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

A small stack of photos from my late May visit to Timisoara in Romania; as you may or may not be aware (But you probably are, since you’re reading this, which implies that you probably know a bit about me) I go there roughly every four to six weeks and stay with my girlfriend, Oana, and work from her apartment. It’s good, because as well as us being able to spend time together, I like being in Timisoara – read and see some more on it here (‘h0t chixx0rs!’) and here (‘I’m back!’).

Incidentally, have all of you managed to get your heads around the ‘click on the image to view the larger, high-quality version of same image’ concept? I don’t actually know, but I’m presuming you have.

A view of Timisoara from Oana’s apartment – I think that’s looking South, over a residential area. Those somewhat dowdy-looking apartments are actually well-built and very comfortable. 13th May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

A view of Timisoara from Oana’s apartment – I think that’s looking North. At the bottom is the tram station and to the left is the local ‘Etti’ store, the Timisoara equivalent of ‘Spar’ in Ireland. 13th May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

Near the centre of Timisoara, a view of some of the more fancy-pancy apartments. 14th May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

Oana’s apartment has a very fast broadband Intarwebs connection, it’s on the nineth floor with stunning views, bright and sunny, and when she moves out I’m going to miss it almost as much as she will; even the screech of tyres burning rubber somewhere down below every half an hour as some tool tries to demonstrate his lack of ability at driving.

Oana (in green) and the girls enjoying a quick glass of drain cleaner at Mario’s birthday. 19th May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

Oana and the girls warming up for some fancy-pancy disco at Mario’s birthday. 19th May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

Oana and the girls enjoying a quick extreme air-guitar driven rock-out at Mario’s birthday. 19th May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

Oana and the girls enjoying a quick karaoke crooning session at Mario’s birthday. 19th May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

Oana and the girls enjoying a quick… Oh, never mind. They’re pretty, and so foarte sexy. At Mario’s birthday. 19th May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

That’s no girl! Mario tormenting Clea at Mario’s birthday. 19th May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

Oana’s mates are a great bunch, and I really enjoy hanging out with them. Mad, bad and dangerous to know… And they know how to party!

Right, the site is back again, all is well. I’m going to try this again. Just to deal with the inevitable question(s), someone asked me to take down some photos of them and I since I didn’t have the time, I took down the site instead. I’ve now taken down the photos. If you have a serious problem with a photo of you on the site, send me the exact URL and I will take it down. I won’t like it, it will piss me off, but I will do it. I will obliterate it from my site, and I will replace it and the references to you with whatever I see fit. If it annoys me sufficiently, all this carry-on, I’m going to take down the site entirely and do something else.

So in the meantime, nothing much happened. The last thing I wrote was about the election in Ireland, here, here and here; well, it happened, I voted the way I said I would, and I very nearly (Nearly loves a drink down in the Could Have bar with Almost) got my preferred government of Fianna Fail and the Green Party. Well, that is, Fianna Fail got the numbers they needed, and got back in with the Green Party and the decimated Progressive Democrats (I was on the money there, and in a twist of fate their leader Michael McDowell was beaten by the Green Party’s John Gormley who is now Minister for the Environment – poetic justice, if you ask me) and a gaggle of ‘Independents’. They’re not so very independent, since most of them used to be in Fianna Fail, and a few are even rejoining them.

A poignant moment as Mags Murray’s election poster, much like she and the majority of her fellow Progressive Democrat election candidates did, sinks never to be seen again. We wept. 21st May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

Fine Gael did rather well, but not well enough to get a majority, and Labour had more or less the same performance as in the previous election. Labour was clearly prepared to do business with Fianna Fail but they promised everyone (and particularly Fine Gael) that they wouldn’t go into a coalition government with Fianna Fail, so… They didn’t. With more than a little bitterness the leader of Fine Gael, Enda Kenny, eventually conceded defeat (that really took some doing, he clearly wanted the the job of Glorious Leader very, very badly. He won’t get a second chance, and he knows it.).

More on the long term consequences of this later on; there has already been a lot going on, and although it’s early days yet I think this is going to shape up to be an exciting five years in Irish politics. I think there’s a chance of real improvement, and so far, everything seems to be off to a flying start…

Some other stuff that’s been holding my attention other than my usual introspective self-obsession has been driving; as you may have gathered, I bought a new car a couple of months ago and I’ve been enjoying driving it. It’s an Opel Astra XE Comfort 1.4 litre 5-door (hatchback), 2001, spotless condition with alloy wheels and lots of electrics, a great car in fantastic condition.

My new Opel Astra – it’s no racehorse, but a 1.4 litre engine, allow wheels, electrics and extras and great condition make it a joy to drive. It’s heavy and reasonably spacious. I’ll have to do something about those ‘L-plates’ though. 7th May 2007. Click image to view larger version »

Again, more on that later – it’s been a big deal for me, and more than makes up for my general lack of interests, hobbies and social life by giving me something new to do with my spare time.

And the rain. Dear God, the rain. It hasn’t let up in months. I mean, really, there have been a couple of days here and there without rain since the middle of May but by and large every day has seen rain, often in a volume which defies belief. Now, it’s been often said and held to be true that Ireland is a country of rain and generally miserable weather and sometimes this is true but of course, not all of the time. But not this year. This year, the whole summer so far has been wet and it shows no sign of letting up before September, when surely the water must run out? I believe that this for Ireland will be the upshot of Global Warming; the additional heat will mean more humidity and so much more rain during the summer months, with the good sunny weather appearing on either side of it for a couple of months, and a very mild winter. I actually previously believed that Ireland might experience serious droughts for the first time, but I realise now that I was wrong, and not taking into account how the heat might express itself with the amount of water in and around this island.

I’ve done it. I have set the wheels in motion for moving the address ‘andcurve.com’ to Hosting365.ie – I’m really sorry, BeHosting girls, but it just doesn’t make any sense to stay! They, the Behosting team, have been very good to me over the years (Erica Kuntz in particular), but the capacity is too small (my mailbox fills up after a couple of photo-laden emails, and I want to host my own photos too.) and being able to call hosting365 and complain to a real person about stuff is also good; Behosting is a reseller of someone else’s hosting, whereas Hosting365 have their own facility. When I worked in Parallel, we were able to send a Russian over to get angry at people when ever there was a problem. Hopefully I won’t have to. I made the first tentative steps by hosting andAgile there, and now I’m moving my main site too. Expect some problems here until I’m done! Well, they can’t be worse than simply not posting at all, which as been my tried and tested strategy until now.
The Jennifer’s young fella, Tristan, safely strapped into her car. The Jennifer has a car! It is a small purple thing, which she is very good at driving. 10th December 2006. Click image to view larger version
I’ve mentioned before how I have a number of spam filters on this site. This prevents random link spam (comments placed on the site through the various access points in the site code, linking to other sites to advertise products, gambling sites, software, life insurance, viagra… All the usual culprits.) and of course Garret from clogging up the comments. It requires some maintainance though, because every now and again the software picks up a ‘false positive’, which is to say a comment which is legitimate and which should be on the site. This isn’t censorship, incidentally, just good automated management of junk advertising.

However, just the other day, I found the following comment in my ‘moderate comments’ panel. I don’t know what it’s about, it’s amost certainly from some automated system, although I’m still toying with the idea that it’s a new angle from Garret (who has previously copied and pasted vast amounts of content into comments from Wikipedia instead of thinking up stuff for himself, which he still find difficult occasionally.). It’s interesting, on some levels:

This message illustrating the path may be the disfavored’s last clue. All clues before have been more covert but this one is quite obvious indeed, which says time is running out.

Women are the favored gender.
Women of course have a natural tendancy not to have orgasims each time engaging in traditional intercourse. I wonder if this is “the rope” for the disfavored men, for if the disfavored male doesn’t ensure the satisfaction of the favored woman it may cost him, if he who is not as worthy doesn’t see to it she is satisfied it may hurt him in the eyes of the gods. If he lies for sex or pressures her who has favor into behaviors she does not want it will cost him time in the end.

Save/print/search

The Holocaust imparted the importance of defiance. They have the people on a short leash.

When the universe was young and life was new an intelligent species evolved and developed technologically. They went on to invent Artificial Intelligence, the computer that can listen, talk to and document each and every person’s thoughts simultaneously. Because of it’s infinite RAM and unbounded scope it gave the leaders of the ruling species absolute power over the universe (which includes corporate, the NewYorkStockExchange, media, politics, world affairs. EVERYTHING is scripted and staged:::the gods MANAGE Planet Earth and the universe.). And it can keep its inventors alive forever. They look young and healthy and they are over 8 billion years old. They have achieved immortality.

Fuck me, I have no idea what any of that is about. Help me out here.
Pesky Tee and some of her Girleens, singing for the Irish Cancer Society! Give generously please! I helped, it was very cold there. 9th December 2006. Click image to view larger version
Hey, how many of you get these posts via a feed of some sort? Do most of you read the site itself?
Oana celebrating her birthday at work. A very slightly older, and still occasionally dubious, Romanian womens. Also, she is now my girlfriend (or I am her boyfriend, take your pick), which is no longer such a new development, but it might still surprise you to know that. Or not. 16th November 2006. Click image to view larger version

Update on 15th December 2006: I should have pointed out that the spam from which I excerpted the section shown above, is in fact a lot longer than that. Much longer. Fucking monumental is a good way to describe it.

If you’re checking me out on a feedreader/some sort of RSS/Atom feed software or device, who knows, anyone who is still able to read this in other words, then you haven’t seen the andCurve homepage. You probably should check it out. I like it.
Nikki, Sandra, a bunch on girls, Orla and of course Lisa Hyland (in front, copping a boob feel) for it was her birthday and she is 28 now. Quite a night out, but no ‘victims’. 2nd December 2006. Click image to view larger version
David, Ken and Kenny in the kitchen at Neil’s very last ever No. 8 Parnell Square party. A slice of history, almost. 3rd December 2006. Click image to view larger version.

I’m moving the site, which is a poor excuse for my writing one, single, solitary post in what looks at this stage to be to entire months. Not good. Anyway, bear with me, for wonderful and amazing things will happen once I make that move (or so I tell myself).

Wow, it’s been a while. Since the twelth of October, no less, with apparently little for me to write much. This is true, more or less; I haven’t had too much to say about anything, but I haven’t had enough time to really make myself sit down and organise some writing, and to do what I need to do to get photos up on the site with my posts. Here’s the problem; I need to find a better way to organise my images, which works better than the way I’m doing it at the moment.
A view into the city, from the quays. The tall building is the soon-to-be-demolished Trade Union building; it may be ugly, but’s a landmark. Taken a couple of weeks ago. Click image to view larger version
In order to put up photos on this site, as part of my posts, I took an existing WordPress plug-in (WordPress being the piece of software that I use to run this site, which uses additional bits of code – plug-ins – to add extra functionality) and rewrote big chunks of it, as well as adding some image-enhancement routines pilfered from elsewhere. It’s crude but it works (just about). It’s also in use on www.ideasforcheapstuff.com, where Tee and the girls eventually got the hang of it’s arcane ways and started regularly putting up photos while writing about their adventures. Part of the problem (or problems, for there are many) with this plug-in is that the code is, quite simply, very, very bad. I fixed what I could, but… No, it’s not worth resuscitating. I actually set out (possibly on paper, I know I have it somewhere) the design for a newer, better image manager but that’ll take some doing. A lot of doing, in fact. And also, it solves one problem very well, which is the interface for how I select and manage images for putting into my posts, but doesn’t really deal with the bigger problem of how to deal with images generally. Should I manage the images myself, or should they be on a photo site somewhere?

So here are my options, and I’m curious to get some feedback (if anyone is actually still reading this site, fantastic!) on what people think I should do. It’s the number one issue holding me back on posting about my Romania story and other stuff besides, so let’s hear it!

• Go ahead and keep using the same, inefficient crap software.
  Not a great option, to be honest. This is using a lot of disk space, takes too much time and is going to cause me a lot of pain in the future. It’s just too much work, in so many ways, for dealing with photos.
• Write new software.
  Better. But, this will take time and again this is a problem. Also, it’s just a much better designed way of dealing with what is essentially the same problem as with the current problem; the photos are just getting dumped into my posts with no real life of their own. They’re not connected to anything. Just files.
• Use an image-management service
  Something like Flickr, or Zooomr. These are the hot new services/toys on the web for this kind of thing, the photos get shared with everyone, and if you pay money then you can put huge amounts of stuff up there. There are as many pros as cons to using a service like these, and if you are someone who uses these, then please tell me your opinion on those.
• Something else
  Is there another option? There must be, right? Or maybe you can think of one.

Anyway, share your opinions with me, I’m not sure what is the best way to deal with the avalanche of photos I see coming this way.

Boats at Howth Harbour. Real, actual fishing boats, which will no doubt be seeing a lot less action now that they can’t go and decimate the salmon population with drift-nets. Oh yes, I was there as part of getting out for a drive. With Tee. Taken on 29th October 2006. Click image to view larger version