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

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.

A non-eventful weekend, really. I wasn’t even productive (other than managing to scan about 4 million photos and organise them and some others on cds for the girleens what travel).

Girleens trying to look innocent. But I know better now…

I was shaken after talking to Tee on Sunday. It was great to talk to her and I could ask for little more but reminded me of how much I miss her too, which is good and bad all at the same time. Like being wrestled by a huge angry chocolate bear.

So, not much happening otherwise. But I did buy an international call card with which to call Jane in England (that’s her on the left there; the other woman is Ute. They are way older than me but don’t look it). Hopefully I’ll visit her soon. I had booked the trip during the summer months but some pretty serious stuff happened to one of my nearest and dearest which meant I couldn’t go. Anyone who knows me well knows what I’m talking about.

Jane and Ute laugh at the comedy that is life, while encouraging me to make a meal of my travel plans

Since I had the card and I hadn’t been in touch with people, I called Erika in Japan, although I ended up having to call her on my mobile.

Erika with More Alcohol! No good!

And I called Sean, who I could always email but a chat is good, and besides he is very entertaining to talk to. And his mother Gael, as well.

Sean on the left, G—– organising shady business deals on the right

Sean and G—– discover that flight is powerful. And next to impossible.

Sean will hopefully be writing some articles for this site soon, including some stuff on AJAX and Content Deportation technologies, which we think are going to be really big soon.

And Rik called! Rik is coming over from Belgium to explore Ireland for a couple of weeks. Rather foolishly, he seems to feel that Ireland is a great way to spend his first extensive holiday in two years. Well, I better find stuff for him to do.

Rik in Ljubljana preparing to loudly call me a cunt from across the street

So, my weekend in pictures, more or less. I shaved my head again which is something I feel I need to do more often because, as you can see in the photo below, there really isn’t very much hair left at all so I’m trying to get a bit of consistency to the hair extinction situation.

The baldness.

And I was out on the town in a low key manner on Friday, where I saw the new bridge out past the IFSC over the Liffey, which looked great with all the lights and what have you.

Sean O’Casey Bridge by gaslight. Or halogen, probably

(edited 28.06.2007)
Obliterated the photo references to Garret, by request.

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.

So, that crazy night out! What about it, huh? Not much, but it was very interesting. I don’t get out too much these days, I’m old and busy and what have you, so it doesn’t interest me as much these days. I used to go out with a mentality which actually does have a term for it, and often resulted in my not having as much fun as I could have had without it: desperation.

It was refreshing to be in the Gaiety, a theatre which metamorphoses into a massive and very mixed (and occasionally interesting) nightclub with dance music, live bands, a movie and all sorts of things happening until just shy of 4am. I was not, as I might have been even 5 months ago, interested in scoring or anything of the kind, I was just there for the fun and it was a chance to hang out with Jennie and catch up, or at least it would have been if she hadn’t been extremely drunk and getting competitive with Angela and her artificial boobs. I fended off some somewhat amourous advances from nearby women and enjoyed generally being pleasantly unavailable for anything more intimate than a chat and a hug, which was a great feeling. I guess I was the token huggable Pole, in spite of not actually being Polish.

The odd thing is that not being drunk and not giving a shit about getting some action (I would even say advertising being straight but uninterested) is like sticking up a huge flashing neon sign saying “Challenge! Come get some!”. Hmm. So I guess it’s true; you can’t get it when you’re actively looking for it, but as soon as you’re broadcasting vibes indicating that you’re off the market, everyone wants some. Is that women specifically, or women, men and even mutants, god help them? That would be a good one to test the waters with in Dun Laoighaire.

So it went. I’m just sorry I don’t have photos, but that’s probably a good thing and I really didn’t think the girls would have been too comfortable with me taking photos while they were so out of it.

Sunday saw me fixing my laptop. Fixing the laptop really deserves it’s own write up; I didn’t exactly repair anything, but at least I know what the problem is and what’s involved in repairing it, and I very much want to get the relevant links up for anyone else who has this problem and sets about Googling for it. It’s a very, very common problem with iBooks (that is an Apple consumer laptop) so isolating what was causing my screen to die wasn’t, in the end, very hard. It was a tedious process though, and it does irritate me to think that I could have restored the functionality to my laptop within half an hour last week, had I known what I needed to do (remove the back from the screen and re-arrange the wiring). Now it doesn’t go to sleep correctly all the time while the laptop is closed, but it’s better than nothing and I can get some work done.

A small fact about getting the repairs done: If the repairs cost more than €250 – €300, then I’m better off buying a whole new one which will be in at around €1000 and which will be much, much better. That will take €50 and up to 9 days to find out from the repair centre. I’m telling you now, it’s a racket.

I also spent plenty of time trying to get Garret out to watch the football game on Saturday afternoon. The idea originally was to help him with painting and assembling the odds and ends he needs to finish for their (himself and Nora, his girlfriend) house. We didn’t get too much done, and with a bit of economy of truth I got him out of the house over to Kenny’s, where we watched the Irish team put on a remarkable display of not doing very much against the Cypriot team who, while not being a fantastic team, did their best to play a game of football. In fact, they would have won by a comfortable margin if it hadn’t been for the Irish goalkeeper, Shay Given, who put on a performance worthy of the Matrix movies in keeping Ireland in the game, leaping diving and generally defying gravity. This is all the more interesting in light of the fact that Cyprus is already out of the tournament on points; in other words, for them it was a matter of honour rather than staying in the tournament, and they could have gone home having lost 10-0 and it wouldn’t have made any odds to them. Nonetheless, they put up a spirited fight to the end which is more than can be said for the Irish team. It’s a moderately contentious issue with Ireland fans. It was after that, when we went to do something more interesting which was hang out in the Dice Bar, when I cleared off for the previously mentioned night of bedlam.

[edited for bad spelling, clarity and errata @ 6.41pm. Worth a re-read, I'd say]