waider

I wonder who decided that the June Bank Holiday would be a good time to clean the stiletto in the ghetto? And I wonder if this is what's inducing the rain in the area, you know, like how it always seems to rain just after you've washed your car?

So last night's party had the sort of small-world connections you get used to after a few years in the IT industry in Dublin (or possibly in Ireland). The bits I've managed to keep straight in my head:

• I worked with both Louise and Kevin, and was instrumental in their hiring to the jobs where I worked with them.
• Louise and Kevin both worked in Gateway with Peter
• The party was being hosted by Louise's friend Alan. Alan works with Gavin, whose boss, Dave, is one of the dspsrv admins, as I am.
• Gavin knows two more Daves - he used work with them - both of whom now work in the same office as me.
• Gavin also knows Richard, who sits next to me in said office.
• Lisa worked for the same company as Gavin and Alan, and possibly with any one of a number of my current coworkers, but I didn't get around to asking her.
• Said company bought a company I worked part-time for back in 1996.

There were more people there, and mostly IT folk from what I could gather, and had I talked to more I'm sure I'd have found more connections. In fact, I'm sure I'd have figured out how Katie (a trainee solicitor) was somehow intricately connected with some random job or company in my past, despite the fact that she was the only person I talked to who I know definitely isn't an IT person.

There's an odd new sculpture down in the waterfront park near Sandycove (approximately here[1]) which looks like a small cluster of boulders. It showed up some time earlier this year, if I recall correctly, and initially I thought it had been vandalised by local graffiti artists using fluorescent paints. Then I noticed one day that the colours disappeared and reappeared, and since then I've been meaning to go and take a video clip of it. However, I feel very self-concious (by which I mean stupid) holding my phone up to do this, so the clip I took this evening isn't very good. It's apparently some sort of James Joyce thing, since there are words from Joyce scrawled across its surface that are only properly visible when the lights come on, and the lights themselves are inside the sculpture. There's a closed-circuit camera nearby, which I presume is intended as a vandalism deterrent. Anyway, here's the clip in that horrible MP4 variant known as 3gp. I know that mplayer at least will play these, and probably quicktime.

[1] Slack. There is no maps.google.ie.

Apocryphally, someone (not necessarily RSF) organised the rioting in Dublin. Interesting second-hand stories about well-dressed guys with bluetooth headsets directing the ebb and flow of the rioters from somewhere behind the line. Jeffery Donaldson on the radio, responding to a caller who said it was "a bunch of northsiders who came out of the pubs to join the riots", responding that if northsiders generally went drinking carrying tricolours and fireworks, he'd not be drinking on the northside any time soon (Good comeback, Jeffery, and wholly without malice I'd suggest you'd not get an entirely pleasant reception on the northside or the southside anyway.) My own suggestion, that the rioters had raided Carroll's (a purveyor of many, many Oirish tourist gimmicks who were offended when I asked if they sold "cheap-ass sunglasses") prior to or during the rioting in order to stock up on "Irish" paraphenalia (made in $cheapest_location_available, of course). Some idiots headed to Lansdowne Road on Wednesday for the Ireland/Sweden friendly chanting pro-IRA slogans on the platform. No, seriously, you are assholes, if only for equating the Irish soccer team with a bunch of (actual, as opposed to Bushian) terrorists. I missed said match due to it not being free-to-air, i.e. the Irish soccer association having sold the rights exclusively to a pay-for channel based in the UK. How is it the alleged nationalists aren't up in arms over that? I caught the highlights of the match; Ireland's first goal was a typically Irish fluke: a lone striker keeps the ball to himself, takes a shot, and it bounces off the opposition into the opposition's goal. This is how we fumble our way to victory, except that the third goal was an absolute stunner. Which makes it all the more inexplicable why one of the freesheet tabloids the following day had a big headline crediting Duff (goal 1) and Keane (goal 2) but making no mention of Miller (goal 3, and the only decent goal scored). German coworker asked in jest if this meant we take Sweden's place in the World Cup.

No link from there to here: no sooner do I post about running when the weather takes a turn for the colder (apparently including the coldest night in ten years; temperatures somewhere down to -15°C) which meant I wasn't even inclined to leave the warmth of the front room, much less the house.

I think that about covers everything. Time for bed.

Door to DART: ~10 mins
DART to Tara Street, walk to Aston Quay: ~35 mins, fare €1.90 (single)
Bus to James' Gate: ~10 mins, fare €0.90

I think I got extraordinarily lucky with the bus (noone wanted to get on or off for the whole length of the quays) and the inter-mode timing (DART arrived within minutes of me getting to the station, bus was waiting at the stop when I reached it and departed within minutes of me getting aboard) but it certainly looks like a viable commute. I walked from the office to the DART on the way home - 30 minutes, roughly - and just to reassure me that not all was sweetness and light, the DART was running slowly due to some problem with a level crossing, meaning the trip home ran a good deal longer (the southbound DART wasn't as fortuitously timed, either).

For the last two years or more, there has been near-constant disruption on Dublin's commuter rail service (the DART) because they've been extending platforms to accomodate larger trains. Now that they're almost finished, the drivers are threatening to go on strike unless they're paid more money for driving the longer trains. Gah.

A curious collection of geographic facts about Ireland, including the area of Phoenix Park (at the end). 1752 acres. Wow.