The mystery of modernity

2011-12-01T00:13:00.001Z

Sometimes being honest is not always the best approach.

I think I am very open and tend to be very trusting with my thoughts and opinions. I don't think there are any deep-lying motives that lurk beneath the surface that have bad intent attached.

I think I am giving freely the information that I have or believe.

It can come back to bite but I am big enough and perhaps wise enough to be honest about that too, to admit when I have spoken unfairly or have been wrong to share my opinions, or that they were just not an accurate reflection of the reality.

I don't want to be the kind of person who withholds information and mistrusts others. I guess I have to learn to live with the reality that sometimes I can get it wrong and can upset people.

My mistake

2011-11-30T21:47:00.001Z

Doh!

forget I said anything.

I interpreted something as if it was all about me, and it wasn't.

End of story.

Maybe I upset you?

2011-11-26T21:25:00.001Z

I'm kind of stuck. I did something last week that I thought at the time would not be a big deal. In hindsight, maybe it was a big deal and maybe I have upset you.

I, of all people, should have known you would have been upset at feeling excluded. That was never my intention.

Maybe I am making a big deal out of all this, but I know you a long time and I think I understand how you are likely to have interpreted what happened last week.

I tried contacting you, but you seem to be ignoring me. I'm hoping that you are away or some other problem is preventing you from seeing my messages or from replying to them.

A little voice is telling me, however, that you are really pissed with me. I understand that and respect what you are feeling about what I did.

6 hours in the car...

2011-11-21T20:49:00.001Z

photo by mcdarius via Flickr.com

Almost six hours in the car today, driving on the motorway to Limerick and back again. Motorway driving in Ireland is really boring nowadays. Nothing to watch but the concrete barrier on the right, to avoid crashing into it. And maybe a fence way off to the left, for the same reason.

I had to stop after 2 hours because I was becoming hyponotised by the humming of the tyres (well not exactly humming, whatever that sound is.. the uuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh-ing). Coffee and a donut (strictly for energy purposes) later and I was grand again.

Repeated that trick on the way back and finally stepped out of the car and into the house again.Now to repeat it on Thursday.

Need to get myself a new ipod FM transmitter, one that works.

Car competition in the Airport

2011-11-18T22:49:00.000Z

photo by HikingArtist.com via Flickr.com

I was in Birmingham (the one in England) yesterday for a meeting. The meeting ended up in the afternoon and the next available flight was around 8PM. That left me with a lot of time to kill in the airport.

I tried accessing the 'free' wi-fi. Nothing. Maybe it's me but I have never had much success connecting to free wi-fi in airports. In fact free wi-fi is generally not available nor working properly.

Enough of that. With no internet to browse, I headed for a book shop and picked up a copy of New Yorker magazine. I spent about 10 minutes deliberating about which magazine to buy, which probably reveals a lot about my mental state these days.

I sat down on the first available seat and started to read. I didn't get very far because right beside me there was one of those platforms on which stood parked two high power sports cars. An Aston Martin and a Porsche. With the cars were two eager salesmen trying to grab the attention of passers by, with the aim of selling them a raffle ticket for ten pounds.

I tried ignoring them, zoning them out by extra hard concentration, but it didn't work. Their constant hooks such as "what about you big man, do you want to win this car?" or "come on sir, let's get you into this Aston.." or "come on sir, we'll be giving it away at the end of the month, why not you?"

One one level it was interesting to see who did actually stop. In a word, Germans. Almost universally it was Germans who stopped to learn more. There was one guy who stopped that was not German. He was from the UK and had bought one of these tickets recently. They really love bombed him and looked him up on the computer to see how his ticket was doing?

Anyway, I eventually was drawn into the magazine by a brilliant Malcolm Gladwell piece on Steve Jobs and a harrowing murder investigation story (not related to Steve Jobs) about a soldier who was on death row, and then free, and now possibly heading back to death row.

And then it was time to board.

Until the next time.

image courtesy of HikingArtist.com via Flickr

User.Guide.Duh!

2011-06-11T22:36:00.000+01:00

I got a new phone a few weeks ago. It's a Samsung Galaxy S smart phone. It runs the google Android software so it can do lots of clever things.

Naturally I assumed it would be able to connect to my handsfree unit in my car, a Plantronics K100. The Plantronics unit is easily the best car handsfree unit I have ever used. Simple to set up and simple to use. How hard could it be?

Well being a man I managed to make it much more difficult that it should have been. Step 1 was to try and do this without reading any instructions whatsoever. This step usually takes a week or two.

Step 2 is to scratch your head and repeat step 1 all over again.

I finally gave in and googled "Samsung Galaxy S pair with Plantronics K100" and all I got was a load of websites trying to sell me either device. I then youtubed (if that's even a verb now) "Plantronics K100" and found a few well made videos that explained what the K100 does and how to turn it on and off. Not very useful for my predicament.

We're probably at step 5 now which is to visit the manufacturer's website and look at the user guide. I did that and it explained exactly what to do. Turn off the Plantronics K100. Hold down the power button continuously until the little light flashes blue and red. Then click "scan for bluetooth devices" on the phone handset and that's it. It worked! 3 weeks later.

Lesson learned? Probably not.

Power in my hand

2011-06-06T10:40:00.001+01:00

I have one of those fancy android phones that allows me to blog wherever. Man is it slow to type though.

Currently i am on the sofa. Riveting i know.

Hoping for a rough this week

2011-02-21T19:52:00.002Z

A rough is what my graphic designer refers to as an early draft of the cover design she is working on for my book.

She and I met two weeks ago and I am really excited to be working with her. She has done some amazing work with established authors and I am her first self-publishing author client.

I am hopeful that she will have a couple of designs to choose from this week and that it will not be too much longer before the book is typeset and heading for distribution.

It's a super exciting time for me just now.

I have my fingers crossed that I will have something to look at by the middle of the week.

Hope you are well wherever you are reading this.

Beautiful sounds

2011-01-04T22:30:00.001Z

Downstairs my wife is playing the piano. She thinks nobody is listening. The music she is making is really lovely.

I wish I had even a fraction of her talent.

A new year begins and it's time for some serious positivity

2011-01-03T22:39:00.002Z

Well nobody can argue that 2010 was not an eventful year, especially anyone reading this in Europe. In Ireland we have had our fair share of bad news stories, shameful levels of international attention, and the kind of year that in truth most people just wished would end so we could move on.

I'm a bit like that myself. It's been that kind of year where I got very low about things. I think I let all the negative media stories get to me. And then when I would meet people all that would be discussed was how screwed we are as a country.

Then I decided to do something about my worsening mood and my feeling down about things. I went back to the books because in the past that's what I always did and it always worked for me.

Thinking about it way back when I was in college and wondering what the hell I was doing studying to be an electronics engineer I went through a phase of visiting second-hand bookstores. Every so often I'd visit and pick up something that caught my attention and I would read voraciously, allowing the stories to take me away and re-engage me in thinking about positives in another place. I remember going through a few by John Steinbeck, a whole raft of Graham Greene titles, and then kind of having a Russian phase with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. It did the trick. I managed to park all the crap that was a struggle and escape when needed to divert the brain to a more positive state. I ended up passing all my finals.

A few years later when working for IBM I went through a kind of dip and started to find my interest in work waning. I took to the books and again they did the trick. Lots of business titles and a special focus on stuff that really resonated with me. Patrick Lencioni's books are great for engaging you in a great story with a powerful message.

And so I am back into the books again. I went looking for something to lift me and in that serendipitous way a friend in facebook made a reference to a book she had read recently and that turned out to be exactly what I needed.

I'm determined to choose my own disposition in 2010 and to be as positive and enthusiastic as I can because nobody else can make me so. It's in my power to enjoy each day and I intend to do just that.

I've kept my mood up over the Christmas and new year's holidays and have had a really great break with my family. The bad weather didn't set us back and we've had a great time relaxing and sleeping loads and doing whatever we feel like.

I'm back to work in the morning and I'll be bringing the same sentiment with me :-)

Wishing you a fantastic year and looking forward to sharing whetever great news and positivity comes my way.

Trick or treat. Well mostly treats to be honest

2010-10-31T20:18:00.002Z

It's about 8:20 PM in the evening now and the steady flow of little kids dressed as monsters, psychopaths and Lady GaGa seems to have ended.

We had about 70 tiny visitors to the house this evening with varying degrees of effort on the costumes it has to be said. We had plenty of store-bought examples from Spider Man to Batman. We had the usual gaggle of princesses. We had death (grim reaper), victims of death (skeletons etc.) and various other forms of scary characters. We had a few Lady GaGa types, a few of what my wife said were "Nerd Chic" attempts and one character that looked like a kid in a number with a wooly hat and bad teeth.

Usually after all the kids have called on the various houses I venture out with my eldest boy to watch the fireworks. It's usually pretty decent to watch and draws a decent crowd. This year there was about 10 minutes of fireworks and very few people watching. The recession has started to well and truly bite in Ireland. I guess this year it's a straight choice between fireworks and eating. Maybe not that extreme.

Anyway I vainly brought the camera and once again took a bunch of really terrible photos. Maybe I should take a course. Once I get the kids to bed I will eat all their treats. Only joking! Happy Hallowe'en!

Poo, chips and Dolphins

2010-08-18T21:06:00.004+01:00

I was in two minds last Sunday evening. My wife was taking the boys down to see their grandparents leaving me with an enviable free-house. Admittedly the thought of sitting on the couch and watching sports for 3 hours was very attractive but in the end I decided to grab the camera and zoom lens and head out in the car to take some spontaneous photos.

I have only done this twice before. The first time I drove down to Blackrock, a nice little village on the south coast of Dublin and a place where I spent a lot of my summers as a young boy with my younger cousins. The first time I wandered about and just took random snaps, trying hard to get the camera to focus on what I wanted it to focus on. Easier said than done. I inadvertently snapped some rather choice graffiti on the bridge over the railway tracks.

It just goes to show that you should pay attention to the details of what you are snapping and not just focus on the focus.. if that makes sense. Anyway the few pictures I took were OK so I was happy enough.

A month or so ago I decided to repeat the act and drove down to Dun Laoghaire, again on the south side of Dublin and a bigger place than Blackrock. It has a ferry terminal with a link to the UK port of Holyhead, a main train station, even a Burger King. A decent sized town. It also has two lovely piers, the aptly named East and West piers and they are splendid for all kinds of leisure activities such as fishing, skating, cycling, and of course good old walking. I grabbed the camera and zoom lens this time and drove down there and found a great parking space right next to the pier entrance.

Alas when I returned to the car after walking and taking photos the car was kaput. It would just not start. Turned out that the starter motor and ignition were crocked and my little jaunt to the harbour would eventually set me back just north of five hundred euros in car repair costs.

Undaunted, I decided this weekend that it would be fun to head out to take a few more snaps. This time I headed to Bray in Wicklow, the next county to the south of Dublin. I had hoped that there would be a summer fair or festival or something like that but there wasn't. Instead there was just a lot of people sitting about and strolling along the seafront and cars everywhere.

I parked and put the camera stuff over my shoulder and made my way down to the beach. The first thing I encountered was a man wearing headphones and waving a metal detector about. He seemed to be very focused on a particular area, perhaps he was helping someone out who had lost something on the beach. I headed south away from his work and passed various people hurling stones into the sea with great venom. It's usually a male thing to go to the water's edge and hurl stones into the sea and if you can find them it can be fun to skim flat stones on the water even at 40 years of age.

Moving past this group I walked along the pebble-covered beach and passed a huge poo on the sand, covered with flies. Clearly this was the work of a canine as nobody would be so bad as to do that on the beach. Nonetheless there is a rule for dog owners in Bray and this is why. Totally gross and actually quite rare to see in Ireland these days. Granted it would be nicer to have rare things like a Picasso or a vintage Rolls Royce to look at but these would probably look just as out of place on the beach as the poo. Enough about that.

There were precious few people in the water at this stage of the evening, not that it was a cold evening more that it was likely to be fairly chilly in the water at this stage of the summer. At the end of the beach I ventured up Bray head, Bray's version of that huge mountain that overlooks Rio. It has a cross on top too but it's just not that spectacular. I climbed a little but the light was already starting to fade and I wanted to be home in time for the family. I headed back down the hill past a now almost-decrepit guesthouse which still seemed to be open for business. It looked like one of those spooky old haunted places you would see on Scooby Doo or on that episode of CHiPs in season 2 (quite specific I know) where the little kid runs away on Hallowe'en and ends up hiding in a wardrobe of an abandoned place like this. I digress.

Walking back along the pavement and a little away from the shore I was intrigued by the amount of people sitting eating fish and chips or chips with something fried anyway. The smell was very powerful and wafting all along the seafront. I looked for the place where all these chips were coming from and there it was. A tiny little hut on the seafront selling all this fried food to all these happy soul-food eaters. Why not. I reckon eating at a place has the effect of burning a memory into the heart and the head through the gut. Just a theory.

About two-thirds of the way back to the car I was very taken with a group of young people down at the water's edge, one of whom was screaming. It was a kind of unintelligble excited or frantic scream and impossible to make out what she was saying. She was jumping up and down and pacing and running from side to side. At this stage lots of people had stopped to see what all the screaming was about. There about 100 metres from the shoreline was a fin protruding from the water and swimming in very straight lines from side to side parallel to the shore.

My initial reaction was 'crikey there's something in the water'. Often in Ireland the only thing you find in the water off the coast is seaweed, trash and the occasional bit of raw sewage. (Shopping trollies and couches are mostly found in rivers these days). Clearly it was not a shark as it was too small and nobody else was freaking out.

Turns out it was a dolphin and apparently (my wife tells me) they are pretty common off the coast of Ireland these days. A woman passing by pushing a wheelchair asked me if I had managed to capture it and I told her that I had not been quick enough with the camera. Turns out I was and one of the snaps I took shows the fin sticking up out of the water. Granted it's miles away and not that clear but it's a fin nonetheless. Success. Pictures from Bray were OK too so a decent sunday night's effort with the camera too.

Roll on next weekend.

I hope all (optimistic I know) that are reading this are well and in good spirits and that life is treating you well right now.

Best wishes until the next time.

The end of the summer

2010-08-13T21:43:00.004+01:00

This is my first post on this blog for absolute ages. I am determined to keep writing and don't really know what is taking all my time up these days.

Anyway - I have just finished my first week back at work after 3 weeks of holidays. It was not fun if I am completely honest. It all began wit me having trouble opening my eyes on Monday morning. I don't mean when the alarm clock went off. I mean between the hours of 8am and 12 noon when I was actually awake and upright. I just could not keep my eyes open. Let's face it, the fact that I went to bed late every night of the 3 weeks of holidays probably made opening my eyes before noon a little bit more difficult than a normal week.

And of course there was a whole heap of stuff waiting for me when I got back to the office. Not a heap of gifts or praise or even curiosity. Just work, problems and deadlines. But I made it to friday evening and am still alive and well so I guess that's good.

So driving home tonight from work I was thinking all kinds of things about the way life is right now. One the one hand it does seem like something has ended. Maybe it's a general feeling about the way the westernised world is struggling to get out of this awful mess we got ourselves into. Either way it seems to me that life feels like it is in mourning for the golden days of excess and queuing up for iPhones and new cars and buying property and stock and all that.

Then I washinking about what my work demands of me at the moment and how different it is from when I entered the organisation. And I'm still thinking about that.

Then I thought about an interesting question I had posed to me by a video on YouTube last night. What if this is as good as it gets? What if life is meant to pretty much be like this for the rest of your time and you won't be able to do much about it? Kind of bleak I know and probably not entirely true since I could go out and change things in all kinds of ways albeit shallow and superficial. I could get a haircut for example or grow a moustache like Napoleon Dynamite's brother Chip or like his friend Pedro (a fuller moustache if ever there was one).

And then I started leafing (via the computer.. I think it's still leafing even if you are pressing [right arrow]..) through old photos and something inside me was saying 'awww' and 'oh wow' and all kinds of gushy outpourings looking at pictures of my little boys when they were just babies. And I figure that from then to now plenty of great things have happened and changed for the better.

So I figure I'll leave it there. My eldest son is climbing the stairs begging me to let him watch a clip of Rodney Mullen doing tricks. He is charming me with "please dad, you're the best!". How can a dad resist such precise and balanced feedback.

Cheerio for now and slán leat / libh.. probably leat if I am honest.

I remember a chat many years ago

2010-07-01T13:45:00.002+01:00

It used to be a kind of informal custom on a Friday afternoon at the end of the working day for a few of us to get together in our work area and ramble about how the computer industry might take shape in the future.

These chats used to take place years ago at this stage, but there were a couple of things that really stood out for me from those chats.

It seemed to be inevitable that at some point in the future Microsoft would start to lose momentum. The idea was that at some stage it would stop being about Windows and it would be about something else that users were concerned with. It looks like we're getting very close to that time where people won't care what software runs on their device (I'm avoiding the use of the word computer since it doesn't matter any more really). They just want the device to be useful and to be ready immediately when they need it. Another idea killed this week too.

It also looked odds on that at some point Dell would run out of road for their 'Dell model'. There comes a time when pretty much anyone who wants a microwave oven has a microwave oven and no amount of repackaging and pricing will create demand that is just not there. Even accounting for countries with possibly high demand for computers (China, India, Brazil etc.) it's no longer just a case of making it fast and pricing it low. They have their own problems just now.

And what about Sun. Those people that were supposedly the dot in dot-com. Gone to all intents and purposes certainly as a stand alone company. Consumed because they really had no real road ahead anymore as a standalone.

That just leaves Intel. They have done OK and keep churning out better and better processors and they have their fingers in lots of important pies. Maybe this will be the one exception, the one that proves it has found a way to keep on moving forward instead of being passed by.

It sure is a long way from how things looked in 1997 when this all became the centre of my world.

I guess there is a part of me that will forever be an IT lover.

From a time ago

2010-05-30T19:41:00.004+01:00

This is my Atlantic beach pebble.

I picked it up many years ago on a windy grey North Carolina Sunday and have had it ever since.

I remember that day vividly.

I was with Grainne and we just decided to drive to the ocean, not knowing how far it was or how long it would take.

I remember passing lots of sleepy little places, places that were once vibrant but not any more. I remember the monotony of the drive and the unusual greyness of the day.

I remember passing a Sea Harrier mounted on a pole on the left-side of the road at one point.

And then we were at the ocean. Atlantic beach had those funny little coastal wood and wire fences that you often see in movies. So we put on our sweaters and took a walk on the beach. There were some people attending to an unfortunate whale that had washed up on the beach and had clearly died.

There had been efforts to move it but they had failed.

And for some reason I stopped, bent down and picked up this pebble and held it in my closed hand for a little while, slipping it into my pocket back at the car.

Lots of things have changed and happened since those days.

Stuck with the artwork

2010-05-09T11:24:00.003+01:00

I may have mentioned that I have been working hard trying to bring the book project to a close. Primarily I want the book to be done because I have been working on it for years and it's dragged on too long. Second - I have some ideas for other books and would like to start exploring one or two of those too.

Anyway, I think the text of the book is all but done. I need to beef up the conclusion at the end a little. Yes it's a serious book.. hence the conclusion section.

The hold up now is the artwork, specifically the picture for the front cover and a few diagrams/models used in one chapter near the end.

I have been deliberating over the diagrams especially because the first run I took at those contradicted (subconsciously) a couple of important points. I need to find a way of representing the key idea without conflicting with something I've said earlier in the book.

It's not easy.

I will carry some paper and a pencil with me today and wait for inspiration to come at a most unlikely moment.

Fingers crossed.

so far so goooooooooood

2010-05-05T21:14:00.003+01:00

Yes my plan to inject some much needed excitement into my life is going well. I can't say too much at this stage other than to say that the plan does not involve crime, taking drugs, getting smashed drunk or anything with an escapist dimension.

What I can say is that I am smashing some of the mental myths that prevail in my daily thinking - and it already feels like a big positive and useful step.

Why exactly I don't know but I think I have made better use of the last 2 days than I have the last 2 years. There shall be no going back.

I promise this will all make more sense in a little while.

p.s. M - I haven't heard anything from you since you finished the Triathlon. Hope you are well and that everything is good.

YEEE-HAAAAA

2010-05-04T22:55:00.002+01:00

It's time to bring some excitement back to life and that's exactly what I am doing this week.

I've been living in a stupor, wandering about in some kind of work-induced trance and missing all the opportunities to engage with life that are everywhere.

So this is a big week in the overall scheme of where I am going and what life must mean from this point on.

I feel like I'm about to climb in through the window of the General Lee and jump over a ravine with my insane cousin Bo behind the wheel. That's how the excitement level is right now.

There is always a reason...

2010-04-27T20:38:00.002+01:00

Just after I was thinking about deactivating my Facebook account something interesting happened. I got an email from a friend pointing out how a mutual acquaintance of ours had posted something really inappropriate about his wife on Facebook.

There was a brief husband-wife exchange via facebook and then it stopped. It was not pleasant.

Thankfully because my account was not deactivated I was at least able to reach out to the guy to see if he wanted to just talk things out with someone who would listen without judgement.

I hope he and she sort it out because this would be a terrible way for the wheels to start to come off a relationship.. and for things to have come to a head via facebook instead of talking to one another.

I won't deactivate my account just for the moment so.

Time to pull back

2010-04-25T12:51:00.002+01:00

I have been thinking of deactivating my facebook account. I am conflicted between the way it satisfies my inane curiousity about what others are doing and the way it wastes time and distracts me from what I could and should be doing.

I started using it and found it brilliant for reconnecting with old friends and for that I am truly grateful. On the other hand it seems to be a monumental waste of time for the other 99% of instances that I use it.

I went in there today and went to the deactivate my account option.. but didn't go through with it.

I still may deactivate it tonight. I could of course just ignore it but I don't trust myself to stay away from it.

Ever feel you were in the wrong job?

2010-04-07T00:06:00.003+01:00

Right now I feel like I am in the wrong job. I can't work out exactly what it is but I just feel my energy is not quite flowing into my work the way I would like.

I notice it when I am doing stuff I enjoy, stuff I find interesting and engaging and I feel the energy again. And I want to keep working even though I should sleep.

But lately when I apply myself to my work it's not the same. I don't feel that energy. Maybe I am over analysing it. Maybe I just need more sleep and a holiday.

I also feel I am afraid of something just at the moment. Afraid to let myself experience what could be good for me. Hmmm. Enough blather for tonight. I am probably going to have a mad dream now and wake up confused. Ah well.

Time to brush the teeth.

Are critics the arsenic of the people?

2010-04-06T21:02:00.003+01:00

Image: djcodrin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I have been listening to this song (not saying which one.. you'll only slag me off) and was curious about who wrote it and what the story behind it was.

So I googled it.

Boy was I sorry.

I found what can only be described as a hate-filled stream of invective at each result displayed by google. So here's what seems to be happening. A song is recorded and released. Maybe it gets some airplay, maybe it doesn't. It's not important. Some people like the song, like hearing it on the radio and go out and buy it in some form. Some probably download it illegally. I'm saying nothing about that. The song gets billions of plays on ipods, walkman phones, and just about any other kind of device that can play music.

At the same time the song is reviewed at various websites. The person reviewing the song either likes, dislikes or has a neutral opinion about the song. That's pretty reasonable up to that point except for one small factor. The person reviewing the song is comparing it with something. What will they compare it with? That's the million dollar question.

The review comes out and guess what. It annoys all those people who hold a contrary view. A row breaks out. Mud is thrown from here to there and people get pretty agitated. You're wrong. No you are. You are a dumbass. No it's you that's a jackass. And so on.

And it's down to this thing about subjective opinion, judgement. It's disastrous for us because we don't really need to judge something as harmless as a song, or a band, or a singer, or a sound. But we do. And that judgement is not very honest. And it annoys the hell out of people.

And what does judgement actually bring to us? How exactly is critique of someone else's work useful when all it does is say something as trite as "I don't like this". And should anyone really care what someone else thinks about what another likes.

I think Seth Godin once wrote that while Washington DC has hundreds of statues of great leaders, poets and thinkers not one of the statues is of a critic.

I don't have much time for critics because it's such a waste of time trying to make a living spotting the faults in something when someone has laboured to create it out of devotion or just plain hard work.

I promise to never read reviews of songs, albums, artists or movies. Why should I care?

Making the most of every day

2010-04-05T13:09:00.005+01:00

It's one of those unusual things but life has a funny way of reminding you every now and again about how fragile and short-lived our time on earth really is. And while we should be making the most of every day, trying to connect with something each day that makes us proud of who we are and what we did that day, instead we get caught. We get hooked by routines and distractions that consume the precious time and deflect us from seeing the opportunities all around us to make best use of the time. We waste what we have in a semi conscious state. We know deep down that we should run towards what is good for us but instead we run away from that and towards those things that just don't do us any good at all.

It has been a strange start to the year. There has been a fair bit of sadness and a fair bit of fear. We are all looking down at our feet and wondering what will lie ahead. Well that ends too because we've all got to move on.

Last weekend the family decided to climb a mountain. Not sure why but it just seemed like the right time to climb a mountain together. Not Everest or anything so difficult but a mountain in Ireland. So we loaded up into the car, my wife and I and the boys now aged 7 and 5.

It took a while and there was a brief moment of hesitation on my part about 20 metres from the top when it looked unlikely that our 5 year old could make it up and down the last part. My wife to her credit pushed us on and we all made it up to the top in the end without any huge difficulty.

My 7 year old and me on the easy part of the climb

I think that pause on my part was coming from a deep place inside me. It was the emblem of some self doubt that lingers in me at the moment. Yet I know I can climb on something in me tells me every now and then that maybe it's better not to try in case I fail. But then I remember there is only today. And after today there is only another today.

We sat on the top of the mountain and breathed in the smell of fresh air and achievement. It was good. And of course the return is always easier.

And so yesterday found us once again walking in the mountains having had a taste for the air and the freedom from distraction and the sense of wanting to do something with the day. So we headed off and found ourselves once again atop a little mountain, about 270 metres above the city and a beautiful view all around.

The view from the top of Carrickgollogan

Life can't always be about the good times because you can't control what comes your way. But you can control what you do with the time you have so why not make the most of every day and do something that makes you proud of how you spent the day.

p.s. my wife took these pictures. Aren't they great!

p.p.s. Thanks Megan for checking in with me. Appreciate you doing that.

After darkness always comes light

2010-02-19T16:00:00.003Z

It's hard to imagine a run of events in memory that has had so much bad luck, awful news and sheer sadness close together. It's easy to see how life can seem so cruel and hard and unfair.

And yet sadness must end at some point and light must return. This is brought home to me by the arrival into this world of two beautiful new babies, one boy and one girl, born to two sets of parents that I know very well and hold as very close friends.

And it does kind of make you wonder if somehow we are all missing the point about life. It makes me think that perhaps the constant change is the whole point and that by trying to keep things the same we are deceiving ourselves so badly.

And then I think about my own family and my own life and I think how lucky I am and have been over all the years and I realise that while things are always changing you can bend and flex and lean into what life brings and somehow it does all make sense to just go with the flow and be carried in a little row-boat along the river that is experience.

To me it's never been that important to know exactly where I am going or when I will get there. Now more than ever I am conscious of the importance of taking time to peer over at the river bank and to open my eyes to all that is going and growing around me.

Less philosophical the next time I write. I promise.

Why does life break your heart sometimes?

2010-02-08T19:50:00.002Z

My wife's cousin passed away this morning. It's an unspeakable sadness that prevails. She was a young woman who fought so hard to overcome her illness. Thinking at one stage that she had fought her way back to health the illness returned and spread.

For all the things in life we are so grateful but it still seems unbearably sad that this young woman in her prime has left us.

Life has a terrible way of shocking. Rest in peace.

the chemicals of crush

2010-02-02T11:17:00.002Z

Did you ever want something but knew you couldn't have it?

It's kind of like when you are little and you maybe have a crush on someone else. And of course you almost always find out afterwards that it was a bad idea anyhow.

That Garth Brooks song (!) Unanswered Prayers does a pretty good job of explaining it. Am I now without a shred of credibility?

Anyway - I wonder is there a chemical that is released by the brain when we want something yet rationally speaking we will never ever ever have it?

Now I have my iMac I don't have any chemical issues when I look at the Apple store. But every now and then I get these little rushes of chemicals that make my pupils dilate and my brain heat up.

Curious.

That's quite a drop

2010-02-01T13:22:00.003Z

Just looking at that thing on the right there.. yeah over there where the map is. You know the thing with the number of posts per year.

What a drop eh?

2010 is not exactly off to a flyer is it?

I promise to keep writing something just because it's good for the mind.. or soul.

More tooth pain. Sheesh.

From nerve to nervous

2010-02-01T12:54:00.002Z

It must be a sign of something. I am a lazy brusher when it comes to my teeth. I really feel like that time I spend each day brushing my teeth is good quality time I could be using for something else. That makes my brushing half-hearted and lacking in concentration and effort.

I am playing for it now I fear. About a week ago while eating dinner I felt a little sharp pain in my teeth. Upper area to my left is all I can discern. I poked about a bit but no tooth presented itself as the cause of my new pain.

My mind immediately went into overdrive creating a little movie of what had happened. I saw a scene where a wash of food and drink over time had let to a little blow hole appearing in my tooth. I saw a wave of coffee or cranberry juice or red wine washing powerfully over that tooth and the fluid gushing into this blow hole terrorising the nerve ending hiding meekly inside.

And my amygdala immediately took over and advised the rest of my brain that the two best options were to (a) pretend that it's not happening.. the "you're imagining it" approach and (b) run away by trying to avoid the subject and avoid taking action. Turns out a combination of (a) and (b) has worked pretty well.. for about a week.

Now when I drink hot or cold fluids I get the pain. I am out of self-deception.

So I called the dentist and to my relief I got the answering service. I figured it might be a sign. Maybe the dentist has ceased operating (ouch.. wrong choice of word) due to the recession. Maybe I can keep trying the number for a few more weeks. You know the way.

But curses! I just got off the phone from the dentist's office where I am now booked into the schedule for next week. What unspeakable horrors await me. But there is an upside. I have a week to get out the various dental devices I bought over the years in a vain attempts to have a little machine do all the work while I stood there at the sink drooling into the mirror. These devices can do a kind of 'pimp my teeth' job. Surely it's not too late to gloss over everything and trick the dentist.

No. I don't believe it either. And I am nervous because the dentist will scold me for not taking better care of my teeth. And this will become the first of a series of expensive and painful encounters.

And there's no escape. I should have paid more attention to brushing. Well duh!

I hear the last mile of a Marathon is the hardest..

2010-01-17T12:25:00.002Z

Since Christmas I have been trying to finish a book. Finish writing the book that is. I had the idea for this book many years back and started writing it then. When I started the MBA I just didn't have time or enough focus to do both properly so the book got shelved for a little while. In October 2008 I graduated from business school and right after I decided to pick up the book once again.

It's something of labour of love this same book. I really want to finish writing it and really want to publish it but it's taking so long. I had a flurry of activity from October 2008 until the middle of last year but work took over and I took on new responsibilities in work that again made me park the thing for a little bit.

Sitting in the house over the Christmas holidays frittering my days and evenings away doing nothing I had one of those moments of rare determination and personal resolution. I resolved to get back into the book once again and to bring the thing to a successful end.

So here I am within touching distance of being finished. I have re-edited the thing heavily, thanks in large part to some pretty candid and much needed feedback from some wonderful people who volunteered to read the thing. The re-edited book now looks quite different and reads very differently to what those volunteers trudged through. Ah well.

This past week I have been discussing my next steps for publishing with successful authors in the US and in Ireland also. I have some options though there isn't a single option that is 100% perfect. I will end up likely going with the option that ticks most of the boxes that matter to me.

I have been struggling with daft stuff like pagination and margins and section headings. Ugh. I could have someone do all this for me but I'd have to pay for that I am just can't bring myself to do all that when I can easily do it myself. It's just time consuming that's all.

A lot of people have asked me what my expectation is about this book and when it gets published. To be honest I'm taking a leaf out of Pema Chodron's book and have decided just to lean into the experience and see what happens.

It is hard just trying to get to the finish line having come so far. Having said all that and having had a little moan about all the effort this is taking, a browse through what Megan is doing to prepare for an OLYMPIC DISTANCE TRIATHLON (caps are definitely intentional) leaves me feeling like I have nothing to complain about really.

So, I'm sitting at the computer on Sunday afternoon and my elder son is gone swimming with his mum. The younger guy is playing with his Nintendo DS and there is peace in the house. I will seize the moment and get busy with the book. Onwards towards that finish line.

p.s. Megan it is so great to hear from you! I am reading through your new blog from the start.

That came around quickly!

2010-01-11T20:49:00.002Z

I'm sitting here on the couch watching a soccer match on ESPN with my seven year-old son. It seems like about two years ago since he was sitting bouncing gently on my knee as a tiny tot. I blinked and there he was sitting as a big guy watching the match with his Dad.

Everyone tells you when you have little kids that they grow up really fast when in truth it's just life that passes so fast. This is brought home to me when I meet up with my friends these days. That's a challenge in itself. I really like meeting up with old friends, people I used to work with in my former jobs, people I was in school or college with. But there seems to be very little time to meet anyone, despite all my expressed good intentions. So when I do meet up with people and they say things like "It's hard to believe it's two years since I last saw you". Kind of shocking really.

Anyway here we are watching the game and I just had this computer beside me so I figured I'd just do a quick blog posting. Why not?

So what's going on at the moment?

Well we've been very restricted by some bad weather in Dublin and haven't been able to get out much in the last week. Since Christmas I discovered a new drive to pick up the book once and for all and I have now finished editing the thing from the beginning to the very end. I have made contact with some really great people who I hope can guide me through the final stages to eventual publication. It's been a very long time in the process but by hook or by crook (if people still say that) I'll get it to a successful conclusion.

Duty calls. My five year-old son has just arrived to ask for help in another room to put a DVD on. Better go.

Hey! what's happening?

2009-12-11T16:53:00.002Z

Wow.

Life seems to be racing past these days. Right now all I am thinking about is getting some extra sleep tomorrow morning.

Christmas is just 2 weeks away and I already feel the excitement mixed with anxiety ahead of the big close down for the holidays.

It has been a mad year. I changed roles in my job and my youngest son started big school so we don't really have a baby any more. The two boys grow up just a little bit more every day and I'm really enjoying their company at this stage. The older one is really interested in football and wants to talk about it all day. That suits me but kind of drives his mother crazy.

I've really worked hard to try and keep in touch with all the people that I want to keep in touch with but it's just impossible to get around to everyone and even to fire off the occasional email is tricky. I only hope at Christmas that people will be around and that I can bump into people here and there and catch up with them. I also hope that people won't think that I am slighting them just because I have not managed to keep in touch the way I would have wanted.

Life has spat out a few tough moments this year too. It has not been all rosy, that's for sure. But it's good to be alive, healthy and still smiling somehow.

It would be great to hear how m. and Stephen Smart and Al and the others who have written great blog posts over the years are doing these days. If it's hard to find time to keep in touch with friends and loved ones then it's even more difficult to keep a blog updated. Look at me.. I am a disaster at keeping this thing up to date.

Maybe nobody comes here anymore to read this anyway and I am conducting some kind of online secret dialogue with myself. Maybe I could post my deepest thoughts and darkest secrets here and no-one would know.

See you soon.

Life without an office

2009-08-27T22:07:00.002+01:00

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if we all lived where we worked. In the old days people worked in a job that was based on a skill, craft or trade of some kind, usually tied in some way to a premises or workshop with specialised machinery or something like that. And at the end of the day you went out back or upstairs to make some dinner or relax for the rest of the day with your family.

In those days we had no office buildings, no factories, no commuting or apartment blocks.

It's interesting to me to imagine a world where communities are smaller, closer and simpler. Without the trappings of so-called modern life, the trappings of so-called progress.

The opposite of hoarding

2009-08-26T21:38:00.002+01:00

I wonder why I hoard things. I mean we all seem to hoard things these days, and for me as I look across the room I'm sitting in I seem to hoard books, DVDs, CDs and all manner of stuff. I also ave an awful lot of ties.

And then there's my iPod. I have heaps of stuff on it, music, videos and all that sort of thing. Don't get me started on digital photos..

But what would it be like if one day we all decided to do a bit of a purge. Instead of keeping everything (or a copy of stuff) we all decided to get rid of everything. Clearing out bookcases, wiping disks and so on until there was only the real right now experience of life. Would that really be such a bad thing?

I think this idea came from watching something odd happen in Spain earlier this summer. I was sitting on a bench on a little cobbled street one night in July. My sons sat next to me eating ice pops. I watched a group of teenagers take their places around a table outside a restaurant, all chatting and laughing as they ordered and waited for their food. One young guy stood up and took a picture of the group and then proceeded to show everyone the picture of themselves taken just 10 seconds previously.

Why do we do that? Why do we waste time taking and reviewing pictures of what we are supposed to be actually experiencing? why do we need to keep a record of stuff like this? isn't that what our memories are for?

I'm blathering on. Anyway I need to go and throw some stuff out.

it sure has been a while

2009-08-26T11:24:00.002+01:00

The time is flying and life continues to be interesting.

Last weekend I took the family away for the weekend to Galway. No particular reason for the trip. Just wanted to get away before the schools start up again.

We stayed in a hotel on the edge of the city and it had a marvellous pool and leisure centre. Our kids have never been interested in swimming but for some reason we felt that this might be the weekend that this changed. And it did.

We had packed arm-bands, goggles and swim hats (and swimming trunks for the boys) and they really surprised us. On the morning of the saturday the older guy was straight into the pool while the younger guy just wouldn't even consider it. I managed to talk him into getting changed into his trunks and once he had done that he was into the water like a little duckling.

They spent 2 hours in the pool that morning and then wanted to go back in later that evening, this time for an hour.

We left sunday morning but not before another quick dip into the pool.

Brilliant.

Really busy in work and such interesting days these days. Change on the horizon too.

my 5 year old wants to vote

2009-06-02T20:31:00.001+01:00

There's no way of knowing what goes on in the mind of a child. My 5 year old (to be fair he is only 4.56 years old but considers himself sophisticated enough to be a 5 year old) casually noted today that he intends to vote for Alex White in the upcoming elections in Ireland.

Clearly he can't vote but he does intend to vote for Alex White when he is old enough. I suspect Alex will not be actively campaigning then. Too bad.

I suspect that he likes the name Alex (his best friend is called Alex, his cousin is called Alex and one of the main characters in Madagascar 2 is called Alex) though he may indeed have a deep appreciation for politics.

I don't know why I'm nervous

2009-05-06T20:53:00.000+01:00

Re my previous post..

I don't know why but I am nervous about calling.

My head is full of lots of daft stuff these past few weeks.. you wouldn't believe what has been going on.

I am SUPER-indecisive these days. I know what is triggering it but I'm struggling to park it.

I am delighted for the person in question but am not in the right frame of mind to say what it is I mean to say.

I'm guessing that none of this is making sense.

I need to go for a walk in the mountains perhaps. Clear my head.

A little bird

2009-04-27T17:06:00.002+01:00

A little bird tells me that a former colleague of mine is expecting her first baby...

I am so delighted for her and her husband, more than she can know.

I will call her later this week to say hi.

Now I want brownies

2009-04-26T21:21:00.002+01:00

Come to think of it, I'd actually really like to bake (and eat) a whole pile of brownies. Trouble is I don't have a decent recipe.

If anyone has a decent recipe that is fool-proof (no, really.. I mean it) I'd love to get a copy or maybe point me to a link somewhere.

I'm looking for a recipe that is easy to make and hard to mess up. Also I am in Ireland so I don't have access to Semi-sweet tollhouse chocolate morsels or stuff like that.

I tried making flapjacks some time ago and they tasted like muck.

CHiPs and Pot

2009-04-26T21:14:00.003+01:00

My two sons are suddenly into watching CHiPs again. Remember CHiPs. Of course you do. That timeless TV show from the late seventies and early eighties. Two motorcycle cops on patrol on the highways of California. Yes that's the one.

Well yours truly is a fan. I mean I was a fan when it was on the TV. I was only a young lad then of course.

Some time ago it was showing again on one of those channels that plays endless re-runs of The Dukes of Hazzard or The A-Team. One saturday morning it was on and I paused briefly out of nostalgia and my little boys were hooked.

That led to me buying the DVD of season 1 which we all watched and loved. Then season 2 came out on DVD but by that time they had kind of moved on to Mario Kart and there I was all alone with my green-coloured box set.

Until this weekend that is. They just asked to watch it and have watched a fair few episodes over the weekend.

There is one that really stands out. The one where Jon and Ponch fall foul of a bunch of frat kids on their way back from mexico with a bag of the old fella.

It all ends rather bizarrely with the frat kids making a batch of hash brownies an trying to slip them into the Highway Patrol's cake sale. Needless to say Jon and Ponch save the day and the brownies end up on the ground unfit for consumption by the fine citizens of California.

Excellent.

everything is certain again

2009-02-24T18:12:00.001Z

aH THAT'S GRAND

CURSE THIS NEW KEYBOARD - WHERE IS THE CAPS LIOCK BUTTON

AAAGGHH

Tough interview questions? puh-lease

2009-02-24T18:02:00.002Z

OMFG (as hip people say)

I opened my web browser today and saw a link to an article called "Eight toughest Interview Questions".

Given that I spent almost four years trying to improve the standard of interviewing at my former employer I thought 'I'm gonna take a look' so I did. And boy was I sorry.

Sheesh! Where do I even begin.

p.s. Saddest fact about this. Tips come from a career-related website. Ahem.

Head games

2009-02-23T16:38:00.003Z

Looking at the picture of the fella getting off the plane today from Guantanamo and reading the statement read out by his lawyer one can only begin to barely comprehend what it must be like to suffer torture, especially all the mind-torture.

I'm in the middle of a period of life right now where I've never felt less certain about the road ahead. I have always been confident that no matter what happens I'll figure out some way to survive and keep afloat.

But lately there's just so much uncertainty, so many people around me all worrying endlessly about the future and what will happen. And all the time the people who should be leading just aren't.

Take the situation in Ireland as a clear example. Businesses have been pulling out of Ireland, and people have been losing their jobs. On top of that the banks have pretty much disgraced their profession, showing themselves to be less than adept at managing their businesses than the average small trader and in some cases being plan dishonest.

So people the length and breadth of the country are wondering if these 'gougers' will be brought to account, if they will have to pay for their mismanagement and misdeeds like ordinary people have to. Sadly up to this point the usual maxim applies.

Those who can afford the best legal advice tend to enjoy the greatest legal protections. There's a lot to be said for getting good advice but when you view this disaster that is Ireland's economic standing and reputation from afar then you see it for what it really is. A greed pit with an escape hatch.

And on a more local scale, that uncertainty prevails too. And there is a real lack of leadership.

I always liked the vision of the leader as the one who climbs the tallest tree to see where the edge of the jungle is. Well right now it seems that all is happening where I am is lots of huddles around camp fires, waiting for God knows what.

It's like mental torture for some people. The not knowing. The waiting. The lack of information. The pain of amplified rumours as each person adds another little bit of power to a rumour and to misinformation.

Sometimes it's better to turn off the radio. Put down the newspaper. Switch off the TV or PC and go and do something that you and only you can influence. Like taking a walk or making a cup of tea or taking a drive to some place calm and beautiful. And take in what you can of what you actually see and actually experience.

We don't need anybody else's filter to tell us how to see what is happening in our own life. Yet that's exactly the problem.

We've all become hooked on the views of economists and accountants and business commentators and news anchors and all the rest.

Maybe it's time to see again with your own eyes and just live the life that you have now. There you go. I just sorted my own mind out. Grand.

There is always a lesson

2009-02-05T18:35:00.002Z

I spent two hours in the car with my two boys on Tuesday night trying to get home in the snow.

The weather has been unusual in Ireland for this past 4 days especially. We don't normally get a lot of snow and we're not totally prepared for it to be honest. So 4 days later, 3 of which have had pretty much constant snowfall on the east side of the country, and I think people are getting a bit tired of being boxed in by the weather.

Anyway it was kind of interesting being there in the car with my 6 year old and my 4 year old sons. Naturally the 4 year old fell asleep on the back seat and he was pretty much out for the count for the whole arduous journey.

The 6 year old was a different prospect. He has such an interesting take on life. For him everything is interesting and everything is there to be understood. So the two hours was long, dull and pretty much going nowhere fast. But the 2 hours spent chatting with him about snow, traffic, other motorists (!) and everything else that came up was really great.

Eventually he and I agreed on an escape plan. We decided we'd turn off the main route and risk taking the back roads. It took an age to get to the turn itself but once we did we agreed that we both decided to turn off the main road.

It turned out great.

We ended the journey with a sense of what I once heard described as "complicité", a kind of shared experience that bonds people together.

Granted this was no "Alive" but it sure was good to get home and it was fun chatting to my son.

Naturally as soon as we did get home the Wii was powered up and I was once again relegated to my previous role of "that's just my dad".

p.s. I'm not sure why I linked the word Wii for people who don't know what a Wii is. Is it possible that there are people out there who don't yet know what a Wii is?

In the Name of the Father...

2009-01-30T19:47:00.002Z

A few years back, maybe more than that, there was a film made about a bunch of lads who were accused of something that they did not do. Sounds like the opening sequence of The A-Team.

Sadly it was more serious than that.

These lads, four of them, were accused of a terrible attrocity and each jailed for life.

Turned out years later that none of the four had any involvement whatsoever with the attrocity, despite all the 'authorities' declaring with absolute certainty that these were the guilty parties.

Now that's something to behold.

Just imagine if it turns out later that the guy who was blamed by the 'authorities' had nothing to do with all the awful stuff that went on...

Where has integrity gone?

2009-01-29T08:51:00.002Z

Yesterday was a day of extreme disappointment for me.

I'm trying to not get too attached to my ego on this. I don't take it personally because if I did I might just want to retaliate in some way, to defend myself and my own integrity.

So where exactly is all the integrity gone?

Barrack Obama aside (these days) it seems that integrity has become like water. Everyone knows they need it to survive and everyone knows they need plenty of it each day. But it's not there every day.

In truth integrity is one of the first casualties when it comes to people justifying their own behaviour and their own poor judgement. Is it somehow connected to attibution error?

Could it be that when I look at someone else's behaviour I decide that they did what they did because of their personality, their way of doing things. That's a convenient explanation, especially when you decide to do it differently to me. You can put my actions down to 'the way he is'.

Integrity means that you stand for something. There are some things that you hold to be more important than others. There are certain behaviours that people can always expect of you. Yes, even in tough times like these.

Integrity draws the line you say you won't cross when it comes to how you go about your daily business. Integrity means that you take responsibility for your own actions and your own decisions.

It's just too easy to say "well things are pretty different now and all bets are off". You can't decide to have high integrity when things are good, and a free-for-all approach when things get tough. Isn't that what leadership is all about. The leader is the one who holds firm even in the worst of storms and tough times.

I haven't changed. My line is still the same.

Where has integrity gone?

Disappointed...

2009-01-28T18:04:00.002Z

I have the distinct feeling that my reputation is being slowly and steadily dismantled by people I trusted.

I gave my all for so many years to so many people. I went above and beyond the call of duty to try to be the best possible resource for my friends and colleagues.

Now that I am at a distance it seems that I am being blamed for everything that has turned sour.

I don't think it's fair that I'm supposedly guilty of everything.

Words are being attributed to me that I don't recall saying. People are pissed off with me and I don't know why.

It's dishonest and unfair.

I am so disappointed.

Ah yes, the recession

2008-12-08T18:57:00.003Z

I used to drive a really crap car like this the last time Ireland was in recession.

It wasn't the case that all Toyotas were crap. Far from it. Just my particular one.

No shock absorbers, spongy brakes, steering that used to drift left no matter what, and a horn that used to sound by itself whenever I would make a hard left turn. I think the person that owned it before me had neglected it to the point of it being worth nothing.. which was pretty much what I had available to spend on a car at that time.

Then in the last few years, as the Celtic Tiger grew from strength to strength, it used to amaze me how many young people I would see driving cars like this or this. I'm still unable to fathom how people in their early twenties can afford cars like these in Ireland.

So now we're headed for a couple of lean years it seems so you'd expect people will start becoming more prudent again. Driving smaller cars will surely be back on the agenda.

Then I saw this (below) today.

Yes - the picture is a bit hazy but it's a Hummer.

Chacun à son goût, as the French say.

cold night, warm heart

2008-12-01T18:42:00.003Z

I was at a school reunion on Saturday night. It was a gathering of old friends some 20 years since we left school and went our separate ways.

When I got the email during the week for some reason I knew straight away that I would go. I think the previous reunion, at 10 years after leaving, seemed a totally different proposition and there was no way I was going.

But this time, it was different. I wanted to go, and am really glad I did.

Some of the guys there, they hadn't changed a bit really and I recognised them right away.

It's hard to believe that 20 years have passed since I saw most of those guys.

We determined to meet again next year for a 21st year celebration. I will definitely go.

Doh!

2008-12-01T18:40:00.001Z

Doh!

it was in the Washington Post and not the New York Times.. I should pay more attention.

Does outsourcing get any worse

2008-12-01T13:36:00.001Z

Just finished reading an article in the NY Times.

Very sad indeed.

Worth a read, click here to go to the piece.

Did I see you at the rugger?

2008-11-24T19:09:00.006Z

Last Saturday I went to the rugby with my baby brother. I say baby but he's not exactly a baby anymore.

I mean when he was still wearing nappies he was a baby but now that he has graduated from college, got his own place and works in one of those big multinational corporations he's not exactly a baby. But we always call him that, we the family that is.

Anyway, I was at the rugby on Saturday, Ireland v Argentina in Croke Park.

The game was curious because it was so tense, both sides kind of hating each other because of the past series of games I suppose. A few fights broke out during the game which was good because there was sod all else happening at times on the field.

At half-time, or the interval as it used to be called when I went to the cinema as a lad, I went out to answer the call of nature.

There was a big long line queuing for hot Bushmills, and loads of people were knocking them back. Yes it was pretty cold come 4 o'clock on Saturday.

I was at the game with my brother's mates, 6 of them I think. Isn't it strange the way your brother or sister's friends often seem like weird people but your own friends seem totally sound, salt of the earth people.

So they were planning to go on the lash or to "skull the pints" into themselves. That was a prospect that did not entirely entice me.

One thing that is always abundantly distinct about going to watch an Ireland rugby match is that there is such a different atmosphere to say a football (soccer) international match. Not really why that is but you'd really feel it.

I do enjoy going to watch matches in Croke Park but always preferred Lansdowne Road as a venue. I guess that's the southsider in me. That won't change.

The game ended and I headed home along the river and back to pick up my car.

I was struck by how different the river banks are now to say 15 years ago when this whole area of the city was an almighty kip.

Now you look everywhere and it's stylised lighting and wine bars and the offices of law firms.

Funny thing today. Not one person asked me about the match. I must be now 100% anti-social.

Ice Age 08

2008-11-11T16:16:00.004Z

It is very cold in Ireland right now. Cold. All the time. My toes are cold. The end of my nose is cold.

Perhaps there is an ice age coming. To punish us for driving big cars and watching too much TV. And cutting down all the trees.

Oh no wait. It's the opposite. The planet is heating up.

So why is it so cold then?

So very cold.

Election 08 - will it end?

2008-10-29T21:29:00.002Z

I'm watching the unfolding action in the race for the White House over these past few months and it's reaching a pressurised and uncomfortable climax.

Now I'm not an American citizen so I can't vote, but that doesn't mean I can't take an interest or have an opinion. Some bloggers seem to think otherwise. The tone of comments on just about any newspaper's website is so harsh, so angry and so confrontational that it just amazes me.

And of course the result on November 4th has obvious ramifications for everyone else on the planet whether we like it or not.

So trying to understand or explain why this race is so bitter, and lately so personal, is difficult. The need to win by destroying the other side is one of those damaging, divisive strategies that just makes no sense in the long run. Yet it seems to be the default approach to politics everywhere these days.

In Ireland we had the same thing with the Lisbon Treaty, with the issue turning into a deeply divisive campaign that descended into fear-mongering, name-calling and misleading presentation of information. And of course when people don't know what to think because they are confused the best option is to maintain the status quo and change nothing.

And you know maybe this is yet another example of where politics imitates business, with government campaigns borrowing ideas from the ruthless world of business, where winning can often only result from the total destruction of a serious rival.

Either way, it makes it hard to sit on your hands and watch the race for the White House unfold without feeling a sense of frustration.

Just tonight people are complaining about the fact that a party-political broadcast by one candidate will delay the start of the baseball. Even though this has been refuted by the baseball authorities, people are still claiming that this 'delay' is disgraceful.

And there's no point talking about truth any more. Because as Charles Tilly once explained, there are 6 types of truth, each of which can make sense depending on where you stand.

And yet, come November 5th, because of the way this race has been run, will it really be over.. or will it have just begun.

We live in interesting times.

Bravo for really useful search

2008-06-06T22:32:00.001+01:00

I remember first connecting to the internet way back in 1995. I logged on using a modem at 14,400bps and used Netscape as the browser. There was no Internet Explorer then.

I searched using Yahoo or Lycos and remember the typical search results being utter rubbish.

This pattern for search results, you type something in and get loads of rubbish back, continued for many years.

Search did improve and Google has had a big part in that in my view.

Lately it seems that plain text searches, typically typing in a regular sentence rather than just key words, returns some really amazing results.

Here's an example.

Last night I was watching The Bourne Supremacy. There's a scene towards the end where Bourne sends the CIA off on a wild goose chase while he breaks into Noah Vosen's office.

The CIA realise they have been tricked and come screeching back into the city.

I've been wondering about one of the cars in this scene, wondering what kind of a car it is.

So I typed in tonight "what type of cars are used in the bourne ultimatum" and it resulted in this.

And on the page is a whole host of screen grabs from the film. Amazing.

I found out the type of car. That's really useful search.

My youngest son insists he's not lying

2008-06-05T20:27:00.001+01:00

There is an awful stench in the kitchen just now. It appears to be coming from my youngest son's back quarters.

He is wearing a nappy and I suspect he has a little surprise in there for me.

I have asked him if he has anything to declare, well not exactly in those terms, and he insists he does not.

I asked him if he was telling me a fib and he insisted in a most aggrieved tone that he is not telling me a fib.

Without wanting to give him a complex because I appear not to believe him, while grappling with the horrendous truth that awaits me when he eventually gets on to the changing mat..I am stumped.

I'm going to try again with diplomacy. Let's see if he agrees to a visual inspection.

Bruce in Dublin - the rain can't stop it

2008-05-26T20:31:00.001+01:00

I was at the Bruce Springsteen concert in Dublin's RDS arena last night.

What can I say? The show was fantastic.

It was a kind-of last-minute decision to go having been offered some tickets by a friend who bought them ages ago and I am so glad that she offered and that I decided to go.

The show started around 8:30 in the evening and Bruce and the band played solid until about 11 o'clock. At 10:30 the stadium floodlights came on, a bit like the way the barman turns the lights up when he wants to throw you out on the street. In the end it didn't matter because the public kept on standing there chanting for more and the music kept on coming.

A great show and a great night.

Today I am wrecked.

I must be getting old. How's that for a statement of the bleeding obvious.

Review in the telegraph newspaper here.

Smoky coats and chilly toes

2008-04-07T19:01:00.002+01:00

Jaysus that was a Saturday to remember.

A mate of mine is getting married in a couple of weeks so he invited me to his stag which took place on Saturday last. So a stag party is where a guy about to get married heads out for a wild night of drunken debauchery with his closest mates and they basically get trashed before ending up crashed out on the floor of someone's house/apartment the following morning. In the US I've heard it referred to as a bachelor party but I prefer the term "stag".. not sure why.

Well anyway this one was different.

Instead of the formulaic trip into the city to down loads of pints before heading on to a club somewhere to essentially down loads more pints before heading on to a fast food restaurant to down loads of greasy food before heading to the kerb to.. well you get the picture.. this involved going the opposite direction.

Instead we all met up in the mountains of Wicklow. Wicklow is a beautiful part of Ireland, often referred to as The Garden of Ireland and when you are up in the mountains you can see why.

So we met up first in Laragh, a picturesque little village up in the mountains, and headed into a local pub for some dinner and to watch the rugby. A few drinks and a few hours later we all piled into a small convoy of cars and headed even deeper into the countryside.

The plan was to stay in a hostel way up in the middle of a valley and the hostel was pretty spartan. I was reading about it yesterday on the internet and it was listed as a 1 star hostel. It was pretty basic but absolutely fantastic nonetheless.

This was a hostel with a difference. It had no electricity, no running water, and no toilet.. at least not a water-flushed toilet. And no mobile phone coverage. But inside the cottage, because it really was a small cottage, on the wall was a framed listing of all the people who had owned the cottage over its history. Not only that but some really famous people from Ireland's history had stayed there. So we were humbled to be staying in this famous little place way up here in the hills.

Did I mention it was dark? Really really dark. Pitch black, can't see your hand in front of your face. That kind of dark. Which of course meant that the view of the stars from deep in the middle of a valley was just breathtaking. That and the freezing air every time you stepped outside the back door.

So well and truly off the beaten path.

In all there were 12 of us staying there for the Saturday night and it was cold enough, around or just below zero Celsius but there were plenty of blankets and such like and we were all comfortable enough, especially after a few beers and a night spent chucking wood and turf onto the stove in the little common room where we were all gathered. Gas Lights, torches, candles and the smell of burning turf. Superb.

On the Sunday morning I woke up at 5 AM slightly dazzled by the bright white light shining in the window. On opening my eyes I realised the whole landscape outside the window was covered in snow. I dropped off again and woke around 8 and dragged myself down off the bunk I was sleeping on and headed outside. It was still snowing and there was a river rushing past right next to the side of the cottage. A really wonderful scene and not the typical stag weekend. I was sorry at that stage that I had not brought a camera.

A big fry-up followed, a mountain of sausages and rashers and a big pot of tea, and we were all starting to look and feel awake again.

By 10 AM the snow had already started to thaw and it was time to hit the road and head home back over the mountains.

Madra agus Cata

2008-03-30T23:18:00.003+01:00

That's how you say "Cats and Dogs" (or Dogs and Cats to be precise) in the Irish Language or as Gaeilge as we say over here on this little green island.

Anyway the day started really nicely and we had some great weather until about 6 PM. I had the lawn mower out for the first cut of the year and the mower was running nicely, chewing up grass and clothes pegs equally well and spitting out splinters of wood at my sons chasing around after me with their toy lawn mowers.

I went to the recycle centre with the grass cuttings and paid 5 euros for the privilege. That place is a gold mine. Five quid for a few bags of grass. Huh.

Anyway this evening has been spent listening to eighties music and looking out the window at the lousy weather.

I dumped all the pictures off the digital camera tonight and then tried taking a picture of rain. I think I need some tips on taking a better picture at night perhaps. Here's the best one (I know).

It's good to be blogging again even if the subject matter is crap.

Who framed Roger Hargreaves?

2008-03-30T23:08:00.003+01:00

I was reading a Mr. Men story to my son tonight before he went to bed. Mr. Messy to be precise. The story, like just about all the Mr. Men stories, is by Roger Hargreaves.

Anyway right at the start of the book, to illustrate how messy Mr. Messy is, there is a page covered in messy finger prints.

I looked at the page, and thought instantly of the scene in The Bourne Supremacy where the Russian FSB agent Kirill plants Bourne's fingerprints on some explosive detonators in the basement of a building in Berlin to essentially frame Bourne. Sorry if I ruined the movie for you right there.

Anyway, I then wondered what would happen in some FSB agent took Roger Hargreaves prints (stay with me on this one) and framed him for some big mad explosion somewhere.

OK don't panic. First of all Roger Hargreaves passed away sadly a few years back so he's not going to be framed. Second, I think it's not likely that these are Roger Hargreaves' own prints but you never know.

I did not share any of the above insane thoughts with my 5 year-old son.

It's a beautiful day in Dublin

2008-03-30T12:03:00.003+01:00

Hello world.

Today is a beautiful day in Dublin Ireland. The sun is shining, the sky is clear of cloud and for some reason today I am feeling very buoyant.

more to follow.

Conklin dead, Abbott dead, Zorn dead and Vosen in custody.

2008-02-18T19:17:00.001Z

Well it only took me 6 years to catch up to the rest of the world but what the heck.

I recently watched the three Bourne films and I really like them.

I'm not sure why. I've never been completely taken with this kind of movie before but I really like these ones. I've watched them over and over and find that I really get hooked watching them.

I think I must have starved myself so badly by not watching movies during my studies that I am now rediscovering why it's great to sit down and watch a whole movie. Actually having two young children also explains a lot.. I think it's been a long time since watching movies regularly was a regular thing.

Forgive me as I catch up if I bore you all with my 'discovery' of films everyone else on the planet has seen ages ago.

Rant of rants

2008-02-18T19:08:00.001Z

ok so the story is this. The Ireland football team got a new manager recently. The last guy ~~got sacked~~ left his post by mutual consent after some poor results and a whole bunch of fans and the media turned against him.

Then there was a very drawn-out selection process to find a successor and they settled on this guy. He has had a very good career and has had lots of success. That might bode well or badly given our record as perennial great losers when it comes to international football.

Then I saw this today on YouTube.

Part of me is hoping the thing is faked. Part of me says that it doesn't matter that the subtitles are pretty much incoherent. When you look at the video you realise the gist of what he is saying without any need for subtitles. And that is scary.

Lean time for writing

2008-01-27T11:26:00.001Z

I have not posted anything for days and days. That is not good.

I've been busy, mostly watching movies and doing things I have not had time to do over the past 3 years in Business School. So now that my time at Business School (I refuse to write B. School because I think it's just a weird thing to do) is coming to an end I'm rediscovering some of the things I have had to forego during that time.

I won't name the movies that I've been watching because I'm afraid someone will try and spoil the endings etc. for me (talk about paranoid).

I've also dabbled in reading non-business material (I know !!! shock horror !!!)

So I have found some space in life again to do things with my wife and children and unashamedly I have been taking the chance to do fun things.

It's hard being responsible for a blog and knowing that someone somewhere checks occasionally to see if you have bothered to write something while you personally don't have the motivation.

But I want to keep it going because its fun and looking at that map of the world showing where people are reading from.. well it's just amazing.

So let's agree that I'll post a little more frequently and you in return might tolerate the occasional gap between posts :-)

Nani, Eder, Zico and Pele - sign here

2008-01-07T19:08:00.000Z

Football players, soccer to those of you reading this on the other side of the Atlantic, are often accused of being, well, thick. You don't have to search too hard to find stories that would make you scratch your head in dismay at the behaviour of a so-called professional sportsman (professional footballers are almost exclusively men) earning big money to ply his trade for an hour and half a week, such as this, this, this or this.

But then something got me thinking that this might not be as generalisable a truth as it seems.

For example what about the following famous footballers?
Edson Arantes do Nascimento
Arthur Antunes Coimbra
Luís Carlos Almeida da Cunha
Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite
Éder Aleixo de Assis

They have all done something that the average footballer has not. They have figured out that when you are knackered tired after a hard training session, or trying desperately to get out of the stadium after an exhausting game past the hordes of fans scrambling for your autograph, the last thing you want to have to do is write our your quadruple-barrelled name 50 times.

Solution?

Come up with a four-letter alternative (not one of those four-letter words however) and call yourself that.

Time saved, money saved and much easier to remember.

Gosh those lads are clever.

World record pants-change

2008-01-03T17:07:00.000Z

Today I am entrusted (!) with potty training my 3 year old son. He is not keen.

There seems to be no standard way to effect a smooth transition from nappies to pants without having to go through the odd puddle on seats, carpet, tiles etc.

He appears to be going for the world-record number of changes of pants in a single day.

And he is not fond of the idea of sitting on the potty at all.

He is a very discreet child and in the past would often slip off to a quiet corner of the house to 'do his business'.

Now we are asking him to showcase his bowel movements and he is not best pleased.

Right now he is sitting at the kitchen table with play-doh and a rolling-pin and I am watching him like a hawk in case he suddenly gets the urge.

Tonight I will research best-practice in potty training.

Play, damn you!

2008-01-03T16:58:00.000Z

I was over on Youtube today looking at music videos and was very taken with a comment from one particular user.

The comment was about a song from a certain group and the user commented that this was their favourite song. Then they went on to say that they were annoyed that when the group toured their area recently they didn't play this song.

They were aggrieved that not enough groups take requests from the audience at concerts.

Call me odd but I thought this request, this expectation is just, well, mad.

I know if I was a member of a famous group and the audience was shouting up stuff at me, you know "play blah blah song" or whatever I think I would be less than impressed.

Unless of course I was playing the 'Dog and Duke' pub in some obscure suburban part of London and charging a fiver in at the door because my career had gone south fifteen years previously.

Anyway.

None of this is my fault

2008-01-03T16:49:00.000Z

I was down in Portarlington yesterday visiting some friends and two things struck me about the journey down from my home.

The first was how much the roads have improved, with motorway almost the entire length of the journey. That makes a big difference and really made the drive very straightforward.

The second was how stupid some people become when they get behind the wheel of a vehicle. I use the word stupid advisedly here because there is no other term for what I observed.

Winding unlit country roads, cold nights with temperatures close to zero Celsius and no ostensible need for anyone to rush anywhere. And pitch dark.

And what I encountered was idiots driving too close, too fast, and with no concern for anyone else's safety on the roads.

And then I saw this horrendous story and picture on the news this morning. Is it any wonder things like this happen?

It was the first day back to work after Christmas and New Year for many people. Maybe this could be offered as some kind of excuse for all the rushing about and unthinking driving behaviour.

I'm not the first to write about this worst of Irish behaviour and surely won't be the last. This kind of outcome is tragic.

But for most they fail to connect their own behaviour behind the wheel with stories like this. A terrible start to the new year for this horrendous aspect of modern Irish life.

Can you hear what I hear

2007-12-31T18:42:00.000Z

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

2007-12-31T18:27:00.000Z

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

2007-12-31T11:17:00.000Z

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

2007-12-31T11:07:00.001Z

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...

2007-12-17T22:19:00.001Z

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.

What do boxers do with their money?

2007-11-17T21:04:00.000Z

A bizarre story doing the rounds this week concerns former professional boxer Chris Eubank.

Apparently he drives around in a massive truck (the tractor unit part, without any trailer) and he recently attempted to park it outside 10 Downing Street to protest against the war in Iraq.

After hitting a parked car he was arrested.

He subsequently failed to show up in court and now there is a warrant out for his arrest.

And here was I thinking retired boxers sit at home all day watching 'rumble in the jungle' over and over again.

I've had better Thursdays

2007-11-12T23:32:00.001Z

[WARNING: don't read this if you are about to eat]

Ok so last week was pretty much a write-off.

I picked up a cold, probably from one of the children somewhere in the network of cousins, neighbours or school friends of my own boys. Either way I had a bad head cold which suddenly got a lot worse.

Old fashioned remedies
I went in to work early in the week but felt really lousy so the middle of the week was a mix of staying in bed and working at the desk in my home office, progressively feeling more and more congested with the cold.

I started out with the old reliable Lemsip. It was of no help this time as the cold took hold in my head behind my nose and the pain in my jaws increased. I then moved on to try the old steam and Olbas oil remedy, immersing myself in a steam cloud to see if it would relieve some of the blockage in my sinus. That too was of no use.

By thursday afternoon I was in real pain. My left ear was blocked up and the whole left side of my head was in real pain. I had a steadily growing pain in my left ear caused by pressure in my sinuses and nothing seemed to be helping. There was only one thing for it. Bed.

Pop, click, bleed
By 10pm I was in bed, lying down and hoping/praying that a good night's sleep would do the trick. By 10:15 I realised that this might have been over-optimistic as the pain increased. By 10:30 I was in such pain that I would have gladly accepted a bullet in the head. The pain rose and rose in my left ear to a point that was unbearable and then it happened.

A loud pop, a loud click and then the sensation of something running down the side of my head. I sat up in the bed, my ear still aching painfully, and applied a tissue to my ear. Blood and some other fluid mixed and trickling out of my ear. Great.

Few drinks
I went back downstairs, by this time slightly thrown by the mixture of fluids emanating from my ear. The original plan was to address the issue of not being able to sleep. I thought a couple of Limoncellos would do the trick. That of course was before the whole ear discharge scenario started to unfold.

My wife sat there on the next chair looking at me dabbing the blood and pus from the side of my head. I explained my brilliant Limoncello plan to her and she looked at me as if I had gone completely insane. I realise now that it was not such a great plan.

Get this guy to the emergency room, stat!
So it seemed to make sense to get this 'blood and other fluids pouring from the ear' checked out, just in case it was some of my brains leaking out or whatever.

My wife drove me to the emergency room of Saint Vincent's hospital in Dublin. It goes to show how long it has been since I last went there that the emergency room was now on the other end of the hospital. On the way my wife asked me if I knew where the emergency room was and I of course said I did. What I meant of course was 'I did 10 years ago'. Anyway I registered with the guy at the reception. They operate a triage system basically meaning that you'll be attended to according to the severity of your injury. Thankfully there weren't a whole load of people waiting so I was seen pretty quickly.

But with this triage approach you might be 'called' several times, each time with a different set of things going on. This is pretty much what happened on the night with the first call being to ask me some questions about what happened, on a scale of 1 to 10 how much pain was I in and all that kind of general stuff. The second call was to take a blood sample and the third call was to finally get seen by a doctor.

A long night
I think we arrived at the emergency room just before midnight and I think I was finally seen by a doctor around 5 am. To be fair the treatment I received from the staff was superb and they were going as fast as they could. Once I went through the triage area into the treatment area I could see the place was full so they really did have their hands full.

I was relieved when a doctor finally came to see me. That relief turned to anxiety when he took me into a procedure room and started wheeling in scary-looking equipment he said he was going to use to examine me. Thankfully I was half-asleep at this stage, having spent a sum total of 30 minutes in bed that night, and had also taken some painkillers given to me by the triage nurse. So when he put a little metal funnel into my ear and started jabbing my ear drum with some little plastic sticks it was painful but I was so knackered that I couldn't muster the energy to complain.

The verdict
Pretty much as I suspected, the pressure from all the gunk inside my ear had built up to such an extent that it made my ear-drum tear, hence the high pain followed by the loud pop. It was not fun. The stuff leaking from my ear was a mix of gunk from inside the ear, blood from the tear, and some yuk fluid leaking from the infection around the tear.

The doctor prescribed some antibiotics to kill the infection inside the sinus to reduce the build up of more gunk, an anti-inflammatory pill to reduce the swelling in the ear, and some other stuff to relieve the pain in the general area of the left-side of my head.

I checked out of the hospital at 5:30am and by this time my wife had gone home to get some sleep. The nurse asked me an hour previous if she should send her home and I thought it made sense, especially since she was still planning to do the school run for our boys that same morning. So I was glad that she had gone home to get some sleep.

I wandered around to find an ATM, Grabbed a cup of coffee from an all-night shop and took a taxi home, arriving just as the boys were getting up for school.

Getting back to normal
It's Monday now, soon to be Tuesday and the sinus infection is starting to clear a little. I won't go into how I know that to be true. The only problem is the antibiotic pills are making me unwell in the stomach of you know what I mean. I've been sprinting to the bathroom a fair bit of Saturday and Sunday and my stomach sounds like Jabba the Hut with indigestion.

Not good and not conducive to going back to work. I was back and forth all night on Sunday night between bed and toilet and this wrecked me. So today I visited the doctor and he changed my prescription.

Tomorrow I'm heading back into work and hopefully I'll be back on the straight and narrow from here on. The ear has stopped leaking disgusting fluids too which is nice.

Hopefully there will be some time to revert to more normal content for the blog this week. Now you know why nothing has been written here for the last little while.

Is it a sin?

2007-11-01T19:45:00.001Z

I thought recently that I had lost my ipod.

I have a nano and it's a brilliant little gadget, one that I also think I can't live without. I guess that I'm not the only person in Ireland who thinks like this.

Anyway I couldn't find it for a couple of days and I genuinely started to think it might be gone.

Then I started to think that maybe this was a fortuitous situation seeing how there is a whole pile of new ipods just announced by Apple.

Then I remembered the story of how I came to have this particular ipod. Let's just say that it's travelled the world to get to me and then travelled the world with me since then. So my ipod and I have been through a lot together.

Then I found it.

Life has a funny way of making choices easy sometimes.

Life without mobile phones

2007-11-01T19:34:00.001Z

it's bizarre how dependent I feel when technology fails.

Last week my internet connection failed and I was without internet for a night and then for the early part of the next day.

For some reason I felt strangely cut off, as if someone had transplanted me to an island without any connection to the rest of the world.

Then today when I arrived home I noticed my mobile phone had no signal. I don't normally worry about this kind of thing but today I felt the need to call (via the old wired phone) to check out the problem.

Apparently the network is down and teams of technicians are working on it.

It's not that long ago really since we had neither of these technologies. We also had no dependencies then too.

Maybe I need to take a break from using this stuff to recapture the essence of life, you know by walking out and talking to people on the street and all that.

But I probably won't.

itunes university

2007-10-17T20:19:00.001+01:00

I'm currently enjoying listening to lectures from the University of California at Berkeley on my ipod.

I get in the car at 7:30am and start listening. Maybe my mind is clear of clutter but that time works for me and I find it a really good way to use the hour or so that it takes to get to work.

Obviously Ireland is under construction at the moment. The main motorway serving the capital city is a building site but the end is in sight. The main airport is now under construction as part of an expansion. And the road from my house to the largest indoor shopping mall in Europe is closed until next year.

However I no longer care anyhow because I'm listening to great lectures from excellent and entertaining academics.

What a great service. I found out about it from a friend and have been using it for about 2 months now. Check it out here.

be safe, be seen

2007-10-17T20:09:00.001+01:00

When I was a lad I remember there was a campaign appealing to people on bikes to stop getting themselves killed.

Loads of people used to cycle around in the dark with no lights, and of course dressed head to toe in dark clothing.

There was a rush on sales of lights, reflectors, and those belts.

Well that will only get you so far.

I mean once you have all that gear you're obviously going to want to have the right eyewear. Right?

Evidently so.

I passed some clown, not an actual clown, but a guy on a bike the other night and it was dark. Not getting dark but actually dark. He had the light, a little thing flashing away on the front of his bike. And a reflective vest. Good so far. And orange wraparound shades.

I mean if they are going to chuck you on a stretcher and ferry you into hospital you need to look cool right. Especially when they are all laughing at you in the hospital after you crashed into a parked car. Because you couldn't see it what with having your orange shades on. In the dark.

<end of rant>

a flurry of activity

2007-10-17T20:02:00.001+01:00

haven't had time to post anything lately.

Note I didn't say anything meaningful because I'm not sure any of it is meaningful.

In anyways, as they say around here, here comes a few nuggets of something...

Editorial standards as gaeilge

2007-10-03T19:03:00.000+01:00

To start with, for those of you who don't know what 'as gaeilge' means, it means 'in the irish language'.

So I was sitting on the sofa this evening eating a pizza and flicking through the channels on the TV. It was early, maybe 6:30 in the evening, so I was surprised to find South Park showing on the TV.

This is the show that features the routine deaths of Kenny, swearing, violence, and all the rest of it and all in the name of humour of course.

Fair enough once it goes out late enough so that kids don't confuse it with say Dora The Explorer.

Now I am of course very au fait when it comes to children's television and I can assure you that nobody ever gets killed during an episode of Dora The Explorer.

South Park is a different proposition altogether.

So I turned the sound up and sure enough instead of "ay! you piece of crap!" and the usual stream of child-swear, there was a whole load of "póg mo thóin lads, táimse ag dul abhaile".. roughly translated as "screw you guys, I'm going home".

So I'm wondering who in their right mind decided that it would be OK to show South Park at dinner time in Ireland with Irish translation on an Irish-language TV channel.

Maybe the thinking was that because it was as gaeilge nobody would pay much attention. That's possibly true until the anvil/airplane engine/tower falls on Kenny and kills him.

Credit please

2007-10-01T20:33:00.001+01:00

I was watching something on the TV at the weekend and at the end of the programme the closing credits rolled past on the screen so fast that it was impossible to read them.

Now normally this would not be a big deal but I was actually trying to find out who was singing the theme tune to this particular show. I thought I recognised his voice and wanted to find out who the singer was.

The credits flashed past, all over in something around 5 seconds.

Now if I was the songwriter or singer in question I'd want people to be able to follow up their interest. Maybe other work could flow as a result. Same goes for all the other people working on the production I imagine.

So when these credits go past so quickly that only someone willing to record the show and play the credits back on slow-mo can find out who the singer, best-boy or key-grip was, there's something not quite right.

I know commercials are annoying but credits are credits. They are there to credit the work of the people who put the thing together.

I know I'd be mad if I worked on something like that and the credits went by so fast that nobody could read them.

Apparently this is becoming more and more common, with some shows having no credits at all. I don't think this makes sense at all.

People in the media are starting to pick up on this. Is it too late though?

Back to biofuels

2007-09-30T23:28:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking about this area of how we're going to fuel our cars in the future.

I mentioned recently about seeing that guy pouring vegetable oil into his fuel tank outside my local LIDL store.

A couple of you (thanks M. and Paulie) put some clarity around that and now it makes more sense.

So that got me thinking. And I did some poking around. And I found this interesting article on the Economist website.

Now call me cynical but could it be that some people are vying to convince the powers that be that their fuel should be the one adopted by the whole planet?

I mean right now there is petrol and diesel and aside from a little bit of marketing and price difference petrol is petrol pretty much all over the world.

So clearly we can't have a situation where you drive into a petrol station and they have 20 or so pumps each serving a different variety of fuel (one of which is clearly vegetable oil :-)

So we're back to VHS versus Betamax, DAT versus DCC, or Mini-Disc versus whatever it was competing with back then.

Is a bidding war to become the new future standard fuel on the horizon?

Cue scary music.

On a much more serious note Ireland was dumped out of the Rugby World Cup this evening. Talk about analysis paralysis. Do these TV sports pundits never take a break from pointing the finger. Yawn!

It's only a game and it's over. There'll be another day for redemption.

Hotfooting it through Waltham Chase

2007-09-28T22:08:00.001+01:00

I've just returned from the UK where I was attending a class near Southampton.

I reserved a rental car and expected this..

When I got to Heathrow and picked up my car it turned out I was driving this..

Excellent.

Now the real question is why this kind of thing happens on a trip where I have virtually no time to use the car?

Then to compound it I found myself driving through a part of the UK that is overrun with speed cameras and such like. Not that I'd be speeding of course. A chance to drive faster than 30 miles per hour would have been good.

The irony is not lost on me.

Feedback via the toilet paper dispenser

2007-09-17T20:15:00.001+01:00

After washing my hands in the bathroom/restroom in work this morning I pushed the button on the hand drier and nothing happened.

So I stepped into one of the cubicles to take some paper to dry my hands. I noticed someone had written in pen on one of the paper dispenser boxes. It said:

I hate my f*cking job

In one of those bizarre demonstrations of workplace democracy someone else had responded in pen just above it.

then f*cking leave you loser

I remember regularly seeing this kind of graffiti in college back when I was a student but haven't noticed it in work in recent times.

It's funny how people choose to provide feedback on their level of job satisfaction sometimes. It's interesting how others feel the need to respond.

Why do all shower gels for men smell like chemicals?

2007-09-09T17:36:00.001+01:00

I was in Hawai'i a few years back and remember visiting the Iao Valley state park on the island of Maui. It was a really nice place and two things struck me about it.

One was how serene it was. There were other people there but the whole place had a real lack of anything touristy about it and aside from passing the odd person on a bridge through the park there was a real sense of it being a vary unspoiled place.

The second thing was the fragrant smell of the plants, flowers and trees. It was real Hawai'i for sure and you could smell the native plants. There were some signs here and there spelling out which plants were which as well as plenty of signs reminding visitors about the need to protect the native plant species of Hawai'i.

Anyway, I was standing in the shower today and as I squeezed some shower gel onto my hand I was struck by how unnatural it smells. It's one of those 'For Men' varieties, with a load of marketing bunkum on the back about spices, energy and all the other supposed merits of these manly gels.

Now I'm secure enough to be able to walk through a forest park and enjoy the smells of the plants, trees and flowers without feeling unmanly. So it struck me as odd that most of the shower gels that actually smell like flowers, plants and anything resembling nature's smells are all marketed to women.

Who decided that all men's shower gels have to smell like chemicals?

seriously...

2007-09-04T22:01:00.001+01:00

I'm serious about that thing with the sunflower oil - does anyone know what the idea is.. pouring sunflower oil into the petrol tank?

Another big day

2007-09-03T22:23:00.001+01:00

Our almost three year-old little boy starts Montessori school tomorrow.

He's pretty neutral about it, kind of matter of fact I suppose. He's a bit like that, cool as a cucumber about doing new things.

Hopefully he'll jog in there with all the other little boys and girls and will have a great time on his first day.

I think it will be strange around the house in the mornings from now on. No sounds of little boys at play. No horrendous mess everywhere.. maybe we won't miss that part too much.

Someone once told me to be careful about wishing your children would grow up because the time goes really fast.It's hard to believe that by lunchtime tomorrow both our little guys will be in the school system and will be on the road to becoming big boys.

Hey what are you doing with all that oil?

2007-09-03T22:18:00.001+01:00

I was in my local LIDL supermarket tonight and while queueing up to pay for the few things I was buying I noticed the guy in the next aisle had a whole trolley full of bottles of sunflower oil.

I was thinking what the heck does someone need with all that oil and figured he probably owns a small restaurant and is buying up supplies.

Then when I was driving out of the car park there he was pouring the stuff into the fuel tank of his Peugeot 406.

Can someone explain to me what the heck he was doing?

Theme tune transference

2007-09-01T11:08:00.001+01:00

What do you call it when you find yourself humming/singing a theme tune at various times during the day?

I suppose you could call it learning.

The boys are really into Power Rangers lately and I keep catching myself singing, whisting or humming a part of one of the various tunes that I hear on the TV when they are watching that show.

I mean it's not like I don't like other music, I do. But this theme tune seems to have transferred itself prominently into my head and I'm subs-consciously starting to sing it at times during the day.

I wonder if I'm doing it at work.

Actually wait a minute. I was doing it yesterday in work.

Time to put on a CD and give myself something else to whistle.

Who urinates on a building site?

2007-08-29T23:50:00.000+01:00

Driving home tonight from work I noticed a sign on a fence surrounding a building site. There was a whole heap of different signs but one in particular caught my eye.

It said:

"ANYONE URINATING ON THIS SITE WILL BE DISMISSED IMMEDIATELY"

Fair enough.

I mean not wearing safety clothes, not having a licence to operate a crane, that's bad.

But taking a leak on the site - now that's a sackable offence.

Little man's big night

2007-08-29T23:46:00.000+01:00

Well the little guy is off to sleep tonight, the night before his first day in school.

His uniform is all laid out on a chair in his bedroom and to my surprise there was no "I'M NOT WEARING THAT!" when he saw it. Cool as a cucumber he looked at it and said "Oooh!" in a kind of "that's pretty cool" kind of way. Amazing.

I took down his little shirt and ironed it for him. I mean no self-respecting 5 year old goes to school with a creased new shirt now do they?

Not sure how often I'll be doing that though since little boys are not known for their natty dress sense when it comes to going to school. Everything is usually stuffed into a bag, or thrown in a heap on the floor so that might be more the norm.

Anyway, as Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman would say (don't ask how I know this, he's sleeping now.

Looking forward to hearing all about the first day of school tomorrow. Should be hilarious.

A big day this week

2007-08-27T19:33:00.001+01:00

My son starts school this week. It's exciting and scary at the same time.

At home we're trying not to make too much of a fuss about it for fear of making him anxious. So we've not really mentioned it too much.

My wife thinks he's excited at this stage but I daren't ask him directly if this is true.

A couple of weeks back we took him to Dun Laoghaire to buy his uniform. It's always been my understanding that young children starting school wear a uniform but speaking with colleagues from other countries it seems that this is not the case everywhere else in Europe.

Then on Saturday I took him to Dundrum to buy his first proper pair of school shoes. I'm not sure how well I did since the pair he picked out have hidden compartments in which a toy car can be concealed.

He confirmed shortly after that when he met his future new teacher a few months back she told all the boys that they can't bring any toys to school.

So I guess he'll be wearing a new pair of black leather shoes with 2 empty compartments. So too will just about all the other boys I'd guess.

Tonight we'll be trying to work out how long it will take to drive to the school on day 1. We don't want to be the parents of the only boy who was late on day 1.

A question for you

2007-08-08T22:36:00.000+01:00

It's been a while

2007-08-08T19:36:00.000+01:00

Sheesh. It's been weeks since I wrote anything on this blog.

I've been busy with other stuff going on that I can't get into here but suffice it to say it's difficult keeping multiple things going on at the same time.

Anyhow thank goodness it has now stopped raining in Ireland. There's this old song called "holes in the floor of heaven". Country music ok.

The gist of it is that there is this little child/young girl/middle aged guy (one per verse) and they are crying about some life-destroying event (country music.. use your imagination). To try and rationalise why this is happening to them and why they are crying profusely someone points out that even though it's raining it's not really raining.

Rather it's because there's holes in the floor of heaven and Granny/mother/wife is crying upstairs and their tears are falling down through the holes and it's appearing down here as rain.

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

anyway.

It felt more like whoever is in heaven had forgotten to turn off the taps in the bath the way things have been going lately. Madra agus cata how are you.

Now the rain has stopped. The sun shines every now and then for 10 minutes. The ice cream guy pulls a handbrake turn outside the house and it's a bit more like summer.

Now to find my qualitative research methods textbook for tonight. Oh joy.

Until the next time.

Well would you believe it

2007-07-24T18:40:00.001+01:00

The ice cream truck came at 3:30 in the afternoon today.

My wife quickly raided her wallet for change and ran out with the boys to buy them ice creams.

By the time she got out to the road he had done a u-turn and sped away.

Maybe he's reading this blog.

If so Mr. Ripple or whatever your real name is please wait a few minutes at the kerb tomorrow. Thanks.

Pesky Ice Cream truck

2007-07-23T18:40:00.001+01:00

There's a guy with an ice cream van that drives by the house most evenings during the summer.

Granted with all the rain we've been having he hasn't been around much lately but as I drove out this evening there he was coming up the avenue with the usual O Sole Mio (also known as the Cornetto music) blaring out the top of his Ford Transit.

He's a bit of a pied piper this fellow. As he pulls up to the kerb the kids come scampering out of the houses with coins in hand. He does a good line in ice cream cones, you know the whipped variety with a chocolate flake stuck in the side, in ice pops or lollies, and also a fair range of chilled soft drinks.

The funny thing is though that his timing is all off. I have to say I never paid much attention to it but my wife mentioned it to me a while ago. She said that he always arrives to sell ice cream just as it's approaching dinner time.

Just when parents everywhere are lining up the children to eat something healthy for dinner he sails in to the road at 5:30 in the evening.

I suppose he just has a strange sense of timing. Or humour.

Paracetamol - can you be trusted?

2007-07-15T10:04:00.001+01:00

So you may know by now that I was holidaying in Spain recently. On one of the days I woke up with a blinding headache so when I went out I headed straight for the supermarket to pick up something for the headache.

I normally take paracetamol since I find aspirin just doesn't work for me. I drove over to La Cañada, a big shopping complex near Marbella and about 30 minutes from where I was staying.

Inside this complex there is a huge supermarket and I mean huge. I walked all through it but not a sign of anything for a headache.

Outside the supermarket there are all manner of shops, dozens and dozens of them. I walked along and spotted the customary blue and green cross that in Spain means pharmacia, a chemist or pharmacy as we call it in Ireland.

I went in and after the customary 'hola' from the shop assistant to me and me to him I asked for something for a headache. He bent down behind the counter and reappeared with what could only be described as a bullet-shaped object. It was brass coloured, about an inch long and looked like a bullet. He said that this was all he could sell me for a headache and that it was a kind of personal massager.

Ahem.

I asked him where could I get some paracetamol and he said I'd have to go to a pharmacy for that. Turns out this was a para-pharmacia, I suppose some kind of almost-a-pharmacy concept that we don't really have in Ireland. I suppose natural health stores would be the nearest thing we have to this.

Once we were done with our shopping we all got back in the car and headed back along the A7 towards Estepona where we were staying. About 3 miles before Estepona I saw the blue and green neon sign again ahead on the roadside. I pulled off the road and parked the car.

I entered the pharmacia which was literally in the middle of nowhere. The door made a ding noise as I entered the empty pharmacy. The female pharmacist finally appeared and called out hola to me.

I asked her in spanish if she had paracetamol. She replied 'si' and proceeded to take a Spanish-made product from the shelf. I noticed right beside it a brand I recognised and asked her if I could have that instead.

In the car I took two paracetamol with some water and my headache started to subside almost immediately.

So the question is why in some countries can you buy paracetamol in supermarkets, petrol stations and just about anywhere while in other countries it is extremely difficult to do that. I also know that paracetamol is much more expensive in some countries compared to others.

I have a colleague from Germany who frequently buys a large supply of paracetamol whenever she is in the UK on business because the price of paracetamol is 5 times higher where she lives in Germany.

Then you have this law in Ireland where you can only buy one pack of paracetamol per visit to the supermarket or chemist. They are not allowed by law to sell you two packs.

Paracetamol seems to be viewed differently depending on where you are in the world and seems to cost more in some countries than others.

Why is this?

My tip if you're travelling anywhere on business or for leisure. Bring something for a headache with you. You just never know when you might need it and you just don't know how difficult it might be to get some welcome relief.

Just to clarify

2007-07-11T23:13:00.001+01:00

Just to be clear. It's not bad to have the brain of a 60 year-old man.

In fact I was talking about my brain age.

The problem is that I am not remotely close to 60 years of age so I should have a younger brain-age.

There is nothing wrong with having the brain of a 60 year old man.

Old man's brain

2007-07-11T23:10:00.000+01:00

According to Dr. Kawashima I have the brain of a 60 year old man.

This is not good.

Time to use it or lose it.

Aside from that, I drove back to Dublin tonight and it's great to be home. This month is going to be a bit mad.

I'm adding some new music to my iPod and then off to bed. I am very tired. My brain is soooo tired.

Puddle-hopping in Tullamore

2007-07-09T18:32:00.000+01:00

Howdy everyone.

Today I am in Tullamore attending a training programme. The programme will last three days so I'm going to spend tonight and tomorrow night in a Hotel.

Tullamore is about an hour and a half's drive from Dublin so I set off early this morning. It was a really nice morning, bright and dry and I loaded up my iPod last night with some of my favourite music.

The drive down was uneventful which is always good.

I arrived in Tullamore just before 9 AM and found the training venue without any great difficulty. The class started at 10 AM and since then it has been raining.

Now people often ask why Irish people are obsessed with the weather. It's not entirely true. We are simply obsessed with better weather and spend a great deal of time wondering if the weather is ever going to get better.

Me, I can't complain. I've been in Spain for 2 weeks in glorious sunshine and 34C temperatures so a day of rain won't bother me.

I have some evening work to do tonight, reading a whole pile of stuff in preparation for tomorrow. Pffffff.

So that will be all for now. Spare a thought for Stephen Smart who is on his way to China right now.