Can you hear what I hear

I just realised while standing here typing into this computer that my hearing appears to be all back to normal.

You might remember some weeks ago I had the joyous experience of a perforated eardrum. I'll avoid going over all that again except to say that at the time when I was leaving the Accident and Emergency department (ER) of the local hospital the doctor told me it could take 6 to 8 weeks to get back to normal.

Curse my narrow Eustachian tubes.

Anyway, today is somewhere between 7 and 8 weeks since that happened and you know I had kind of forgotten about it. But today my ear is not clicking at all, and I can hear perfectly well out my left ear.

Something to toast at midnight so. The joy of hearing properly again.

p.s. my ear just clicked...

Big telly envy

Every home I visited this Christmas seems to have a big LCD television. I don't have one and don't really need one just now.

I wonder how people coped all those years ago when there was just a handful of channels and almost nothing worth watching on the TV, and when you did find something worth watching you'd sit down and watch in on the family 20-inch television set, often with really lousy reception and brutal picture quality.

Now the TVs are so big that a 40-inch LCD TV is becoming 'normal'. It kind of sends the wrong message in homes with young children that TV is perhaps the most important thing in the house.

Now the only thing is that on the back of my brother's new 40-inch Sony TV there was a PC-in connection. Now that would be cool, hooked up to one of those Mac Minis...

aaaggghh. Make it stop.

Dreaming in brushed silver

I've been having dreams lately about an iMac. It's not normal. I know.

Last night in my dream I was worrying that the new iMac doesn't have a USB port. Then I dreamed that I wrote down to check it out this morning. So I'm going to do that after I finish writing this.

I have never owned a Mac and feel like it's a big deal to cross over to the other side.

Maybe I should drink something strong before going to bed tonight, especially with the night that it is and all that. I don't want to be dreaming about iMac every night now do I?

New Ireland? Maybe not

Ireland has changed an awful lot in recent years, much to the bafflement of friends and colleagues around Europe who have witnessed the rapid changes to the place in the last 10 years.

Some people think it has not changed for the best. Just the other night I met with some old friends that I was in college with years ago and one of them was lamenting the way things have changed in Ireland. He was pretty wound up about it and his view would be pretty common around the place these days.

Ireland has become a lot more obsessed with wealth and materialism, largely fueled by a boom in property values. Tie this in with the obsession of the Irish to own property and a net inward flow of people to take up newly-created jobs in a shopping-mad population and you have a powerful source of new money, showy materialism and a generally more-selfish attitude to society and what it means to be Irish. Of course this particularly affects Dublin, the capital city and source of much of this property-fueled wealth generation, but its effects have spread to most other parts of the country.

2007 brought all this to a shuddering halt, due to a downturn in the property market, high profile scandals, lousy performances in things we used to be great at, all leaving people disappointed and confused.

The short film below should explain the change better than I can.

Still alive...

I completely lost track of just how long it has been since I last posted something, anything to this humble blog.

So first off let me apologise to anyone out there who has popped by every now and then to check if I have written anything new. I haven't added anything in quite some time and here's why.

As some of you may know, I'm coming to the end of my studies in Business School and things have been really intense. Way back in the earlier part of this year I took and passed my finals and it was such a relief to pass the last exam on the programme.

I think I remember myself then thinking 'great, only the dissertation to complete now'.

Yeah.

Well anyway the small matter of completing the dissertation has turned out to be not quite so trifling at all. It's been a huge piece of work. Partly because of the way I work, and partly because the dissertation has to be completed as a one-person job and those who have been helping you along during the programme all suddenly step away. And of course your life must be factored into the equation too.

So this has been one major time management challenge, the greatest challenge of the time-management type that I can honestly say I've ever faced.

But the good news is I think I might be nearly there. I've been devoting all my spare time to getting it completed since my boys started school in September. It's been a case of getting the notebook computer out every night and chipping away at it.

I've had brilliant support from various people and it's all helped to inch towards the finish line.

I'm at the stage now where I am ready to submit something for an initial review but that's probably not going to happen until early in the new year, what with the way western Europe tends to close down for Christmas.

So that's what's been going on. Instead of blogging and digging up mysterious tid-bits of life, I've been immersing myself in my dissertation and pushing hard to get it done.

I really am looking forward to getting back into some routine writing again but that's secondary just at the moment. As soon as the dissertation is done, and all the edits are made and it's finally accepted (fingers and toes crossed) then life will hopefully get back to something like normal.

if you're one of those people who has stopped by every now and then, thanks for sticking with me through the vacuum. It will soon be over.

Normal service will be resumed as quickly as possible.