Continuing on from the last post, I was telling you about Christmas in Ireland.  After we came back from the North, we settled in for an icy and snow-packed holiday.  I’ve never seen Ireland quite so icy before; driving to Dublin for example typically took over an hour instead of the usual forty five minutes I would expect.  A couple of times on the Trim road we were limited to about 30mph simply because the traction was so bad.  It was really interesting seeing the difference between a country that is prepared for ice and snow, and one that isn’t.  I’m not being snobbish here; the ice and snow in Ireland was extreme, and we usually only get a few days of mild ice or frost there.  Of course they aren’t prepared for it.  In Munich they get far much more snow and ice, and they have a three week stockpile of salt for the roads, and two months of grit for the paths.  They grit the footpaths!  Anyway, it was damn cold.  Anna’s parents came over too, so we picked them up from the airport. Slowly.

Speaking of snow, we’re going to Bayerischzell tomorrow.  We are going to spend a week snowboarding and skiing.  I promised James I’d take some pictures this time, particularly of me getting serious air… which means I have to charge the battery in my camera. This post had started out with the title “on piste in twenty four and counting”. Now its more like twelve to be honest.  Anyway, I’m really looking forward to this next week.  Last year I ended up in hospital with a severed ligament that had to be operated on two days before our skiing holiday, and didn’t get any snowboarding at all. Tomorrow that’s going to change.  Provided I don’t crash the car on the way there ;-)

What else?  Oh yes, there’s a reunion of old AOL heads coming up.  Really old timers too, not just folks who were in Fulham Road, but further back.  This is for those who were in the Fulham Broadway office, which I got invited to on a technicality: Although I wasn’t in that office originally, I moved there early on from Fulham Road when we re-located the Marketing department there.  I don’t really think I can justify the cost though, and there aren’t many there that I would actually pay money to see again.  A couple for sure, but they’ll wait until another time.  We’re already going to London in July, so those that I really want to see will be covered.  Sorry Scally.

I started another German course on Monday last.  This time its with the Deutsch Akademie, and the teacher seems to have has a relatively illustrious career having worked in directorial capacities for both the Goethe Instutite and Berlitz previously.  The course is far more what I need, I’m finding the pace just about right, and unlike the last one it seems more at my level.  I may stick with this group for a bit for a couple of reasons.  Firstly they have a higher quantity of narrower scoped bands (twelve as opposed to Berlitz’s ten), and secondly the class sizes are really nice.  There are ten people in my class at the moment, which is so far working out really well.  I’ve had two in a class at Berlitz, and twenty eight at the Volkshochschule, and ten is nice and comfortable.

Right, gotta go get packed and wax my snowboard…

Right, so then… Happy New Year.  Glad we got that out of the way, no need to belabour the point.  I haven’t been blogging at all lately, though in fairness the last couple of months have actually been busy for me.  I have been working.  Sort of.

We have been just over two and a quarter years living in Germany and in all that time I haven’t earned much money, nor do I have a full time job.  I’ve done some freelancing stuff for a couple of companies back in London, but never enough to ensure our monthly expenditure was lower than our income (actually, there was one month, but its only one out of twenty seven or twenty eight).  Over the last couple of months I’ve picked up some more solid work from some online freelancing sites, and its possible that its all turning around a bit right now.  I have two things on the cooker, that might prove to be worth pursuing right now.  One of the two is potentially fun, and involves building portals (and plugins) for OastOne.  We have a nice test version up and running right, which I won’t link to because its ephemeral.  The second is setting up a company with some guys I know online (one of whom is a customer from one of those freelancing sites I mentioned earlier, but there’ll be more about this in a later post).  Actually, I have three things, but the third is just to continue trying to build up freelance customers and jobs as best I can.  I’ve also built out a small portfolio site with which I hope to establish a presence on teh interwebs.  So, with all of this you can see why I haven’t been blogging as much at all over the last couple of months.

We were in Ireland for Christmas, and took a three day trip to The North at the start of the trip.  I have to prefix this by saying that I had never before been further north than Newry (and that was with my dad¹ on a technical call at some point).  We drove to Belfast and stayed there in an incredible hotel that was cheapish, new and incredibly comfortable all at the same time.  (I can’t remember the name, but if anyone is looking for a place to stay in Belfast in the near future then let me know and I’ll dig it out.)  Belfast is a pretty cool city. I’m not sure what I was expecting really and I guess my perceptions were clouded by twenty years of looking at the Troubles on the news. I just had a really interesting segue through Wikipedia there.  Anyway, so my perception of Belfast was completely different from the reality.  It’s a lovely city, and one I would visit again should I have the chance.  One thing which we couldn’t do was see the Titanic museum in the Harland & Wolff shipyards, or the graving docks for her or her sister ship; the Olympic.  We did get to see the huge cranes (Sampson and Goliath) and the whole rebuilding of the docklands, which looked much the same as Canary Wharf does in London.  I also re-discovered Subway!  I had stopped eating in Subway about twenty years ago because I hated the bread they put on their rolls. Turns out that after twenty years you can be wrong about something – and I had a monster sub with just about everything on it :-) 

Anyway, the next day we headed north around the coast road for Antrim.  We stopped for lunch in a place which worried us (actually just me) when we discovered that we were two of the only four customers in the place.  Turns out the food was amazing.  Its a little off the beaten path (actually its about 5 miles off the coast road, at the end of a cul-de-sac) but totally worth visiting if you’re in the area.  Again, ping me for more details.  We eventually got to Portballintrae, after driving through the highest snow I’ve ever seen in Ireland.  There was a good metre of it up in the hills.   There we went to see Dunluce castle (awesome, and very very cold), and finally the Giant’s Causeway.  Twenty years of living less than two hundred miles from this amazing feat of nature tells me that I really am fucking stupid for dismissing such beauty without ever having actually seen it.  Its breathtaking.  The weather really helped too – it was fucking cold, and misty, and the sea was rough.  It wasn’t the kind of day that I’d suggest going to the beach on, but it was just spectacular. The picture really doesn’t do it justice (it was taking with my phone), though I think even with my SLR I couldn’t have captured the heart of that place at that time.  We walked the long way back to the car, heading further around the bay, up the cliffs and then back over the top to the car park.  The view from the cliff path was… white.  We could hear the sea breaking below, but couldn’t see it because it was all hidden by this carpet of low-lying fog. I loved it there, but you probably got that already.  Anyway, we headed back to Trim after that, stopping off in some huge (by Irish standards, tiny in comparison to Leesburg corner or Jersey Gardens for example) outlet mall for some retail therapy.

Okay, I’m going to post this now, because I have to get some homework done for tomorrow, and its getting late.  If I have time, I’ll start the rest of this post a little later.  If not, then it will be tomorrow.

¹ SceneMaker.eu is very much currently under construction. In February and March 2010 it'll be broken and down while we figure out exactly how it's going to work.

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 in Munich airport again, this time waiting for a flight to Dublin. We are in Terminal 1 this time, the older one, which is basically all non-Lufthansa flights. I personally find this terminal mostly easier and faster to get through, as some of the gates are no more than ten metres from the security checkpoints.  Those are pretty quick too, with at least four lines operating at a time and four or five entrances to the terminal.  Check-in and security took no more than 15 minutes and now we get to kick back for half an hour before boarding.

I checked out a pair of sunglasses earlier, and think I have finally come up with a decent pair that sits well on my face and looks good.  My nose is crooked, which means that sunglasses mostly look shit on me, but these ones may actually work.  Anna likes them too, which is kind of a pre-requisite.  They’re called “Whisker”, by Oakley, and come in brown with transitions lenses.  They are also bloody expensive, so I’m going to pick up a pair when we get back, possibly over ebay.

My Dad turns fifty on Monday, so we’re having a large party for him.  Last time I was talking to Mum about it, all of my parents siblings were coming (eleven of them including husbands & wives), and potentially some of my numerous cousins.  There are a few surprise visitors too, and some old friends of the family.  Later on Saturday, the rest of Trim have been invited to come and partake of a few bevvies and join in the celebration. All in all it promises to be a fun day, provided the weather holds out.

We’re probably up close to cruising altitude for this leg of the journey, and most of this part of central Germany is covered in cloud.  It was raining earlier in Munich, and well, miserable.  Up here its lovely and sunny though, with a snow-like carpet of cloud far below.  I have U2’s Vertigo Tour Live playing on my MP3 player, with my headphones completely killing the noise of the A320.  We’re bearing 310° and I think I’m gonna veg out with my book for a while.  We were delayed about an hour on the ground and I’m more tired than I expected.  Anna was saying earlier that we should travel only by train next year for holidays, and that sounds just fine right now. I’ll post this later when I get to my parents.

Yesterday we were looking to book some flights to Dublin for my Dad's birthday later in the year.  There are only two carriers flying direct between Munich and Dublin; Aer Lingus and Lufthansa. Unortunately Lufthansa seem to only fly on some days of the week, and we were looking for something more precise than their schedules.  Aer Lingus fly twice a day, and at first glance appear to be cheaper. 

I have to say I find the experience of booking with them to be very irritating. The first thing is that you appear only to be booking for one person, even if you have multiple passengers selected at the front page.  I went back a couple of times to check if that was an error on my part before proceeding, but it obviously was some quirk they thought would make the process more transparent. ie: price per customer rather than total price.  I can almost see how it would make sense, if they hadn't completely fucked it all up later in the process.

The next is that their session time isn't set to be too long, so one has to go fairly quickly through the pages in order to not have the transaction time-out and avoid restarting from scratch. I only had to do this once, but the simple fact that I actually had to go back and restart my transaction again from scratch irritated me no end. By the time I had figured out which dates we were going to fly, how long we were going to go for, and what times of the day we could fly, the process had to be restarted.  Now, I don't know about you, but I rarely know in advance that I want to fly at 19:00 on a Friday.  I typically know the days I want to fly, but there are so many variables when I book flights in advance that I can change my mind significantly.Aer Lingus's web site doesn't want that.  It wants you to know before you load it exactly when you're booking for, and you have no more than a few minutes per page to process those pages.  Also note that there is a LOT of small print to be read.

I have to pay (preferably in advance) for my luggage to go on the hold.  I discovered that only after I had gone sufficiently far into the process that it was just too much hassle to quit, and I had no backup plan anyway as they fly the most regularly on our route. It is a fairly large amount too - €18 per bag for a return flight.

After entering my credit card details and getting the transaction processed, I was presented with a further page telling me that I had to pay for seats. What.The.Fuck. Seriously... think about that for a minute.  Why would they go to the hassle (and expense for them) of running two transactions against my credit card for the same flight? Never mind the fact that I had just paid €400 for flights, now I have to pay for my seats too? What if I had said "no"?  Surely there's a cause for someone suing them for bait and switch sales practices?

So, my words of advice to you are these.  Aer Lingus has gone completely mad.  They used to be an airline I liked to fly with, and would chose over others if I had the chance, but no longer. Enough is enough.  Next time we get to say a warm and fuzzy "Fuck you, Aer Lingus". Next time we're flying Lufthansa (if it actually is Lufthansa and not an Aer Lingus codeshare).

Wow.  After eleven years as Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern is to resign next month. He said that it has nothing to do with the ongoing investigation of his finances to see if he took backhanders hen he was in office. "I know in my heart of hearts I have done no wrong and wronged no-one." said Ahern today.  All I know so far is from the BBC, but I wonder what the real reason is?

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.

So, we're off to Dublin in 40 minutes or so, which gives me a chance to update this a little.  The Algarve was incredible.  It was so much better than I expected that I was just blown away by the whole thing.  I thought it was going be full of Tourists and cheesy cafes selling fish and chips.  It was, but only at the coast, which meant inland was left relatively unspoiled.  Here's a preview of the villa where we were staying...

It was in its own little valley, with a farm house a couple of hundred meters to the left of where you're looking now.  The villa was bigger inside than it looks from this perspective.  To the right of the picture is a barbeque, and there's another one behind the house too.  We did a LOT of cooking in these areas I can tell you.  The food there is really nice; typically we ate fish and salad when at home which rocks.  Drank a lot of beer and port too ;-)
At the bottom of the wall above you can see little holes in the concrete at ground level.  They are drainage holes, but a couple of times we saw small gecko lizards going through them to the area behind.  They would come down the steps and take a look at the pool area.  Anna saw a bigger one inside the house too.  On the roof you can see a chimney structure at the back; it was there that the pizza oven was located and I think the gecko came in through that chimney.
So we did the usual tourist things too - went to all the places we had picked out of the guide books as places to see.  Possibly the most memorable was indeed the farthest westerly point of land in Europe.  OK, have to head to the airport now... more as soon as we get back...

So we had a fun Christmas.  We were home in Ireland with my parents, doing family stuff.  It was all fun, though I still maintain that Trim is too far out of the way for anything good to happen. Still, its nice to see that my parents have settled in so well there.  Life in Dublin was better, but that's just my perspective, considering that all of my social life was there, or at most just a bus journey away.  Of course, they've closed down the Rocky now, but the Classic still stands in the same spot.  I drove past there sometime during the holidays, up Terenure road and down past Rathfarnham.  Its all different now.
I haven't had a chance to play much Eve of late, though I've just gotten back into it now.  We've just built out very first space station, so I'm gonna head down there when I get a chance and take a look.  The screenshots look brilliant though.
I have a bunch of pictures that I want to post up here.  Christmas, Brighton, the last holidays in Germany... they're all sitting in my pictures folders waiting to be processed.  I'll get to them hopefully before the weekend is over.
Anna is going to graduate this year, so we're looking at moving somewhere else.  Just how far we go remains to be seen, but London doesn't click with me much anymore.  We don't know exectly where or when we're going, but it'll definitely be this year, probably sometime during the summer.  Have to go and do some work now, but I'll post more later on.

Ireland was fantastic as usual.  My dad was directing an amateur production of Jesus Christ Super Star that we went over to see, and it was better than I had expected.  The production was really together in a way that you don't typically see with amateur groups.  The rest of the weekend was just socialising.  We saw my aunt and uncle on Saturday, and in 4 years of marriage this was the first time Anna had met them.  We had fun though, hopefully they're going to keep in touch too... though I didn't get contact details for them.  We caught up with Max too, and Brian was over from Dulles also.  So it was a fairly packed weekend all in all.
My damn camera still hasn't arrived!  The tracking site says expected delivery today, which isn't much help I have to say.