andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

Today I felt like shit in the morning, the cold is really taking off now but, today was beautiful. Really very beautiful, in the special way that it does at this time of the year with the golden light bouncing off everything, the piercing, slightly cloudy sky but at the same time very clearly delineated clouds and sky. It makes the light behave differently. I can’t get enough of it and it made me feel a lot better. I’d have taken a photo for show and tell but the batteries were all flat unfortunately. Still, there’ll be more of those.

It’s Thursday and I’m just starting to tackle writing about last weekend. It’s actually been a trying week; I’m not well, coming down with cold and it makes everything that little bit harder, particularly since I’m still doing that trying commute from Bray and back out. Been hard work in office too, I’ve really been copying and pasting like a bastard recently and I’m getting very good at it. In seriousness, I’m starting to worry about the value of my CV because it’s not looking great at the moment. I really need to get some stuff on it that people will actually value and pay for – programming languages, sites, achievements.

So, Drogheda. I went up on Friday night to visit my friend Martha, see how she is, inspect her new gaff, have a look at Drogheda. Actually, Martha’s been discouraging me from coming up and having a look at Drogheda since last summer, on the grounds that it wasn’t interesting enough to visit but I’ll find anything I haven’t had a look at within the last five to ten years interesting, including Northern industrial towns such as Drogheda, and it couldn’t be less interesting than Bray (which, to be fair, seems to hold some sort of peculiar exotic fascination for most people who don’t go there).

Martha getting something for me to sleep on

The journey up was fun, I was sharing seats with two entertaining nerdy technical types who were both called ‘Bongo’ and we traded comedy on iPods and discussed the huge, all-terrain laptop owned by one of the Bongos. However, by the time I’d gotten there, partly thanks to delays and partly down to me not communicating enough Martha believed I’d bailed out and gone for pints with the lads instead… Oh no! We got a take out, some wine, and had a night of chat. It was good to catch up.

On Saturday morning we tried to get me some tickets to the Dandy Warhols, but no luck there, and then Martha had to head off to Dublin, which meant I could indulge my need to wander about Drogheda aimlessly taking lots of photos…

Kenny had warned me about the Louth culture (for Drogheda is in County Louth, north of Dublin and which borders on Northern Ireland – for those of you who don’t know much about Ireland, Northern Ireland is part of Great Britain, uses British currency, and… It’s a long story.) which he claimed was a bit rough although like most places in Ireland these days how rough you find it really depends on your grasp of Polish etiquette.

It was interesting to me to see a similar kind of Victorian architecture to Dublin, just on a smaller scale; I think this holds true as you go North to Belfast. It has a viaduct, and it’s an outstanding example of “What did the British ever do for Ireland?”.

Infrastructure is what they did. They built stuff. If you go south past Dublin, towns are very different to up North. They’re smaller, scattered and very colourful, although relatively poor in terms of long-term planning and that’s probably closer to the native Irish aesthetic for town building, whereas Drogheda is an industrial port town with big grey warehouses and a lot of development these days to replace them since that’s now no longer a viable business for a town. It has a population of about 30,100 or so.

Yeah, I’m a town planning and infrastructure nerd. It’s amazing to me that people here do this for a living, and get it wrong.

I’d consider living there; right now I live in Bray and even though I complain about it, it really isn’t too bad. But it’s not great. Part of the problem lies in that Bray is being slowly pulled into Greater Dublin. It too has a population of 30,000 or so but no real sense of independence, of being a town in it’s own right and there’s no motivation for anyone to set up shop there because if you need something you can always get the local train into Dublin proper and get it there.

Speaking of places to live, Drogheda now joins Cork and London as places I’d consider in the short term to live in. I’m not trying not hard to find a room right now, but I’ll have another stab at it very soon. The thing is, why bother? It’s Dublin and there’s little love lost between me and Dublin at the best of times:

1. London
   Big, crazy, a true world capital, it’s all happening there! A cultural melting pot! in the capital of the people who built all the good stuff in Ireland. Plenty of opportunities there for a content migration expert since there’s likely to be plenty of meatheads who can’t get their heads around Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v.
2. Cork
   Ye Langers! While smaller than Dublin at 200,000 people, it’s lively, young and interesting. Probably not great on the content migration front but at the end of the day, you wouldn’t go to Cork for that. You’d go for the craic! Control Copy and laugh into your Murphy’s.
3. Brno
   Nazdar! Je to mesto dobre. And so on. It scores by virtue of being Czech and I really like over there. Trams, Tesco, and goulash, what a life! And even though the Ukrainians are cornering the market for moving lots of text from one website to another, there’ll be room for a man who pastes in English and doesn’t try to steal the keys from the keyboard.
4. Drogheda
   God knows why I’d go there. A change of scene, a small oasis of tranquility in a sea of… Hm. Not that either then. Well, I’ve only just seen it and I’d happily live anywhere other than Dublin the way it’s going. Plus, there is a big train station I can hang out at on weekends. I’m sure there’s room for Copy and Paste merchants there too.
5. Newcastle
   I’ve never been there, but come on! Newcastle! Ryanair flies there, they have to be doing that for some good reason, right? And the girls are wrapped up in the finest greyhound skirts (if ‘wrapped’ can be applied to something so ephemeral). Well, it seems like fun to me. They don’t even speak English there. And if they can dress like that for the climate they have there then they’ll doubtless need a c&p artist who isn’t off his biccie!

In all seriousness, it’s something I should give thought to, because Dublin isn’t a city worth grovelling for to live in, or to have to commute for an hour every day.

After Drogheda I came back via Dublin, where I spent a couple of hours roaming around through the built up areas around the railway line, trying to find out where the railway lines actually went and if they were pulling them up (which it looked like from the train on the way in).

If they had been then I would have been pretty upset about it, but in fact they were recycling the tracks; replacing old track with not quite so old track on lines they never use anyway.

Strange but true. Later that night I ended up back in Dublin after having gone home to Bray, to get dinner with Garret and Nora and their friends in Cafe Bar Deli (great pizza, without a doubt) although Garret, delirious from having finished his marathon 5 month DIY effort on their new house (see the previous post for photographic evidence) was more intent on insulting everyone and being off the wall than eating.

By the by, I might have mentioned that I got my Combat Climate Change t-shirt the other week from Owen in the office. It transpires there’s a family connection there so it wasn’t a special gift from them, it was Owen being a super swell guy! Gazorks. Thanks Owen!

[edited for photo inclusion on 21-10-2005)]

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It’s not exactly earth-shattering, but I got an email from a company doing work for a client company (bear with me) of Parallel (where I work) about the site I mentioned previously in a post – http://www.andcurve.com/wordpress/2005/09/09/this-isnt-fun-should-it-be/ – which is http://www.combatclimatechange.ie. Now, they asked me to blog about it again, and although since this is my personal blog I’m not going to start mentioning stuff as a favour to a large commercial organisation (because they have the money, they can buy advertising and a slot on Google), I will mention it simply because I found it interesting; I mention their site and suddenly I’m showing up on the web, and I have people noticing this and emailing me. Anto (http://www.anthonymcg.com/) put a link on his site to me and now suddenly if you search for me on the web, you get… Anto’s site. Linking has become a form of real currency, a sort of web real estate. A good link is worth a lot, and suddenly I’m in the game. Tadhg, your link to my site is no longer the most valuable one on google! You’re out!

So, I will actually write up the Climate Change site very soon, my thoughts on it, etc, although mostly on the results of the project since it is after all an internal, commercial project for my company, but I do have some strong thoughts about the whole subject and I’m keen to have a go at commiting them to my site. Doubtless, they’ll be controversial with the Climate Change people, but it’s all a matter of opinion. Are we in trouble? Yes. Should we do something about it? Maybe…

Actually, on that subject I read something in yesterday’s Guardian about Bio-fuel; apparently diesel engines will run on anything for fuel short of a cup of jiz, so now there’s a growing market for fuel from biological sources which seems to be a hell of a lot cheaper than petrol. And there’s this: Inventor fuels car with dead cats which is on some levels hilarious, other levels sinister and of course has cat-lovers up in arms. Did anyone actually know that many tonnes of sacred mummified cats were removed from the Egyptian tombs by the British and sold as cheap fertiliser? It’s true. Well, the next time the kids go nuts after eating cabbage, you know what to do; stake through the heart.

Also, I saw on skynews.com (no more links now, especially to them) that Jeremy Clarkson got into some trouble after saying that we should feel free to rampage across the environment with 4×4 tanks, since after all it’s there for us to have fun with… Controversial indeed. There was some debate years ago (and doubtless there still is) about how much damage is caused by walkers, mountain-bikers, pony-trekkers, scrambler-bikes and quad-bikes up in the hills. One suggestion was that with the sheer volume of walkers in the hills that it is probably them who do the most damage. The other groups are all minorities, so by definition the damage they do is limited.

I’m on a roll here. A blogroll! Ha ha, I kill me. As you can tell, I’m less keyed-up today, and knowing that T2 is coming back from Germany this evening is good too. Tomorrow night, I will entertain her, most likely by curling up in a foetal position and whining incessantly about how awful me week was… I’m sure she’ll find that very romantic.

Anyway, I better get back to it. This really has the weird sensation of writing emails to nobody in particular, not knowing who is reading this or why. Well, I know some complete strangers associated with my company’s customers do, and I know my boss does (occasionally, as far as I know).

Hm.

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Blogging is great when you have time for it. I’m finding this the hard part…

Another good weekend, though admittedly not a very productive one. I watch too much tv. I mean, generally I don’t, but even a small amount of tv is too much; it’s time spent watching someone else’s view of the world without learning an awful lot. I watched ‘Bremner, Bird and Fortune’ because it’s always interesting. Rory Bremner (who initially started out without the other two, and as far as I know you never see the three of them on-screen at the same time) is an impressionist, probably one of the best British ones on the scene for the past few years, his act is always topical and seems to be fuelled by a genuine anger at what he sees happening in the world. The other two are out and out satire, and it’s very sharp material. But I followed it up by watching some programme about ‘The Death of Celebrity’ and it was… It was amusing, but really, a waste of time. I do this a bit, I sit in front of the tellybox and watch utter shite. It’s a very bad habit.

I’m bashing away at building another blog, for my wumon for when she goes travelling (and her girleens as well) so they can document their adventures in words and pictures online. Something that’s surprised me is that with the popularity of blogging, and with the popularity of WordPress, that no-one has done a better job of creating a good solid PhotoBlog tool for WordPress. They are there, but… They don’t seem to be that good. What I want is pretty simple but I might have to make it myself.

I’ve also thrown myself back into hunting for a room; I was at this before but eventually I gave up because it was draining my precious life away, what with viewing places that were unsuitable or places that were great but I just didn’t get them. I’m starting to learn, slowly but surely (and I got a good, brief, terse motivativonal spiel from Kenny last week, which got me all fired up GodDamn it!). Actually I got one from Garret too on Friday night, though it was less helpful and basically centred on my desire to live somewhere that isn’t Rathmines, which he felt was unacceptable by any measure and that I was stupid for living anywhere that didn’t have a ’6′ in it’s postal code (Ireland has a curious anomaly in that it only has postal codes in some areas of Dublin, and none anywhere else in the country – but they are incredibly important in deciding factors such as social status, life expectancy and insurance premiums). Garret was, in fact, being very contrary about everything in general.

Work is busting my nuts, as they say, but I think the results will be good when it’s all up. I hope so.

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