Photos from Zermatt

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

Zermatt 2009

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

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


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



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

The Spanish Invasion

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

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

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

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

Wii Fit

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

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

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

Congratulations America!

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

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

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

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

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



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

Prague

Well, we finally made it. About 6 months after we booked it, and after a few weeks where we didn't know whether Aer Lingus were going to go on strike and either strand us there or stop us going at all, we're just back from our few days in Prague. So, the xmas shopping is pretty much all done and dusted now!

For once, there wasn't a delay in Dublin, even tho we were flying out of the Ryanair prefab, and we got to Prague about the time we expected to. Was a bit of a shock when we got there - it was warm! Well, not exactly t-shirt weather, but 1-2 degrees, just like back home. After weeks of taking the piss out of Michelle, saying she was going to freeze to death there, it was almost disappointing not to be in -10 degrees! The hotel was pretty damn good, it was in a quiet back street in Male Strana, and the room we got was huge! Was nearly the size of our apartment, with gilt everywhere and a four-poster bed! Hell, even the bathroom had a chandelier! there was only one problem tho: their computer system was on the fritz when we arrived so they couldn't code a keycard for our door. Meant any time we left and wanted to go back into the room, we had to get the receptionist to come up with us and leave us in with the master key :-)

So, after settling in it was still early, about 4pmish, so we headed out to wander around town. I still pretty much remembered the way to go, so we headed for the main market in Old Town Square. Once we got there, it definitely looked the part anyway, very picturesque. First order of business tho, food! So we wandered around the stalls seeing what sort of edibles there was. Pretty soon we found something that was very much to Michelle's taste: a pastry thing called trdelnik, which is wound around a wooden roller, cooked on the spot and eaten still warm and rolled in sugar. After that, it was time to take a look at the market itself.



To be honest, I was a little disappointed in the marketplace. It was very nice, and looked very nice, but there wasn't a huge amount of stuff to get there. There was kitchy handmade xmas decorations, and various types of food and drink, and loads of stalls selling prague souvenirs, but not a huge load else - and stuff was repeating itself about every 4th or 5th stall! The markets that I was in in Brussels and Leuven 2 years ago when I was over visiting Sara actually had a lot more to offer goods-wise. But hey, at least we were there and not at home!

Next thing, as we were heading down towards Wenceslaus square to see the other market, it started raining. That wasn't what we came over for, we can get that at home! The rain pretty much settled in for the night, so after the markets were winding up and we were fed and stuff, there wasn't much motivation to go off exploring for a nice night-spot in the rain, so was back to the hotel. Turns out the hotel bar had something in common with our room - we couldn't get into either on our own! So, was an early night.

The next morning, we decided to do a bit of touristy stuff before we started the real business of the trip, so we went up to the castle. the rain had turned to snow overnight, but the ground was wet so it wasn't sticking, it just made things a bit more slippery. In the castle I found myself pretty much retracing the same paths I'd gone the last time I was there - is funny how things come back to you. We could have taken a funicular to the top of the nearby hill to a sort of mini-eiffel tower called Petrin, but as it was still a bit snowy and overcast the poor visibility wouldn't have made the trip worthwhile, so we set about the main reason of the trip - shopping for xmas pressies! :-)

Contrary to our expectations before we went over, the shopping wasn't done a little bit here and a little bit there - because there was a lot less on the market than we'd thought, I think we got pretty much everything in one of the stalls and one of the shops off the main square! It was also somewhat curtailed by the fact that the bedroom safe had locked shut on us that morning and the hotel staff had had to call in whoever made the safe to open it for us while we were out, so the only money we had was the walking-around money I'd put in my wallet the night before - or about 1/3 of what we'd brought over with us! By the time we got back to the hotel to find the open safe, we'd pretty much bought all that we reckoned we were going to buy, so the rest of the day was just spent wandering around at random with no particular objective or destination in mind - I think we ended up sitting in some cafe with a baileys coffee (for Michelle) and a beer (for me), watching the world go by.

The next day we had an afternoon flight, so there wasn't really any time to do anything before we had to pack up and go home. Turns out that we got to teh airport stupidly early - I'd estimated it'd take about 35-40mns to get to the airport by taxi, and it only took 20 in the midday traffic, and then the flight was at 3:15 when I'd thought it was at 3. So, we were there close on 3hrs before the flight! And then, naturally, just as we were wandering towards the gate after killing as much time in the duty free as we could, the flight was almost inevitably delayed! The flight coming in was late, we were boarding when we should have been taking off, we lost more time de-icing the wings and eventually took off about an hour late! Ah well, it wouldn't be a trip abroad without a delay somewhere would it?

So, that was the lats of our big pre-planned trips out of the way, have to start thinking about the next one. So, would I go back to Prague? Probably, during the summer. Would I go back to the xmas market there? Probably not.

Iarnrod Eireann: Punctuality and the small print

I was standing around the train station in Athenry this afternoon, with a few minutes to kill while I was waiting for the 13:30 from Galway, and as you do, I got bored and started reading the advertisements. One of them is that "Timing is Everything" ad where they tell you how close the service is to being on time, every time. For the Dublin-Galway line, this is apparently "100% Reliability", 91% Punctuality". Then tho, having the time to do it, I did something that not many people probably do: I noticed the asterisk on the word "punctuality" and then read the small print at the bottom which tells you what that means. Apparently, for Irish rail, punctuality means "arriving at the destination no more than 10 minutes late". TEN minutes? On the continent if a train is more than 2-3 minutes late you get all sorts of apologies! Irish Rail aren't exactly setting themselves a stretch goal here are they? And what's worse is that on the galway line, they don't even meet this rather generous timeline, of being in less than 10mins late on a 3hr journey. So 1 time in 10, they overshoot by 3% of the journey time and it's OK. I wish my boss was this lenient on my deadlines!

And what exactly does "100% Reliable" mean as well? They always get to the right place? So what they're saying there is that "The train that is supposed to go to Galway actually gets to Galway, as opposed to say accidentally ending up in Cork or Limerick, every time!". You'd be sort of fucking worried if it didn't wouldn't you? Or is it that "the train that is supposed to leave platform 2 in Galway station at 5pm that has a sign up saying it's going to Dublin can be 100% relied on to go to Dublin at some stage"? Again, we're not talking about heart surgery or a mission to Mars here, this sort of reliability should be a given as opposed to them boasting about it! Is sort of like boasting "our staff manage to get their shoes on the right feet first time every morning, aren't they great?"

And what's worse is that I've seen this "X% Reliability, X% Punctuality" signs on DART stations before, and they don't manage the 100% punctuality every time. I didn't pay this much attention before, but now I know what it is, bloody hell! So say the trains to Tara St are 98% punctual. That means that a service that's supposed to run every 5-10 minutes is late by more than 10mins 2% of the time. So basically, 2% of they time they're effectively skipping 1 or 2 whole trains! Where are these missing trains going? And what about their passengers? So as well as the Dublin DART Doppler Effect (where the pronunciation of a train heading south goes "deert, deert, daart, daart, dart, dart, dahrt, dahrt, dort"), we have a "DART Triangle", where trains just go missing? Where are Mulder and Scully when you need them?

Slough

Well, I've finally made it to Slough anyway. Since I joined the project, the mention of Slough has been sort of like the boogey-man: "if you screw up on somethign we'll send you over to Slough for a few weeks". Now that I've been there, it isn't apparenly all that bad. From what the lads had been saying, I was expecting the O2 office to be stuck out in the middle of an industrial estate outside of town, but it was actually pretty close in, directly opposite the main train station in fact. That puts it one up on Vodafone UK, where the office was a good mile or so outside Newbury! I didn't see all that much of the town itself, only what I saw out the taxi window, but it was at least on a par with the last place I got stuck - there was one shopping center there that the lads were complaining about, saying it shut too early in the evening - but at least it's there in the first place! Is one up on Newbury right there. And I don't know what the Travelodge that they stay in is like, but it can't really be any worse than that Fawlty Towers-type place I was stuck in when I was working in Vodafone!

To be honest, I don't really see the point of the trip over. Was up at 7am, in the airport at 9am for a 10am flight (which actually took off at 10:30, that's dublin airport for you), got to Heathrow around 11:45ish, made it to the O2 office around 12:30, had a sandwich in the canteen for lunch, had a meeting from 1pm to about 3:30pm, got the taxi to Heathrow about 4:15 and were stuck there til our 7:45 flight took off (on time!). We spent more time in Heathrow than we did in the meeting! I suppose the customer was just looking for that nice warm fuzzy feeling of being looked after, that we care enough about them to send 3 ppl over for a day to listen to their problems. Hey if they're paying for the flights, we'll go! And at least it got me out of the day as well, that's always good.

And now I can also scratch "Seeing Slough" off that list I have of things I have to do before I die :-P

Google has you!

This is somewhat funny, somewhat unnerving. I was showing someone in work today where I was doing my xmas day swim by opening up the location in google earth, and there was a picture of the beach tagged to it that someone had uploaded. So, on a whim I decide to see what Bonmahon looked like. Imagine my surprise when I see the following pic!



That house just to the right of the middle is my house! My house is up on google earth! Is there anything that google doesn't know? :-)

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

This day has been coming for a while now, but I guess I can't put it off any longer. The customer I'm working for wants some face-to-face meetings (capacity planning for christmas), so I'm off over to Slough on weds, over in the morning and back in the evening. At least it isn't overnight job I suppose!

What will make this trip even more fun is the fact that apparently some chemical plant is after exploding over there today. Great, chemical fires, will have to have meetings in hazmat suits! I love the comment on the sky news website's page tho: "From what I have heard about Slough this explosion could cause millions of pounds worth of improvements!" :-)

On probation

A few days ago, I was thinking "you know, my 6-month probation in work has to be up around now, right?". I took a look to find my contract and to my surprise, I'm here 7 months today! I thought the end of probation thing was supposed to be a bit of a big deal! I remember in CAPE my end of probation meeting was just Marco coming up to me with a signed letter from Phil Sharpe and saying "Well, looks like we can't get rid of you now", but at least it was something.

So, I contacted HR to see what the story was, and found out that they told my boss that I was finished probation and she was supposed to verbally notify me, but didn't. Also, the CEO hasn't signed off on the formal end of probation letter yet as he's been too busy! Well, is nice to feel appreciated isn't it?

Am eligible now anyway for the benefits, they pay into my PRSA and I get a discount on a VHI subscription. What I want to know is will they pay the month's arrears on the pension, seeing as I should have gotten this last month. Have to find out as well the price diff between VHI and the BUPA package I'm paying for now will make it worth my while to switch. Also, apparently "You might be entitled to share options too but I don't know if you will get them in this round" - shares, yeah, no thanks, last time I looked my $120 SUNW shares were worth about $3...... How's about giving me the money instead?

Broadband! :-)

Well, my parents finally have broadband in at home :-) No more coming home for the weekend and feeling like I've lost a limb, struggling for 5mins to download 50 emails (49 of which will turn out to be spam anyway) and only being able to look at one web-page at a time 'cos loading more than one is just too slow! Also means I can actually work from home after xmas - before I was looking at getting up at stupid o'clock on Stephen's morning and taking the train up to Dublin 'cos I'm on call the 26th-28th December and I couldn't do it over dial-up, but now I can stay at home and wait for o2's network to go tits-up from here! :-)

Bloody Aer Lingus!

Saw this in today's paper:

"TRAVEL agents are advising customers against flying with Aer Lingus this Christmas amid threats of a "devastating" all-out strike in a fortnight.

With bookings poised to plummet and the airline expected to announce €20m losses today, Transport Minister Noel Dempsey called on both sides in the dispute to restart talks on plans to outsource almost 1,300 jobs.
..........
The chief executive of the Irish Travel Agents Association said customers were in confusion even though disputes between Aer Lingus and SIPTU, in particular, had a "track record of heavy posturing and empty commitments".

"My members are trying to find solutions for their customers and are giving priority to alternatives to Aer Lingus," said Simon Nugent. "They are backing away from Aer Lingus flights because there is a higher risk of disruption to them."

Well fuck them anyway. I booked my flights to Prague months ago for the 11th december, and now I'm potentially either not going to get there or will get stuck there because the usual fecking suspects in the management and the unions can't get their shit together and are rehashing the same old fucking fights as ever? Seems to be in their contracts that they have to threaten to go out on strike at least once a year, just to remind people that they're there, like. Have been caught out on flights at least twice before with these feckers walking off the job. What are they, French or something?

Screw them, time to see what other flights I can get. Think Ruinair have a sale on.....


(Later..)

Just after checking the Aer Lingus site re: their policies on refunds. Well, is pretty simple:

  Fare Rules
Cancellations

    * NO REFUND AT ANY TIME EXCEPT FOR BUSINESS CLASS

Fuckers. So looks like unless I want to take a €220 hit, we're stuck with Aer Fungus.

Skiing is booked - finally!

Well, I've finally booked my ski trip for Feb now anyway. I say "finally" because 2 weeks ago I mailed one of the lads to see what the story was with the ski trip, only to get a reply that said "Dude! Were you not cc'd on that?". Seems everyone else organized and booked everything at the beginning of September, but someone forgot to include me on the mailing list! So, I've spent the last 2 weeks teasing out the flight/accommodation details that have already been booked and trying to find myself something similar. At least this year's trip is earlier than last year, the beginning rather than the end of Feb (31st Jan -> 7th Feb), but seems to be a bit more scattered in terms of planning: the destination is the same for everyone (Zermatt in Switzerland) but there seems to be 3 separate airports in 2 countries that ppl are flying into. I managed to get the same flights as some of the lads but after that we have a 3hr train journey to Zermatt, and I didn't manage to get the same accommodation.

What makes the return trip awkward is that the flight back is at 9am on the sat from Zurich, which means either getting up at stupid AM from Zermatt (like the first 2 trips) or leaving Zermatt on the fri evening and staying overnight in Zurich. Problem I found was that I could book a 7-day stay (sat-sat) with almost no problems but a 6-day (sat-fri) was over €200 dearer! So I went for the 7-day option and will figure out closer to the time what I'll do about getting to the airport.

Now all I need to do is book my gear.....

Well fuck this!

Just got an email from my boss, after asking her about how much time I was due off for doing all that work over the weekend. Here was the reply: "In relation to the time in lieu there isn't any for on-call unfortunately.". So, in other words, I worked about 13hrs on the on-call problems on Sunday, about 9hrs on the bank holiday Monday, another 2.5hrs Mon night/Tues morning (midnight to about 2:30am), and I'm getting fuck-all for it. The on-call rate is €50 a day for the week/weekend and €75 a day for the bank holiday - and that's before tax. So, €50 for 13hrs work and €75 for 11hrs work on a bank holiday.

Well screw that. Given my current salary after tax, €50 on-call money gets you about 3hrs of my working time (less if you take the tax off the €50). So, I'll do that much work, and anything after that, if the on-call phone starts ringing, it can just keep on fucking ringing!

leaving work in the dark

I hate this time of year. I didn't get to see daylight at all yesterday so I didn't notice when it was gone, but today was the first day I've left work at 5:45ish and it was completely dark. Am not sure why we bother with Daylight Savings time, you're just prolonging the inevitable anyway. Give it a few more weeks and we'll be both going to work in the morning and coming home in the evening in the pitch black! :-(

On Call

Wow, what a shitty weekend.

I'm finally on the on-call roster with work, and unlike in my previous job, the phone goes off a lot. Quite a lot! When I was on call in CAPE, I only ever got 2 calls - and one of them was a wrong number. Not here!

Was quiet enough during the week, only got 3 calls (which is still one call more than I got in CAPE tho!). Then however, everything really kicked off at the weekend. The phone started going off around 2pm sunday and just didn't stop. Every time there's a problem on the network, I get a text message on the on-call phone, and I had to empty the message memory twice 'cos it was too full to get any more alerts! I was working 2pm to 3am sunday pretty much non-stop, trying to keep things up and running. Then I got 3 more calls during the night, one at 5am, one at 6:30am and one at 7:30am. Got up then about 10:30am and was working solid from 11am to 8pm last night - I didn't even see the outside world yesterday. Then, just to top it off, the phone started going off again about midnight and I was working on stuff til 2:30am! Thank god I was able to hand the phone off to someone else today!

Am quizzing the boss now to see how much time off in lieu I can get for all this..... :

malta: impressions.

Here's just some general impressions of Malta, for ppl who might be thinking of going there.

Malta is lovely - was a lot warmer than here. Was about 27-28 degrees every day, altho we had spits of rain occasionally. Managed to get pretty badly sunburned, but then again that's par for the course on hols when you're Irish. Are a few beaches that you can go to lie out on if you want, but there's a good bit of other stuff to go see as well - can do a boat trip all around the island, and there's loads of historical stuff to go see as well. Is easy to get around too, there's rickety old buses that go all around the island, altho you have to really not be in a hurry to rely on them, as some of them only go once an hour (which sucks a bit when you're stuck on the south side of the island like we were at one stage), and the service gets a bit more spotty after about 4pm!

Another good thing about Malta is that it's so cheap! I went over with about €500 spending money for the week, expecting to have to go to the bank machine at some stage (as you normally do on hols), but the only reason I didn't come back with €150 of that still in my pocket was that I went a bit mad in the duty free in the airport on the way back! ;-) Costs €1.16 to get a bus from one end of the island to the other, and most trips are only 47c. A meal for two, including starters, mains, dessert and a bottle of wine, was about €33 - the most I paid out for a full 3-course meal for two was €65 (incl tip), and that was a place where the likes of Madonna & Guy Ritchie and Daniel Craig go when they're there.

Pictures from Malta

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