Modern Life Is Stylish (But Rubbish)

Well we've just had the deepest snow this year , here and the back garden is still white but the residue on the local footpaths is just slippier ice.

Earlier this year we had a new bathroom suite fitted,

see here. It looks very nice and is very nice but has one potentially disastrous design flaw which came to haunt me yesterday when laeving the running tap during shaving to answer a phone call. The bath and sing have no emergency overflow!!! The weight of the water had pushed the integral plug down and I returned to the bathroom just as the water hit the top of the sink. Luckily I caught it just in time, but could be worse could be like this!! Now imagine walking into that bathroom!!

Idiosyncracies Dublin and Newcastle

Well the snows virtually gone, the main PC has packed up, but walking for the bus this morning the bus driver let us on outside the front door. Admittedly there was a bit of a jam , but better than some of the miseries you get.

A few things I noticed in Dublin:

In these days of super duper mobiles , Dublin is as up to date as anywhere , but it seems everyone just has the default ringtone on their phone which is far more annoying that the MP3 customisation that we get over here.

Also in the posh (well five quid for a hot chocolate , knockin' Travolta's five dollar shake for six) Butler's Chocolate Cafe , you have to collect your drinks from the counter . I was flabbergasted. At five quid a drink I expect MORE than waitress service!!!

Alternatively in the decent pubs such as the Ha'Penny Bridge, The Druids Cair , The Queens and Finnegans they server the drinks at your table no matter how busy they are.

White Out...

Worst winter for Eighteen years so they say. London brought to a halt. Lot's of snow here, and this is what it looked like here, soundtracked by the Yardbirds "White Summer" a version of which can be found here by Led Zeppelin , same guitarist different band. The video is bookended by pigeons hiding in a tree from a predatory, but cold, cat.

The Met Office is the best source for weather forecasts and can be found here.

Dublin Images 2009 ... With Guinness

Now back from Dublin , and thought the simplest way to show the pictures was to just do a brace short videos. The first is stuff around Dublin , soundtracked by the Dubliners "Seven Drunken Nights" which you can download here:

The second is from the Guinness Storehouse which is well worth a visit despite being in a fairly dodgy part of the city, the soundtrack of this is "Guaglione" by Perez Prado that you can download here. To Celebrate the 250th Anniversary of Guinness in 2009 there is a CD of iconic music used in their adverts , available here. This is a direct link to the Virtual Tour

That's it for today!!

In Dublin....

And they're charging 12.5 Euros for a days wi-fi access and the bus drivers seem intent on telling which busses you can't catch rather than what you can catch.

On the plus side the Druid's Chair in Killiney is fully redecorated and still providing totally excellent service and Guinness. Also The Queen's Head in Dalkey is still doing their excellent Bacon and Cabbage which tastes far better than it sounds!

The ASUS is a bit small for my fingers so I'll expand these entries with pictures and video at a later date.

Highlights of the week included the visit to the Guiness Storehouse finishing up with a pint in the Gravity Bar.

Also theres an updating of "Playboy of The Western World" by Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun , which was playing to packed houses at the Abbey Theatre , see here, and is absolutely superb. Hopefuly it'll tour the rest of the world at some point.

Richard Thompson's 1000 Years of Popular Music At The Sage

Absolutely top drawer stuff (as usual from Mr T) . The 1000 Years of Popular music first run is available as this gorgeous 2 CD / 1 DVD set here well worth fifteen quid from your bank account.

The first half of the set was mostly new (but old) stuff if you know what I mean , but the post 1900 stuff featured a lot of familiar stuff.

This is the only youtube stuff I can find so hopefully it will stay available. If you can see him do so! The first is a trailer:




The man himself:



And one of my favourites:

Anyone Can Do The Web ...

..but not everything is worth looking at. The web or net or whatever you want to call it , is a great leveller , in that absolutely anyone can create a website , which means theres an awful lot of dross out there, full of "Under Construction " signs , or just unfinished and left to rot or just plain bad. The main thing about a web site is that it must do what it's supposed to do , no more no less. Amazon is a great example of something that doesnt look great , but allows you to do what you need (ie buy stuff ) , very efficiently. Play follows it very closely in this.

Then you get entertainment sites such as JibJab which allows the sending of e-cards and is one of the few sites of this ilk that is worth visiting. You can see various examples of Jib Jabbery throughout this blog , such as here.

There's also the personal websites that are the equivalent of cards in the shop window , but can be made to look like a page out of Vogue such as Mark Johnson's Photography Gallery , with an example picture below, which is a small catalogue of the sort of photographic work he undertakes. This includes commercial photography and travel photography as well as bespoke photographic commissions:



Another is Bob Artstrong's Paintings Gallery which displays some of Bob's work (he's an excellent Lincolnshire based artist) and has news about exhibitions and the like . One of his paintings is displayed below:



And finally this last one is for Woodlands Nurseries in Louth , an excellent plant nursery in Lincolnshire,which is an online news and plant catalogue, with many pictures of the beautiful plants available to the public:


And then there's the more mundane but neccessary world of Gas Boiler Servicing and the like . And my mate Harry Willis has his own site to advertise his services, such as installation , radiatore sytem flushing as well as annual bioler serviceing in the Newcastle area here.