Time Share!?!?

Well, our 3rd day didn't exactly get off to the type of start we were expecting for it, that's for sure! After being late for quite a few stuff the day before, we decided to get u a little bit earlier - 8am instead of 9am, so we could be on the road that bit earlier and so not get stuck with getting places just as the sun was at its hottest and everything was shutting around us for the siesta. So, up early and out of the hotel by 9:30, all set for the day - or so we thought.

We were just after literally crossing the road from the hotel when we were approached by a guy who said he was working for the Malta tourist board and wanted us to fill in a questionnaire. After we did it, he gave us a few scratch card type thingies as a "thank you" for doing the survey. I got a bottle of wine on mine, and Michelle got a free holiday!

Then the fun bit started. Apparently to collect this prize we had to pretend to be married, as it only applied to married couples, and we had to go collect it at a hotel down the road, where yer man told us we'd probably have to take about an hour of listening to them trying to sell us time-share in the hotel before we could get out with the goods. So, we headed down to collect our winnings, thinking "an hour isn't all that bad for a free holiday!" :-)

FOUR HOURS LATER we were leaving the hotel. The first hour of the meeting was ok, we were asking the rep guy about all the things to see/do on the island, how to get there etc, and he was giving us bus numbers and times. One thing we hadn't realised was that one of the main bus terminii(?) for the island was only 5mins walk away from us on the Sliema waterfront, we'd thought that to get anywhere we'd have to go to the main bus terminus in Valetta first. After that though, it was the hard sell for 3hrs. Apparently what they were doing wasn't a timeshare scheme, oh no, you just paid your money up-front and then you had your own room in a 5-star hotel, pre-booked, for a particular week every year, for 37 years. For a small change fee tho, you could change the week of the year, or change to a different hotel in the chain, and at the end of the 37 years you got your initial fee back. And all this for a mere €12,000, payable in one lump sum or a series of easy instalments (plus interest of course). No mention naturally of the fact that your €12,000 now isn't likely to be worth anything like €12,000 in 37 years time..... Plus you had to decide on the spot, no thinking about it, no waiting around, sign the paper and pay the deposit or "lose this fantastic opportunity"

Everything was pleasant enough until we told them we weren't likely to sign up for it, at which point the hard sell really started, with varying degrees of higher management dudes being brought out to try to convince us by dropping the rate, planning more flexible payments etc. When eventually they got the message we managed to get out, me with my bottle of wine and Michelle with a pamphlet on all the places we could get out free holiday in, with a promise that they'd ring us a few weeks after we got back from hols to see when and where we wanted to go. At that stage it was nearly 1:30pm, so we headed out to find the bus we wanted to get to Mdina, our original plans for the day. Only problem is, when we got there around 2:30 and finally got something to eat, we discovered that we didn't have enough time to do everything we wanted to there as most things (like the cathedral museum and the dungeons) closed at 4:30 or 5. What we saw was nice enough tho, the view from the citadel walls covered pretty much the whole island, but it would have been nice to see more of the museums and stuff.



Well, at least I got the wine I guess, which turned out to be not too bad...... Am not going to hold my breath on those dudes ringing us asking which holiday we want tho! ;-)

Acclimatization!

Hmph. the one bit I hate about travelling is the, well, actual travelling part of going to places. I'm definitely going to ave to think more about planing my flight times better, to get to Malta we had to get up at 4:45am - which meant after finishing packing the night before and all, was about 5 1/2hrs sleep! We managed to sleepwalk our way to the airport for our 7:45am flight anyway, made our way out to the Ryanair prefab and took off only about half an hour late (not bad for a flight from Dublin airport!). Three and a half hours later, we finally saw a patch of land under the wing - Malta!

In our half asleep state, we had a little bit of a shock to the system - the weather. When we left Dublin it was 12 degrees and spitting rain, but in Malta, we hit 32 degrees and about 75% humidity. This felt like quite a pleasant change as we made our way to the hotel, but once we were settled in and decided to go out exploring, it started to hit us hard. Our hotel was located on the waterfront in Sliema, across the harbour from Valetta (hence the name: "The Waterfront Hotel" :-P), and as we walked along in search of something to eat, the sweat was pouring out of us (well, out of me definitely anyway).



At this point the decision to go at stupid o'clock in the morning as it was cheaper option turned out to be a not quite so good one: we were zonked out, and it was only 2pm! We took the option of least resistance: starting off with a harbour tour, offered by the many kindly gentlemen positioned about every 50 feet along the boardwalk. Unfortunately at that stage the heat, the early start and the lack of sleep started to take their toll: by about half-way around the 2hr trip Michelle was starting to doze off and I wasn't all that much better! The tour was pretty good, we were jut not in a really good mood to appreciate it. So, the saturday we arrived turned out to be a bit of a non-event, we pretty much bummed around Sliema for the rest of the day and got an early night.

The sunday started bright and early outside - unfortunately we didn't. We woke up around 9am, got breakfast, showered and dressed and were out and about by 11am. We soon discovered that by sheer accident we were in a pretty damn spot location-wise, about 200 yards from the hotel was the ferry acrtoss to Valetta, and only a little but further up the road was the main bus terminus for the west of the Island! So, we took the ferry across (for a whopping 93c each!) and started touring around Valetta. As we got off the ferry, we saw signs for "The Malta Experience", a sort of potted history of the island, 4,000 years in 30mins video sort of thing, so we decided to do that. Unfortunately we discovered that the Malta tourist board had seemingly arranged the signs pointing to this attraction with a view to giving you a tour of the city along the way - it took us ages of wandering around to find it!

After the tour we decided to take the horse-drawn carriage tour back down to the front gates of Valetta where the marketplace was supposed to be on (the signs for he Malta Experience had eventually brought us out to the tip of the peninsula), so we could maybe start the pressie shopping! Unfortunately, the market closed at around 1:30-2pm, so by the time we got there everything was shut. And then we discovered that so was everything else. We knew that Malta did the spanish-style siesta between 12 and 2, but what we didn't realise that the country was religious enough to really take the "day of rest" thing seriously - on sundays, pretty much nothing opened again after the siesta! Shops, museums, everything was shut - even some of the churches, which I thought was a bit strange on a sunday!

And then, much to our surprise, it started raining! Rain, the very stuff we went on holidays to get away from! Luckily though, rain in Malta doesn't mean the same thing as rain at home - it only lasted about 10mins and was almost pleasant (I never knew you could have warm rain before)! Once the rain was over, we managed to find one museum that was open (the archaeological museum) and so spent a bit of time wandering around that before we headed back to Sliema to bum around for the evening.

Malta

Well, I'm off to Malta in the morning. Finally a bit of sun! Haven't seen a decent bit of weather since I was in S Africa - if this is Global warming I want my money back! Only problem is, the flight is at 7:45am, so have to get up at stupid o'clock! :-(

Darkness

I hate this time of year. This is the first morning this year that I noticed that I had to turn on the light in the bathroom when I was getting up. So, that and the barely perceptible nip in the air definitely means that we're heading into winter! Then again, with the way the weather has gone the last few months, the only difference between summer and winter is that in the winter we have less daylight hours to be able to watch the rain out the window!

Then again, I got to put winter off for a least another week anyway - am heading to Malta for a week on Saturday :-)

Only the fecking Irish!

Well, here we go, another Olympics, another horse doping scandal in the Irish Olympic team. The best part about this one though was the first comment by the head of the Irish Olympic committee on hearing that one of the horses was tested positive for banned substances

"Well, that's a bitter pill to swallow"

Aussies are just strange

I was hunting around the kitchen in work yesterday morning to try to find where the cleaners had hid the black mug that they keep taking off my desk (it's a morning tradition at this stage), when I came across something a bit strange:


Salt 'n Vinegar flavoured salt? What the hell? What's wring with just using traditional old-fashioned salt and traditional old-fashioned vinegar?

Then I looked at the back, and it all fell into place: "Made in Australia". The country whose other contribution to world cuisine has been biscuits that you suck your tea up through.

You have got to be kidding me!

It seems that SpamAssassin is on the side of the Georgians in the ongoing conflict in the Caucasus: I tried to send a Register article about google map's little "russians invade georgia" error to some friends of mine, and it seems that if you try to send a mail with the word "russians" then you get the following error:



I asked our admins about this and they swear blind they didn't do anything: it seems our mails are checked by SpamAssassin before they go out though, so it could be them that are doing it.

New Trains, at last!

Well, finally Iarnrod Eireann are after rolling out the new trains on the Waterford line. After watching for the last year while the super-fast, new, shiny Cork train has whizzed in and out of Heuston while the rest of us mere mortals climbed onto the same old orange pieces of crap as we always have, it's our turn. Finally I'm travelling on inter-city transport that isn't older than me! Irish Rail has dragged itself kicking and screaming into the late 20th century at last! I say "late 20th" rather than "21st" because now we're getting the type of trains that our brethren on the Continent have probably taken for granted since the 1990s - and people in the likes of Japan & Korea have probably had since before then even.

It seems that once they catered for the special people in Cork by giving them their special trains (I'm surprised they didn't paint them red), they're replacing the rolling stock on the lines in order of seniority, which means that even Galway got the new trains before us. Then again, they needed them. Up until recently, if you were going to Galway and were getting off in one of the intermediate stops like Athenry where my friends live, you had to go to the door, pull the window down, reach out and open the door handle from the outside. Takes a bit of getting used to!

So, what are the trains actually like? Well, when you see them, the first thought is "shiny". They're silver and green as opposed to the faded orange and black of the old ones (and at least they look like they've been painted this decade). When you get onboard, the first impressions are "new" and "clean", the seats are in blue and grey colors and the ceiling is white with recessed lighting instead of the old florescent panels. The toilets are the same as on the Cork train, all electronic buttons, automatic sinks and airline-style flushing loos except without the annoying automated announcements for everything (yes, I know I've just closed the door, you don't have to tell me mr. robot). These have a bit of a disadvantage over the old-style toilets tho, at least on the old ones the locks were mechanical, if you don't hit the button properly on these, or don't remember to hit "lock" as well as "close", someone can walk in on you. One of the other disadvantages of the new trains is that the engine is part of the carriage like on the Arrows rather than being a separate unit, so to get a long train you have to stick pairs of these back-to-back. This means you can't get on the back and walk the length of the train to get a seat like you used to be. Then again, if they got everything right first time, it wouldn't be Ireland! :-) At least the seats are relatively comfortable, not like on the Cork train. There, you're glad that the new trains are faster and it's only a 2 1/2hr trip, 'cos your as is definitely gone numb before you've hit 2hrs!

So, progress anyway! Now all we have to hope is that they don't break down as often as the old ones! :-

Sun Shares costing me money again!

Well, if I didn't need it before, I'm just after getting more validation of my rule never to accept stock options from a company ever again. I thought the time that Mercer sent me the check for 2 cents after selling some shares for me was bad enough, or the time that they offered to sell $27 worth of shares for me and charging me $30 handling fee for the privilege, but this one takes the fucking cake!

I'm just after getting a letter from Dolmen stockbrokers, who AFAIK for their sins took over from Mercer on the Sun account:

"Please be advised that the annual account fee for the period July 2008 to June 2009 is due for application now, and we are also taking this opportunity to ascertain whether prior year account harges hev been fully discharged"

Ok, so far so good. Here's what I owe:

Portfolio balance as at 9th July: €10.93
Account fee due to July 2009 Inc Vat: €54.45

What the Fuck? I owe them €55 for looking after €10 of stock for me? Screw that! But it gets better.

Account fee due to July 2007 Inc Vat: €48.40
Account fee due to July 2008 Inc Vat: €48.40

Seems I must have not bothered opening a few other letters once I saw they were from Dolmen. So, seems I owe them just over €140!

The letter goes on:

"If Dolmen does not receive your remittance by latest, 18th August 2008, we will ahve no choice but to apply Section 13 of our Terms and Conditions which permit Dolmen Stockbrokers to dispose of any investment held for you to reduce ie eliminate the relevant liability. the proceeds of sale (net of sell out cost of €30) will be applied to your acount."

Oh no, you meam I'm not going to be able to pass on this $10 of stock to my grandchildren? I say "grandchildren" because it'll probably take that long before the stock is worth slightly more than fuck-all again.

Now comes the threat:

"In the event that you have insufficient stock to discharge the liability, Dolmen will dispose of the investment to reduce the liablility and close the account"

FINALLY they say something I agree with! Yes, by all means, close the account, enjoy the €10 of Sun stock for the short time before it goes down to €8. This will also help them do their bit for the environment by not having to waste paper sending me out these stupid fucking balance letters any more! I just wish Solomon Smith Barney would do the same......

Working late

Well, here we go, am 5 weeks into the company and this is my 2nd day going home from the office at 6am - and the second day in a row actually! This better not be the start of a trend! This is one of the problems of working with a large telco as a customer (or any large customer-facing organization), the only time they can take their big-ass databases off-line for maintenance is overnight. So, I did a full day's work on tues, came back into work at 11:30pm, left around 6:45am weds, was back in again around 11, did another day's work, came back in last night at 11:30pm again, and I should be leaving here in the next few mins provided nothing goes tits-up.

So, by 9am tomorrow morning, out of the last 48hrs I will have spent 29 of them in the office, and only 6 of the others asleep (well, that would be if I was actually getting into work at 9am, which ain't fucking happening!)

The worst part of it is I wasn't actually busy most of the time. I had a busy first hour shutting down al the services and setting everything up, a busy last 30mins starting everything back up again, and most of the rest of the time was just monitoring stuff every now and then to make sure nothing had keeled over! I could have done it from home but I don't have a VPN account yet so had to come into the office :-( At least I was able to being in my home laptop with my game/movie collection!

Pics from Edinburgh

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

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

Foreign Reserves

After the last trip, I was putting my UK pounds back into my foreign change wallet, when I decided it might be an idea to see how much I actually had lying around. So, here's what I've managed to pick up around my travels:

• 10 Macau Patacas (79c)
  
• 11 U.S. Dollars (€7.05)
  
• 50 Danish Kroners (€6.70)
  
• 80 Polish Zloty (€23.64)
  
• 85 British Pounds(€106.73)
  
• 100 S. African Rand (€8.18)
  
• 130 Singaporean Dollars (€61.04)
  
• 200 Czech Koruny (€8.12)
  
• 237 Chinese Yuan (€21.87)
  
• 680 Hong Kong Dollars (€55.86)
  
• 2,000 Japanese Yen (€12.11)
  
• 2,700 Hungarian Florints (€11.07)
  
• 116,000 Indonesian Rupiyah (€8.01)
  

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

And this isn't including the currencies I have here that don't actually exist any more, which are pretty much just souvenirs now:

• 35 Dutch Guilders (€15.88)
  
• 1,200 Belgian Francs (€29.75)
  
• 2,000 Spanish Pesetas (€12.02)
  
• 104,000 Italian Lira (€53.71)
  

Ya gotta love Michael O'Leary

Saw this in the paper this morning:

HARD-pressed funeral goers are Ryanair's most profitable customers, chief executive Michael O'Leary revealed unapologetically yesterday.

His comments came as Ryanair unveiled record annual profits of €481m and detailed plans to ground up to four Dublin planes this winter.

"The best yields (fares) are VFRs (visiting friends and relatives) going to funerals," Mr O'Leary announced. "They book late because they don't tend to have much notice, and they tend to be price insensitive because they have to travel."

.....

Mr O'Leary's comments came in response to a question from a London-based analyst, who congratulated Ryanair on its "balanced customer base".

"I'm not sure who told you we had a balanced customer base but they were bull-shitting you," the Mullingar man replied. "We don't care whether you're (travelling for) business, leisure, or visiting friends and relatives.

"All we want to know about our customer base is that they've booked and we have their credit card number."


Well, is nice to see a top exec in a company admit it: "we're only out for your money, we don't give a crap about you after that". makes a refreshing change from all that "we care about our customers" crap you get off other companies. Then again, you'd sort of expect this from O'Leary, he's not exactly shy in speaking his mind...... :-)

Edinburgh

Well, I've finally been to Scotland. With all my years of travelling, going to the other side of the world and (near) the bottom of the world and all, it's been sort of funny that I've never been to one of the countries that is closest to me. Well, now that particular gap has been filled, with a weekend in Edinburgh, courtesy of my g/f who booked it as my 30th b'day present (well, when I say "booked it", I mean I booked the flights she told me about on my credit card. She got the hotel tho :-P).

This trip was actually an unusual one for me in that the plane took off on time from Dublin Airport and we got into Edinburgh airport a bit ahead of time! I reckon the only reason we actually got into Edinburgh airport proper was that there's no other airport close enough nearby that Ruinair could call "Ryanair Edinburgh" with a straight face. So, no need to pay them the extra €10 each to take their bus into town, we could rely on public transport. Problem was, there were roadworks going on in the street that the Airport Express normally drops you off so the stop was in a different spot to where the maps said it was - and the girl in the airport tourist office told us it was in a diff spot from where it was! So, was a bit of confusion with finding the hotel, but we got there in the end anyway.

Saturday morning started off lovely and fine and sunny, and then got hotter - almost too hot. Deciding that I wasn't going to end up looking like a tomato on this hol, I finally got sense and put on sunscreen before I started to crisp! We started the day by climbing the Walter Scott monument, all 270-odd steps of it, and then went on the bus tour. There's a fair difference all right between the old town and the new town, and who would have guessed that the lovely park we'd had lunch in had previously been a sewage-encrusted loch? The rest of the day was spent mostly wandering around the castle, before heading out for dinner to a Mexican restaurant several people had mentioned was really really good. They also said it's normally so busy that if you don't book you're not getting in, so we went more in hope than in expectation. We walked in the door, got a table straight away (the last table in the place), and spent the entire evening watching the manageress turn people away who hadn't a booking, saying the place was too full! ;-)

Later in the evening, we decided to do one of the ghost tours that Edinburgh was famous for, so we went on the Witchery tour. The tour was good, but it lacked a certain something. A ghost tour should really be done on a dark and preferably foggy night, but we unfortunately picked the wrong time of year: the tour was at 9:30pm, but it didn't get dark until about 11ish! The tour was very tongue in-cheek, and after the 2nd time the "jumper" jumped out on us we were on the look-out for him and it became a bit of a running joke. Was good fun tho. After that, we were pretty knackered after being up and about and walking around since about 10am, so we just went back to the hotel and to bed.

The next day was not quite as nice as the sat had been. In other words, it was pissing rain all day! Luckily, all the outdoorsy stuff had been done on sat so we spent the day doing the indoor stuff like the Camera Obscura, the Whiskey Museum or a tour of one of the old, now underground, tenement buildings. There were plans for doing one of the ghost tours as well, but it was a little bit too damp for wandering around town! Our flight back was on monday, but was an afternoon flight so there wasn't very much time to do anything, so the only thing that got done on mon was the obligatory present shopping for ppl back home!

All in all, a nice city, wud definitely go back. am thinking of trying to organize something for Hogmanay..... :-)

Coke need to rethink their belgian marketing strategy

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



Now I know that the Mannekin Pis is one of the tourist icons of Brussels and is probably it's most famous image (and also probably one of the few tourist attractions in the world where you can get a souvenir bigger than the original), but when you're going to get a Coke, do you really want the mental image of a little boy pissing into your bottle before you get it?

New Job

Well, the new job starts in the morning. Am not sure how I feel about it. Apparently in the new place they are big into dropping you in the deep end, so we'll have to see how that goes. Hopefully I won't be mad busy already by tomorrow evening! At least I wont be on my own, is already one CAPEy there, and another guy that I know from college, plus a few more CAPEys following me in the next few weeks. Will be a lot different at lunchtimes anyway, I'll be able to come back and have my lunch in the flat if I want.

I know one thing I WON'T be doing anyway, and that's giving the ppl at work the URL of this blog! :-P

Pimp my Helmet!

I was at the Star Wars exhibition yesterday when I was in Brussels (it's doing a tour of europe), and at the very end of it they had a pretty cool display. apparenly they'd gotten a load of Darth Vader helmets and given them to local artists to "pimp up" as they saw fit.

These are some of the results!


The Green Bay Vaders




"El Vador", the Sith Luchador


Darth Moule


El Diablo!

Ruinair again!

Well, you have to hand it to Ruinair, they sure know how to give their victims customers that wonderful warm fuzzy feeling of being loved. As well as charging more on taxes than you pay for your ticket and charging you for bringin luggage, leaving you play musical chairs for your seat, you also get their wonderful customer experience when you're getting on the plane.

A few months ago, they opened up the new multi-million-euro pier in Dublin Airport, Pier D. It looks lovely and shiny and new and pretty - hell, it looks like an airport in a real developed country! And where are the Ryanair gates in this wonderful new pier? Down in the same fecking prefabs they were in before the pier was open! You walk down this wonderful new building, and you get to the sign for gates D74 to 78, pointing down a stairs, You look out the window, and you see the prefab, tacked onto the side of the Peir like a lean-to shed on the side of a Bel Air mansion.

And then when you get in there: "Air conditioning? Shur what do you need that for, this is ireland!". Is only 800-odd people crammed into a prefab with no opening windows and an outside temp of about 19 degrees (hey, it's hot for ireland). Then, just to make things worse, a full 10mins before we were due to board (well, the time it said on the boarding pass anyway) and a good 45mins before take-off, someone decides to stand in the queue, the herd mentality kicks in and I have to stand with the rest of the sheep to avoid being last on board and have nowhere to put me bag. There wasn't even any sign of the plane at that stage! And because I hadn't remembered to bring my passport into work with me so that I could check in online, I was at teh end of the pleb's queue and had to watch all them "priority" passengers get on ahead of me.

The last day

Well, tomorrow is my last day in WeDo. It's pretty much all over bar the shouting now, I've had my exit interview and my going-away piss-up as well, and I brought home all the crap from my desk this evening. The going-away do was a good long session, we went to the pub at about 5:30 and I got home (from Copper Faced Jacks, oh the shame!) at about 4am-ish. The exit interview was a bit strange, we didn't really talk about the usual stuff ("why are you leaving", "is there any way you think we can improve things here" etc), I sort of went through all that in the last 1-1 with Darina the HR head, was more like just a regular chat about random crap.

Feels a bit strange to be leaving. I won't miss some of the muppets we have for customers, but it was a very good learning experience regardless, and I'll miss all the ppl I work with (well, those that are left in the place).

So, so long WeDo, hello Newbay!

Gooooool!!!!!!! :-)

If by some miracle we found out that my granny was from Brazil instead of Wexford, and if I had any soccer talent worth a damn, this is what my Brazilian football shirt would look like :-P



See what your one would be! :-)

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

I'm heading to Belgium this weekend, and my friend over there is thinking of organizing a trip to Ypres for the day. I've been there already, so I put in my €0.02 on what to go and see, then I remembered that I might have a few pics up on the web from my last trip. So, on the off chance that my old IOL page was still up and running, I decided to throw the URL into the browser and see does it work. Imagine my surprise when instead of a 404 error, I got:



I haven't paid for this account in about 8, 9 years! I wonder is my mail still working. Imagine, 9 years of spam, is like a time capsule! I wonder if I can remember what the password was........ :-)

Pimp My Vista

Well, I have a new laptop - again. I finally got sick of every single game I tried saying "You need an Nvidia card to play me" and sticking two fingers up at me, so I'm selling my "old" (as in 5 months old) laptop to my flatmate and now I have myself a new HP Pavillion 9565ea. As well as an Nvidia card, it has a built-in webcam, TV tuner and fingerprint reader, so to login I don't even need to type a password any more. It also has 2 120GB HDs so plenty of space to put my pr0n movies, and something called a lightscribe writer on the DVD drive which means as well as burning blank DVDs, if you have a certain kind of DVD it can actually print the face of the DVD for you too!

Only problem is, as it's a new laptop, it's running Windows Vista. And Vista is, well, slow and clunky. Last time I got a laptop I tried sticking with Vista for a few weeks and then got sick of it and threw XP back on, but this time around it seems HP have gotten wise to that sort of thing and not put the XP drivers for things like the lightscribe, fingerprint reader and webcam on their support site. So, I may have to stick with Vista until I find all that good stuff!

I've already found a website called 99 Windows Vista Tips and Tweaks, so I can use as many of those as I can to pimp up Vista to see can you actually make a decently performing OS out of it! I'm already after managing to turn off that annoying "User Account Control " dialog that asks you "are you sure?" every time you try to do something, which is good. it's supposed to be to stop computer newbies from accidentally doing something stupid, but I reckon I know my way around a computer well enough now not to need it. I reckon as well that my old Alienware laptop doesn't really need as much RAM any more as no-one will be using it, so I might try to up the new one from 2GB to 4GB (altho I think Vista can't actually use any more than 3.2GB). So, let's see if we can't actually make use of this damn OS!

And, as well as that, I'm going to hunt for as many of the XP drivers for the laptop as I can find, just in case :-)

Well there it is.......

I'm not in my 20s any more. Apparently some time around 4pm today (or is it 4:30?) I'm officially 30. So there it is, I've just jumped a decade. Apparently everything is downhill from here on in now, as everyone here is gleefully informing me - next stop 40! :-(

So, time to take stock?

• I'm starting a new job in a few weeks, more money, more holidays etc - and a 5min commute!
  
• I'm still living in the same place I was 8 years ago - but seeing as that's city center and 5mins walk from anywhere, why would I move?
  
• According to an app I found on facebook, I've seen 9% of the world, which doesn't sound like a lot until you take into account that it's a big-ass world.
  
• I'm probably the most unfit I've ever been in my life, which isn't good.
  
• Unlike a lot of ppl I know who live pretty much from paycheck to paycheck, I have a bit of money in the bank.
  
• For the first time in about 10 years, I can use the term "my girlfriend" in the present tense and be actually referring to a real live person ;-P
  

So, not bad I suppose.

[update]
OK, just a call from my mother: the official time of getting old was 4:35. There we go so. It's done.

Gotta love Vodafone.....

Well, it seems that Vodafone.ie have set up a lovely spiffing new web interface for things like webtext. Is only one problem: it doesn't work. Now when you want to send a message to someone in your contacts list, you're supposed to click a check-box beside their name and their number automatically gets added into the "send to" box. Only problem is, it doesn't - at least not on Firefox. You click the check box go to send the message, and you get an error saying you have to pick a number to send it to first.

Then, another wonderful feature they have is a feedback form - once you send a message you have a little form on the right of the page asking you did sending the text work, and if not, you can fill in a little form to say why not. Problem is, if you try to use it, you get:



So, the form that you use to complain about something that isn't working, isn't working! :-)

All Done and Dusted

Well, I finally handed in my notice anyway. I got a new job last week, and got the contract signed on tues, but I was holding off on handing in the notice as it looked like Work (as in, the current one) might be sending me to Cairo for a week. My new job starts on the 26th May so handing in my 4 weeks notice now means I get a week off in between jobs, but the cairo trip looked like it was coming up the week of the 19th, so I was holding off on the notice for a week so that my last week would be spent off abroad one more time! Turns out the customer wants to hold off until the end of May tho, so that's me out - so no point in hanging around here the extra week! :-)

It was surprisingly easy to get the new job actually. Unlike last time where I was fruitlessly searching for 2 years and had god knows how many interviews (including the one where the muppet recruitment agent sent me to the wrong interview!), I got this on on my second try! The first interview was for a job that I didn't really want anyway, a 2nd line support job with Eircom which was a bit too close to the bits I didn't like in my current job - I was doing it more for the experience and to get back into the rhythm of interviewing than naything else. I dind't get offered it, and even if I had I would have turned it down. The interview was full of the HR type stuff like "where do you see yourself in 5 years time" or "what would you consider your main strengths/weaknesses to be" or "how would you say you perform under stress?", with techy questions few and far between, and needless to say it was this HR crap I apparently fell down on.

My second interview was a lot better - well, I got it, didn't I :-)? Was pretty much all techy stuff, and was more like a chat than an interview (I was bouncing as many questions off him as he was off me). It started at 3pm, I was out by 3:45 and by 4:15 the nice girl in the recruitment agency (and by "nice" I mean "hot") was on to me saying the company wanted me to give then references to check. Here was the first hurdle: they wanted one from CAPE and one from Sun! The CAPE one was easy, just banged off a txt to my manager who'd left a few weeks before and got an immediate "no probs", but the Sun one was more tricky. Seeing as my former group in Sun had all been laid off about 3 months after I left, I dint' have any contact info that I knew woud work! I ended up chancing my arm with a few emial addresses and eventually got a repy from two of them - Tom, my ex boss in Dublin who had survuved the department's demise (I thought he'd been let go too), and Shinobu, my former project lead in San Francisco. Up til the point where I heard from them, I'd been trying to remember what the last name was of my host manager in Beijing so I could send him a message! The reference info was duly sent off anyway, and in short order a reply came back: I had the job.

So anyway, the role is with an Irish company who do mobile phone content provision (I'm not naming names, amde that mistake before and got stung for it!). The role is as a "Deployment Engineer" which is pretty much the same thing I'm doing in my current job - I'm the guy who sets up the customer's systems and throws the software on them. There'll be some travel, but not much - at least they're honest about that, the reason I took my current job was 'cos they said I could be spending as much as 1 out of every 3 months abroad, and lok how far that got me! It's 4 grand more money anyway, 4 days more holidays, and hte best bit is it's only 5mins walk from my apartment, which is just as good as another €700 a year to me as it means I won't have to take the DART to work any more!

So, how will it turn out? Will my current place get out of the slump and start hiring ppl instead of losing them? Only time will tell.....

New Shiny Shiny

Well, I have meself a nice new phone here. Seems it's company policy that everyone has a company phone, so I took the opportunity to use the company discount to try out a Nokia for the first time in about 5-6 years. So, my new Nokia E51 has just landed on my desk. It looks nice anyway - about the same length and breadth as my K800i but about half as thick. I can't play with it til I get a full charge on it now, but I have a good 2 1/2hrs to play with it on my way home on the train this evening :-)

Some more pics of the ski trip in austria

...courtesy of Clement

New Passport! :-)

Well, I can travel again now. I have my new passport! That was quicker than I thought, I knew they said "10 working days" but this is Ireland so I was expecting it to be another week maybe. Plus I got the old one back with a big-ass "CANCELLED" stamp across the pic page, so at least I get to keep my entry visas from China etc as souveniers.

Going-away parties.

Well, I was out at another going-away party with work last night. One of the girls from our group was leaving - which brings us down to 5 from a team of 14. As one of the girls is relatively new, there's only 4 of us who'll be able to take the support phone foe a good while. So, one week a month I'll be on call!

So for we're still maintaining the record of not having a week this year where there hasn't been a going-away party for someone - and a lot of the more recent weekend do's have been for 2, sometimes 3 people at a time. We were figuring out the numbers last night and realised that we've gone from over 140 in the Dublin office at its peak (before the takeover) to just a tad over 40 now. That's a lot of people gone! At this stage I don't even really bother reading the names on the going-away cards, just sign "all the best", and the having to put a fiver in each card has pretty much negated that bonus I got last month!

Passport

Well, at least now I know for definite that work isn't going to be sending me off anywhere for the next two weeks anyway: I don't have a passport any more! I'm just after sending off my application to get a new passport, and I had to include my old passport to get canceled as well. So, I can't leave the country for the next 10 working days!

Man, I can't believe that it's nearly 10 years since I got a passport. I can remember being so excited about my first trip abroad (to Brussels to see my uncle) that I barely slept the night before. Now I'm so blasé about it that my 2nd last trip to Brussels I left work at about 4pm to get back to the flat to pack my bag and find my passport for my 7pm flight! (the last trip to Brussels I went straight from work, and I'd taken 10mins to pack my bag that morning). Since then, according to them applet thingies on my facebook account, I've been to 9% of the countries in the word - 79 cities in 21 countries. And a few of them (like Belgium, Italy, America and Spain), I've been to a few times. Not bad I guess eh?

Power Cuts

Well, it was fun yesterday evening in work when we had a power cut around 3:30 - no-one could do anything, and just as it came back in, it was time to leave for the evening - but now this morning there was a power cut in my apartment building as well. I was just getting out of the shower and the light in the bathroom went off. I thought it was a blown bulb until I noticed there was no sound of the water heater pump when I ran the hot tap (it's not loud but it's noticeable). Sure enough, when I went out the all the lights were off, and when I looked out the window the traffic lights were out and the building across the road was dark too.

Yesterday in work we were blaming the guys digging a big hole in the footpath outside the building for hitting the wrong wire, but I can't do that for this morning. Maybe some overzealous employee in ESB decided we didn't celebrate Earth Hour enough? Or maybe it's me? Maybe I've started emitting some strange electromagnetic radiation that turns off the power? That'd be cool.......

Hee Hee

I was in town yesterday, and when I was passing by the Great Outdoors I noticed that they had a big "SALE" sign in the window, so I decided to go up and take a look. I saw pretty much the same type of ski boots as I have at a slightly different price - €199, or still €50 more than I paid for mine! :-)

On another note, you can tell that the winter is over and summer isn't that far away, when you see the arrival of the annoying little foreign students. When I was passing by Trinity College, there they were, a big group of about 20 or so spanish (I think) kids in matching backpacks and chatting at full volume, blocking the whole path. A few years ago, we came up with a collective noun for them: a "babble" of spanish students. So, from now on, we'll have to batter our way past them every time we want to go past Trinity, the GPO, and any McDonalds in the city.....

Flights

Well, I'm just after booking my 6-monthly trip over to see Sara in Brussels here. I decided to do it a bit differently than usual - I'm flying out with Ryanair and back with Aer Lingus. Is costing about €78 return, which is cheaper than going both ways with either airline - a return with Ryanair on the same days would be €95 before adding on their stealth charges (so probably about €100) and with Aer Lingus it'd be €126. Most of the flights here are taxes -t eh ryanair flight allegedly costs €3.99 before taxes etc (€30 after) and Aer Lingus was €10 before taxes (or €48 after).

The strange thing is that the Aer Lingus prices seem to vary quite a bit. I got the single flight for €10, but apparenly if I was getting it as the return leg of a two-way flight, it'd be €6.....

The pubs are never opening again!

Well, that seems to be the attitude of Irish people around this time of the year. Twice a year, the pubs close for a whole day and off licenses etc aren't supposed to sell drink (Good Friday and Xmas day), and both times you see people the day before coming out of the supermarkets with trollies packed to the brim full of booze. There's more drink bought on Holy Thursday and Xmas Eve than I'd say in the 2-3 weeks before each put together, and more alcohol probably drank on those days than when the pubs are actually open. Sort of misses the whole point of "day of fast and abstinence" doesn't it really?

It's like primitive man sacrificing animals at midwinter so the sun will come up again, people seem to be afraid that when the pubs shut this evening, they won't ever open again.......

Skiing in the dark

On our last night, Eugene, the Irish guy whose place we were staying in, decided we were going to start drinking up at the middle station and then drink our way down the mountain. He took a bit of a shine to us I think, because he was on a leave of absence from CIE and there were two of the guys in the group from there, so we got maybe preferential treatment to other groups (including the discount on the boots) :-) He knew a little gasthaus that hardly any of the tourists ever went, which was on a blue run off to the side of the final run down to the village (which incidentally was a black run), if you didn't know about it you'd miss it every time. So, the plan was to drink a bit, ski a bit, drink a bit more, ski a bit more and end up in there at around 5pm for dinner and more drinks. The dinner was absolutely fantastic - roast pork, roast potatoes and dumplings, probably the best meal we got in the whole trip! After the meal there was a bit of a singsong, and we wound that up around 9pm. Then came the interesting part: the only way back to the village was to ski down. A black slope. In the dark. With about 5, 6 pints on everyone. Fun! The only light we had was from a piste basher a bit up the slope. Strangely enough, it was probably some of the best skiing most ppl did: if you can't see the black slope, you can't be scared by the fact you're skiing down a 75- or 80-odd degree angle, and the alcohol got rid of any residual nerves anyone had! Everyone made it down with no injuries at all, even the beginner skiiers. So, for future reference, the best way to tackle a black slope is half cut :-)

Nocturnal events: apres-ski in Zell.

Well, no-one goes on a ski holiday to ski, that'd just be silly. The nightlife is as much of an attraction as the slopes, and I've known ppl who've spent more time on the piss than on the piste!

We started off quite well, with the Ireland V Scotland and England V France matches in the Irish pub pretty much as soon as we arrived. The forst match went well, but then we hit an uncomfortable situation for the second match: for Ireland to have a chance at the Grand Slam, France had to lose, so we had to shout for England. Alcohol helped numb that particular pain, and the night ended well apart from the very end: the trek up to the guesthouse. We were staying about 300m up the mountain from the village and the slope up to it was nearly steeper than anything we had to ski! Walking back up there was often more knackering at the end of the day than anything else we'd done earlier.

As the week went on, we took the measure of all of the alcohol serving establishments in the village. The irish bar we tried to avoid, as, well, it was an irish bar and there's too many of them at home. A few of the guys had been in Zell a few years before and had fond half-memories of a bar called "Deiler", but this year that seemed to always be full of 17- and 18-year-old dutch kids and you nearly felt like a paedophile just looking at the dancefloor. The music was brutal as well, so we abandoned that place for a bar called "Crazy Daisys", which didn't always hit the spot music-wise (this is a ski resort in austria I guess, their taste in music died with Mozart) but had a better atmosphere. And once that place shut at 4am, there was always Viva, which was a shite club that only played techno music but stayed open serving alcohol til the last person left or 8am, whichever happened first.

So, there were quite a few mornings where we weren't quite able to catch the first chairlift of the morning at 8:30 :-)

Skiing without snow (nearly)

I remember on my first year skiing I had a bit of trouble adjusting to having to walk around in the village on that cold white "snow" stuff; on our way to the pub the first night and for the few days afterwards I was slipping and sliding all over the shop until I got my "snow legs". I needn't have worried about it this year. Once again, we arrived into a snowless ski resort. It was a little bit better than Kitzbuhel last year in that you could ski all the way down to the village, but only just about better. The day we arrived there wasn't even any attempt to get on the white stuff though, as it was just about getting dark when we arived and there was an ireland match to be watched anyway (strangley enough, same as last year!).

We had just about enough time before the match to get sorted out with gear, and I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a pair of ski boots. Last year, I'd been looking at the sales in the Great Outdoors in Dublin and at the end-of-season clearance sale the boots were down to about €300. Here, the boots started at about €250 and even then I got them reduced to €150 because there were a few of us getting them together and because the shop owner had a deal with the guy we were staying with. So, €150 for a pair of boots I'll wear maybe one week a year, am I mad? No, paying €400 for a pair you'll wear one week a year, that's mad! ;-p

So, sunday morning we headed up the ski slopes. Straight away, we noticed something. It was warm. very warm. Too bloody warm in fact! Normally when you go skiing, you get the expensive ski jacket and pants for a reason: the temp is normally in the minus figures. Minus 5 degrees is nice weather for skiing, anything lower is maybe a bit chilly. Here tho, it was plus 5 degrees - at 9am! By early afternoon, I'd seen a thermometer on one of the ski lifts reading an air temp of 15 degrees! This was nice in one way as you could ski in just your base layer or a fleece instead of being wrapped up like an arctic explorer (altho you couldn't lose the ski pants which got a bit toasty), but bad in that the snow conditions got messy real fast in the afternoon. High temps and lots of ppl sking combined to make the slopes pretty slushy and bumpy by about 2pm, and there were no piste bashers in evidence around to smooth things out again. By later afternoon, some of the slopes were less ski runs and more obstacle courses as you had to navigate around bumps and moguls that had been carved out gradually during the day.

This unfortunately was somehting that didn't change as the week went on: it got a bit cooler but never went below zero during the day, which meant that they couldn't use the snow cannons to make more snow (it needs to be below zero for that to work). Add to that the fact that we pretty much didn't see any snow falling on Zell til the last run of the last day (and even then only on the top of the mountain, any lower than 2000m and it was rain) meant that the snow we had at the start of the week was the snow we were stuck with til the end of the week. The mornings were ok, as the snow had a chance to refreeze overnight and hte piste bashers went in after it got dark, but by the afternoons it was a slushfest again. The worst run was on the last day, a 1km(ish) red run down to the village which by the time we went on it was just pure muck to ski on. Was as much ice and slush as actual snow, you couldn't turn worth shit, was bumpy as feck and even the experienced skiiers with us were wiping out. Everyone was knackered and soaked by the time we got the whole way down.



Then again, it could have been worse. I feel sorry for anyone who was arriving on the day we left - it was pissing rain all morning and as we were dropping our gear off in the shop the assistant told us they were after closing all the lifts as the ski conditions were just so bad - and this was just before lunch! So, if you arrived in Zell on the 1st March, I hope you were into hill-walking 'cos you sure as shit weren't going to be doing any skiing!

Getting there is NOT half the fun!

Well, I'm just back from my ski trip in Austria. Next time we go on a ski trip, I think I'm definitely going to try to convince the lads to fly into the same country as we're actually skiing in! To get to Zell Am See in Austria, we flew into Munich in Germany. I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning to catch an 8:30am flight. Normally I don't mind doing that if I'm going somewhere on the far side of the globe, but Germany? You're barely out of your own timezone there, is way to early in the morning to be doing that! The majority rules tho, and in our group, the majority said we fly early :-

The plan was to get to Munich at around 11:30, hop on the bus we'd hired for a "quick" 2 1/2 hour trip to Zell, settle in and have a couple of hours to spare before we headed down to the irish bar to watch the Ireland Scotland rugby match at 7 to grab our gear, get some food and generally settle in. What we didn't realise before we set out tho was that the week we were going coincided with mid-term break in Holland, and it seems if you're Dutch, the thing to do on mid-term is to head to Austria skiing. So, the whole of Holland seemed to be heading in the same direction as us, the autobahns were choc-a-block with NL-plated cars, and at one stage on the radio we heard there was a 16km long tailback outside Munich! Luckily our bus driver knew the score,and we spent the whole trip on back-roads and side-roads, seeing a lot more of rural Germany than normal tourists do (and I can see why they don't bother with it). The only time we got on the autobahn we took 20mins to get 1km between intersections! So, what on a normal day would have been a nice easy 2, maybe 2 1/2hr trip turned into a 3 1/2hr odyssey.

On our way back, we discovered that Newton's 1st law also applies to traffic: just as for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so for every mass Dutch migration to the ski slopes there is an equal and opposite mass migration home at the end of the week. And once again we got caught in the middle of it. At least on the way out we didn't really have a deadline to keep, but on the way back we had a flight to catch! So, we arranged for the bus to pick us up way way in advance of what we thought we'd need - 1:45pm for a 7:40pm flight. This time though, some of our tulip-growing pot-smoking cousins seem to have gotten wise to the fact that the autobahn was a recipe for creeping disaster, and so transferred some of the traffic jams and tailbacks onto some of our back roads. It also didn't help that there'd been a big-ass storm the night before so a lot of the roads the driver was planning on taking were blocked by fallen trees, forcing us to take detours. As a result, we arrived at Munchen airport just in time to catch the tail end of the check-in queue! At least we made it I guess.

Having said that, we could have easily taken our time a bit more. I read a statistic somewhere the other week saying that on average about 30% of flights take off late from the major european airports, and this was one of our chances to add to those statistics. We started boarding at about the time we should have been taking off, which is generally par for the course on any flight, but then when we were all nice and comfy and had buckled up and noted the location of our nearest emergency exits (bearing in mind that the nearest exit may be behind us) and ready to go..... nothing. We get an announcement from the cockpit that we'd lost our take-off slot and had to wait for the tower to give us another one - which would be at least a half-hour delay. Half an hour later(ish), we started moving, and eventually got into the air, where we immediately seemed to hit a headwind which stayed with us most of the way over. As a result, what should have been a 9:30pm landing into Dublin turned into an 11:15pm one, and I crawled into my flat just after midnight.

Next year, if we're going to Italy, we fly into Italy and not Switzerland 'cos the flight happens to be €40 cheaper!

The Lisbon Treaty

I was flicking around today on a few of the irish groups on facebook, and came across this article posted about the Lisbon treaty.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2773

Is about the only thing I’ve read so far on the treaty. This is obviously not an unbiased opinion methinks, but is more detail than I’ve seen on it so far.

The govt here is doing the same thing they did last time around, not bothering to tell us anything about it. I think that they’re not allowed to do the whole “trust us, it’s good for you, now be a good sheep and vote for it” that they did last time we had an EU treaty to ratify, thanks to some supreme court case which said they weren’t allowed come down on one side or other of an argument like this. This time tho, we haven’t even gotten any factual information about what’s in it, devoid of spin or no.

To my mind tho, one of the best reasons to vote for it is that the shinners are dead set against it........

....and off again.

Looks like Cairo is off. Project management problems mean that I'm not flying on Monday like I thought I was. The whole trip is apparently off but I'll have my gear ready to pack anyway, these things have a habit of changing at the last minute, I'm not safe til I leave here fri evening.

Well, if they want to delay things by a week and then get me over there, they get me for 2 weeks not 3 - I don't care, I'm going skiing the end of next month regardless!

Off again......

Well, never mind what I said the other day about Ecuador, it looks like my next destination is Cairo. At least I got about 2 weeks warning on this one - plenty of time to put the light clothes in the wash & get them ready! Looks like it's going to be about 20-25 degrees over there. Nice. Thing is, I'll be back on a sunday and the sat after I'm flying out to Austria to go skiing. More temperature shock!

No dogs, no irish......

You know, every time you go though Heathrow airport, it's very easy to get the feeling that as an Irish person, you're still treated as a second-class citizen. After you check in and go though security, you look up at the board and see:
* Edinburgh: Gate 62
* Newcastle: Gate 79
* Dublin: Gates 80-90
* Shannon: Gates 80-90

In other words, "No! You irish scum don't need to know where you're going. We'll tell you when we bloody well feel like it!".

Then, when you finally get to the gate, it looks awful. You have to go out a long passageway to get to it, and then when you get there it looks like a prefab, a big long tube made from what looks like corrugated iron, tacked onto the side of the main terminal building. Apparently it was put up back during the Troubles to sort of quarantine would-be terrorists coming over from Ireland - so if they blew up the gate it wouldn't cause much damage to the main building. And we're still coming in though there. Yup, thanks guys.

Then, when you are flying into Heathrow from Ireland, or taking a connecting flight through Heathrow going back to Ireland, you have to go though another set of metal detectors, just like the ones you went through getting on the plane in the first place. So, after going through the previous set of security, we're somehow after picking up guns or bombs in the departure area. Very trustful of the UK authorities eh?

Lads, the IRA declared a ceasefire over 10 years ago. We're not the ones trying to blow you up any more. If you're worried about terrorism then maybe put the flights to/from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan through Terminal 1.

Oops, I can't say that, can I? That would be racial profiling based on the country you're coming from.....

Says it all really......

Saw this on my way back though Heathrow Airport last night, on an ad for Aer Lingus. At least they're admitting it now!



I suppose the main diff these days between taking an Aer Lingus flight (or any "low-cost" short-haul airline) and getting a taxi or a bus is you don't have to get to the taxi rank 2hrs in advance and take your shoes off going though a metal detector before you get in your taxi/bus. You get the same quality of service, and just like a taxi, these days if you have any more than one bag with you on the plane, you get charged for it.

Heathrow airport is great though, it really is. I love the way security at airports is so consistent these days - going out through Dublin, you have to take your laptop out of its case and put it though separately, but you can keep your shoes on. Now in Heathrow, you have to keep your laptop in its case but you have to take your shoes off. Also, now in some airports in the UK you're allowed take on 2 pieces of hand luggage but in others you're not. Keeps the terrorists on their toes I guess......

Be careful what you wish for.....

Remember how a few months ago here on this blog I was complaining that the company weren't sending me anywhere? Well, you know the old saying, "Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it!". I'm currently typing this sitting in a hotel room in a place called Newbury, about 10 miles from Reading in the UK.

Like the last trip I was on, I got about 3 days notice on this one. I was sitting at my desk on thurs evening, minding my own business when the boss comes over and says "Can I have a word with you out in the hall for a sec?". Now when this happens it normally only means one thing, and sure enough, someone has to go and firefight somewhere. So, fri morning I got my flights and accommodation booked and here I am!

I got in about an hour ago here, and about the only thing I can say about Newbury is "quiet". I took a bit of a wander around the town after I got checked in and there's nothing open but a Dominos pizza and 2 pubs - and the pubs look like they're shutting up for the night. It sort of reminded me of the night I flew into Shanghai, where I was wandering around with the streets pretty much all to myself (and I'm sure that this is the first and last time in its history that Newbury will be compared to Shanghai)!

So, at this stage there's pretty much nothing to do here bar head to bed! Maybe tomorrow the place will be a bustling hive of activity!

Oh, and while on the subject of "be careful what you wish for", I was talking to one of the project leads before I left, and apparently there will be someone needed on-site in Ecuador for a week some time near the end of January, with a choice of 3 ppl to go. So, my ideas of hitting all 6 continents before my 30th birthday may be one step closer! :-)

New Years

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

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


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


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


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

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

dial-up

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