The thing about doing lots of stuff and having an eventful week to write about is that because it was eventful and involved lots of doing stuff, I didn’t get around to writing anything. That is bothersome. Jacob Nielsen, who is not well known outside of web-design circles but famous and infamous in equal measure inside it for reasons I’ll explain shortly, recently put up his 10 points for good blogging (blogging is what I’m doing right now, writing a diary on the web) and one of those was to post regularly. If you post infrequently and erratically, he says, people are much less likely to repeat visit and of course repeat visits are what you want. He’s right, but he doesn’t get out much I’d say.
Nielsen made his name by making a lot of noise about how web sites should be designed in order to be usable; there was a time when web sites were a hit and miss affair because people didn’t understand the technology, tried to force it do things that it wasn’t meant for, didn’t understand how people were using it, all sorts of factors that have largely been eliminated by a sort of Darwinism.
So, no regular posts this week. Last week, the government published it’s transport plan which is a big event for me because as I’ve said before (and damn it, I’ll say it again!) I’m an infrastructure nerd and one of the things that bothers me most about this country is that it has terrible transport infrastructure. It’s a hell of a plan; 34 Billion euro over 15 years, which is apparently 9.5 million every day as of last week. Straight away we got… 20 new busses for Dublin. 20. Out of the 180 that they need to get people moving, they authorised 20. So more on this later. It’s a lot of money for winning an election. My money. Incidentally, today was my second trip out to Blanchardstown by train this week, and the second time that they had trouble with it resulting in delays and over crowding…
I had a good chat with Tee via MSN and tried to help her videos and photos and the like. She’ll have photos to post on the Interweb now, yay!
Rik the Belgian came over to visit for a couple of weeks, as I write this he is no doubt recovering from a hang-over on the Aran Islands somewhere.
Tee’s brother Joseph got married on Thursday to Diana, so they had a big party on Friday. The O’Reillys really can party, and Diana’s family and friends from home (who are all Croatian) know a thing or two about that too. I have plenty of photos to prove it. A good night, I stuck to my moderate drinking principle, with some… oddness in it (and I’d expect no less, particularly since I was there and Tee wasn’t) and I also played the videos she made which was emotional. In spite of the diabolical sound, which made most of what she was saying sound suspiciously like ‘Rarr rah rarr rerrr rar’. We need a bigger speaker…
The next day I went to see a room which I subsequently got in Blanchardstown. I’ve had interesting reactions from my friends. It’s not far from town, it’s a nice area, it’s all good… And yet, I could have moved to say, Swords or Newbridge for all the positive responses I’ve had. Garret (who believes everyone should live in Rathmines, and to prove the point he bought a house in Rialto, next to Beirut) has even started to try to see the positive side of it! He actually believes it’s that bad that he should be supportive! After a good initial mocking of course. I expected that.
Saturday night saw myself and Rik go to Dmitry and Alex’s party, which was great. I work with them, they’re a great pair of guys (both Russian) and know how to rock the joint, with the able help of our work colleagues as well as Tanya, Sarka, Vlad and Diana. I have a lot of photos from that too; I didn’t drink much but everyone else did and anarchy ensued (as usual). Rik drank so much that he got sick and I had to make sure he got back to town ok. He might have learned a lesson there. If you drink with Dmitry, don’t try to keep up.
I finally finished the Javascript Gallery software I’ve been writing for Keith (which, although Tee doesn’t know it yet, will also be making an appearance of sorts on her site too) and I’m very happy with it. It’s not perfect but it’s good lesson in Object Orientated Programming. I managed to find the last of the odds and ends I need to make sense of the Image manager I’ve been working on for Tee’s site so now it’s full steam ahead on that. I’ve also been moving slowly but surely into my new home. In fact, I’m posting this on the wireless broadband connection here from my bed.
I truly am a nerd-like being.