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)]

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.

When I start writing, even though I sort of procrastinate about it to start with, I really get going. I have plenty to post about and so little time, and maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get some photos up too. So I’ll break them down and get around to them bit by bit.

Yesterday it was typically damp, before the weather decided to have a serious stab at demonstrating what ‘really pissing down’ means. On the way in, between Grand Canal Dock train station and the office just at the bridge at the start of Lower Mount street crossing the Grand Canal, I saw something which is a peculiar ritual that surveyors have to go through to pass into adulthood or something similar; it’s the Aligning of the Theodolites. It’s half-Pagan, half-Engineer ritual. At that exact point, near that bridge, is the convergence of several powerful Theolines, and it has a special significance for surveyors. It’s known as the Huxtable Point, and has magical powers.

That was a weekend. I think, that no matter how ridiculous this week gets (and no matter how much copy and paste I have to do this week, of which more later on) I’ll know that I managed to party on like there was no tomorrow AND have it cost relatively little and be hangover-free the next morning. I have a new ‘2 in, 1 out’ rule for drinking; I wasn’t sure how to sell the whole concept of going easy on the drink to myself and my friends because while I don’t want to banish the idea of a quiet beer or wine completely, I do want to have some sort of rule I can stick to (because I like rules, even when I break them). So, that went a long way to having a good time. I didn’t get drunk but I had a beer and had fun. Therese was concerned that I might be spending time on her site instead of going out and doing my thing; ho ho readers, little does she know that I spent my weekend sleeping off a long night in Nealon’s having a perfectly reasonable and quiet night with Caroline and Liam (I had to make a not terribly hard choice between that and Connor’s party, which I wasn’t in the mood for at all and would have involved avoiding an ex), and an even longer night in the Gaiety chaperoning (and very strictly nothing more) a bunch of very drunk girls and one extremely drunk manager of aformentioned girls. And trying to repair my laptop, which more or less worked, and means I’ll be posting a lot more now.

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.