Long article is long (but really, really interesting)
http://www.vanityfair.com/business…
An outsiders view of the situation we are in now. Obviously some of his sources are dodgy, but it makes for a very interesting read.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business…
An outsiders view of the situation we are in now. Obviously some of his sources are dodgy, but it makes for a very interesting read.
I Love Christmas
It's snowing. My tree is up. And I am listening to a Boney M Christmas album.
I'm sorting presents before bringing them home to my mothers.
I love this time of year.
I'm sorting presents before bringing them home to my mothers.
I love this time of year.
Epic Journey Commences
Got the standby flight so heading to Heathrow in a few minutes. I'll try and keep this updated as I progress.
Edit: Landed safely in Heathrow, to find flights to Dublin cancelled. Happily now on board a Virgin train to Bangor, North Wales, presuming that I'll be able to make it to Holyhead from there, to a prebooked Ferry at 2:40 am.... Total costs of misadventure are now running at about €180. Travel insurance will pick up the tab for atleast some of this (and they have already very kindly sent me a claim form). I also presume that I will be able to get a refund for the LHR -> DUB element of my trip. So apart for a continually increasing sleep deficit all is good. Oh, and I also picked up a young female sidekick from Kerry as a travelling partner :).
Further Edit: Virgin Trains get serious kudos as upon seeing us all standing in the snow on the platform in Bangor, they reboarded us and are taking us straight to Holyhead. Now for a 6 hr wait in Holyhead. Atleast there will be food (which it didn't look like there was in Bangor station)
Final Edit: I am home. The sidekick was also safely delivered to Heuston for her train to the interior. Snow, heavy cases and missing buses make for interesting adventures at Dublin Port. It was also heart warming to eventually get a taxi and know the taxi driver from the local Rathmines rank.
Edit: Landed safely in Heathrow, to find flights to Dublin cancelled. Happily now on board a Virgin train to Bangor, North Wales, presuming that I'll be able to make it to Holyhead from there, to a prebooked Ferry at 2:40 am.... Total costs of misadventure are now running at about €180. Travel insurance will pick up the tab for atleast some of this (and they have already very kindly sent me a claim form). I also presume that I will be able to get a refund for the LHR -> DUB element of my trip. So apart for a continually increasing sleep deficit all is good. Oh, and I also picked up a young female sidekick from Kerry as a travelling partner :).
Further Edit: Virgin Trains get serious kudos as upon seeing us all standing in the snow on the platform in Bangor, they reboarded us and are taking us straight to Holyhead. Now for a 6 hr wait in Holyhead. Atleast there will be food (which it didn't look like there was in Bangor station)
Final Edit: I am home. The sidekick was also safely delivered to Heuston for her train to the interior. Snow, heavy cases and missing buses make for interesting adventures at Dublin Port. It was also heart warming to eventually get a taxi and know the taxi driver from the local Rathmines rank.
Vancouverbound
As in bound to Vancouver. My flights via LHR were cancelled yesterday, and so I patiently rang the number I was supposed to, waited over and hour and got the least helpful person in the universe on the phone, who took my number and suggested that I would be put on a list... And that was it. So, I got off the phone, booked the hotel I was in for another night (sans free internet, grrr..), and mailed my mother, my travel insurance, my physiotherapist and my local Canuck friends apprising everyone of the situation. But I was stressed. Real stressed. I do not like uncertainty at the best of times, and because of my current situation vis a vis career etc I am already suffering some background macro stress. So today, in search of certainty I have come to the airport and hounded a very nice Air Canada woman who has put me on standby for tonights flight. I am hopeful but not really expecting to get on this flight. I have another flight booked for Christmas day via Calgary & London, so hopefully things will be less bad by then. Sure we'll see.
Anyway there ya go, if anyone is wondering where I am, you now know as much as I do :)
Hopefully see ye soon and have a good christmas!
Anyway there ya go, if anyone is wondering where I am, you now know as much as I do :)
Hopefully see ye soon and have a good christmas!
Lime Juice Query
Does anyone know if it is possible to buy Lime Juice in supermarkets at home? You know, something similar to Jif Lemon except with limes?
Homeward Bound
Well, mostly...
I have started my trip back, with flights from Invercargill to Wellington and then Wellington to Auckland. Invercargill is 46.41°S, 168.37°E and that is likely as far as I will ever get from Dublin (53.33°N, 6.25°W). I will have travelled nearly 26,000 miles by air, and several hundred on the ground by the time I get back, enough that for next year, Air Canada will consider me a Prestige client!
New Zealand has been mildly interesting. It is primarily a geologists dream, with an incredibly rugged and active terrain, being both a fugitive land mass from Gowondaland, earths primordial great continent, and on the Pacific Ring of Fire, an area circling the Pacific tectonic plate that has regular earthquakes, volcanoes and other upheavals in the earths crust.
Of note, because there were no mammals here until recent history, the birds evolved to fill many of the niches left available, but this is not something that is apparent on the main islands anymore, as mammals (including humans) have run rampant. There are indeed many, many sheep too. And that's largely it.
It's sunny and it's christmas. There are maoris and pacific islanders. Oh, and it is expensive. Your average paperback novel here is about NZ$19, circa €12. Internet access here is sold in portions of 100MBs (at around €6 each). The best package I saw for mobile broadband was for 4GB for about €48, which compares against 15GB for €15 at home. A copy of Settlers will cost you between €55 and €65!
My soul just won't catch on the firmament down here. I have been in places that would normally ellicit a surge in emotion, but for whatever reason it's just not doin' it for me. I think it is atleast partly linked to the fact that I have found it difficult to find like minded New Zealanders down here to talk to. I have been mainly engaging with other Irish people, or the occasional shopkeep that I corner. My attempts to find board gamers or non magic players have all met with failure. (Magic is huge down here, there are shops that sell almost nothing else)
I would come back, for love or money, but I don't think I'd come back for anything else.
I will be returning home at a leisurely pace, unfortunately missing some of the christmas festivities, but I will be back in time for the day itself.
I have started my trip back, with flights from Invercargill to Wellington and then Wellington to Auckland. Invercargill is 46.41°S, 168.37°E and that is likely as far as I will ever get from Dublin (53.33°N, 6.25°W). I will have travelled nearly 26,000 miles by air, and several hundred on the ground by the time I get back, enough that for next year, Air Canada will consider me a Prestige client!
New Zealand has been mildly interesting. It is primarily a geologists dream, with an incredibly rugged and active terrain, being both a fugitive land mass from Gowondaland, earths primordial great continent, and on the Pacific Ring of Fire, an area circling the Pacific tectonic plate that has regular earthquakes, volcanoes and other upheavals in the earths crust.
Of note, because there were no mammals here until recent history, the birds evolved to fill many of the niches left available, but this is not something that is apparent on the main islands anymore, as mammals (including humans) have run rampant. There are indeed many, many sheep too. And that's largely it.
It's sunny and it's christmas. There are maoris and pacific islanders. Oh, and it is expensive. Your average paperback novel here is about NZ$19, circa €12. Internet access here is sold in portions of 100MBs (at around €6 each). The best package I saw for mobile broadband was for 4GB for about €48, which compares against 15GB for €15 at home. A copy of Settlers will cost you between €55 and €65!
My soul just won't catch on the firmament down here. I have been in places that would normally ellicit a surge in emotion, but for whatever reason it's just not doin' it for me. I think it is atleast partly linked to the fact that I have found it difficult to find like minded New Zealanders down here to talk to. I have been mainly engaging with other Irish people, or the occasional shopkeep that I corner. My attempts to find board gamers or non magic players have all met with failure. (Magic is huge down here, there are shops that sell almost nothing else)
I would come back, for love or money, but I don't think I'd come back for anything else.
I will be returning home at a leisurely pace, unfortunately missing some of the christmas festivities, but I will be back in time for the day itself.
Backbenchers
Just watching some daytime TV here in NZ. OMG.
There is a quiz show where 4 back bench MPs are quized on news items of the day... They didn't do that well, and were particularly rubbish at questions that had anything to do with international news. Seems to be aimed mostly at students. Looks like it was recorded in a pub... Awesome idea.
There is a quiz show where 4 back bench MPs are quized on news items of the day... They didn't do that well, and were particularly rubbish at questions that had anything to do with international news. Seems to be aimed mostly at students. Looks like it was recorded in a pub... Awesome idea.
Commercialism
Wow. I thought I had seen commercialism in Hawai'i when I had watched TV ads and gone to a local mall. Not even close.
Tonight I decided to walk around the outside of Waikiki along the canal as far as the zoo, and then came back thru the heart of the tourist area. The streets were thronged. And the stores were all (and I mean absolutely all) of the big name luxury brand stores, from the obvious like Ralph Lauren, Gucci & Louis Vuitton to the relatively obscure like a Ferrari shop. Interspersed were galleries, 5 star hotels and restaurants. All I can say is that to support all of these the amount of money spent here must be in the billions (and indeed wikipedia backs me up on this, $10bil in 2006, so I'd guess atleast $12bil now).
I feel poor.
Tonight I decided to walk around the outside of Waikiki along the canal as far as the zoo, and then came back thru the heart of the tourist area. The streets were thronged. And the stores were all (and I mean absolutely all) of the big name luxury brand stores, from the obvious like Ralph Lauren, Gucci & Louis Vuitton to the relatively obscure like a Ferrari shop. Interspersed were galleries, 5 star hotels and restaurants. All I can say is that to support all of these the amount of money spent here must be in the billions (and indeed wikipedia backs me up on this, $10bil in 2006, so I'd guess atleast $12bil now).
I feel poor.
Hawai'i
Aloha!
For those of you that don't know, I am currently in Hawai'i.
It's an interesting part of the world. Obviously VERY touristy, which isn't my bag really, and also consistently hot, also not really my bag, and yet I do like it here. My survival requires only thinking about going out in the early hours of the morning (for dawn) and in the evenings, starting pre sunset, and this means I now fully understand siestas.
One of the very interesting things is that it is Thanksgiving tomorrow, and the holiday period is in full swing. Tomorrow I will be having a classic thanksgiving dinner courtesy of one of the local eateries depending on how fancy I want to be. Xmas music is in full swing in the shopping centres (though much to my inconvenience many shops don't open 'til 9:30am, which is useless to me wandering around at 7:30 am!). And it doesn't sound weird. Mainly because it stays in the style of the pretty constant backdrop of female singing that you find everywhere in Waikiki (where most of the hotels are). In fact , in style, it reminds me of Disneyland, you know with that constant soundtrack, trying to create the idyllic moment. The ads on TV are for stores opening at 3am and 5am (Walmart is open all night and all through thanksgiving), and with 19" LCD TVs for $99 etc.
I may have mentioned my dislike for Whistler, a rocky mountain ski resort near Vancouver, and of course it would be fair to point out that I knew in advance that Hawai'i was also a resort, and that I should have expected to dislike it. But the reality of it is that they are 2 very different beasts, and that is why I like Hawai'i (or at least Oahu) quite a bit. Because there is such enormous US style commercialism here, it requires an enormous workforce, and an enormous workforce means that real people doing their everyday job live here too in great numbers, and this means there is real culture here underneath some of the over emphasised polynesian culture. (Not that that isn't cool, but it feels like theatre mostly).
Not that I have a good overview of real hawaiian culture or anything, I just am not going to be here long enough nor will I be able to interact with enough different people. And Hawai'i includes 6 other large islands that I am not going to visit on this trip.
That's it really. I had no real point to make. I like it here despite the weather, and the resort nature of things. I imagine that people who were more into either of these things would love it.
Other asides... The number of men in ads here is spectacularly low. It's gotta be atleast 80% women, mostly young, hot and not wearing very much. I also notice a startling lack of car ads on the TV (which makes some sense I guess), though the biggest shopping centre I have been to was invisible from every road because it is completely surrounded by an enormous parkade. And I had Hostess Twinkies yesterday, just in case there is a zombie apocalypse I won't be able to find any...
For those of you that don't know, I am currently in Hawai'i.
It's an interesting part of the world. Obviously VERY touristy, which isn't my bag really, and also consistently hot, also not really my bag, and yet I do like it here. My survival requires only thinking about going out in the early hours of the morning (for dawn) and in the evenings, starting pre sunset, and this means I now fully understand siestas.
One of the very interesting things is that it is Thanksgiving tomorrow, and the holiday period is in full swing. Tomorrow I will be having a classic thanksgiving dinner courtesy of one of the local eateries depending on how fancy I want to be. Xmas music is in full swing in the shopping centres (though much to my inconvenience many shops don't open 'til 9:30am, which is useless to me wandering around at 7:30 am!). And it doesn't sound weird. Mainly because it stays in the style of the pretty constant backdrop of female singing that you find everywhere in Waikiki (where most of the hotels are). In fact , in style, it reminds me of Disneyland, you know with that constant soundtrack, trying to create the idyllic moment. The ads on TV are for stores opening at 3am and 5am (Walmart is open all night and all through thanksgiving), and with 19" LCD TVs for $99 etc.
I may have mentioned my dislike for Whistler, a rocky mountain ski resort near Vancouver, and of course it would be fair to point out that I knew in advance that Hawai'i was also a resort, and that I should have expected to dislike it. But the reality of it is that they are 2 very different beasts, and that is why I like Hawai'i (or at least Oahu) quite a bit. Because there is such enormous US style commercialism here, it requires an enormous workforce, and an enormous workforce means that real people doing their everyday job live here too in great numbers, and this means there is real culture here underneath some of the over emphasised polynesian culture. (Not that that isn't cool, but it feels like theatre mostly).
Not that I have a good overview of real hawaiian culture or anything, I just am not going to be here long enough nor will I be able to interact with enough different people. And Hawai'i includes 6 other large islands that I am not going to visit on this trip.
That's it really. I had no real point to make. I like it here despite the weather, and the resort nature of things. I imagine that people who were more into either of these things would love it.
Other asides... The number of men in ads here is spectacularly low. It's gotta be atleast 80% women, mostly young, hot and not wearing very much. I also notice a startling lack of car ads on the TV (which makes some sense I guess), though the biggest shopping centre I have been to was invisible from every road because it is completely surrounded by an enormous parkade. And I had Hostess Twinkies yesterday, just in case there is a zombie apocalypse I won't be able to find any...
(no subject)
From bastun_ie
The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets and comic book authors can be included) who've influenced you and who will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag everyone, because I'm interested in seeing what authors my friends choose.
(In rough chronological order)
Captain WE Johns
Monica Hughes
Isaac Asimov
Mario Puzo
Orson Scott Card
Terry Pratchett
Julian May
Keith Giffen & JM DeMatteis
Mark Waid
Iain M Banks
CJ Cherryh
George RR Martin
Pat Ingoldsby
Ursula K LeGuin
The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets and comic book authors can be included) who've influenced you and who will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag everyone, because I'm interested in seeing what authors my friends choose.
(In rough chronological order)
Captain WE Johns
Monica Hughes
Isaac Asimov
Mario Puzo
Orson Scott Card
Terry Pratchett
Julian May
Keith Giffen & JM DeMatteis
Mark Waid
Iain M Banks
CJ Cherryh
George RR Martin
Pat Ingoldsby
Ursula K LeGuin