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

(edited 21.12.05)
That didn’t work very well, did it? This is a re-edit of an accidental posting I made using the Flock browser which is based on Firefox but has some fancy features for working with blogs. However, it’s apparent that it doesn’t do it very well despite seeming to be able to, and so I ended up putting live a test post. It just goes to show that I shouldn’t try to muck about with pre-release software, as exciting as it all seems.

I’d have taken it down, only now people have commented so it’s too late. Poo.

More adventures to be written about later, we had the company Christmas party on Friday and today I was in the UK on a business trip, all very exciting, and Friday (my first day of Christmas holiday) I’ll be in hospital for some sort of examination. Nothing too serious, but doubtless I’ll be walking funny for a few days. Let your feeble imaginations run riot with that one. Also, there have been many more entertaining posts over on www.ideasforcheapstuff.com with the ever-delightful Tee and her girleens so get over there and check it out.

If any of you, my loyal and ever diminishing readership, want to come over to Los Blancheles for a drink over Christmas, or to meet up for a pint in Dublin, let me know; you’re not only welcome, I invite it.

(edited 21.12.05)
This might come in handy: http://www.andcurve.com/wordpress/contact/

I started a series of posts recently, roughly every week or so, and then stuff came up and then something else happened, and then poo, the post was rendered essentially useless and I had to start again. The few remaining regular followers of my site, which include Tee and Tony, occasionally Kenny and Sean, and sometimes Fergal and a couple of Parallel customers (allegedly, but I hope so; more on this shortly) have no doubt been thinking that this is one of the less persuasive reasons to fire up a web browser, though my outburst of 11 November seems to have gone down very well as a piece of entertainment.

I was going to do my posts during my recent trip to England, but I didn’t have quite enough time (as you’ll see, that’s kind of surprising but that’s how it happened) and then after that I was all tied up until now, at the end of my week off…

Weeks of not posting, an absolute sin in terms of maintaining an audience which as I explained in a previous post is very important indeed, according to dogmatic self-appointed Danish web experts. Though as my previous post demonstrated, I have an audience which hovers in at around two so stuff like audience numbers is a moot point. Anyway, there’s been a lot on, and over the next day or two there will be many, many photos and all sorts of odds and ends. I’ll probably break them down into individual posts.

A bit of a recap: Two weeks ago Rik the Belgian came over, and although he spent a lot of that two weeks roaming around the country, we had a lot of fun in Dublin and it was great to see him again. During that time, I went to Tee’s brother’s wedding party,
The traditional pulling off of the garter with the teeth. I don’t think this was their first time…
That’s Tee’s (and Joseph and Derrick and Michelle’s) Oul’ Fella in the foreground
Michelle and Laura, Tee’s sister and best mate respectively. Dangerous women for sure.

Dmitry and Alex’s party,
Sarka, Tanya, Rik and Ciaran; aren’t we cosy?
Dmitry is concerned we’re not drinking enough, while Rik realises he is actually very drunk. Again.
Me, Ciaran and Sarka celebrating Sarka’s theft of Ciaran’s beer

I got myself a room in Los Blancheles (that’s Blanchardstown; I won’t say it again), hung out with Rik,
Rik tasting Guinness; this is his ‘appreciation’ face

went through childhood ephemera with my brother, more parties, a vast improvement in my footie skills, my mother bought a house (with cash! What a turnaround.), I visited the Jennifer,
Jen and Tristan having a wrestle; that kid is strong!

I had a big adventure in England, I walked to Maynooth,
Garret The Troll surveys the journey ahead. There is still far to go.

there was a great party to help poor Pakistanis,
Ibiza Uncovered. In Owen’s house. Notice the pride of Pakistan at the top…

and I painted my mother’s house.
Haarrrgh! The roller!

Friday morning two weeks ago I got to experience the Calcutta Express, which is the train from Maynooth to Pearse.
Waiting for the Calcutta Express at Castleknock station. Sitting on the roof will be harder when they electrify the line out here.
Not many people know or even believe that Los Blancheles has a train station although it is cunningly named ‘Castleknock’, and I’ve discovered that people in Dublin know surprisingly little about the greater Dublin rail network, or at least what’s left of it (it’s a fact that as soon as the English were out of Ireland, the Irish ripped up the bulk of the rail network and replaced it with shoddy roads and poor public transport. Fucking idiots.). The line through Los Blancheles is known as the Calcutta Express simply because it’s generally completely packed solid during rush hour, standing room only, and to make matters worse it has to wait for a random period of time just before Connolly station (and sometimes at other points on the line) because it plays second fiddle to the coastal line.

Potentially a great service, unfortunately run by an Irish state company (yeah, underfunded, I know, but money doesn’t organise timetables or explain to people why the train has stopped apparently at random. Diligence does that.).

We had a company lunch on Friday too, which is always an odd experience
Having an interesting lunch. That is Lyner on my right.
I mean, it was great that Tom took us out to the Indian, the food was good albeit minimal, but having a regimented lunch with most of the work crew in a semi-structured environment tends to feel like… work. It was reasonably good food though, and relaxed enough.

After a hard and fast game of footie I had a hard and fast game sprint to Kilkenny to visit Jennie and her remarkably fast growing kid. Originally the idea was to stay for most of the weekend but for various reasons (not least, having spent very little time in my new home so far and having to get a number of things done, as well as the ongoing crusade to weed out uneccessary old stuff from my childhood memories since my mother is moving and wishes things to be ‘sorted’) I ended up staying just Friday and heading back on Saturday evening which was probably better for everyone… Jesus, her young fella has grown! I hadn’t seen Jennie and her kid since well before I started going out with Tee (which comes close to putting exact dates on it all) so the last time he was exactly a year old. Now he’s 18 months, walking, talking, making lifestyle choices, negotiating his next mortgage and figuring out how to steal my job… Crazy stuff, and reminds me that time is passing; I’m not getting any younger. 33 next March!

So there’s Tristan:
Tristan sizes me up. He reckons he could take me.
And the Jennifer:
Poor Jennifer is all played out. She needs a rest.
And we can combine them:
Now they’re both all played out!
And then we can remove Jennifer, and add Mikey and Jane:
Mikey (Jen’s brother) and Jane, his wumon, with Tristan
For those who routinely make the same jokes (and you know who you are), I was in Australia at the time. So go fuck yourselves, it’s not funny anymore.

Kilkenny is great place even if it’s expanding like there’s no tomorrow. There’s a great clothes shop called ‘Praha’ which has a logo in the colours of the Czech flag. Actually, it just sells the same stuff as everywhere else, I guess the proprietors must be Czech.

I got my duvet on Sunday morning, after an overlong and tortuous trip to the Los Blancheles Shopping District, where you can buy just about anything that it is possible to buy, and get caught in 10 kilometre tailbacks with your SUV on the way home. Shopping, ‘they’ say, is the new religion here in Ireland and everyone was at worship that morning, flinging their cards and cash about with abandon. A lot of these people have high mortgages too, or other debts, it’s pretty frightening to shop for a pastime under those circumstances.

The entrance to Los Blancheles Retail Park. You park, and then you retail. Shop til you drop from sheer irritation.

Me? I just needed a good warm duvet with feathers pulled from a real duck.

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.

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)]

I’m really feeling like shit right now, thanks to my bi-annual cold having kicked in. I got home early today but under the promise of being in and fit to work the next few days… I have a feeling it’s going to be a trying couple of days that’s going to probably end up with me hating work. I don’t tend to take time off for sick leave, by and large; I don’t get sick much and I wouldn’t see the point, other than that if you take time off and get better sooner, you can get more done afterwards.

I’m going to post some photos now, because I’ve been remiss in doing that. Although I’ve had a hectic month and taken lots of photos of this, that and the other, I’ve written relatively little and posted almost no photos at all. I’ve been trying to work out how to get a decent photo-upload system going for Therese and her girleens of Ideas For Cheap Stuff because that was part of what I promised but it’s one of the areas where unfortunately WordPress is a little patchy and the solutions tend to be over-engineered cludges or hacks. I think I can do better but I haven’t had enough time. Most likely, I’ll embrace and extend one of the existing tools to do what I want, adding some features, making sense of existing ones, and generally achieving what I want.

The pictures! Some of these are several weeks old; Therese and Lids have been gone a couple of weeks now, for example and some of these are from well before that. Most of them are, actually.

The eyebrow bar

Tee staring out a tiger at the zoo

Me and Therese monkeying about in the zoo

Me and Therese, yum!

Me spazzing in the Odious Bar

That’s Tee on the right and Lids on the left, getting ready to check in

Tee, Lids and Dee posing for a photo shoot. Messers!

Tee, Dee and Lids, girl dancing action!

Therese on blue doing the eyes! Eeep!

Me in the abc suit, helping out with DIY in G—– and N—’s gaff

G—– is a painter boy

N— is a painter girl

G—– The Destroyer surveys the carnage he has wrought

Me spaz dancing in the Odious Bar. How bizarre!

The next episode will be about sunny Drogheda, and my adventures up North! Yay!

(edited 28.06.2007)
Obliterated the photo of Garret and Nora, by request.