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

Whoa. I have to say, that post was strong, contained harsh language and was a general all purpose apple-cart upsetting gesture of the first order. I was angry, I was impulsive and I can tell you it was cathartic in a big way. But enough! What’s done is done and let’s all move on, in our interesting ways.

Weekend was hectic and if it wasn’t for living out here in this great house then I’d have lost the plot, although hanging out with Rik was great and Neil’s party on Saturday was a bit of fun. Watching the Irish rugby team get turned into a stain by the New Zealand All Blacks team on Saturday was demoralising but it was sort of inevitable, like watching the Faroese football team put up a spirited fight against Brazil. I also managed to get more work done on my ongoing project of getting an image manager for WordPress (the current offerings, while all free are also not very good at all), which will allow Tee to put images on her site.Today I had to trawl through old toys and odds and ends from my brother’s and my childhood which was emotional and trying but necessary. So, I am happy enough.

What I’d like to know is, if you’re reading my web log, who are you and where are you? Comments below please and don’t be put off if your comment gets held for moderation, I’ll put it up sooner or later

Right, I just got an email from someone I haven’t heard from in a while so I better get on and actually do some personal communication…

It’s been good, the last few days; I got a big room in a nice house, sharing with good people. I had a good sociable weekend. Even the erratic public transport and inclement weather shouldn’t have been able to put a dampener on the great feeling of a good night’s sleep in a solid (massive) bed.

But something else did, and I’m still seeing red over it. Today I got to hear a tirade which could have curdled milk, and it was directed at myself and my colleagues, the generally gist of which was our competence at doing our jobs. Now, I sometimes say I’m not the hardest worker – not lazy, just not sweating blood – but I do my job well, I’m good at it, and there shouldn’t be any reason to complain. I get paid to do a job, not to care about it or have passion or shit like that. What enrages me is that we work hard, all of us and if someone has an issue with any of it then it should be handled personally, in a group or face to face, not broadcasting in our direction.

This was out of line, I’m well cunted off and I think it’s a red card offence. If anyone reading this has any suggestions on how I should handle this, comment below. Remember, red card offence.

Christ, I could tear the heads off chickens and still be angry, I really could.

Get up early. Commute. Work. Engage*. Commute. Home late. Eat.Sleep.

In between fits getting in touch with friends, email, phonecalls, writing for this site and trying to develop some software (which is as close to a hobby as I’ll get right now). Somewhere in there is the bones of a lifestyle.

This isn’t quality of life. Now, I don’t want to complain about what I do have, but this is not something i’ll look back on fondly in later years. Maybe it’s a self-discipline issue?

On a related note, I was thinking again about the possibility (as I did late last year) about working in the Civil Service somewhere, trying to improve the quality of life for other people, planning things so that they don’t have hours of commute, so that things are where they should be for the community, so that people generally have a better life. Seems to me like it beats sticking my finger up someone’s arse and then wondering how come they didn’t like it. Excuse the crudeness of that last turn of phrase, but that’s sometimes what it feels to me that I’m doing; I’m certainly not improving anyone’s life right now and I think that’s what I should be doing.

Incidentally, I think I’m good for about 6 and half large right now, so aside from personal debt (and I’ve finally got a hang of the balance between personal debt and credit) I think I’ve got options. I should check these out over the coming week…

* How I hate that work as an expression of social interaction.

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)]

It was a beautiful morning yesterday. Truly stunning, I think; a clear blue sky, with golden light which continued through the day. I didn’t take a photo because I have photos of such things and I’m happy just have seen it and enjoyed it for what it was.

I was thinking about that last night, that I’m lucky to experience these things. In fact, I’m lucky about a number of things – I’m healthy of mind and body, I’m not generally beset by traumas, I have good friends, my life in general is pretty good even when I complain about particular things which are actually quite trivial. And I get to enjoy seeing a sky with light like that, which is a special thing that shows how meaningless some of those trivial things are.

That rather neatly brings me to something I alluded to briefly in a post a couple of days ago, ‘the copy and paste’; I don’t intend to write to much about work generally, what I do there and how I feel about it because it’s sensitive in several ways and it’s unprofessional to start expounding at length about issues in the workplace in a public forum. It doesn’t help any and might actually cause a number of problems, not least to me. It would be like, for example, drunkenly discussing company strategy in the pub on a Friday night to anyone who’ll listen for three hours, and by Saturday morning everyone knows the company’s strategy for the next six months. Of course, I am who I am, and I’ll say this: I’m hoping to get the guys at work to let me do some web stuff. I’ve been doing some HTML and CSS stuff at home, and I reckon I could tackle a couple of web pages, maybe even a whole site…

Hm, I better stop ‘stirring the shit’ because I’ll likely get into trouble anyway. As you might gather, I’m not entirely satisfied in the office but issues are being resolved (diplomatic company management speak for things are getting better) and doubtless I’ll be singing a different tune in a few day’s time. My PC is already running faster…

I did intend to write something about the whole issue of self-censorship because it’s interesting, but I’ll summarise briefly by saying that I’m not going to go into company issues, and at the same time I’m not going to sell the company either. I’ll write what I like here, within reason.

The other morning, incidentally, I got my very own Combat Climate Change t-shirt, as thanks for my hard work on the site. By an interesting coincidence there was a lead article in one of the free morning tabloids about the cost of our Government’s attitude towards the whole issue, which is going to be very high once the various fines for not meeting our targets for reducing carbon-based pollution are calculated. For those who don’t know, the Irish Government is notorious for it’s attitude towards waste disposal, recycling, pollution and environmental issues generally (which is if you want to get rid of it, bury it somewhere or put it in a river, if you want us to do something about it for you then you’ll pay dearly for it), and finally the European Union is taking notice and handing out massive fines. So, on the one hand they’ll spend the money to promote say, putting less water in your kettle, but on the other hand they don’t make recycling a primary aim and get people to produce less waste, much less get companies to be more environmentally friendly. That’s because then Ireland will be ‘less competitive’. It’s remarkable, and goes to show that Ireland, while now a wealthy country, is still socially very backward.

Also, as an aside (which goes to show that I’m still going on repetitively about last Saturday) Garret mentioned to me that allegedly the Rape Crisis Centre may have come to the conclusion that Rohypnol/drug rape doesn’t happen anywhere as often as people think it does; in fact, some girls are drinking more, losing control, and then thinking the next day that the only way that they could have done what they did the night before is by having been drugged… I’m not saying this is true, I’m not saying that anyone said this, but if it’s true then it’s very interesting. It goes hand in hand with what doctors observed in Cork, which is violent girl-gang culture where girls drink as much as guys and then go out and beat the shit out of people very much like blokes do. I’ve certainly seen both happen. Gender Equality legislation doesn’t make a girl’s liver any bigger. That’s all I’m saying.

[Originally written 13.10.05, posted late thanks to my 'Write First, Post Later' strategy, which isn't going terribly well. Sick as a dog right now. Poo. Also, the weather isn't very good anymore and I'm not sure which is worse.]