Category: Personal

Happy Christmas!

Went up to Enniskillen in Norn Irn this weekend, for Julie’s belated works Christmas dinner. Nice hotel, great views across Lough Erne (the pic is from our bedroom window), but the event was a bit of let-down… it was all booked months ago, so they could at least have saved us some Christmas crackers, made sure the carvery included a turkey, or hung up a few decorations. Unfortunately, all we got was some local crooner and a drum machine murdering the usual Elvis and Beatles repertoire. Still, the six hour round trip drive was pleasantly traffic-free, and it’s always fun crossing the national border on one of the minor roads– you can only tell you’ve changed countries when the painted stripe at the side of the road abruptly turns from yellow (Irish side) to white (UK side). Changed times indeed.

On the plus side, got back just in time for the live Motherwell game on Setanta, in which Jim Hamilton crashed in as good a goal as I’ve ever seen a Motherwell player score (we still lost though), and to find that Eircom’s DSL upgrade has gone to plan (now up to 3Mb/384kB… upload speed still a bit crappy, but better than the 128kB we had before).

Poker power

Julie and I had an excellent lunch at Boccacio’s on Dame Street today, which was made all the more entertaining by the otherwise ordinary-looking bloke on the next table receiving a call back from Paddy Power. Apparently he’d phoned to complain about some adverts for their online poker service that he’d seen in a public toilet, and made it perfectly clear that he was appalled and outraged by double entendres such as “Get your hands on a big pair tonight” and “The man next to you is watching your hand”. He was equally appalled that they had not been cleared by the ASAI because it was not “compulsive” (sic) to have them reviewed prior to being posted, and that they would remain in place to “disgust” other people over the festive period.

You do have to wonder if some people have too much time on their hands…

Nollaig Shona

My Christmas break started on Wednesday, and I won’t be back in the office until January 9th (except next Wednesday to see if I won anything in the annual corporate-gifts-we’re-not-allowed-to-accept raffle). I don’t anticipate that GNOME usability will suffer in any way while I spend the next month parked on a beanbag eating chocolate and trying to finish as many of my old PS2 games as possible so I can pick up some new ones in the January sales, but my waistline inevitably will. Happy whatever-it-is-you-feel-like-celebrating!

Kea-no thanks

I do hope Roy Keane doesn’t join Celtic. Not because of his ability– it’s always a good laugh when injury-plagued has-beens join the Old Firm and sap their resources while doing nothing more than lying on the treatment table. But if nothing else, it would be bound to encourage even more people to flock over to Glasgow from Dublin Airport every weekend, and there’s already more than enough vileness in the air when Rangers and Celtic fans come to town, without high profile Irish signings and a stadium full of tricolours to provide certain elements with even more targets for their sad vitriol.

Yes, Celtic FC was founded by an Irish priest. Ancient history, get over it everyone. Irish sports fans who actually care about football more than history would do well to direct their air fares and gate money towards their local league teams instead for a while, to improve the quality of the grass-roots Irish game instead of glory-hunting in Glasgow. And more importantly, to give the West of Scotland a bit of space to sort out its nasty sectarian problems, rather than (innocently or otherwise) adding to them.

All your music?

I suspect the European iPod truth is somewhere inbetween Havoc‘s and Benjamin‘s estimates. I live in Europe too, and despite what Benjamin says, I know very few people whose MP3 player of choice isn’t an iPod. And I for one regularly buy from the iTunes Music Store– the selection of music in the Irish store isn’t great, but the ludicrous price of CDs in Ireland still makes it well worthwhile for certain purchases, and it’s scarily easily when, like me, you’re running iTunes at some point pretty much every day anyway. (And it’s trivial to work around the DRM if you want to, not that I ever have any reason to as I’m only ever playing the music on my Mac or my iPod anyway.)

Weekends

Busy couple of weekends… last Saturday, since it was a bank holiday, we decided to treat ourselves to a night at the Clarion in town to de-stress from our recent house-moving escapades, making as much use of the facilities as the budget allowed. On Sunday night, we had tickets for a recording of RTÉ’s The Panel, which is always good for a a laugh. And this weekend, we went for an international shopping day-trip… well, okay, we took the train up to Belfast. Dunno if it’s the slightly-more-Scottish-accents or the City Hall that looks a bit like a squashed version of the City Chambers, but it reminded me of Glasgow even more than last time I was there.

Update: Johan points out that Durban City Hall is actually an exact copy of Belfast’s, except that it’s surrounded by palm trees… (or by idiots, as Stephen quipped…)

You want it *what* way?

First day working in my new home office since we moved house and BT got around to switching on our broadband connection again. Still a lot of unpacking and cable untangling to do, but everything worked pretty smoothly otherwise. (Wasn’t brave enough to try getting dual-head working on Ubuntu on my Powerbook, though– don’t know if it’s even possible.)

A couple of nights out last weekend… Harry Hill at Vicar Street on Saturday (my choice), and the Backstreet Boys at The Point on Sunday (Julie’s choice). Harry had his amusing moments, but I’ve seen him do better work, and Julie was seriously unimpressed. BSB were, well, five blokes looking younger than they ought to, singing close harmony 90’s pop songs amidst dry ice, lasers and indoor fireworks. More memorable for the spectacle than the music from my point of view, but Julie went to bed dreaming about Kevin so I guess she enjoyed herself 🙂

Moving House Wrecks Your Head

Packing and unpacking mountains of boxes is bad enough, but it’s not helped by the muppets who staff the utility companies.

BT Ireland need the Eircom account number at our new address before they can transfer our broadband connection, which will then take 14 working days (so, at least it’s not quite three weeks then). Eircom, though, despite having to log into their phone system with my existing account details, won’t tell me my new account number over the phone for “security reasons” (despite having done so every other time I’ve moved house), but offered to email it to any address I chose instead… which didn’t strike me as outstandingly secure either, until now, several hours later, when I’ve realise that they haven’t actually bothered sending it at all. Fair play to them, you can’t get much more secure than that, really.

Then there’s Bord Gais, whose skills clearly don’t quite extend to copying and pasting my name correctly from an email to wherever they have to type it in to open an account, and NTL who seem to be unable to make the cable TV point in our new house live without me taking a morning off work for an “appointment”, when they’ve managed to quite happily just flick a switch somewhere every other time I’ve moved.

Hopes of a full house are thus pinned squarely on ESB , who I have to phone at the end of this week with a closing meter reading for my old address. One can only imagine what inventive ways they’ll find to make that a miserable experience too.