesting to go to! :-P

Of Wine and Sea and Ducks and Penguins

So, 7:30 sunday morning rolled around, the alarm went off and as usual after a night on the drink it took a second or two to get my bearings. The first question I asked myself after I remembered the all important "when" and "where" bits was "Why the hell was I setting my alarm for 7:30 on a sunday?". The answer soon follwed: time to get touristic!

After meeting an equally tired-looking Marcin for a fry-up breakfast (or as close to it as I could get in the hotel), we headed out to meet our bus. On the tour, we had an Irishman, an Englishman, a Pole, a Lebanese and three Brazilians. Am sure there's a joke in there somewhere! We headed out in what was now familiar territory, out past Clifden, Bantry Bay (thought I was back home here with all the place names!), Camps Bay, Llandudno and down to Hout Bay. The tour guide was explaining all about these places but I'd heard it all before so was concentrating on just staying awake. When we were nearing Hout Bay tho, the clouds started rolling in, and I started thinking "oh shit, here we go again". Seems this year, every time I wanted to do some touristy stuff, the rain decides to come along for the ride. Happened in Bandung, happened in Bali, Singapore, Galway with Sharon, and looked like it was happening here too. The rain held off tho, so it just stayed overcast - am well used to that! At least as well it meant that I didn't have to worry about sunburn this time!

Alto it didn't look very far on the map it still took a good couple of hours to get down to the cape (looked like no distance at all on the map, but then again I was comparing it to the size of the country...). The closer we got the more barren and windswept it got, and by the time we got to the gates of the National Park there I could almost believe that I was in a slightly scaled-up version of the West of Ireland, around the Burren (of course the cloud cover helped with that impression too). I suppose one windswept lump of rock perched out in the atlantic looks pretty similar to the next. Then tho I saw Zebras and Ostriches, so I knew I wasn't at home! Just as we got to the cape, the sun came out as well, which was a nice change.

I always thought that the Cape of Good Hope was the point where you couldn't go any further south on Africa without getting your feet wet, but it actually isn't. The Cape is off to the side a bit, and is the most south-west point you can go to, but sticking out about another mile or so is Cape Point, which is the bit where the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic meet. Where one stops and the other starts I couldn't tell you, there's no dividing line or anything and they both look the same color, all you can say is that if you're facing the pointy bit at the end of the peninsula, the Atlantic is on your right-hand side and the Indian is on your right. I would have liked to have gone to the very edge and looked down but the path we took only goes to the lighthouse about 200m from the actual end. You can get out there, but it's aparently a 30min hike (that was 200m as the crow flies), it had taken us 15mins to get from the bus to where we already were, and we only had 45mins total there. Ah well.

After waiting about an extra 15mins for the Brazilians to quit taking photos (could have made it to the edge after all!), we headed off to Stellenbosch for the wine tasting part of the trip. First tho, Penguins! Part of the tour was to see some real life penguins in their natural habitat, at a place caleld Boulder Beach just outside of Simonstown. Am not sure are penguins by nature a fairly phlegmatic breed, or is it just that these guys are pretty used to tourists, but you could get to within inches of them without them batting an eyelid. So, being tourists, lots of pictures were taken. There was a bit of a distraction from the penguins while we were there, there was a duck out walking her family and one of the ducklings managed to get itself separated from the group, tried unsuccessfully to jump across a crack in the rocks, plopped into the water and looked like it was being dragged out to sea. At this stage you got a great look into the differences between men and women, all the girls looking on at the beach looked like they were thinking "Oh no poor thing!" and all the guys looked like they were thinking "Heh, he's toast!" :-) The next wave brought him back to shore again tho, much to the delight of the girls and the secret disappointment of the guys, who were probably hoping there'd be a shark cruising just off the rocks. Reckon those ducks got more pics taken of them as a result than the penguins did!

Finally, after our little bird detour, we got to Stellenbosch itself and stopped for lunch. Am not sure would I like to live there, is supposed to be a university town situated in the heart of wine country (recipe for disaster right there!) but nearly all of the buildings on the main street date back to the Georgian or Victorian period or even further back, and nearly all have preservation orders against them - would be like living in that show village beside Blarney Castle back home! We had an hour and a half for lunch so we split into two groups, the brazilians went looking for veggie food, as the girl in the group is a veggie (no surprise it was the girl), and the irish/english/lebanese/polish folks went searcing for real food. We ended up picking an indian restaurant (as you do when in wine country in SA). The food was good, but we forgot that it seems to be a feature of indian restaurants that they take forever to serve you - we were supposed to be back at the bus at 1:30 but it was only 1:15 when we got the food! Good food, just too bad we had to rush it so much.

And now the piece de resistance of the trip, the wine tasting! We headed out to the Zevenwacht winery just outside of town to get our drinking on! Our menu for the event was 5 glasses of wine and 4 types of cheese, as the place did their own cheese as well. I'm afraid I have to say that I was less than overwhelmed with either, the first wine we tasted was nice enough, but the rest weren't to my taste at all (nor by the looks of the others, to their tastes either). Were fairly small glasses as well, so even had the wines been nice enought to drink all of what you got, no-one was getting pissed on this trip! the most fun we had was winding up the brazilian chick about the cheese. Seems she was a veggie for moral rather than dietary reasons, and she was a card-carrying member of PETA as well, so we told her the cheese may not be vegetarian friendly as they could have used rennit from the cow's stomach lining to make it :-) The guide got cornered as soon as he came back to the table with the next wine, but was able to reassure her it was veggie-friendly so she didn't have to run out to the loo for a quick purging.

After the tasting, the tour. We were wondering why we had the tour after rather than before the wine, but as it turns out you'd maybe need the bit of alcohol to find the tour interesting. First was the "cellar", and while we were expecting a big cavernous cellar with arched roofs as per the stereotype, was just a big white room filled with barrels that was a bit cold. Lots of wine tho, 1,000 barrels holding a grand total of 400,000 bottles of wine! Not an overly bad place to be accidetally locked in for the weekend (if you liked the wine, that is). Then on to the factory floor, where "the magic happens". Now I know that there's not a lot to see when you do a tour of a distillery or a brewery, but still, is like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory compared to this. Grapes come in on the left, get crushed, go into these big tanks to get the yeast added, then it's pumped over to some other big tanks to ferment, sits there a few weeks and gets put in the barrels. So, all you see is a set of big tanks with no indications as to what's in them. Wow.

After all this heady excitement, we all were ushered into the gift shop to catch our collective breath. Decided to get a bottle or two of the one wine I liked (the xmas shopping starts here!). After that, we all climbed into the bus to go home, a tad tired as we'd been going all day. So ended the first day's real touristy stuff in SA! Next stop, safari! :-)

taking it easy around cape town.

So, the first full day of freedom dawns over Cape Town. Seeing as I only found out on friday that I didn't have to work on the weekend, me and Marcin 9the other CAPE guy on-site, over from Poland) didn't have anything organized so it was a case of schlep around town looking for stuff to do. I was hoping to get up to the top of Table Mountain, but it was covered in cloud so that was no good for us (once you get to the top, it'd be nice to be able to see stuff.....) So, we went to the Aquarium instead, which was sort of nice but generally when you've seen one aquarium you've seen them all. After that we went to the tourist office to see about doing some tours. We were thinking about something like the Cape of Good Hope or the Wine Tour for sunday, but we managed to find a tour that combined the two! After booking this, we again were at a bit of an impasse for something to do, so we headed out to Camps Bay for a while, Cape Town's main beach area.

All I can say is I never really thought before that I would be standing on a beach sweating on the 1st december! the beach was packed full of people - it's just the start of the summer holidays over here - but no-one was actually in the water. I went down to see what it was like, and discovered the reason: the water was quite chilly (about 13 degrees I think someone said). I suppose that's what you get when the nearest land mass to you is the Arctic! So we took a wander along the beach, taking in the sights. And some of the sights were quite interesting indeed. Not as many as I would have thought, but there were some very nice things wandering around in bikinis (or even half-bikinis in a few cases). It was hot enough that I was tempted to take off my t-shirt myself, but seeing as everyone around me was all nice and tanned (and in a lot of cases a bit more than just tanned) and I haven't seen any amount of sun since probably last august 12 months, I decided against it. Remember the scene in Jaws where al the people were rushing off the beach screaming trying to get away from the Great White Shark? Well, in this case it would be trying to get away from the Great White Irishman! So, for the sake of other people, I stayed clothed.

After a while of wandering around, we felt a tad peckish so headed up to grab some grub. All of the bars, restaurants etc are on the opposte side of the road to the beach, so was easy enough to find some place. Naturally being so close to the ocean, the restaurant menus tended to trend towards the fishy variety, but we managed to find a place that did steaks so we sat out on the balcony eating, sipping beers and people watching for a few hours. the great thing about people watching is that you get to see all shapes and sizes, in this case including a couple of muppets in a BMW with no front bumper and a big dent in the passenger side door who obviously believed that they hadn't wrecked their car half enough and disappeared off into the distance with a screech of tires and a big enough trail of rubber that you'd think they were in a DeLorean and trying to get up to 85mph to go back to when their hairstyles were in fashion.

After that the evening was drawing in a bit so we headed to this bar/restaurant that the guys in work had mentioned called 'Le Caprice', and settled in there for the duration. Again, more people of all shapes and sizes were around, including a few we'd seen on the beach with (slightly) more clothes on, so the people watching was resumed. The vibe was a bit different to pubs at home, but there was a bit of craic nonetheless, so drinks were had and people were chatted to, and more drinks were had and finally an unexpected hitch was discovered: Unlike my normal tipple at home, Bulmers, where you know by the taste that you're drinking alcohol, Savannah Dry cider pretty much goes down like lemonade but is 6%. So, as sat night rolled slowly into sun morning, we were getting more and more "tired and emotional" Eamonn Dunphy style so seeing as we were leaving for the Cape at 8:30am, we decided to call it a night. Not a bad introduction to Cape Town weekend life!

How I spent the 1st december :-)

Here's what I was doing on the 1st of December this year!



On the beach in Camps Bay, Cape Town. I hear the weather is quite bad at home....... :-P

no weekend work!

Well, I managed to weasel my way out of the weekend work! The guy who was getting the build ready for me to install said he was going to have it ready first thing this morning, and the guys who were working on the machine were going back to jo'burg, so I asked the perfectly valid question, why couldn't I do it today instead of tomorrow, and they couldn't come up with a good reason why I couldn't! Means I'm still at work at 6pm on a friday and will be here for some time yet, but better to work late on a friday than not have a saturday.

So, now I have to start planning for the weekend now, a weekend I didn't think I was getting! :-)

Food, glorious food!

Well, this is more like it, no more late nights hopefully (even if I am losing a weekend day). Am managing to get out early enough to actually get something to eat these days! In fact, yesterday, we got out at 5:30 and headed out to Hout Bay for some beers and some food with the guys from the office here. And what food! We went to a place called "Jimmy's Killer Prawns", which as you might guess by the name, does seafood. The other guys all got big mad platters of prawns, calamari etc, but not being a fish person, I decided to go for something else. So, I went for the 600g T-bone steak (about 21oz). Man, what a steak! The last time I had a steak something like this size was the 25oz I had in FXB's in Dublin, which cost €30 as opposed to €8 for this one. And no contest on the taste, this one was way superior, hell it can lay a decent challenge to the title of "best steak I ever ate". Medium, so nice and pink & tender on the inside, beautiful BBQ sauce, and whereas the FXB one was maybe 1/3 bone, fat and gristle, this was nearly all meat off the bone!

Whatever else about this place, I'll be lucky if I go home the same size I am now. And I've slipped back into my habit of eating weird stuff that you cna't get at home. As well as the big-ass steak, so far I've eaten Ostrich, Springbok, Crocodile and I know where I can order Zebra and Warthog as well :-)

weekend work

Great. As if it wasn't enough that I was in late last night and it looks like I'll be in late tonight too, the cust has decided that they want to upgrade their production servers to the new build as well - over the weekend. So, will be in here most of Saturday and probably a bit of Sunday too! This better be a peak period for work, if I don't do this late night/weekend crap at home, I'm not doing it here for 3 weeks running. The odd time is OK, but if the guys here are expecting it as normal, well.......

Boss has said I can get a day in lieu for this, going to push to get them before I go back home - extra days are better spent in warm sunny South Africa than cold pissing-rain Ireland!

This had better not be the start of a trend.......

I'm just after pulling a 13hr day. Got into the office this morning and took me ages to get properly set up (network problems with my laptop), and as soon as I got connected, I landed in a shitstorm, had a ton of emails waiting for me. I knew from being told last min on friday that I'd be doing an upgrade today when I arrived in, but I never quite got told how complicated it'd be! It didn't help much that there was a lot of confusion between our side and the customer side over what exactly was being upgraded - with me being on the sharp pointy end of the argument over here with not a fecking clue what I was arguing about since the first time I'd heard any of it was half an hour before the meeting!

Finally got sorted what needed to be done, so all I had to do was actually do it. Easier said than done! We managed to get all of the arguing done by about 4pm, which meant that most of my day was gone already, on something I was told absolutely positively had to be done this evening. So, I managed to get out of work finally at about 10:15ish. Betcha I go in tomorrow and get told that "oh no, we won't actually be getting the test results until tomorrow anyway." :-(

Made it!

Well, I made it in one piece anyway. Her I am, sitting in my hotel room at the bottom of the world (well, not quite the bottom, call if a few km from the bottom of Africa so). Man, what a trip! I've said it before and I'll say it again, whoever said "getting there is half the fun" obviously never had to connect through Heathrow!

The first leg of the journey out of Dublin went uneventfully, and then when the transfer from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4 went off without a hitch I started thinking "wow, this looks like it'll be an easy one". Bad mistake! I got to the terminal in plenty of time (nearly 2hrs), and it just so happened to be Rugby weekend, South Africa (my destination!) were playing Wales in Cardiff. Mindful of what happened me on the beijing trip where i list track of time watching the rugger and had to run for my gate, I told myself I'd only watch the 1st half and then get to the gate in plenty of time.

And here's where things started to go awry.

I got to the gate with hages to spare (35mins maybe), and was waiting around until 5mins before we were supposed to be boarding, an announcement was made that they'd discovered some electrical fault on the plane and so were replacing it with another one, which had to be cleaned and serviced, at least an hour's delay. I could have watched the whole of the rugger had I known! :-(

Eventually we took off, 2hrs late, and started the trek down the Dark Continent (well, via France and Spain). This meant I was now getting in at 8am rather than 6am. I knew that this trip would be screwing up my body clock anyway, as normally if I have a 10-12hr flight then my destination is about 8hrs plus or minus what I'm used to , which I'm used to acclimatizing to. This one tho was an 11.5hr flight to end up only 2hrs out of whack with back home! Not used to it at all! As a result I wasn't feeling the cleverest when I got into the taxi.

And here's where things get even more fun. We make it to the hotel, and they tell me they can't find the booking. Lovely. Turns put that originally Alan was supposed to be flying out earlier on sat so he'd be getting in sat night, so the room was booked for the 24th to the 16th. Seems no-one had told them I'd be on a later flight and so getting in this morning, so when I was a no-show last night they cancelled the booking! Took about 30mins to sort that out with the manager and all (ended up paying for it on my plastic despite the fact it should be covered by the cust). Then, to make it worse, after that they told me that check-in time was 2pm so they couldn't let me have the room til then. And this was 9:15am! So, I dropped my bags in the left luggage room and headed out to see Cape Town. As I said tho, I wasn't feeling the cleverest so I got on the open-top bus tour (the same type of red bus that have in Dublin), forgot I'd left my sunblock in the check-in bag and ended up a few shades redder than I was when I woke up yesterday morning!

All in all, not the best of journeys!

(oh yeah, I finally got the room at 2pm anyway)

heading off

Well, am packed up and ready to go now. Has been a hectic few days - have had to drop everything I was doing and hand it off to other people, and then get up to speed on a project I didn't know anything about. It didn't help that the guy who I'm taking over for was saying "ah, it's a cushy number, you'll just have to hold their hand and answer any questions they have", then at abot 3pm yesterday I was told "Actually, you'll be doing an upgrade of tehir productin systems on monday using OWB" - which I've never done before, so needed a crash course in that! Should be fun!

It was also hectic aftert I got out from work in the evenings. Was out with the g/f on weds and had to tell her I'd be heading off for a while ("Um, remember you said we were hgoing ice skating next week? Well, I don't think I'll be able to make it..."), on thurs night we had a going-away piss-up with a few of the guys who were getting laid off, and then last night there was an impromptu going-away meal for me and another guy who#'s off to singapore to get married next week. So, my first chance to actually pack for this trip was when I got home at 11:30pm last night!

At least I know now that it'll deinitely be at least 3 weeks. At first the boss was saying "ah, it'll only be a week, until Alan gets back form Jamaica, then we'll send him down instead of you" but then I got my flights and they had me coming back on the 16th Dec. So, I leave her in a few mins, my flight takes off for Heathrow at 12:10, and then I get into Cape Town at 6:05am tomorrow. Well, at least it'll be warm there.... :-)

Cape Town

Well, I was complaining before that the company weren't sending me anywhere......

Was talking to the boss about half an hour ago. One of the guys here was supposed to be going to Cape Town on Saturday to support a customer down there, but it seems that there's been some big panic in Jamaica on the product he normally works on so he's being shipped off there, and I'm being sent to Cape Town instead. On Saturday. This Saturday coming. For "two weeks".

The last guy who was sent there for "two weeks" left the beginning of October and he just arrived back today! Xmas on the beach perhaps? :-)

Vista gone! :-)

Well, I finally managed to get rid of Vista. It took a while to get the XP CD to recognize the HD, I wasn't able to chnage the BIOS to uncheck the AHCI options, so I ended up:
* Copying the contents of my XP CD to a folder on the HD
* Downloading the Intel AHCI drivers
* Use=ing a tool called nLite to integrate the new intel drivers into the XP image in the folder
* Creating a bootable ISO and burn it to disk
* Installing off the new disk

The problem was the first time I did it, I used the same XP CD that had bluescreened on me last time, so when I tried to install off it, it blue-screened again :-(

Finally last night around 11:30pm, I had a bootable image that actually worked. Unfortunatey I made the mistake of kicking off the install (plus the reformat of my 85GB HD) at about 11:45, so had to stay up babysitting it til 1:30 :-(

After that I hit another small snag. Seeing as I got the laptop with Vista on it, the driver/apps CD I got with the system had, well, only Vista drivers. So, took a little bit of time to get all the necessary stuff installed! Surprisingly, after not being able to find the drivers easily forthe wi-fi card or the audio card, I let Windows Update try to find it for me, and was pleasantly surprised when it did actualy find them!

Tonight, I have all the fun of re-installing all my apps and stuff :-)

Vista doesn't like to go quietly on my laptop

Well, I finally got around to backing up all of the data on my laptop and decided to dump Vista off it and replace it with a more streamlined and less resource-hungry verion of windows (words I thought I'd never use about a Microsoft OS). It took me a while to find my working XP install disks (I have a few but they're either scratched or not bootable), but I finally found them, shoved one in the DVD drive and rebooted Vista for what I thought was the last time.

Not so.

The first disk I tried got as far as loading all the drivers and starting the windows installer, then it blue-screened on me. The second and third disks I got further, as far as the next screen after the other one blue-screened, but after I hit [ENTER] to install windows, another problem arose. Suddenly the installer is telling me that it can't find my HD. Great.

Loking on the web, I found the explanation here. Seems that newer laptops have some new intel technology for doing something i neither know about or care about. Luckily though, you can disable it in the BIOS, so I'm goign to try that now and see what results I get. Wish me luck! :-)

Safe

Well, I still have a job anyway.

I reckoned I'd be safe enough in that my group are so short-staffed at the mo anyway that if I took a few sickie days next week then the boss wud be screwed 'cos there'd be no-one left to do the work! Is still good to hear the news that you're staying officially tho. We were called into the meeting rooms one by one to hear, done alphabetically by first name, so I was in the 2nd half of the list. Then the boss decides to go for lunch in between the guy before me on the list and me, so I'm left sweating for another while longer! Meeting was short and sharp when it happened tho, "OK, you're staying, things are as they were from the re-org meeting yesterday".

So there we go, another round of layoffs survived! After all the Sun ones, I've lost count of how many bullets I've dodged now!

Suppose that's the Xmas bonus out the window anyway. Damn, would have been nice to get one this millennium.....

Layoffs

Well, we just had a company update meeting here, and it was all going as well as usual (boring update slides on the "merger" etc), then the boss drops the clanger on us. Seems due to one thing or another, we haven't been getting in as many new customers as we forecasted in the last quarter, so we made a rather big loss (can't say how much but there were a lot of zeroes involved). Reckon if we hadn't been taken over merged then the whole company would be on the skids, but as it is we're losing 12 ppl from the dublin office.

They're taking us into the meeting rooms one by one in alphabetical order and telling us individually, I should be finding out in about an hour or so. At least it's a short sharp shock, not like the layoffs in Sun where they'd tell you there was layoffs coming up (sorry, a "Reduction In Force") and then leaving you stew for 3-4 weeks. I might even be joining my ex-teammates in Sun who got culled a few weeks go on the jobs market!

I don't really care either way, after working in Sun I make sure my CV is regularly brushed up anyway, and there's no point in stressing about something I can't change. I'm used to layoffs at this stage anyway.

Xmas music

I was walking up Grafton St yesterday and I noticed a change to the usual "ambiance" of the street. As well as the normal buskers, we now have xmas music being broadcast from Brown Thomas. In fecking mid november. And all the lights are up already, even if they're not turned on. I don't mind shops playing xmas music inside, I can always avoid those, but you can't avoid it if they're playing it in the fecking street!

At least I suppose it's the old Bing Crosby crooner type songs, not the T-Rex "I wish it were xmas every day" twaddle (although I'd be surprised if a classy place like BT was playing that crap). Any xmas song brought out after Bing hung up his microphone should have all copies of it tracked down and burned in a big huge pyre, preferably with the original artists sitting on top as well.

Ok, now this takes the biscuit. Just heard an ad on the radio for some furniture superstore place on the north side advertising it's January Sales already! Jesus! :-(

Footy

Well, I started back playing soccer last night. If I was under any illusions before about my fitness level, I'm not any more! Was struggling after 10mins, had to keep going in goals to catch my breath for 5mins, and played crap 'cos I was too knackered to run or put in proper tackles. Got home last night and wasn't up to much bar vegging in front of the TV. It doesn't help I suppose that I'm coming down with a cold so my lung power isn't up to full capacity (however low even that is!), but damn that match hurt!

Is probably about 2 years since I've played (was before I went to china anyway) so I wasn't exactly expecting to set the pitch on fire with my endless running and silky skills. And I knew it'd be painful afterwards - when I was playing, whenever we'd break for the summer in Sun the first few matches back of the new season were quite bad. I'm not feeling too bad now at the moment but I know from experience that by tomorrow I'll be walking around like a 90-year-old! Normally for some reason it's never my legs that stiffen up the most, is my lower and mid-upper back (didn't do anatomy so don't know what the muscles are called - the ones under your shoulder blades). Having said that tho, I won't be running up any stairs either, and getting up out of chairs is going to be a bit painful over the next few days!

It's not like I'm not getting no exercise at all, am not a total couch potato, but the 20-min walk to and from the dart station in the day isn't really so much getting me fitter as helping to stop me becoming even less fit. Is still about half of what I used to walk when I was in Sun as well, but walking the full way into work in the morning would be 1hr 20min, so that's not happening! Am not sure will I be playing again next week, will see how I feel by say sat. Might need to try to stop my lungs from collapsing first!

Another Trip Cancelled

Well, I've just had another trip shot down at work. One of our customers in Australia is doing an upgrade, and someone has to go down and do it. Originally it was supposed to be another member of the team, Viv, but then the project got delayed and it conflicted with her 3-week holiday in China, so someone else had to go. I was the only implementer left in the office (the other guy is in cape town) so I was supposed to be sent instead. Now it's been delayed again and Viv is going - in fact, they're flying her straight from Hong Kong to Sydney, she's not even coming home.

As I said a few days ago, I'm not overly happy with the way the travel has gone here. When I signed up it was on the understanding I'd be travelling a good bit of the time. I'm here nearly a year now and I've been to one place! Instead, my days are spent reading log files to try to see how Vodafone [Censored] have fucked up their systems now! So far, since I've come back from Jakarta, I've had the following trips proposed, then cancelled:

• Reading: Supposed to go on the tuesday, got cancelled on the monday
  
• Guyaquil, Ecuador: Got put on one week's notice to go (as in "have your bags packed"), then got canned. Issues with the contractor I think
  
• Cairo: Same as Ecuador, was "vitally urgent" we send someone over at short notice, then the urgency sort of evaporated (despite their systems still being as fucked-up now as they were then)
  
• Sydney: project got delayed, I was told I was going, project got delayed again, so the original person is going.
  

Maybe in January when the takeover (sorry, "merger") is done, the travel situation may be different. Our new lords and masters are apparently extremely good at project planning - good, we could do with some of that around here! Maybe we won't be spending our whole time firefighting then! I'll wait and see what happens in the first few months of the new year In the meantime however, I might be dusting off the CV just in case.....

My new laptop is not very game friendly

Well, here I am, still running Vista on my new laptop. One thing that I'm not running tho, is games. Seems tho that nearly every game I try doesn't work on this new laptop of mine:
- Enemy Territory: Quake Wars: Doesn't like the gfx card
- Rush For Berlin: Bad gfx drivers for Vista
- Lost Planet: Won't run
- Biohazard: Keeps crashing
- Medal Of Honour: Airborne: Gfx card not supported
- Crysis: Gfx card not supported
- Jericho: Keeps crashing
- Call of Duty 4: Gfx card not supported
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars: Keeps crashing

And I'm sure the list is going to get longer.......

One of the reviews I read before I got it said that "most games will run on the graphics card". Experience and this page say otherwise.

Xmas before Halloween makes the Baby Jesus cry

I thought things were bad last year when the xmas decorations started going up before Halloween, but this year is worse. We've still got a week and a half to go to Halloween, and already the xmas ads are already starting to creep onto the TV, and in Dunnes in Waterford they already have a whole section of xmas decorations in the shop. We're still nearly 10 weeks to go to xmas, which is like 1/5th of the year. What the fuck? Give me a break, is all this hype and full over one day of the year!

5 minutes

It's amazing the difference 5 minutes can make when it comes to getting to work in the morning. This morning I got up a tad late and decided to take the dart from Tara St rather than do the 15min walk to Grand Canal dock. I just missed one train (naturally) and when the next one arrived, we only got as far as Pearse station. It seems some gobshyte truck driver misunderestimated the height of the railway bridge at Grand Canal Dock and wedged his truck under it. Was one of them brick-carrying trucks with the crane on it to take off the bricks, and the crane was jammed tight under the bridge. The impressive bit was that he managed to run the truck half-way under the bridge before it jammed tight enough to stop - is a wide bridge! As a result, no darts erre running between Pearse and Lansdowne until they un-wedged it and the engineers checked out the bridge, so I had to walk up to Lansdowne, and there they said they hadn't a clue how long it'd take before the trains were running again, but prob at least an hour. So I had to go catch the bus, naturally just missed one and finally arrived in work an hour late!

Lessons

Well, I did French in school for 4 years and I still sort of 3/4 know it, and I did Arabic night-classes and have forgotten it all, and Italian night classes and remember a good bit of it, and then I did a few language lessons when I was living in Beijing ("survival chinese"). So, I'm semi-fluent in lots of languages! I decided a few weeks ago to try to improve my slightly sketchy knowledge of at least one of these languages, so I looked around on nightclasses.ie and found a cheapish Chinese course on up in a place on Baggot street on weds nights. Cool!

Started the course tonight and was definitely value for money! There were only two of us in it - altho there's supposed to be 7 signed up. Happy days for the organizers if they've already paid their money I guess :-) Didn't really cover muchfirst night: pronunciation of the tones (which is always a bitch from what I remember from last time), "Ni hau ma?" and the usual greetings stuff - altho we got a bit of grammar as well. Will see how we go next week!

One thing that I definitely found is that I'll need to rewrite my notes when I get done each day - I haven't done any real writing bar signing credit card slips and a few scribbled notes at my desk in the last few years (and even then we're gone to Chip & PIN with the credit card so I don't even do that any more), and my writing, never all that good in the first place, has really gone to shyte! I might as well be a doctor!

My New Toy

Well, I've been giving out about my old laptop now for a while, saying bits of it weren't working all that well (like the gfx card, the DVD drive, the wi-fi card, the heatsink, the 'e' key...) and that I was thinking of getting a replacement for it. I was passing though town during the week and saw that Dixons were doing a sale - 10% off all laptops, this weekend only. So, I decided to go in and take a look, and came out with a new toy. This is what I got:



The specs aren't hugely different to the Alienware - same RAM (1Gb), same GFX RAM (128Mb), slower chip (dual-core 1.7Ghz rather than a 2Ghz), bigger HD (100Gb), and what I couldn't get off any similar-specced Dell, an S-video out port so I could watch all the bootleg AVI movies I get off my boss on my wide-screen TV :-) One area where it is bigger tho is the screen - is a 17" rather than the 15.4" I had on the Alienware. One nice change as well is the machine not sounding like a hairdryer when I'm turning it on thanks to the dodgy heatsink causing the fan to be at 100% the whole time!

This is it sitting beside my work laptop:




My work laptop wants to be my new one when it grows up! :-P

One thing about it which is taking a bit of adjustment is that I'm now running Vista. Am not sure do I like it yet, still feels like a toy OS with all the flashy-flashy menu animations and stuff. I'm getting a bit annoyed as well with getting messages up saying "are you really sure you want to do this?" every time I try to install something - plus when I went to install my old version of Norton AV yesterday, I kept getting a dialog popping up that one of the devices Norton was installing was incompatible with Vista. Every time I clicked "OK" or close on it tho so that I could cancel Norton, the dialog would pop up again straight away! Took me nearly half an hour to cancel and roll back Norton in between clicking that fecking dialog! Hopefully there's an admin option there somewhere that I can turn that annoying shit off in!

Takeover

I came into the office this morning to have my boss tell me in an ominous tone: "you'd better check your mail". My first thought was "oh shit, what have the Egyptians done now?", but then I see the following:

"We are delighted to announce that early this morning CAPE became part 
of the largest non-financial company in Portugal.

Specifically CAPE has been purchased by our most respected competitor, 
WeDo Consulting."

So, they're calling it a merger, but is like the HP/Compaq "merger" - WeDo and Cape are being merged into a company called: "WeDo". So now I'm working for a Portugese company. Is going to take a good while to merge the two, but that is going to be the end result. So, my first buyout!

According to the 2hr meeting we just had on it, our jobs are all safe - in fact the new company has so many unfilled jobs on the books that they'll be hiring a lot more ppl! Will be a big change in the way we do business here in dublin anwyay - definitely in terms of my group. Instead of supporting customers all over the world, we're just going to be handling Northern Europe. Am not a happy camper over that.

When I started this job I was told I'd be spending at least 1/3 of the time on the road, possibly up to 2/3 - was pretty much the reason I took the job in the first place! I've been a bit pissed off with the whole travel thing for a while actually. I've only had one trip to one shithole of a place, and in the last 2 months I've had trips to Reading, Ecuador and Cairo dangled in front of me and then cancelled, which sucks (well, maybe not the Reading one). Now we've been told that the Dublin office will be responsible for Ireland, England and Scandinavia. No more pissing off to Asia or South America for me! I joined this job to go off to foreign places, I didn't join to spend my days rooting through server log files and poking through database tables or answering questions/fixing problems from some customer who didn't read the manual before he started hitting buttons, which is what I'm doing now.

We have a meting later on this afternoon with the boss to see what exactly this is going to mean for our team in particular. Will be pondering my options after that.

At least it may mean trips to Lisbon for "orientation meetings" maybe..... :-)

Fucking DHL.........

Well, after my recent fun and games with UPS, I said I'd never order using them again. Now it seems I'm having fun with DHL as well. Got a letter in the post yesterday dated 10th September from some debt collection agency saying I owed DHL €15.13 and I needed to pay it straight away. Today, I get a letter dated 21st sep saying if I failed to pay up within 72hrs they were going to possibly take me to court over it. Take me to fucking court? Over €15? Reminds me somewhat of the time the cops were investigating me for illegal dumping in wicklow 'cos they found some letter addressed to me in one of the illegal landfills!

I paid off the "crippling debt" anyway, but am getting them to send me out an invoice stating what the charge is for - I reckon this is from the time the guys at work had to send me over some DVDs to Indonesia 'cos the FTP transfers weren't really up to sending 2GB of stuff. If it is, this is definitely being charged back to the company! Am also tempted to ring DHL and ask them do they send their packages the same way they send their demand notices - got my "final warning" letter (dated the 21st) the day after I got my first notice (dated the 10th).

Last time I had problems with DHL it was over a package they lost. I ordered something from the US which was supposed to take "up to 3 weeks" to deliver, and had no sign of it after 4 weeks. Rang up the company, they said they'd sent it via DHL, rang DHL and they said they had no idea where it was. After a few days of ringing around different depts in DHL, discovered that it had reached Ireland 3 days after I'd ordered it, but then it has disappeared somewhere in Dublin airport..... Company sent out a replacement but DHL couldn't deliver to the house out of business hours, and wouldn't for some reason change the delivery address to my work one, so I had to walk down to the DHL office to pick it up myself.

So who's left to use for deliveries now?

Birthdays

I seem to be going to a lot of birthdays recently. Was the g/f's birthday yesterday (is still strange to be able to say that - "the g/f") so we're going out for dinner tonight. Was another friend's b'day celebrations on sat night, another last mon, another last sat (well, same one as this sat - 2 countries, 2 parties!), another the weds before - and another this weekend coming! Reckon I've been to about 7 birthdays in the last 5 weeks, seems a lot of my friends were "xmas pressies" so to speak..... :-) Is fecking expensive going out for all these meals tho! Bad for the wallet, bad for the waistline!

One other thing that hit me as well is that apart from Michelle's (the g/f), all of the birthdays have been 30ths or over. When the hell did everyone I know start hitting 30? Last think I noticed, I was going to 25ths - Where did it all go wrong? :-(

If this is global warming........

.....then I want my money back! God damn you Al Gore!

I walked out of the house yesterday morning on my way to the DART station, and rather quickly noticed two things. One was that the tip of my nose was starting to go a bit chilly, the other was that I could see my breath. Cold? Where the hell did that come from! Where was the indian summer we were promised! The kids have barely been back in school a few weeks yet, after that shite wet summer you'd think we were owed a few more days at least of warmth! :-(

Global warming, pah!

Gold Teeth

I was just out at the shop, and it had the usual old Romanian woman sitting there selling the Big Issue. The second thing I noticed about her (after the moustache) was that she had 3 gold teeth. The last time I saw this was again on a Romanian, this one a guy selling the Big Issue outside of Waterstones. This guy had a full set of gold caps on all his teeth.

Maybe it's a cultural thing or something, but to my mind, if you can afford to bling up your teeth with a set of 24-carat grills, why the hell are you in my country selling the Big Issue?

UPS can go screw themselves

Well, I seem to have gone a bit mad on the auld internet ordering in the last while - got a ton of books from amazon.co.uk, a DVD or two and a few toys from thinkgeek.com (was getting a gift token for a friend and sort of forgot to stop shopping). I don't think I'll be ordering from thinkgeek all that much any more tho - or using UPS.

I got my order delivered today, and the total from the thinkgeek side came to $75 including shipping (or about €55). That was ok, was expecting that, but then the charges came to €48 - or nearly the same worth as the order! They charged me €20.89 on VAT, €10.65 on Duty, which I can accept 'cos it's all govt charges, but then what pisses me off is that they charged me €13.50 on "other charges" whatever the hell they are, and then on top of that they charged me another €2.84 on VAT on my charges! So, they charged me VAT on the goods and then VAT on the fecking VAT! I thought that Ticketmaster were good at ass-raping you when you order stuff, but jesus!

So, if I order from thinkgeek again (which is doubtful looking at these charges), I'm not sending it by UPS!

Ag caint as gaeilge on the DART.

Had a very unusual experience on the DART this evening. Was taking the train home as I normally do, minding my own business and with my brain pretty much in neutral, when I notice something rather unexpected. There were two girls standing beside me chatting away, in irish! This is not something you ever really hear in real life, as apart form TG4 and the few Gaeltachts scattered around he country, most ppl can't speak Irish worth a damn! Granted it wasn't 100% pure Irish, was maybe 3/4 irish with 1/4 english words thrown in, but still way more than you'd normally hear.

The funniest part tho was looking at the reactions of all the other people on the DART. You could straight away spot the foreigners, as they were ignoring all this, being unaware really that hearing someone speaking Irish was not a normal thing - or even not recognizing it as Irish (you hear so many languages around these days). The other Irish ppl tho were equally easy to spot, with their ears pricked up and looks of concentration on their faces as they recognized someone speaking irish and tried to unobtrusively eavesdrop and try to figure out what they were saying! And looks of puzzlement as well as they tried to remember a language they hadn't spoken or used since leaving school!

The conversation as far as I could make it out was about some house party at the weekend where one of their friends had been going stuff with some guy that they thought she shouldn't have. Or something like that. More proof that no matter what language, most female conversations are full of crap that we guys don't really care about listening to anyway :-P

God doesn't want me to do touristy stuff.

Somehow I think God doesn't like me doing touristy things any more. On my last trip, it rained in Bandung, it rained in Singapore and it rained in Bali. I haven't really done anything touristy since, until now. And now, when I did? Rain!

For the last week, I've been playing tour guide to my Israeli friend Sharon who came over for a visit. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take time off so she was doing most of the tourist stuff by herself during the day, but this weekend, I decided that she's seen enough of Dublin and it was time to actually see Ireland :-) So, we hopped on the train and headed off to the West for the weekend, destination: Galway!

Yesterday, we took a bus tour around the Burren - the Burren, Ailwee caves, Doolin, the Cliffs of Moher, and some castle (can't remember the name, no place I'd ever heard of). Up til then she'd had good weather on the trip, but now what did we get? Rain! Pissed rain all the way though the Burren and only stopped when we got near the cliffs of Moher (least the Ailwee caves were inside I guess - a few ppl on the bus were doing a hill-walking tour!). When we got to the Cliffs though, I was reminded of the volcano in Bandung. The cliffs were, well, invisible, low cloud covered them, you could tell where the cliff in front of you stopped but that was about it. Reckon it cleared for about 2mins while we were there. Then, as we were heading back to Galway after all the touristy stiff was done, the weather cleared and we got blue sky! At least there was a nice view of Galway bay out the bus window as we were coming back...... :-(

Spam - not just for email any more

Well, I suppose it had to happen eventually, but the last few days I've been getting spam on my myspace and skype accounts. Myspace I wouldn't mind, I've been getting the odd mail on and off on that from chicks who really want to talk to me but who don't go on myspace that often, but if I sign up to her webcam we can talk any time I want. Unfortunately though I don't have a webcam, so I can't take these lovely girls up on their offer. Ah well.

Now though, I'm getting spammed by Chinese wholesale companies who are apparently trolling for business any which way they can. I don't mind spam emails, I have filters for that, and I don't really care much about the spam on myspace, as that's what the "report spam" button is for. What pisses me off though is getting added to a 50-person chat on skype where the "chat" starts off "dear friend : we are big trade international company .mainly trade electron goods come from international big company". FUCK OFF! If I wanted cheap-ass Chinese electronic knock-offs that'll break 5 days after you get them, I'd go looking for them!

How not to win the lotto

Yesterday I was talking about winning the lotto on a €3 qickpick. It seems someeone else had a better idea of how to win - a couple of Chinese bank guards recently lifted about £3 million from the bank, then put it all on the lotto to win it all back, replace the money before anyone found it, and pocket the difference! Read about it Here.

Lotto

Well, I've done something I haven't done in a long long time. I went out at lunch time and got a 2-line lotto ticket. Normally I don't do it as I go by the old quote that "the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at maths" (or "bad at probabilities", depending on which version you hear. I figured today tho that for the sake of €16 million (or part thereof) I could afford to spend half of what I paid for my (overpriced) lunchtime sandwich in O'Briens!

bright...shiny....burning....thing...?

This feels weird. For the first time in over 2 months (44 days according to the newspapers - I think) it's not raining. It hasn't rained at all today. I didn't get soaked either coming into work or going out for lunch. There are big clouds around the horizon but right now there's a big patch of blue sky overhead with the sun shining down. Does this mean that monsoon season is finally over?

No more starbucks!

Well, in the Forbidden City anyway. One of the most jarring things I saw last year when I was living in Beijing was that there was a Starbucks in the Forbidden City. So, one of the big symbols of Amercian capitalism was smack bang in the middle of the old seat of Chinese Imperial power! Today though, I read a Reuters article that said that the Starbucks has been shut down. One down, 3,000-odd to go!

Bali - getting there is half the fun (pt 2)....

Well, once we were here, we had to have some way of getting around. So, we decided to rent a car. Oh, what fun this turned out to be! The car itself was OK, but then we had to worry about getting around. Now, Bali isn't exactly designed for the tourist to be able to get around easily - the attitude seems to be "ah, don't bother your poor little tourist head about getting around, just stick to the beach and the tourist strip, and if you need to get from A to B, take a taxi. Leave driving to the locals". One village looks pretty much the same as another (yup, and the Adolf Hitler award for cultural sensitivity goes to....), with no signs saying where you are, and the general rule with road signs - where such things exist which is infrequently - is that they have to be placed right behind a tree/wall so you can't see them until you're right on top of them. We did have a map that came with the car, but I was half tempted to bring it home with me,as I'm sure it'd be just as handy to get around Dublin with it as it was to get around Bali with it. What we wanted was a road map, like an OS map maybe, with proper road signs, placenames and street names. What we got looked sort of like the sort of tourist map you'd stick up on your wall when you get home as proof that you were there, but you wouldn't really use. Unfortunately, we were using it.

After a while my impression of the person who drew the map was "more enthusiasm than accuracy", around the level of a leaving cert geography project. After another while, I began to suspect that the artist was in fact Stevie Wonder. No way of telling main roads (where such things existed) from secondary roads (or tertiary roads - yes, there are words worse than our worst irish country roads!). Roads/road junctions on the map where no road seemed to actually exist, and vice versa (as in, we'd hit a T-junction on a stretch where the map said it was just one straight road). Villages on the map where no villages existed, and villages which didn't exist on the map. Villages on the wrong roads or with their names spelled wrong. The map wasn't the only difficulty tho. The balinse attitude to road signs was that they were put up wherever they felt like it, and forget about the rest (shur the locals know where they're going anyway, right?). Then, where these rare beasts did exist, it seems a tree or bush was planted in such a position that the sign was covered so you couldn't see it until you were right on top of it. As for name signs for villages, well, forget about it too. The only way I knew where we were a lot of the time was by trying to catch the name of the place on the front gate of the local temple as we went past!

Despite all of these "challenges", we managed to get where we were going nearly all of the time, altho sometimes it was by dead reckoning (as in, "well, the sea is over there so we have to turn right here") or just stopping and asking someone. I also discovered what Joey had meant when he said that whenever he let Nina drive him to Bandung, he just closed his eyes and ignored everything that was happening on the road. Nina seems to have some sort of pathological aversion to staying behind any other vehicle for any length of time, and her overtaking maneuvers normally included the beeping of some horn, either hers to try to get the guy in front to get out of the way before we hit the bend ahead, or of the oncoming car as we swerved back in to avoid it just in the nick of time. Have you ever overtaken a car which was itself in the process of overtaking another car? Well, now I have (well, as a passenger anyway). After the first few "interesting" overtakes, I decided that if it was my time, it was my time, and if I'd managed to survive Garuda then the chances of me living through the holiday were hopefully still good!

More pics from jakarta

I've just after getting a few more pics from my trip to Indonesia from one of the other guys who was there, Michal. So, here's his gallery

Where am I again?

Well, I finally got the beach in Bali. Not exactly like the picture postcards! You think Bali, you think sun-drenched beaches with white sand, clear blue skies and cobalt blue calm seas. If I don't look up the beach and see the palm trees (or the guys trying to sell me fake watches) I might as well be on Tramore beach at home! Grey sand, grey skies, grey sea, hint of rain.



At least the water is warm, even if I got a bit deeper in than I originally intended first time.....

Bali - getting there is half the fun (pt 1)....

The trip back from Singapore was pretty uneventful anyway, with the one bad point being as soon as I got back to the hotel in JKT I had to login to work and check to see how things were going ! The next morning tho was not fun at all. I was going over to Bali with Nina, the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-coworker who'd decided to go over with me, and as it was extreme short notice (as in, booking the fri before!) all we could get on flights were a 6:30am takeoff - which meant waking up at 3am to get there in time! So, we sleepwalk our way to the airport, and everything seems go ok right up to the point where we are taxiing out to the runway. Next thing there's an announcement: "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the captain speaking, we've discovered a problem with the flaps, so we have to go back to the terminal". We were just lucky I suppose that they found the problem then and not 5 mins later when we're trying to take off - this is Garuda after all we were flying with, who don't exactly have a stellar record when it comes to safety and, well, not crashing (3 planes in the last 3 months!). When you book at the last minute tho, beggars can't really be choosers.

Unfortunately tho, the "quick trip back to the terminal" turned out ot be a bit longer than we were anticipating. after half an hour sitting on the plane, they deplaned us and sent us off t the execs lounge for free tea/coffee/whatever we could grab. At least that way they were a bit better than Ryanair, who'd bend over backwards to try to avoid giving you anything at all if there were any delays (I remember the 5hr delay in charleroi - "get what you want in the cafe, then send the receipts off with this form to the ryanair customer service dept for a refund"). as nice as leather couches and free tea/cofee/soup/little-sandwiches-with-the-crusts-cut-off are, we were still waiting another 3hrs before we got a working plane. So, our 6:30am takeoff became a 10am take-off, and we'd been up for 7hrs already!

Things only got more fun when we got to Bali, as we were supposed to have a driver picking us up at the airport and bring us to the hotel, but there was no sign of him! after nearly 45mins of waiting and phone calls to the hotel asking where the hell h was, we finally figured it out: he was waiting at the domestic arrivals for us, but for some reason (maybe 'cos we were so late getting in) we came in through the international arrivals! It was only through me taking a bit of a wander and seeing a sign for "domestic arrivals" that we copped it! We eventually got to the hotel at about 2pm, or 11hrs after we woke up.

So, they say getting there is half the fun........

Techy Shopping in Singapore

How did I forget about this? There are three really big places to get good cheap techy stuff if you can get to them: Hong Kong, Akihabara in Tokoyo, and Singapore! It was only when I saw one of the big electronics malls when I was on my ay to Little India that I remembered! Mmm, shiny shiny! 5 floors of camera stuff, computer stuff, laptop stuff, TV stuff and general techy bling bling - could have spent the entire day there and come away with a great big hole in my credit card! Unfortunately I had to limit myself to what I could carry in my hand luggage on the plane, and I could'nt rally justify a new laptop or an iPhone-style PCA-cum-phone to myself. So, I limited m purchases to a few bits and pieces - an 8Gb USB pen drive for about 1/4 what you'd pay at home, and a MP4 player with a nifty little 3" screen was pretty much it. The UI on the MP4 player leaves a lot to be desired, and the software CD that came with it didn't work, but is a handy little thing to be able to watch videos on the plane/train/car/wherever. The memory ain't hugely great either, 1Gb internal and 2Gb on the SD card, still big enough for 3, 4 movies tho.

Next time I go prepared with a shopping list!

Sentosa

I've now been swimming in the pacific - well, the Singapore straits anyway. Close enough.

Today I decided to see what the beach was like in Singapore. There's an island called Sentosa just off the coast of Singapore (literally just off the coast, you get to it by bridge) which has been turned into one big huge holiday resort. According to the guidebook, it's one of the things in Singapore you have to see. SO, I went to see it. Took the MRT to some big-ass shopping center at the end of the line, then took the monorail across to the island. The beach itself is all artificial, and you can easily tell. It's like a shelf of sand that goes out into the water, and you can tell by the feel of it under your bare feet that the sand is artificial as well. The beach itself is pretty steep once it gets in the water - like nearly 45 degrees! You walk out on step, you're at your ankles. Next step, your knees, next, your waist nearly, and after about 6 or 7 steps out you're pretty much nearly over your depth. Not sure do I like that! Th water itself is lukewarm - it makes some difference not having to steel yourself against the shock of the cold water hitting your toes, and you can still feel them even when the water is up to your waist!

The strangest thing about going swimming there tho is the view. Once you don't look out to sea it's ok, you have the beach, the palm trees, the sea, the people playing frisbee or volleyball (my first time seeing chinese chicks in bikinis - nice!), the beach bars etc. Then you lift our gaze to the horizon - and all you have is huge container ships as far as the eye can see! Last time I saw anything even remotely like it was off the coast in Hong Kong, but this was way more crowded!



Apart form the swimming, my guide book warned me that Sentosa was tacky, loud, tourist-trappy - "". Maybe it was because it was a weekday, after a few days of rain, coming up to the end of the off-season, but there wasn't much going on there. I didn't get hassled with guys trying to sell me stuff at all! I decided to see what the view was like from the top of the island, so I took a chair lift up to it. Was a sort of strange feeling, getting on a chair lift without skis on my feet, both getting off and getting on (getting off is harder actually, you can't just push off and let the skis do the work)! The view wasn't that much better than from down on the beach, so I decided to go a bit further and take the cable car to Mt Faber, apparently the highest point in Singapore. Waste of time, you can't see much from there at all, isn't like the view from the Peak in HK at all! Coming back it was getting dark, and the big Merlion statue on the island was lit up in purple light with lasers coming out of its eyes. Now that was tacky!

At least getting down from the cable car stop to the base was more fun. They have a thing called "the luge", which is basically about a 650m long go-kart track down the side of the hill. It was late in the evening at that stage, so I nearly had it to myself. So, "brakes? What brakes? Let's see how hard I can hit this chicane!" :-)

All in all, Sentosa: nice, but you're not going to go to Singapore just on the strength of seeing it.

Lovely!

As soon as I get back from Jakarta, I see in the news that the EU has added most Indonesian airlines to its "no-fly blacklist", meaning they can't fly in Europe, and Europeans will be warned off flying with them. And this only 3 days or so after I was flying with one of them! :-(

Ah well, so long as I survived the trip, that's all that matters.....

Pics from Bali....

Well, even if I haven't blogged about it yet, here are my pictures from Bali

Last Day.....

Well, I'm on my last day here in Indonesia, before I head back to the "real world"! I have a 6:50 flight this evening, getting into Frankfurt airport at 5am monday morning, then a 5hr stopover before finally getting home at about 11ish. I'm going to be wrecked! And frozen - am going from 28 degrees to 14! Is pouring rain at home as well, it looks like my first purchase from Singapore is going to come in handy again!

Will be good to get home tho, I feel a bit disconnected from reality here....

The Ministry

Well, I've finally been to one of the big "superclubs" - the Ministry of Sound. We decided, seeing as it was a saturday night, to go out and see what the Singapore nightlife had in store for us. We headed back down towards Clarke Quay, where we'd been the night before. Unfortunaltey , juts as we got there, teh group became somewhat split up, as just after the canadian guys headed off to get something in the 7-11, the heavens opened and it started pissing rain - and I means serious rain! So, it was left to me and another irish guy to hold the fort in the bar. While we were there, a fight broke out between a couple of brits (who else?). This guy and a girl were having an argument, and he ups and belts her - classy bloke! A bit if a scuffle ensued between him and her mates, which ended up with him being turfed out in the rain. A few mins later tho, he was back and having a go at one of the girl's friends! Bloody brits!

The rain eventually eased off a bit, so we decided to wander over to the other side of the quay to see could we find our canadian friends. there was no sign of them, so we decided for the hell of it to go into Hooters. Now, the whole concept of hooters doesn't really translate well to the asian market - Hooter's main drawing point is waitresses with big racks, and I have to say most asian girls, while cute, don't have the necessary attributes in this area. And so it proved to be! Nice girls, good looking and all, but lacking that one definitive hooters ingredient!

After hooters, Brian, the other Irish guy, decided that seeing as he's been awake for nearly 24hrs straight it was time to call it a night. I decided to explore the area a bit more tho, so we parted ways. I decided, seeing as I was only about a block from it, to head into the Ministry of Sounds, just to see what all the hype was about. Normally at home you wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting into a place like that with jeans, a t-shirt and an old pair of runners, but obviously Singaporean bouncers aren't such big pricks as the ones at home - in I strolled with no problems!

Inside was big - real big. The dancefloor for some reason had a turntable on it, and rotating slowly on top was one of them "smart cars". apart from the main dancefloor, there were 5 other separate rooms; a R&B room (absolutely packed), a had-core dance room, an "old school" room (mostly 80s music), a 2nd R&B room and then another one which was playing the same type of bland generic dance crap as in the main room (did I mention I didn't really like the music?). I had a feeling that the canadian guys would be around there somewhere, and sure enough, I bumped into them. One of them, Vance, was seriously off his head drunk, and was trying t on with everything in a skirt. This proved to be his undoing though, as his one big score of the night turned out ot be a thai ladyboy! Unfortunately for him, he only discovered the fact after he'd snogged "her"! :-) To make it even funnier, I had to stop him making the same mistake again about half an hour later, when he was hitting on a "girl" I'd been talking to earlier (the difference was tho that I'd copped early enough on that "she" wasn't a she!).

Happy hour kicked in about 2am, at which point it was "buy one get one free" on drinks. Too bad they don't do this at home! That helped the rest of the night pass rather smoothly, and so we stayed on til they kicked us out at 6am. An interesting night I reckon had been had by all - especially Vance! :-)

My first purchase in Singapore........

......was an umbrella!

Yup, just like when we went to Bandung, as soon as the touristy part of the trip starts, so does the rain. I decided to start the day by going to Chinatown (to sort of make up for the fact that I was staying in Little Riyadh!), and everything was going OK until I got out of the Dim Sum restaurant after brunch (Ok, I got up a little late......). As soon as I started going around the stalls, here comes the rain! At first it was OK, a bit of drizzle like you'd get back home, tolerable like - even more so than at home 'cos it was warm rain. (Warm rain? Who knew such a thing existed?). After a few mins tho, downpour! I was reduced to scurrying around under the awnings outside the stalls trying to find an umbrella. You'd never guess how hard it was to find such a thing as an umbrella among stalls selling all sorts of crap, but it was! It took so long that at one stage I said "screw this" and sat down outside a food stall for a drink and to wait for the rain to stop (it didn't).

Eventually, I found the umbrella, and having exhausted the pleasures of chinatown, decided to wander a bit more. I ended up down on the riverside along Boat Quay (tourist central, full of restaurants-cum-bars, all with guys outside trying to get you inside), and wandered along until I got to the Merlion, the big statue at the rivermouth which was the symbol of Singapore, a lion with a fish's tail (how drunk do you have to get a lion before he'll have sex with a fish?). After a few obligatory pictures, I decided I was fairly done touristing for the day, so headed back to the mosque for some dry clothes and a rest.

Catching up...

Well, I have a lot of catch-up to do on my blog here. Is what happens when you go off for a week's break! Also, I still have to fill in stuff from before I went off to Singapore as well - like Ancol and the like. I'll start plugging away at it while it's fresh in my mind, and then maybe re-arrange in chronological order.

Lovely.........

I just get back from my week's break, and see an email saying that one fo the guys I was working with over here is out of the office with suspected Typhus. Is a good job that I got all my shots before I came over here........

What country am I in again?

Well, I've arrived in Singapore, in one piece. It took me a bit of time at the airport to get my mind out of "work mode" - and I did have a good bit of time, as I'd allowed for an hour in the taxi to get from the hotel, but we made it in 35mins, which means I had a half an hour to kill before I could even check in! The flight itself was uneventful - everyone always rhapsodises about Singapore Airlines, but I didn't find them anything special. Maybe they're different on long-haul, all I had them for was an hour and a half. They had the in-seat entertainment system tho, which was good, but I didn't get much of a chance to play with it.

After I landed, I got out of the airport in record time, and onto the metro - at last! A city with a decent public transport system! 30mins from the terminal to the MRT stop my hostel was near! At that stage tho, things started becoming a little strange. I was staying near Little India, and when I got off the MRT I was faced with streets like Arab St, Baghdad St, Kandahar St, and Haj St, all of the restaurants were serving middle eastern food (with big signs in the window saying "Halal food") and within eyeshot of the hotel was one of the bigger mosques in Singapore, the Sultan Mosque, and just as I got there I could hear the "Allah Akhbar" coming from the Muzzein, calling people to prayer. So, despite me always considering Singapore to be a predominantly Chinese city like Hong Kong, I felt like I was somewhere in Saudi Arabia!

After I checked in anyway, I pretty much ended up going straight out. This is what I love about hostels, you always meet people who are up for a bit of a night out. In this case, it was a bunch of Canadians - altho not your ususal "aboot"-saying canucks, one was chinese-canadian, one was malay-canadian, one was indian-canadian, and one was a white guy! We decided to go into Clarke Quay, as the chick at reception had told us of a good microbrewery place there called "Brewerkz". Unfortunately, in our wisdom, we decided to walk in as it didn't look that far on the map, forgetting about the 31 degrees and 70%+ humidity outside. 30mins later we stagger in the door of the place, shirts sticking to us, half dead from dehydration, and in need of liquid sustenance. Luckily, they had it in spades for us in the form of a "tower of beer", effectively our own mini-keg of beer, big enough for 2 1/2 pints each and at S$80 (or about €40), pretty good value). After that, some other bars were visited in the area, and bed was hit around 1am-ish (I think).

(and yes, that is to scale - that pint glass is sitting right beside it)

All in all, not our usual introduction to singapore!

Not with a bang......

"This is how [it] ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper"

Well, I've had my last day in the office here anyway - if not my last day of work (will probably be logging on from the hotel in between trips). Was a fairly anti-climactic affair. I had to leave the office around 11ish to get back to the hotel to get my stuff and get to the airport to get to my Singapore flight, and after the last few weeks of screaming and arguing and stuff falling over and not being done properly (or on time, or at all), I half expected something huge to crop up which would scupper my Bali trip plans once and for all. There was only one minor hiccup tho, which was easy to deal with. As I was leaving, the office was like a ghost town as there was some sort of "sports and social day" going on in a marquee outside, so it was like I was sneaking out without anyone ever even knowing I was there..... So, I said goodbye to the two people that were still there that I'd been working with, and left.

After I got back to the hotel, there was a quick debriefing session with Angelo, the project manager. I could tell he still wasn't happy with the fact I was pissing off with things not fully completed, but there was nothing left for me to necessarily physically do there, everything else will be a case of logging in remotely and checking from home.

So, next stop, Singapore! :-)

finishng up - hopefully!

So, I'm hopefully finishing up tomorrow. - my project manager here has to talk to my boss back home and then get back to me about next week. I'd better be getting my Bali trip! Altho at this stage I dunno how realistic that's be since I haven't booked flights or a place to stay yet.

Either way, I'm downing tools tomorrow at about midday and heading off to the airport. Singapore, here I come! :-)

Bali vs Work

I've been deliberately avoiding saying anything in my blog here so far about how things are going at work. This is because I didn't want my whole blog to turn into one big rant. Remember before I came over I had the opinion of the people I was working with here as barely competent muppets? Well, my opinion of them has plummeted in the last few weeks. The engineers seem competent enough most of the time when you can get them to actually do stuff, but to do that you need to wade through so many layers of management and process that I nearly need to bring a new can of air freshener with me each day. And when they do stuff, they do no more than the absolute minimum needed to fulfil what they have been told to do. Before I came over we were supposed to have a public network for our application to run on. We arrived and found we didn't have one. I finally got it working after much effort - on Monday this week, or 3 weeks after I should have had it. This involved me being their sysadmin and their network admin for a lot of it, just to get it done. To give an idea how well things went, I discovered last weds week that the network, contrary to what I'd been led to believe, wasn't even cabled in! I asked for this to be done as a matter of urgency on the weds, and it was finally done on the Tues after. I then discovered that the cable monkey who'd set up the wires had never plugged them in - and he'd cut them all to the same length, so two of them didn't even reach the machines at the bottom of the rack! I ended up spending a whole day in the server room, physically having to connect up the cables to the switches myself, and make sure the network was working properly (which it wasn't)! And this is just one example of the problems. The base team won't even have a build for me for a few weeks as they're still waiting for data, so I'm running a generic build not the custom one I should have!

As a result, on Monday I was in the wonderful situation of having until Friday to do what I should have had 4 weeks to do - get the software running and bedded down on the network. I managed to get a good bit of it done before I got the network, but you never really know how these things are going to perform until you start everything up and start running data through it. So, I'm under serious time pressure to get stuff done here, and that assumes nothing else is going to go wrong (not likely to happen). Once I get the basics up and running the tweaking can be done from home, but I need that up first!

Because of this, my holiday next week is looking less and less likely. I was supposed to have the whole week off, and I was heading to Singapore for 4 days and Bali for 4 before I pissed off home. Singapore has to happen, as I have to leave the country and re-enter again to extend my 30-day visa, but the chances of having the work done in time and heading off to Bali are receding by the minute. Guess who's not a happy bunny! I may, if nothing else blows up or refuses to work, get to Bali on Thurs evening and come back sat morning before I fly home on sun. Maybe.

About the only solace I can take from this is that after this particular job is done, every other implementation should seem like a piece of cake - and in future my ass is refusing to get on a plane unless we have all the networks, databases etc we need!

Back to Shcool sale on the 3th floor....

I saw these two signs earlier tonight in a shopping mall we went to to look for pressies for the folks back home......





:-)

Pictures from Sunda Kelapa and Bandung

Well, I haven't had much of a chance to put up many photos of my own so far this trip - and a lot of the ones I have aren't worth seeing anyway! A few of the other guys who were here for the first few weeks are amateur photographers tho (as in, their cameras cost a couple of grand each and are way better than anything I'll ever want to use), so I'm going to shamelessly borrow their pictures!

Here's Anirudh's site so!