Grr......

Well, looks like the filesystem on my laptop is screwed. I've been trying to download a few game demos the last few days, among them Command and Conquer 3 - a 1.18Gb download! Every single time I've downloaded the zip or rar files, I haven't been able to extract or install them. Every single one has either given me a CRC error on trying to extract or an error on the install file when I try to run it.

So, I've just been getting a lot of bad builds you might say. Well, I downloaded the exact same file (the C&C one) on my brand new (ish) work laptop, and had no problems with it. So, something is screwed on my lappy somewhere. I tried running the defragmenter but it made no difference.

This means my laptop is having the current set of problems:

• A messed-up filesystem


• A broken DVD drive - it'll read most CDs most of the time but only reads DVDs when it wants to. Oh yeah, plus the drive door broke off a good while ago


• A screwed up graphics card. It has to be the card rather than the drivers 'cos no matter what version of the drivers I put on I get the same result.


• The processor is also runnning a bit hot on it as well I reckon

So, it looks like this is a shop job. I could fix the first part by wiping and reinstalling (it won't be the first time - in fact, it's overdue), if only the bloody DVD drive would actually read the install CDs long enough to install! Time to start backing stuff up.....

Hotpot!

Well, I've finally found what I've been looking for ever since I came back from China: a restaurant in this country that does hotpot!. The place is one of the hundreds (or so it seems) Chinese restaurants up on Parnell St, and is called the Zen Win House. I noticed it on the menu last time I was in there, but it's a dish for two and the person I was with at the time had no particular interest in it. So, I went back tonight with Vicky!

Was pretty damn good, altho I would have preferred my half of the bowl to be spicier. We ordered the "double happiness" pot, which was half spicy and half normal stock - guess which I had? ;-) One of the things tho which I forgot about with hotpot is it's so damn hard to eat - you drop your meat/fish/veg/whatever in, and then you have to try to find it again in the bowl with your chopsticks! Ah, a bit of exercise sharpens the appetite eh? :-)

(For those who haven't had it before, it's a big bowl of soup stock on the table on a hotplate, and you get all the meat etc raw on plates on the side. So, you take the raw ingredients, drop them in yourself and cook them to your own taste.)

Indonesia (ish)

Well, it looks like the dates for Indonesia have changed again. Now it seems like I'll be over there for my birthday - we're aiming to be over there around the 25th of April. then again, this is the 3rd date we've been given for it......

Skiing without much snow (pt. 3)

On our last day of skiing, we all managed to get together in a big group, with everyone there, for the first time in the holiday! It didn't last any longer than the first run of the day tho, as the girls who'd just graduated from beginners class didn't want to tackle anything harder than a few blue slopes, while trhe rest of us wanted to head over to another mountain where we hadn't been yet, at the far sie of the valley. The only way to get there was by cable car, right across the valley so we decided to head up to it. Unfortunately, as we wound our way up on the chair lift, what we thought had just been cloud at the top of the mountain turned out to be a full-fledged blizzard! The visibility was down to maybe 10 meters, the temp was about -15 with wind-chill factored in, and the snow was being driven horizontally into out faces. At that stage we decided to cut our losses and just go back down on the slopes we'd been on before. On the way though, we found the entrance to a run we'd been looking for before but had always managed to miss, and despite the fact that it had a big "closed" sign on it, we decided to try it anyway. It was probably the best run of the day, as we had it all to ourselves and were pretty much running on fresh undisturbed snow. After a (really) big lunch, we decided to try a few red runs before meeting the others again, and I was quite pleased with myself that I only fell twice (one was silly tho - crossed my skis on a flat bit!). After that we decided to call it a day, as everyone was a bit weary, so we started heading for the Hannenkamm lift. This involved taking a chairlift and two more blue runs though, and at this stage the weather had closed in again and visibility was back down to bout 5m - fun!

We made it back alive anyway and then headed down to meet the girls who had some sort of medals presentation thing from their ski school to go to, from some race they'd done on their last day (none of them had won tho I think!). After a drink or two in the pub, we all agreed to meet back up and have dinner in that place the lads had had the orgasmic steak in on tues night. So, after showerng, shaving etc, we all met up. Pretty much everyone ordered the same thing (the prawns for starter, then the steak) except for me - I hate prawns, and at the last second I had a fit of contrariness and decided against the steak. Judging by the silence around the table when the mains arrived out, a good meal was had by all, and after we set about the task of finding a good bar to park ourselves in for the night. Unfortunately, our first chouce was not the best one - a trendy cocktail bar full of the beautiful people, all dolled-up in thir friday finery - so naturally a big crowd of loud irish in ski outfits stood out like a sore thumb! We only stayed there for two drinks, then headed out to look for somewhere slightly better. We got distracted along the way by an outside bar where they were playing this game where you hammer a nail into a block of wood with the narrow chisel end of a hammer. Your strike had to begin with the hammer touching the edge of the block tho, so it wasn't as easy as it sounds. After a good few games of this we realised (a) it was nearly 1am and the bar was closing and (b) we had to be up early the next day to catch the taxi to the airport, so we called it a night.

The next day dawned bright and early - too damn early! We were getting a 7:30am pickup for the airport, so had to be up at 6:30am. Naturally the discussion in the taxi on the way to the airport was minimal, and we only really were waking up when we got into Munich. Checking in was uneventful, right up to the point where the girl at the check-in counter told em I had to queue up again to pay for my bags - damn Aer Lingus and their charging per bag policy! The guy at the Aer Lingus desk seemed to have had a serious attack of the slows just before I got there - there were only 4 people in the queue ahead of me, but it still took him 35mins to deal with them! And all of this for an €8 fine that had I known in advance, I could have paid online and saved myself all the hassle! At this stage the others had already gone through security, and by the time I reached them I didn't even have time to get food before we took off! Needless to say I was slightly a bit miffed at this. The flight itself passed uneventfully, apart from a pretty hard landing in Dublin, and so we all went our separate ways, probably never to see each other again until the next time we go skiing.

So, all in all, definitely not a leisure holiday, but a damn good one anyway!

Things to remember for next skiing trip

Hopefully this may make my life a bit easier next time around:

• Book the gear in advance again - saved me a bit of money this time, 20% of shop price!
  
  
• Bring a backpack to keep your shoes/runners in. That way you have to keep the ski boots on if you go out to apres-ski straight from the slopes. Also handy for bottles of water etc.
  
  
• If flying with aer lingus, check the bags in online - saves queuing in the airport (normally I just bring hand luggage everywhere so never have to worry about this)
  
  
• Get a decent pair of wraparound shades. the fakelys I had were crap for skiing in as they weren't wraparound so your eyes are tearing up after 2mins. (seeing as I broke them anyway, not something I have to worry about again....)
  
  
• Remember: no matter how warm it is when you're stopped, it gets colder when you're moving so close your jacket before you start moving rather than having to do it half-way down the slope!
  

Am trying to convince myself now that I don't need to buy a pair of ski boots...

Skiing without much snow (pt. 2)

Day three dawned with a lot more promising weather conditions than the previous two - both in terms of snow on the ground (lots) and snow in the air (none). Lessons were actually pretty productive today - the group was down to seven so things went a lot faster. This was a good thing, since we'd only signed up for 3 days lessons and the previous 2 had been fairly unproductive on our eyes! We were supposed to be going to another slope but it was apparently closed so back to the Horn it was for us!

We started off the morning by doing the run from the top of the cable car to the middle station. The run was quite nice, blue all the way, and it pretty much reminded me of the "home run" into the village in Sol, but a bit shorter. Seeing as we were with Walter (the instructor) tho, and he was going slow to make sure everyone could keep up, it took a bit of time to go down, so after lessons in the afternoon me and 3 of the guys decided to do it a bit faster. Took about 30mins the first time, we did it in about 10 by ourselves! Only problem is, the 2nd time down, we sort of ended up losing someone - we were certain he was right behind us. Ah well, I'm sure he was ok...

After getting back to the hotel, showering, changing etc, we decided to go out to a restaurant that one of the lads had had a drink in the night before when we were out playing pool. Was a fancy looking italian place, with one problem - the menu was in german and italian, but no english! Luckily I had some italian and the waiter had good english! I made a bit of a tactical error in my choices - for starter I picked "parmagiana", expecting flaked parmesan over a salad or something, but I forgot that in an austrian restaurant, what you see on the menu is exactly what you get - so I ended up wit lumps of raw parmesan cheese! Now, I like parmesan (I wouldn't have ordered it otherwise), but not on its own and not in the quantity given! My main course was nice, veal (with a hint of parmesan from my overloaded tastebuds), but going by the semi-orgasmic sounds coming from beside me from Evelyn, the steak was even nicer!

After a really nice dinner, we wandered out to try to find a decent lively pub, and then someone spotted a fateful sign outside a place called "The Pub" - "KARAOKE HERE TONIGHT". So, despite the misgivings of some of us, we all headed in. naturally no-one wanted to go up first, so we all shoved a fiver into a kitty for the first person to go up. Once everyone had thrown down, one of the girls said she loved karaoke and was going to go up anyway, but she'd take the money thank you very much! So, alcohol was consumed and much merriment was had, and come more singing actually happened as well. Unfortunately, there were quite a few locals singing local songs as well (or german songs anyway), which were pretty bloody awful! Then again, they like David Hasselhoff in germany too....

Weds was our first "real" day of skiing - we had no lessons and were finally going up the Hannenkamm with Doyley and Clem. The conditions in the morning were pretty bad tho, it was OK on the higher slopes but once you got to mid-mountain, it was raining! Whatever about blizzards, rain is awful to ski in - it turns the snow to slush, which makes it pretty damn hard to turn, and your goggles are useless 'cos they don't have windscreen wipers. By the time we stopped for lunch, we were literally steaming - we were so soaked by the rain and so hot from having to work so hard at turning, there was steam coming off us once we took off our jackets! The afternoon went pretty well tho, whizzing down blue slope after blue slope, and I even managed my first black! Ok, it was a fairly short one, but still, a black is a black. Only fell on my ass a few times, which was pretty good I thought. As the lads said tho, "if you're not falling, you're not going fast enough!"

After the skiing for the day was over, and everyone gathered in the usual watering spot, we decided to head down to a bar called the Londoner, where there was a live band on. This was the liveliest place we'd found so far, so we sort of ended up not bothering to go back and change, or go out and eat. As a result we were pretty well hammered by about 10 - hey, drinking for 5hrs on an empty stomach will do that to you. I even ended up chatting up some chick, which is not something I normally do on a night out (she was irish and all - go figure, I go to austria to hit on an irish girl!). Around 10:30 a few people got the munchies so we wandered out to see what we could get to eat. Unfortunately, the nearest place to get food was McDonalds, but hey, needs must when the devil drives.... We were slightly surprised when we got in to find that they had prawns on the menu. I privately was questioning the advisability of ordering prawns in McDonalds, and in a land-locked country like Austria at that, but Doyley was all gung-ho for it, and apparently they weren't too bad. That bout of gastronomic adventuring tho pretty much paid to our night.

Thursday was our 2nd last day of skiing, and it had pretty much snuck up on us rather fast. I didn't have the best of mornings, in that I managed to both break my shades and lose one of my ski poles. Was silly really, I was going up on one of the chair-lifts, took off my glove to get something out of my pocket and didn't realise that the pole strap was looped around the glove rather than my wrist. I didn't really miss it when going downhill - you don't really use your poles all that much really, altho you do feel a bit unbalanced with just one - but I definitely missed it on the level or when trying to go up a slope. One ski pole makes for a lot of damned hard work pulling yourself up a hill! The worst thing was, I knew exactly where it was, and could even see it every time we took that particular lift back up (which we did a few times), but couldn't get to it. I was expecting to lose my deposit or something at the end of the day when I went to get a replacement, but the girl in the shop just said "ok, go pick out another one there, we'll pick up that one in the spring". Fair enough!

Tat night, me, Doyley, Clem and Fran decided to split off from the group and try out a restaurant that Gar had told us himself and the missus had been in. We went in, and were told we'd be waiting at leat a half an hour. We elected to stay at the restaurant's bar and wait, and even before the first pints had settled in the glasses, the maitre'd was back asking us did we mind sharing. Seems a table of 8 had just come free, and coincidentally a group of english blokes had also arrived looking for seats. They turned out to be good gas, and much fun and entertainment was had, to the extent that it was close to midnight when we rolled out of the place. The others had hit the irish bar in the meantime, so we had to head down and try to catch up with them in the alcohol stakes. Never let it be said that we turned down a challenge! ;-)

Skiing without much snow (pt. 1)

Well, I'm back from my Ski trip, mostly in one piece! I ache in muscles I didn't know I had, I have a bruised knee, a wrenched shoulder, I broke my oakley shades and my liver is threatening to take out a restraining order against me, so yeah, was a great trip! :-P

Unfortunately, it didn't get off to a very auspicious start. We booked our flights way back in november, back before we knew the 6 nations timetable. So, by a sheer case of bad luck, we were taking off on saturday the 24th, landing in Munich at 5:30 - or just as Ireland v. England was kicking off in Croke Park. This would have been ok, but we still had a 2 1/2hr taxi ride to go to get to Kitzbuhel! So, we were on the road for the whole match. Luckily Vodafone were doing a "free txt" day, so we were getting txt updates for pretty much every kick of the match from one of the guys back home. Still tho, not the same as not seeing the match! What made it even worse though was that fact that the closer we got to the mountains, the more snow we didn't see. According to the taxi driver, it hadn't snowed there in 2 weeks! We got all the way to Kitzbuhel without seeing any more snow than you'd see in Ireland in your average winter, and the town itself was completely snowless. We were joking with each other that we'd have to find the local mountain bike rental, or buy 2 skateboards and strap one to each foot!

We checked into our respective hotels anyway, and headed out in the rain (for at that point it had indeed started raining) to Flanagans, the Irish bar where we were supposed to be meeting up with a few more of the gang. After suffering though their fairly inebriated description of what a bloody brilliant match we'd missed, we headed out to find some grub. We stumbled across a mexican place called 'La Fonda', which coincidentally contained two more of our group who were staying a bit further out of town and so hadn't joined us in the pub. This brought our motley crew up to 13, so much food and drink was had for the remainder of the night until we took the subtle hints of the staff (i.e. stacking the chairs up on the tables around us) and left about 1:30ish.

The next morning we were up bright and early to get our skis etc and sign up for ski school. We had 3 raw beginners, 3 intermediates (including myself) and the rest were "expert" - as in they'd been skiing for 5 or 6 years. Unfortunately by the time we got our gear sorted we were nearly late for school! The hotel was a nice easy 5min walk along the rail lines from the main cable car, the Hahnenkamm (which at various stages before we got the name right, we were calling the "heineken", the "mikka-hakkinen" or the "hasselhoff"), but the ski school was on another mountain, the Kitzbuhler Horn, which was a 5min bus journey away! The first day's skiing in class wasn't very spectacular, as we had a big group (14 ppl) and the instructor was really only feeling out how much we knew already. Also, the conditions weren't great - we'd only started seeing real snow about half-way up in the cable car, and even at the top there was only patchy snow off the pistes - some of the pistes were even closed. After lessons, we met up with the others sitting outside the hotel at the foot of the Hahnenkamm sipping beers (a place that sort of became "base camp" for the hol, as we always met there every evening!).

Once we met up with the everyone we decided to try out the apres-ski bar beside where we meet up. When we walked in we were hit with a wall of the best dodgy austrian apres-ski music, complete euro-crap (music in Austria sort of went downhill after Mozart died). The place was dark, loud and packed to the gills with people in sweaty smelly ski boots and suits necking back beers, gluhwein and jaegermeisters and listening to some of the worst tunes on the planet - everything apres-ski should be! After a good while of musical torture and watching 2 drunk chicks practically dry-hump each other on the dancefloor, we headed out for food (we found a pizza place called "Ali Babas" that did a kebab pizza! Had to try that!) and then to a bar that was showing the Ireland England match on TV, where we pretty much stayed for the night.

The snow conditions were skightly better on our 2nd day - a little bit too good in fact! It had been snowing most of the night, and when we got to the top of the mountain, it was still snowing with crap visibility. Our first run of the day was down a rather windy blue slope from the cable car to the foot of the baby slopes, and there was so much snow blowing in our faces that we were going down in a line and you couldn't see any more than 5 ppl in front of you. We were also the first down of the day, and the snow ploughs hadn't even levelled off the piste in some parts, so we weren't so much skiing as wading though 4-6 inches of snow! the weather cleared off after a bit, but at various stages during the day they shut down the t-lift as the visibility had closed in too far again to run it - the guys at either end couldn't see well enough to know if anyone had fallen and they had to stop it (which normally happens about once every 5-10mins normally!). We ended the day by doing the run from the top lift to the middle station - about half-way down the mountain. Reminded me a lot of the "home run" into the village in Sol, altho a bit shorter - you'd do it in maybe 20mins. After lessons, the 3 of us in the class pretty much had the mountain to ourselves so we decide to try to see how much speed you could get up on a few of the blue slopes and try to kill ourselves on a red.

Once we got back to "ground level", we headed straight for a bar that our ski instructor had told us was having a beer promo with 2 free kegs of beer. We arrived along about 5:30, or 30mins after it was supposed to have started, expecting all the free beer to be gone, as it would at home. We weren't at home tho - apart from a good few ski instructors, the place was practically deserted! The free beer lasted quite a while - maybe 4 more pints each, which was nice. At that stage we'd managed to wangle our way onto the pool table, where we managed to stay til about 10ish when Gar and Ev got beaten by a couple of kids! At that stage we reckoned it was time for food, so we staggered to an italian place where coincidentally we ran into the rest of the group! At that stage we were slightly, um, under the weather so I'm afraid the Risotto I ordered was wasted on me - but at least I wasn't falling asleep in my rockett salad like Fran!