We’re back, and I should have updated here earlier, but everything has been a little chaotic over the last week.  Ireland was brilliant, of course.  Although we spent most of the long weekend in Trim, we got out to Dublin on the second day.  There we had lunch with Trev in a nice organic restaurant, before heading south to Rathfarnham to meet up with Max and Kate.  We discussed the possibility of all of them coming to stay (separately), and once again discussed Trev getting a blog established.  Trev, if you’re reading this, set the damn thing up.  Once that is done I can start working on John (unless he has a blog I don’t know about?)  We had missed Max coming to Bochum earlier in the week, but in fairness it is a fairly long distance from here.

Anyway, there was a big party for my Dad’s birthday on Saturday night.  It was much better than I had expected.  All of my parent’s siblings were there for the first time in many years.  I have some photos of my Dad and all his brothers and sister together which is pretty wonderful as one of them lives in the UK and doesn’t get over to Ireland that much.  I don’t think they’ve all been in the same room in many years, possibly going back to when my grandmother died which would have been around 1995. So we had them all line up together and got some decent photographs, from a bunch of different cameras.  I’m going to sift through them (I took a lot!) and see if there’s one that needs to be printed and framed… they’re that kind of special. Most of my cousins weren’t there, so it was a bit quieter than the usual family parties we have in Trim.  However, one of them was, and all I can say is “holy shit!” – when did he go from being the small child I used to know to being a teenager who was still a bit hungover from the night before?!!!  Anyway, it was a great party, and a great weekend.  We were shagged after it – maybe even a little jet-lagged!  That’s what you get when you go to bed repeatedly at 4am.

While we were over, I tried Tayto crisps again.  I had gone off them over the duration of my time in London, and developed a taste for Walker’s Ready Salted.  However it all came back to me this weekend.  I think I munched a couple of packets of Tayto Cheese & Onion in a row, all wrapped in some Brennan’s Bread.  Fucking awesome!  Have to take a trip to the Irish shop here that supposedly sells them, and soon.

I had been looking for a nice pair of sun-glasses recently.  The lens needed to be decent enough to block the sun, but also not too dark that they hampered my vision as I would use them for driving.   That’s the easy part.  The frames were the difficult thing really.  The size of my head means I would need relatively small  frame, and they needed to be strong but light enough not to hurt my nose.  I had tried some Oakley Whiskers on in the airport on the way to Sweden and found them really comfortable as well as looking good on my face.  They were however about €250, which made them very expensive for a pair of sunglasses that Anna kept telling me I’d lose.  Imagine my surprise when I found them for less than half that price in Dublin airport of all places!  So I bought them on the spot.  Obligatory cool photo on the right…

This brings me nicely onto the new camera I picked up.  I had been thinking about getting a point & click digital for some time now, mainly because my SLR is just too bulky to carry around in my pocket all the time.  So we got a 7.1 megapixel Sony which is actually very convenient for us as we have Sony laptops.  The memory cards it uses are obviously Sony Memory Sticks, for which we have native support on our laptops.  That makes getting the images from the camera to the machine quick and easy for us.  For example, I took the photo of my in the new sunglasses about five minutes ago, which would have been possible but problematic with my Canon.  Oh and I can do things like this on the camera (which has a large touch screen on the back).

You might not be able to see it in these photos, but half my face is anaesthetised as I was at the dentist to have a filling in my rearmost right lower tooth.  I’m starting to get the feeling back now, but its a damn uncomfortable feeling, and I can’t eat or speak much because I don’t want to bite off a piece of my cheek.

So, what else?  Oh yes, we bought a bed settee for the office / spare room, so all are welcome to come and stay at any time (with forewarning of course).  Not that you weren’t welcome before, but as we only had an inflatable bed it might have been a little less comfortable than one might want.  Emma is coming to stay next month, and potentially the other Emma and Helgi later in the year.  The invitation is open to you too.

Oh, my laptop was overheating lately.  The USB port on the right also stopped working on me, so I opened a service ticket with Sony, figuring that I might have to send it back again.  The nice techs there recommended I blow it all out and check if the fan was running correctly which I did and I’m ashamed to say it worked.  If this were a desktop I wouldn’t have thought twice about taking it apart to look for overheating problems, but laptops are closed magic to me.  Typically they’re “warranty void if opened” closed magic too, so I don’t have too much experience working inside of them.  Overheating due to dust seems to be a perpetual problem for my equipment.  Though I have to say its a lot less dusty here than it was in Stockwell.  So, if that wasn’t bad enough, the main hard disk in my desktop died the day before yesterday too.  It is fully covered under warranty, and winging its merry way back to the factory as we speak, but a fucking annoying thing to happen with a very modern disk. This is the second “modern” Western Digital disk I have had die on my in recent years.  I have a 750GB Samsung unit that may work a little better so it has moved to being the primary drive in that machine.  If nothing else, I think its faster than the WD unit. 

We're back from Dublin, and the next few weeks are normal again. No trips, no more holidays (though that's definitely not a good thing), no more OOTO mails to write and not very many medical appointments to keep :-)  So, the Algarve was great, and I was seriously chilled out from it when we came back.  I really needed that break from everything.  The last five months have been very hard and stressful, and I needed the rest.  I needed the tan too - I don't think I've actually been this colour in about ten years!
So, there's an interesting decision coming up.  Microsoft are going to release version 3.0 of the .Net framework soon, and my web host will be using it.  There's a fairly significant amount of difference between the two, and I'm going to have to learn it anyway, so I was thinking of a COMPLETE re-write of this blog.  There are now several external tools I use to manage it (case in point; this post is being written in Windows Live Writer), and it is starting to look fairly bolted together now.  I was thinking of releasing the whole thing as an open source blogging package.  There aren't many of them out there, and I have only found two that are in any way decent.  There'd be a lot of work maintaining that though, and I would be limited to the 2.0 version of .Net.  So, I think I'll do that, but with the 3.0 version.  It'll give me a chance to learn it anyway.  I don't know what's new yet (apart from Silverlight), or what has changed, so a quick trip to MSDN is in order I think.  That can wait until tomorrow though.

You know what the worst thing is?  Not being able to sleep.  I hate that, I stay up all night and my sleep cycle gets fucked around.  So now its 01:35 and I really should be asleep, but I just don't want to.
Andrew & Anthea are getting married in June :-)  I'm not sure about scheduling yet, but it looks like I'll be over there for seven or eight days this year.  U2 are playing on the 24th, and the wedding is on the 19th, so I'll have to figure something out.  Its strange to think of Andrew married, but then I guess I haven't seen him that much in the last five years, and things have changed since he met Anthea.  Even more so since they had Cliona I guess.  Oh yeah, Anthea had a baby girl last week :-)  How strange is that... they're the first of my close friends to have a child.  Now, all we need is Max to... nyah, that'll never happen ;-)
I keep getting asked when we're going to have kids too, and I have to say that we just aren't ready for them yet.  Anna is still in university, and I don't want to have children in London anyway, so we'll wait for another four or five years yet.  Maybe.  Perhaps things will change tomorrow, and we'll decide to go for it.  Who knows what'll happen.  And that ethos is the core of it all for me - I don't have any fixed plans, no reason to "settle down and have kids", nor any serious desire for them either.  Its not that I don't want children, but just not yet.

Photos of Dublin are published.  Something strange is going on though, they're not appearing in order.  ::Sigh::  I'll deal with it later.

So, Anna's gone to California for six weeks.  She has been gone for three weeks today, and in two and a half weeks I'll be going over to see her :-) I have to do some business in Los Angeles, but then we're going to take two weeks and tour the state.  The plan so far is to go from Los Angeles slowly up the coast and finish in San Francisco.  We're also going to meet Danny in Reno, though at this point in time I don't know how we're getting there.  You see, I was supposed to get a driving licence so we could drive through CA, but the waiting list for that is going to take me to October, which messes things up a little.  Oh well, I'm sure there'll be a bus we can take, and I haven't finished hassling the DVLA yet, so there's still a hope that it will work out.
I was in Dublin last weekend, and it was all good.  I got to see my parents, and went to Andrew's birthday party. I'm going to post some photos on the site soon, but there are some technical problems with the photo system at the moment, so its going to have to wait for a few days while I sort those out.

Lots of stuff going on, but I haven't had time to post here for a while. We were in Ireland last week, which I couldn't mention before, because it was a surprise visit. Anna's parents were going over to see my parents, and then going on to tour the west coast for a while. It was supposed to be a big surprise for everybody, but I had told dad about it so he could pick us up at the airport if we were arriving at wildly different times. Unfortunately he told mum, so we didn't get to make the huge event out of it that we were looking for. Gaby and Andreas weren't expecting us however, and that worked out really well. They were queueing at the Avis desk to get their car in the airport and we simply walked up behind them without them seeing us :-) The other surprise is that we had started talking to Emma again. She sent me a birthday card this year, and I called her a few days afterwards and we talked for a bit. We kept that up for a while, and though I think we were all pretty nervous about it, everything went really well while we were over there.
Trim hasn't changed much, and I still pretty much hate the town. I can't figure out how I lived there for two years without going crazy, it must have been the ability to drive into Dublin whenever I wanted too that kept me sane. We took in some of the ruins this time, and they're actually pretty cool. There is also a botanical garden about five hundred meters from my parent's house, that I had never even heard about before, and it is actually really nice. The garden is split into about six sections, each with a different puropse and mood, and its well worth a visit. It had a web site, but I can't remember the address, and Google isn't finding it easily, so I'll post it some other time. Anyway, have to go do some work, more later...

This has to be one of the best things I've ever seen printed on a "respectable" news site : Five fire crews rushed to the scene of a fire at a scrapyard on the docks in Dublin city centre today.
A fire broke out the yard on Pigeon House Road in the city at lunchtime. The fire services have said the fire is not serious and no premises are in danger.
An ireland.com reporter, at the scene, said the smoke is billowing from the fire, and there are ambulances and a helicopter have arrived.
"The fire has caused a lot of smoke but no premises, industrial, commercial or private are at risk. Nobody has been injured," a spokesman for the fire services said.
- From Ireland.com

Everything is jinxed at the moment. Its raining and cold, there's a power outtage across the street so I can't get Latte, I overslept, and the hard disk in my laptop has crashed and had to be replaced. Now I'm stuck with installing Windows again and have lost a whole load of data. Not a happy Friday really... maybe the bad luck genie has gotten his dates wrong or something.
I forgot to mention, I was coming back from Dublin the other day and had the worst landing at Heathrow that I've ever experienced. It was very windy coming in, and we were bouncing from side to side. When we touched down, only the wheel on the left hit the ground - the other was up in the air and we were tilted over to the left by five or ten degrees. We hurtled along the runway on one wheel for a ferw seconds, and then both the right and front wheels slammed down hard and we started slowing down. For a few seconds I was thinking about the fun we could have had if the wing had clipped the ground - there'd be no more blog for a start.

Relief from the abscess came in the form of exquisite pain. Yesterday, at the dentist, she drained the abscess by squeezing it with her fingers. It come close to, or maybe even surpassed the worst pain I've ever experienced... and then it was over. I was left drained; mentally, physically, and abscessally. Unfortunately, she then went on to treat my root canal and broke one of her tools in my tooth, so I now have a small piece of metal stuck in there which I have to have removed by a specialist on Monday.
Today was strange. I was in Dublin, and it hit me late in the afternoon that there are people there that I may not see for a very long time. The chances are that I'm not going to be back over before Christmas, which is when the office closes. Trev is off travelling, and Aido is leaving, and this next two weeks are the last I'll have with my team in its current incarnation. John is coming over here in January, so I'll see him more. We celebrated the end of the year in typical AOL fashion - I have to get my expenses done for that meal before Christmas, or my Amex bill will be fucked.

A couple of cool things happened today. I was on the tube coming home from work, and there was a guy sitting beside me, reading a printout of the AOL 6.0 help file. I asked him what he though of it, and he said it wasn't brilliant, so I said "Thanks... thats MY helpfile you're talking about!" (Actually it was John, but what the hell). We got talking, and I told him he should upgrade to 7.0, so he went away happy. That was my good deed for the day. The other cool thing was that I was reading Wired on my PDA on the tube, and I came across an article about this new piece of art which has been built in Dublin. Its an interactive cloud which is projected in 3D above the new hopstore bar in Dublin. The piece was done by a local artist called Grace Weir, whom I've worked with on a previous piece she did... which is mentioned in the article :-))) If you read it, look for the bit about the piece cast in concrete on a wall in Dublin - there's a mention of using computer aided design to superimpose a relief of clouds over a star map over a viking ship. I was the lucky one who did the CAD work for that - layering three images on top of each other, rasterising them, and then blowing it up to print out on sheets of A1paper covering about 10x3 meters. Each sheet was used as a template to make concrete blocks with different shades of concrete showing the different elements. It looks pretty good, its wrapped around a corner of one of the buildings up at the top of Temple Bar where the old Viking wall is :-)