Wow, I've just discovered this post in draft format has been unpublished for a few months now.  So, without further ado, I bring you the ::cough:: latest from chez uns...

So we’ve been back from our holidays for about ten weeks now, and I really should have posted this before it became too stale in my mind.  The thing is, when making a rough draft of it I discovered that there was so much to cover that my rough draft ended up being the length of one of my usual posts.  Then I procrastinated about splitting it into smaller posts and… and… and… you get the idea.  So here it is, in all of its glorious detail :-)

This was a driving holiday around eastern Germany and some of the Czech republic.  We traded Anna’s parents their car for our minding their dog for three weeks while they were in Mongolia and China.  We started out with a brief one hundred and forty kilometre quick hop to Regensburg. There we stayed with the Bartas, friends of Anna’s parents from way back.  It was just an overnight stay, and we didn’t really do much in Regensburg even though we had planned two days there and a some trips to see the surrounding countryside.  We have seen the city a few times before, including one memorable Christmas where I kept asking for Glühwein mit Schuss, not knowing that the mit Schuss meant that they were adding a shot of schnapps to it ;-) Let me tell you, five or six Glühwein with schnapps makes an outside temperature of -13°C feel really warm and fuzzy.

So, after Regensburg we drove straight to Prague.  The border between the two countries would have been something really interesting to see back when Czechoslovakia was concerned with such things, but these days it’s almost entirely devoid of life.  The only activity was in a little hut where we had to buy the temporary road tax needed to drive in the Czech Republic.  Otherwise it’s a ghost town.   We got back on the motorway and managed to drive mostly non-stop to Prague. There was a diversion where some road works were going on, but that wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle.  Interestingly enough the GPS in our car has this stupid limitation where it can’t actually navigate between different countries.  When you get over a border you need to switch the country to the one you are currently in.  Stupid system.  It also took us to what can only be called a slum close to the river in Prague and told us that we had reached our destination!  In reality we still had a couple of kilometres to go before we reached our hotel. It was the fabulous golfYacht Prague, on the Moldau river and I really recommend it if you’re there for a short stay.  The cabins are very small but very intelligently laid out.  We had a problem there the first night in that the air conditioning had broken down and it was hovering close to 30°C in our cabins at night.  Prague is HOT in the summer, and this was the high season so it wasn’t very comfortable that night.  Second night however it all fell into place when they got a temporary air conditioning unit hooked up to the hotel and it made us crawl under the covers again.

Prague during the summer is packed with tourists. We’ve been there once before in Winter for a conference I was at for work. Unfortunately I had a nasty cold that trip so I didn’t actually want to see anything.  Anna had been out and about and seen the town though, and said it was lovely and that I was missing a really interesting city. This time however, that wasn’t our experience.  It was just hot and crowded.  We walked quickly through the old town and over the Charles bridge to find a nice restaurant for dinner.  There was a lot of meat on the menu, so I had a skewer of different meats and some veg which was.  Washed down with a dark beer in the waning sun it was a far better experience than I been expecting an hour before.  The next day we went up to the Petrínská rozhledna, on Petrín (lovers) Hill.  It is basically a tower that looks a lot like the Eiffel Tower, although a little smaller.  The view from the hill over the city is pretty spectacular, and the park on the hill itself is nice too.  On the way down we passed through the diplomatic quarter and took the obligatory photos of the German and Irish embassies.  We ate lunch in the area in a beautiful but very expensive cafe belonging to the Hotel Aria (just across the road from J.J Murphy’s Irish Pub). The interior was old and frescoed, and they sold delicate little cakes and sandwiches, and it was most pleasant.  That night we had dinner on the boat.  Anna had pork with parmesan risotto and artichoke hearts which she has since described as “awesome” and “yum, yum”, and I had (again) a steak, though this time with potato and carrot gratin which was done to perfection.  Soon afterwards the engineer who had been flown in from somewhere told us that he had fixed the air-conditioning, and the temperature rapidly returned to normal in the cabins.

Next day we left Bohemia and drove through the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) to Malter, which is a suburb of Dippoldeswalde.  There we hooked up with Kerstin & Mathias and their son Franz.  They are relations of Gaby, but I can’t remember exactly how (I think Mathias is her cousin?) and Anna’s asleep now so I can’t ask her. They are a lovely couple of high-school maths teachers who took us in and fed us enough food for a large family.  Great food though – we had a barbeque out the back of the house, with those awesome Thüringer Bratwurst sausages, and a bunch of other meats and salads.  I hadn’t had a barbeque quite like it in a long time, maybe even since we lived in Rathfarnham.  A little later a steam train pulled into the train station, which lies at the end of their garden.  We had a wander over and took a look at it. Apparently it runs twice a day between Malter and somewhere else (should have written this ten weeks ago), and it was pretty stunning to see.  I uploaded a video of it to YouTube which is worth taking a few seconds to look at.

In Malter we stayed in a local pension which backed onto a farm. It was pretty much in the countryside, and it was July, so there was a lot of wildlife around.  In one ceiling corner of our room (conveniently the one closest to my head when sleeping) there was a large spider who kept hunting the flies that stupidly flew in the window to it’s web.  When it caught one, it would do so incredibly fast, and with rather a lot of noise from the web and the insect on the menu.  Now, I’m not normally that afraid of spiders anymore, but this thing was something else. It took me a long time to get asleep that night I can tell you, and just as I had reached the point of getting there, the fucker would catch another insect, and I’d hear a scuttling sound again. Damn thing kept me awake for hours.  Anyway, next day we did a small through the Erzgebirge, taking in a bunch of small towns and villages and seeing literally hundreds of windmills all over the countyside.  I don’t mean the old Dutch type either, we’re talking industrial scale power generators, scattered over any available hill top.

Something else cool we saw around here is what’s known as the Frohnauer Hammer, in Annaberg-Buchholz. It is one of the best examples of a medieval forge remaining today, and absolutely worth a look if you’re ever in the area.  Later on that day we drove past a circus in a field beside the road, and they had some animals outside grazing so we stopped and took a good look.  Probably the coolest, most surreal and unexpected things was that there were elephants outside grazing without anything keeping us from getting to them. Or vice versa. I took some awesome pictures of this too, which I’ll upload to Flickr in due course.  In the mean time, here’s a video of Anna feeding elephants.
We also saw the Greifensteine – a geologic formation similar to the Giant’s Causeway, but with a different shape.  In this case, blobs of granite magma formed large pebble shapes on top of each other and remained after the surrounding material had eroded away. The formation is about three hundred million years old, and reaches up to 30m above ground level.

The next stop for us was Dresden. We arrived there a little early and couldn't check into our hotel, so we went on to see Andreas's Aunt Helga in Radebeule and hang out for a bit. Just before visiting her we took a tour through the GDR museum, which is a fascinating look at life in East Germany before the re-unification. Everything from local brands of Cola (had some and it was awful) to the legendary Trabbants were on show there. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who is in Dresden. The hotel we stayed in there wasn't too bad either.  Its location is a bit strange in that it is in a residential area a couple of kilometers from the city centre.  The rooms are huge though, and it was pretty cheap for a 4 (?) star hotel.

Next day we went on a tour of Dresden itself, including the Frauenkirche which has just been rebuilt after being destroyed in the second world war.  I read somewhere that the bombing damage done to Dresden in two consecutive nights during world war two caused a conflagration hot enough that stone melted. Have a think about the destructive energy required to make stones melt for a second. So after that we wandered over to the other side of the river and took a look at the city from the famous view where Canaletto painted his seminal work of the city. There was a great market there where they were selling only local wines and snacks.  And then we came to the Kunsthof which is a group of buildings all built in completely different artistic styles. My favourite was the water wall, where they had water flowing down through a very intricate series of pipes and channels on the wall.  Again, this is well worth a visit if you find yourself in Dresden. After that we headed back to our hotel, stopping somewhere on the way to look at a shop which was originally painted in the 19th centaury, and is famous for its mural covered walls.

Next day we’re off to Meißen and Morizburg.  Meißen has one of the most famous porcelain works in Europe and we took a tour of the factory to see the stages of creation of porcelain pieces.  Coming from a town where they had a pottery in which I used to play as a kid I found this fascinating. All their pieces are hand-crafted and painted, and the detail is pretty incredible.  The prices are also incredible. We saw a single cup and saucer for €1200 and a soup terrine for €20,000 (reduced from €25,000)!  After the tour we had lunch in the cafe attached to the factory and then walked up to the old town and saw the castle and thought about buying a disused prison that we discovered. It would have had the most amazing views over the town.  After that we bought some pieces of Meißen porcelain for our parents, and drove on to Moritzburg.  This is another famous old town, but in this case for its Baroque castle. It dates back to the mid fifteen hundreds, and is a work of art in itself. It is also built in stunning grounds, with little outbuildings everywhere. Even the outbuildings are pretty amazing, and the Fasanenschlösschen (Little Pheasant Castle) is perhaps the most famous of them. We thought we could get some food there, but the eatery was further on than we expected.  Instead of a ten or fifteen minute walk, we took about an hour and a half to get to a restaurant which was ultimately useless.  They had only cauliflower soup and beer to eat, so we walked another fifteen minutes on towards a restaurant where we were ultimately sated.  Nicely too I should add.  I had roast duck, and it was pretty spectacular.

Next day we left Dresden and drove to Pirna for a quick visit. There was a coffee roaster there so we picked up some some of their “Pirnauer Mischung” (Pirna Mix) roasted beans to take with us.  I also bought a coffee bean sack from them, which we’re going to have framed and mounted as a piece of artwork in our living room.  Anyway, after Pirna, we went to the Bastei.  This is a bunch of cliffs overlooking the Elbe.  The viewing points at the top are about two hundred meters over the river, so the view is spectacular.  I’ll get some pictures published on Flickr soon.  Although it is very touristy it is worth seeing.  It is comparable to the Cliffs of Moher for the kind of view you get from the top, although it takes longer to get up to as you have to walk the whole way.  Or so we thought.  We later discovered that the hotel which is at the top of the cliffs is accessible from the rear by car.  Oh well, at least the walk was really nice.  At one point on the way up, we came across a guy busking in traditional costume.  He was standing in the middle of a dell and using the natural acoustics of the place to amplify his voice. The effect was magic. For those of you who watched BSG, it was a bit like the episode where Felix sings after losing his leg. Magical.

That night we stayed in the Alte Geberei in Bautzen. Anna’s dad is from there and we saw the house he was born in.  Unfortunately it is now derelict, though still standing.  We had an amazing meal in the hotel, another steak if I remember correctly.  The next day we took a walk about  Bautzen, and circumscribed about half of the old town along the walls.  Bautzen is famous for its mustard, so we bought lots of it!  Ultimately it’s very small though, so we drove on towards the Spreewald. 

The Spreewald is an unusual geographical feature. It is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve which has about 1,300km of natural canals and channels which are navigable primarily by punt. There is a town in the centre of it all, but apparently even the postal service uses boat to deliver mail.  We rented a canoe to take us around for the day which turned out to be a lovely idea.  The temperature was perfect and there were thousands of large dragonflies on the river. We stopped in the Wotschovska for food and then headed home.  On the way we discovered that our map was, well, inadequate. We ended up getting lost probably no more than five hundred meters from our hotel.  I still think we would have been faster to get out and carry the boat by road to the hotel, but we made it in the end.

The next day it rained.  A lot.  It rained so much that after breakfast and the obligatory gherkin purchase (Spreewald is famous throughout Germany for the pickles you can get there), we went bowling.  That whole day was a bit of a washout really. I tried to get some work done later, but I seemed to be just on the edge of the cell so couldn’t get a decent enough connection to do anything meaningful.  So I bought a UMTS stick there, but I couldn’t get that activated either.  The next day I took it back to the shop and had them activate it for me there, and that about covered me for mobile access during the next week.  Anyway, after getting the stick fixed, we took a tour of a gherkin cannery, which was far more interesting than it sounds I can tell you. 

Next stop on our trip was Torgau, where we came across something really unusual.  There was a castle there (of course) and Martin Luther’s first church (every town in Germany is home to the most, the first, the largest, the longest or the oldest something), and it was just outside the castle in what I presume was originally a moat that we came across two brown bears.  They had this moat all to themselves, and were playing with some huge truck tires.  It sounds surreal to read that, but there you go. This was the town where the US American army met up with the Russian army in world war two.  There was a small museum to that, and some of what we read was really grim. There’s a statue in the town which was built during the time of communism by some Soviets which has a plaque on it that reads something like “Here on the banks of the river the Glorious and Illustrious 5th Army of the Soviet Union met some americans”.  Anyway, we had some beer and sausage and basked in the sun for a bit before driving on to Leipzig.

In Leipzig we stayed in a “motel”, which was part of a large camping ground.  It was there that I saw what must have been the largest camper van you can imagine. It wasn’t articulated, but was about as large as a 40foot container truck.  Unfortunately I never got a picture of it, but it was about as big as the image on the right.  So Leipzig wasn’t as cool as we were expecting. The city itself is a little ugly, and was built mostly in the sixties, or so it seems.  It does have some interesting features though, such as the museum of the “Rund Ecke” (round corner) where they had the Stasi headquarters for many years.  There’s a lot of information there about how a people can be made to spy on themselves and the lengths that they will go to in order to survive.  It was really interesting, but not all that enjoyable. 

After Leipzig we drove on to Teefurt and stayed with more relations of Anna’s. They cooked us some of the local famous sausages (Thuringer Bratwurst) and we drank a few beers and sat out on the veranda with the sound of the waterfall behind them making everything nice.  Cara of course discovered the kittens in the next house, and basically went crazy trying to get to them.  Next day we toured Weimaar and took a look around the museum there. Goethe and Schiller both lived here and their houses are on the must-see list for what seems like every student in Germany judging by the amount of tourists there.

After Leipzig we moved on to Eisenach. Our reservation there was in a villa overlooking the town but there was a burst water mains nearby and it had flooded, so they had transferred us to a Croatian hotel nearby.  That hotel was awful, and we stayed about 20 minutes before checking out.  At this point we changed our plans and moved everything up by one day.  So we went up to the Wartburg, which is an old castle on a rock near the town.  This is the place where Martin Luther holed up and translated the bible to German originally, amongst other actually interesting history that was buried somewhere that we couldn’t see.

After that we went straight on to Nurnberg instead of staying the night.  We called the hotel and had our reservations moved up a day, and set off.  Along the way we almost ran out of diesel, and had been travelling on a red light and empty tank for about half an hour by the time we found a gas station to fill up. There were a lot of angsty looks getting thrown my way in that half an hour I can tell you.  Still, we made it and got into Nurnberg in time to check out the local Potato Restaurant.  I kid you not.  Anna took one look at the place and made some comments about me having to love it because it was a potato restaurant, and apparently I come from a nation of potato eaters.  Anyway, the restaurant was awesome, and was one of the better meals throughout the whole trip IMHO.

Next day we were going to take a look around Nurnberg before heading home but it was pissing rain, cold and grey so we said “Fuck it”, and drove back towards Munich.  All in all it was a pretty incredible three weeks, even though I don’t convey that here.  I had originally thought that a road trip wasn’t going to be as satisfying as actually going somewhere and doing something, but I was completely wrong.

Once again this post will begin with something like “it seems that I haven’t posted in ages”.  So, here goes.  It seems like I haven’t posted in ages.  There actually is an excuse this time, which is nice.  I have a bunch of updates to post here which I’ll either do in this post or over a couple of posts.  Lets see how it pans out…

I mentioned that I had been busy.  This freelancing thing is starting to get serious, and I find myself with far less time than I used to have.  That’s the good part.  The not-so-good part is that the difference between what I earned in my old job and what I’m earning now is huge, and not in a beneficial way.  However, I’m getting more regular work and some customers are coming back for repeat business so its all going in the right direction.  Its just slow. The rate of increase in business is (not unexpectedly) very slow, and I wish I had concentrated on it more about three years ago.  Just in case you didn’t know, when I freelance I do so under the moniker DnAWebDev.  Eventually I may turn that into a company name, but for now that site is just my freelance portfolio. 

So in a week we’re going on holidays.  We’re doing a three week driving tour around the eastern part of Germany, and western part of the Czech Republic.  Its a road trip of about sixteen hundred kilometres which is going to take us three weeks.  We’re staying in some places longer than one night, which is why it takes so long.  While on the trip we’re going to meet some of Anna’s relations in eastern Germany.  Map of the route is below, courtesy of Google.  If we change it dramatically on the way then I may update it from somewhere.

Summer 2010 Road Trip (click for larger version)

Right, so I’ve been talking about writing this post for what, two weeks now? Three?  Dave bas posted his memory of the events of that night on his blog, and I urge you to read it as he is a far more eloquent writer than I.  It all started on a business trip to Dulles in May of 2002 (I cheated and checked here). We were due to fly home on the Friday morning after a fairly intensive week of doing something or other that I have long since forgotten.  It was around the time when work wasn’t as enjoyable for me as it used to be, as I had been forcibly moved to a different department from the one I had started in. This new department was one with a different culture from the one I had come from.  Different culture, and a very different atmosphere.  Not the fun one that I came to love.  Anyway, we (Dave, John and I) were in Dulles, and along with working hard, we were playing hard too.More...

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.

So, another day, another German class out of the way.  Unfortunately I have an hour to kill in town before my physiotherapy so I figured I'd hang out in Starbucks for a bit.  I deliberately chose to hang out in town so that I could use the wireless in Starbucks and post a new entry here, but I have to admit that now that I'm sitting here I simply have nothing that I want to write about.  Fucking typical. 
I don't know if I mentioned it before, but we saw a singer called Lenka recently.  She's a Australian who has lived in California for a few years, so her accent is... interesting.  Her singing voice is brilliant though, and you should definitely pick up her self titled debut album.  Before going solo she performed with Decoder Ring.  We went to see her in concert a few weeks ago and she was brilliant.  There were about four fans in the audience, and the rest seems to have been a bunch of jaded music industry insiders.  Reception at the start of the event was kind of bland, with not much enthusiasm from what was obviously a pretty weary crowd.  Lenka brought them to life however, and really livened up what could have been a dead audience.  By the end of the concert, the four fans (of which Anna and I were two) weren't the only ones cheering.

I wrote that first paragraph about three weeks ago, fully intending to finish it off and publish the post.  It seems I’ve been a little lax.  Some of you have made up for it however, and some of you seem to have stopped blogging altogether.  What’s that about, dude?  Anyway, since then, a bunch of interesting things have happened.  We were in Berlin last weekend for the U2 concert, which was every bit as good as I expected it to be.  I think Anna has some photos of me screaming like a little girl when. I have a couple too, and some videos, but they were recorded on my mobile and really don’t do the experience justice. This is a concert and stage that has to be seen to be believed.  It was truly Magnificent. The set list was awesome, and comprised of Breathe, No Line on the Horizon, a much better than expected Get on your Boots, Magnificent, Beautiful Day (awesome… Dave B, was it you who said this song just made you smile every time you heard it?), Mysterious Ways and I Still Haven’t Found what I’m Looking For in which the seventy thousand strong audience possibly out sang the band. Angel of Harlem was next, which was assisted by three musicians dragged from the audience who apparently had a flag saying they were a band from the Czech Republic.  Bono asked our forbearance while they tried something new… and promptly had the three guys play Angel of Harlem, assisted by U2!. Pure magic! Then came Stay, Unknown Caller and the ever wonderful and even better live Unforgettable Fire. Next was City of Blinding Lights and Vertigo (which I had never seen before live), and a different version of I’ll go Crazy than the one on the album.  It was… interesting, and reception was perhaps a bit more muted for it than some of the other tracks.  Then Larry started up the intro drum sequence for Sunday Bloody Sunday and seventy thousand fans just went apeshit.  I have to include myself in that too.  There may have been a couple of tears brushed out of my eyes during that one.  An awesome rendition of Pride was up next, at which point I started to lose my voice. Then MLK and Walk On, and then Desmond Tutu was shown on the screen saying that everyone should be nice to each other, with some background music that faded into the intro for Where The Streets Have No Name.  I almost lost it at this point I have to say, it was a moment of sheer awesomeness that is going to be hard to beat. Once that had ended, and the crowd finally calmed down, we were brought back up again with One which Bono described as having been written in Berlin years ago. You can imagine the reaction to that.  Then came Ultraviolet, which was awesome too, and With or Without You which was so much better than I was expecting.  Bono’s voice cracked (deliberately I think) slightly on the higher registers, giving the song a kind of magic it doesn’t have on the studio version.  Finally Moment of Surrender and that was it for one hell of a memorable night. Luckily enough we were staying in Anna’s uncle’s apartment which is in Charlottenburg and very close to the stadium.  We were home in twenty minutes.

We also visited the Reichstag in Berlin, the Berlin Wall Museum and the obligatory ancient stuff for Archaeology geeks.  The ancient stuff was better than I was expecting actually.  It was in the Pergamon museum where they have the Pergamon Altar, Ishtar Gate and the Gate of Miletus all housed in lifelike surroundings.  We picked up some excellent audio guides for this tour, and again I have pictures but they don’t do it justice.

I have no real excuse for not posting.  I’ve been busy, but not too busy.  I just haven’t had the inclination really.  I seem to get in this mood for a few months every couple of years.  There’s lots I could blog about, but the motivation just isn’t there.  So, here follows a collective update, without form or structure and in an almost free-associative manner.

I’m absolutely loving my new phone.  the major update to it (commonly called Cupcake) came out last week, and its looking great so far.  It comes with an on-screen keyboard which is pretty cool for short messages or text entry where you don’t want to flip out the keyboard.  I like the auto-orientation feature; turn the phone on its side and the it orientates sideways.  Turn it back up, and the orientation changes likewise.  Its awesome.  This works on any screen apart from the main screen (default screen?  top page? home screen?  Not entirely sure of the terminology), which makes sense even though I’ve read complaints about it on teh internets.  Widgets are now allowed, and some of then are just cool.  I’ve downloaded some brilliant apps for it so far, such as a travel planner for the German transport system, a shopping comparison package (scan the barcode of something in a shop and see if it really IS cheaper than the place down the road), and the Google maps tracks app.  That one lets me set the GPS to record, and then allows me to track where the phone has been.  For example, we went on a trip to the Englisher Garten last weekend, and then to one of the museums.  That trip was recorded and is documented here.

I still have to get my bike repaired.  I buckled the back wheel back when I fucked up my finger, and haven’t done anything about it yet.  I’ll get that done soon.

I’m doing physiotherapy about three times a week at the moment.  It hurts like hell, but is starting to pay off.  I can move the last knuckle on the finger again, which is very cool.  I have to remember when I’m doing the proscribed exercises that I need to concentrate on extension as well as flexion.  Apparently if I don’t then the finger could end up in a permanent “dipped” state, which would obviously be bad.

Tickets for U2 have arrived, and July 18th can’t come around soon enough.  I’ve also scored some tickets for Bell X1 next week.  I don’t know that much of their stuff, and may have to look out for some over the weekend, but it promises to be a good gig.  They are being supported by Duke Special, who I also haven’t heard before, but whose website produced some interesting sounds.

I have Windows 7 running now on both my laptop and one of the desktop machines.  The release candidate is incredible.  It has a stability and speed that frankly leaves Vista kicked face down in the dirt.  I’ll do another blog post on it later, but if you don’t have it already then download it from Microsoft.com.  Its free to use until march 2010.

I shouldn’t have tried to install Windows 7 on the spare laptop.  I’ve porked it, as I knew I would.  There just aren’t good drivers for Windows for that machine, so I’m going to re-install linux and… hmm, I’ve just had a VERY interesting idea about what to do with it.  It’d be in addition to what I was using it for with linux a couple of days ago – to monitor some specific chat rooms for news about Android. I could use it to handle the nzb files that we process.  There’s a pretty good handler for newzbin files for linux that might just do the trick.  Have to look into that more…

I have an idea for an app I should write.  Its for Android, and its just an different implementation of something that exist on that platform.  It exists in such a way that it is cumbersome and unwieldy I have to say.  I know how it can be done better.

London was dirty.  I’ve been here in an almost sterile environment for the last year, and getting back to London was a touch of culture shock on a couple of levels.  Firstly, there’s soot on everything.  Its a lovely old city, but the operative word in that phrase is old.  Many of the buildings haven’t had their exterior cleaned since the industrial revolution.  You know what I mean… the old red-brick buildings where the soot and car exhausts have left the red covered in a thin layer of black smoke and soot.  Its horrible, and I forgot just how pervasive it all is.  I had also forgotten what it is not to have to walk around and constantly look at the ground to avoid things like dig shit.  Secondly, and nothing to do with dirt, I realise that the feeling I get when talking to people here is fear.  When I am required to talk in German, although I can mostly get along, it is a frightening experience.  I don’t mean scary frightening, but it is definitely something that I prefer not to have to do.  I didn’t have that in London – I was able to go in to shops and simply ask for stuff. 

The sushi in London is awesome.  The rice underneath a piece of salmon nigri (for example) was exactly the right sweetness, texture and moisture that it should have been.  Here in Munich for some reason (that might have something to do with living two hundred and fifty thousand kilometres from the nearest ocean) the fish never tastes as fresh as in London, and the rice is always a little crumbly and more bitter. I miss sushi for lunch every day. Each time I pick up some here hoping for something that meets my taste expectations, I am disappointed.

We ate in the first Wagamama that I have ever been in that had windows in it!  Its down by the Tower of London, go check it out.

That’s how far we cycled today. The original plan was just for a trip into the Englishergarten, a beer and some lunch and then a quick trip home.  It wasn’t supposed to be more than ten or fifteen kilometres, but we got a bit carried away.  After stopping in the Englishergarten we started heading towards Ismaning and ended up at Anna’s parents house. They weren’t there (it was a lovely day and they had gone out on their own cycling trip) so we headed back home. It was a long trip – 42km as you can see from my odometer, which I believe is a few hundred meters longer than a marathon.  The weather was awesome today too, with temperatures up in the high twenties.  It wasn’t too hot to cycle though, just comfortable enough to enjoy, and get a better tan than we had before.  We were pretty trashed after it, but its probably the most exercise we have both had in quite a long time.  Tired, but feeling good.  One thing is for sure, we’ll be doing that again!

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.