U2 have been doing their thing all over the BBC for the last couple of days. Someone commented somewhere that the BBC was acting like their own personal publicity machine, which would be really cool if if only it were true. Anyway, they just signed a big contract with Live Nation to handle their concerts and merchandising for the next twelve years. This morning I went to take a look and see if there had been any more details about the tour released yet, but alas there was nothing. I did find some other groups of interest playing in Munich though, but fuck me were they expensive. Tickets for Madonna range from €70 up to €195! Eagles are coming in June, priced at €110.50 or €127.75.  Springsteen prices range from €79.40 to €96.65. Compare that to Bell X1, whose tickets are €15.16, or Simply Red for €48.05.  Its a fucking crime. If it were just me then I’d be hard pushed to justify spending €80 on a single event, but it isn’t just me.  There are two of us, which drives the prices sky high.  Oh this is interesting… I would never actually have complained about these sorts of prices when we were living in London.  That city was substantially more expensive, and I had a well paying job.  Here though my awareness of the price of expensive things is heightened probably because everything is cheaper and I don’t have a regular job.

Anyway, we went on a walking trip yesterday.  We started in Starnberg, walked through the Maisinger Gorge to Maising and the lake, then on to Aschering. We were supposed to walk through about 2km of forest west of Aschering and then turn north, but there was a navigational malfunction and we ended up heading south to Machtlfing and then on to Erling and up to Andechs.  All in all we covered about 20km. I have to say, walking through snow is incredibly difficult.  When it comes up to your knees you discover just how hard water is to walk through.  I haven’t had any exercise in the last three weeks, and am dreadfully out of shape (even more so than usual) so I found everything beyond Machtlfing fucking hard.  Every step to Erling was hell, and even the thought of getting some good food and a few beers at Andechs wasn’t much consolation.  Still, we made it, and there’ll be more too.  I badly need to get in shape, as does Anna, so this is a good start.  Click the picture to see the route we took, the red line is where we walked, the yellow where we should have gone.

If it seems like I haven’t posted anything here in a very long time, then that’d be a fair assessment.  There’s no real excuse, just a bunch of little things have gotten in the way.  So, instead of a single theme for this post, there’s going to be a bunch of them.  The biggest news at the moment, apart from the financial crisis in the US is of course the death of Rick Wright.  If you don’t know who that is, then shame on you.  Rick Wright was the keyboardist for Pink Floyd, and responsible in a very large part for their unique sound.  He died on Tuesday after a brief fight with cancer.  There have been many things said about his untimely death around the world and the web, and I don’t feel eloquent enough to add anything new.  Suffice to say that his musical brilliance will be missed dearly.

I had to re-install Windows on my laptop last week.  Vista was getting a little slow as a result of all the crap I had installed on it. So I backed up the last of the bits and formatted it a couple of days ago.  Everything is all back up now, though I still need to install some minor apps.  I posted a few weeks ago about my search for a new password(s) and I think I have a viable solution.  There’s an open source app called KeyPass Password Safe that manages passwords, and also has a fairly comprehensive password generator built into it.  It allows me to generate very random passwords with as many characters as I like, in addition to specifying the characters that can be used.  So, I could generate one with upper and lower case letters, and then another which is the same but with added symbols or extended ANSI characters. They’d look like dkBaQ3iDwAlAKnmqV5Df, or 0h-y_PiWVaeKn3H3LTkO or even 5^Zl-uexa*\]YaD:jKFJ)"U%F.Y(7+bE$nxs<zN".  This makes it very useful for web stuff, as there are so many different combinations of what can and can’t be used on different sites.  Portability is something I’m still working though.  For now, I have the app installed on two PCs and simply synchronise the databases if I make a change.  However, there’s an option to synchronise over the web which might be a good idea.  The program will also run from a USB key, so it is portable.  Nicely enough, there source is completely open, so the trust issues inherent to software like this don’t exist should you decide to crack open the code.   Although it is a Windows program, there’s a Mac port, and if you have Mono installed it seems to mostly work on Linux.

There are a bunch of new builds of the Windows Live apps were released today into open beta testing.  I haven’t done much with them so far, but it should be noted that the latest build of Windows Live Writer doesn’t work with BlogEngine.Net.  I’ve mailed someone about it and been told that there’s a hot fix in the pipeline for BL.E users.  Very unfortunately the crash occurs when trying to detect the style of the blog, so you never actually get a chance to get in and create a post with it.  I’ll update more when my contact in Microsoft gets back to me. I had some nice screenshots to go along with this post, but of course I can’t actually use Windows Live Writer to compose in so they had to be removed.  The alternative would be to hand-resize the images and then manually upload them.  Damn this program makes blogging too damn easy.

My sister arrives here in a couple of days.  We had a friend from London over to stay last weekend too, so everything is a little chaotic at the moment.   Emma is going to be here for the beginning of the Oktoberfest, though I'm still not sure if we can get in anywhere.  We may have to take her there during the day and sit outside the tents if things keep on going as they are right now.  It seems that you have to book tickets for Oktoberfest well over a year in advence. To add a whole bunch of interestingness to the mix I have an interview tomorrow (now today) for a job that appears to be perfect.  Its a combination of web development, product management and internal marketing all rolled into one package called “Senior Web Architect”, and the more I think about it, the more I want it.  It has all of the functions I’m looking for in an “ideal” job – though of course I have no idea how the paper description would actually relate to the real job.  I guess I’ll find out tomorrow eh?

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. 

I woke up this morning after having pretty much been asleep for the previous forty hours.  All of yesterday barring an hour or so in the morning and the evening, and most of the previous day.  Its all a result of having been vaccinated against a bunch of potential killer diseases.  So, with three injections, I was vaccinated against TB, Diphtheria, Polio, and two others I can't translate; one of which is part of the standard vaccination sets given to children here, and one to counter the disease carried by tics which you can encounter in the mountains here. 

I continue to be impressed by the quality of medical practice here, and the complete absence of payment except to out medical insurance group.  Don't get me wrong, we're paying about two hundred euros per month for that medical insurance, but it seems to be very comprehensive.  For example, most of our drugs are covered, all of our medical costs (so far) and access to specialists is particularly easy. I wanted to get a follow up test done for my cancer, and instead of needing to be referred by my GP, I can simply pick up the phone and call a specialist.

I have to admit to a certain amount of cynicism about medical things when we came over here first.  In London, we paid nothing for our medical costs either, but the conditions of the hospitals and GP practices were positively Victorian.  I have seen both sides of that system too, both the beautiful (private room in Westminster hospital overlooking the houses of parliament) and the ugly (public room in the same hospital where there were eight of us in a ward), and even the best of them left a lot to be desired.  Here in Germany you have to pay for medical insurance, and its typically pretty damn expensive, but you really get what you pay for.

Oh, that reminds me of something.  There is apparently no blood test for the type of cancer I had (seminoma), but they took blood from me every time I went back for a check up.  Have to go look at my medical records and see what they were looking for...

The process of going through this blog and re-tagging / categorising every post is a long and relatively boring one.  However, some interesting posts have come back to me.  One of them refers to a post I made on May 21st 2002 about blogging at work. Another is about being demoted the same week, and a bunch of others all grouped in the same month.  That period in my professional life was a time of great change and stress.

My entire team had been transitioned into another department and we were very fucking annoyed about it for many reasons.  We felt that we were coming from a different culture into something more stifling than we had previously experienced, and we didn't like it.  I was ostensibly the team manager, although I think there wasn't much management needed with the guys I had working with me.  We were a very hard-working bunch of guys, and all seriously good at what we did.  Consequently we liked to play hard as well as working hard.  It was our way of letting off steam.  Our work culture was very stressful, and conducive to burning people out, and we really needed an outlet valve.

The department we moved into wasn't like that.  They weren't typically under the kind of pressure we experienced in our team.  Part of the reason for this is that we were working to schedules made by our parent company in the US, and they had the luxury(?) of making their own.  So, while there was a general bad feeling on our new floor, we felt particularly abused because of the change in circumstances forced upon us.  I know I thought some pretty awful things about my manager at that point.  With hindsight, I regret those and am glad I never actually said anything to him.  It would have spoiled what eventually became a pleasant relationship with a very interesting guy.  Anyway, at the time I got seriously disillusioned about my job, and the company I was working for. I stage-managed the creation of a new position for myself in May 2003 and deserted my team.

I just wanted to say I'm sorry.  I suspect at the time you all thought I was maybe a bit fucking selfish to leave you all in the position you were, and I wholeheartedly apologise for that.  We have all moved on to better things (except you Sparky, get your arse in gear!) and have all kept in touch over the years, so I don't think any permanent damage was done. However I don't ever remember asking you all how my leaving affected you.  I hope that you don't think I wasn't thinking of you all, for it simply isn't true.  I hope you can understand why I had to leave.  I had to get out of Technology before I ended up coming in one day and going postal.  That wouldn't have done any of us any good.

One more thing... you absolutely should take the photos Dave.  The reason the Killing Fields are still around and have not been built on is that we need to remember just how fucked up mankind can get.  We need to remember so we won't allow it to ever happen again.  Take the photos, make them good ones, and never forget.

According to a group in the US, the price of gold has ben kept artificially low for the last few years.  This would be good news for us :-)  Linkage

I can't believe its January already. I just had a look, and the last entry I posted was in November. Since then we have almost finished our new apartment, been through Christmas and New Year, and now its 2008. We had my parents over for Christmas, which was nice but hectic. Never having had someone stay with us before, there was more to be done than I expected. It was great though, everyone had a good time... right? So now its January. Time for some New Years Resolutions then.

There really are only two New Years Resolutions, and one of them has to happen in any case so maybe it doesn't count. First one is this though : I have to start losing weight. I've developed a bit of a beer gut over the last few months here. That's largely due to the one or two bottles of Weissbier I drink every day, which is thirty to sixty bottles more per month than I drank when I lived in London. Nice, but as I don't do anything else I have started to get fat. That has to stop. So, starting yesterday, I'm going to walk around the park out the pack every day, until I can run around it every day.

The second resolution is (as I mentioned already) something that's going to happen anyway - I need to get a full time job. I've been doing some development work for a couple of guys in London, but that's just a part time thing and while the money is okay, its not as much as I was earning in my old company and not as much as I would like. Actually strike that - taking into account the difference in the cost of living, it may be enough to survive on. Survive is the operative word though. When the money runs out from AOL then I'd have to get a full time job anyway, and now is the time to start looking.

Our apartment has come on a lot since I last posted. The bedroom is almost finished, with the bed and some storage in place, and the wardrobes up and in use though with no doors mounted yet. We have external sliding doors that are going on the front of them that need some tracking installed in the floor and ceiling. I'm going to try and get that done this week, though I need to pick up some more tools first. The kitchen is complete, and doesn't need work. Maybe some small things, but nothing more. The spare bedroom / office still needs a bed settee in it (we were using Anna's parents' blow up bed for my parents which is ok short term), and I have to pick up some more shelves from the shelving company when they finally get them in stock. The living room is still a bit of a blank canvas though. We have the table, chairs and a couch, and some smaller decorations, but nothing else. We need to put something along one wall so that it doesn't look so bare and has storage potential, but I haven't found anything nice yet. So its getting there as I said.

One more resolution that just made it to the list is to clean up the damn code that runs this page.  The character munging around stuff like a hash mark is driving me crazy.

OK, so its half eleven here, despite what the post time says. I have to head into town so I'm going to cut this short now, but of course it goes without saying that in 2008 I will post more ;-)