Maltese Diary

Back in the office today after a week’s holibags in Malta with Julie, staying at the very pleasant Qawra Palace hotel.

Monday: Arrived Monday
evening, dinner. Discover hotel
entertainment is provided on the stage right outside our balcony:
tonight it’s “Martin Elvis”, (sadly not this one) whose act
neither requires nor deserves much in the way of explanation.

Tuesday: Lazy day by the
pool, taking full advantage of our package deal’s unlimited free drinks and ice cream from the poolside bar. Tonight’s entertainment: an incomprehensible DJ whose output
includes a lot of Elvis records.

Wednesday: Holiday rep
finally shows up so we can book some excursions for the rest of the
week. Wander up into Qawra to check out the grockle
shops,
followed by a lazy afternoon by the pool. Tonight’s entertainment: the
aftermath of a brief but entertainingly-torrential Mediterranean
thunderstorm, which cancelled the regularly scheduled programme.

Thursday: Coach tour of
Malta– the church at Mosta with the third-largest dome in Europe (the
other two belong to St Peter’s in the Vatican and Clive Anderson), the
ancient
city of Mdina, lunch at a lodge in Buskett forest, and a wander round the market at the fishing village of Marsaxloxx. Scary discovery: half the Maltese seem to have spent part of their adult lives in the UK, which leaves them sounding a lot like
Bastien. Tonight’s entertainment: the same bloke we had on Tuesday,
playing the same records.

Friday: Lazy day by the
pool. Finally get Thursday’s paper to find out what the Scotland
score
was on Wednesday, as BBC World apparently thought that Engurlund were the only team
playing in the World Cup qualifiers this week. Tonight’s entertainment:
a bloke with a glorified Casiotone and a drum machine, who sings a lot of Elvis
songs.

Saturday: Day trip to the
other (and classier) inhabited Maltese island, Gozo– more ornate churches, a couple of audio-visual shows, lunch in a swish hotel
in Marsalforn, and the azure window at Dwejra. Catch the result of the Motherwell
game
when I get back to the hotel (which somewhat surprised me as I still
thought it was only about Thursday), not to mention the cold that I’m
still sniffing away with. Tonight’s entertainment: two blokes who must
have recently invested in a copy of Big Hits
of The Shadows and an EFTP amp,
later joined by their sister who sings a lot of Elvis songs.

Sunday: Valetta market,
another church, elevenses at the priest’s gaff, and a boat trip around the Blue Grotto to round off the morning.Lazy afternoon by the pool. Tonight’s entertainment: the same two blokes who have now acquired a copy of Big Hits of The Shadows Volume 2, later joined by their sister who’s sadly failed to similarly expand her library of Elvis songs.

Monday: Up at 3.30am for the transfer to the airport, back in
Dublin by 11.30am. Made gnome-themes 2.8.0 release in the afternoon.
Didn’t listen to any Elvis songs.

(These photos are mine, but you can find lots of others at maltavista.net.)

Mini Pops

Offensive as the brick-like monstrosities that purport to be Minis these days are, their advertising monkeys do at least have a sense of humour. Hang around on their website for long enough, and see what pops up…

Power struggle

Discovered one of the drawbacks to living in a top floor apartment today– your water goes off when there’s a power cut, because the pump that compensates for the minimal head of water is electric too. Luckily I hadn’t quite made it to the shower…

Accessible theme thoughts

[Also posted to d-d-l]

Since I seem to be spending most of my time playing catch-up with GNOME’s increasingly-sprawling accessible themes these days, I got to wondering if going forward we can’t put more of the responsibility on the individual modules to install accessible icons alongside their regular ones.

The current situation just doesn’t seem very workable going forward, if we’re considering accessibility to be a core feature. We don’t expect applications to submit all their icons to gnome-icon-theme for inclusion– they just install their own. A similar process for accessible themes seems like a logical extension to me.

Modules installing appropriate icons into $(themedir)/HighContrast etc. would be one way, assuming it’s actually possible to work out where those themes lives at install time, but that sounds rather ugly. Anyone any better ideas?

WAH

Spent my first full day working at home today since I got to the bottom of my VPN/wireless router problems. If Sun had their way I’d probably be doing it three or four times a week, but immeasurably improved as the experience is compared to teleworking over a dial-up connection, I just can’t imagine wanting to do it very often while the office is just a 20 minute drive away.

What do customers know anyway?

Last night we had our last ever Cadbury’s Choc Fudge bar. Only ever available in Ireland as far as I know, we’ve been stockpiling them since Christmas, when Cadbury’s told us that they were being withdrawn due to lack of customer demand.

If you know of a country with more discerning customers where Choc Fudge is still available, you know how to get in touch 🙂