Just Me

On Friday afternoon last, myself and Elly finally got inside what will be our new home. No we haven’t moved in yet, but we’re a lot closer. We got access to ’snag’ all be it without power or plumbing. Still, that’ll be another day out.

Essentially, we studied our new home from top to bottom looking for thing’s that aren’t up to scratch and with only a few minor issues to report, were very happy with our afternoons work. Well apart from the fact that we’d spent hours standing on hard concrete floors and were exceptionally tired as a result.

We also took the opportunity to measure some of the rooms so we could start thinking about where things would go and planning what we needed to buy to fit the spaces we wanted.  We nearly didn’t, we were so tired.

Once we got home (the rented home that is) I logged onto IKEA’s web site to download their room planner tool and plastered across the screen was the news that they were having a 21% off sale in all UK stores to celebrate 21 years trading in the UK, starting at 6am the next morning, running till midnight that evening. We did some calculations and worked out that if we went (what with the current exchange rate and the sale) items priced at £100 sterling would end up costing us about €100. You can’t argue with that value! A call was made to my youngest sister (long time IKEA fan) to see if she wanted to come, Alas too short notice for her.

We decided to get up early, Saturday morning and hit the road. Planning to use IKEA’s delivery service to ship what we bought to Grannymar and we’d get it from there once we had the keys to the new house.

Literally 3 minutes before we were going to leave my sister texted me, to let me know she was on her way, complete with people carrier. After a bit of a wait for her, off we set. The sister had removed all but 3 seats from the people carrier as well so we had almost as much space as a ‘Hiace’ in the back.

After trekking round IKEA for most of the day and meeting up with Grannymar in the process we finally headed to the tills, paid and left, heading for the cars. Packing commenced and for a while it was looking like not even the world Tetris Champion could move these ‘bricks’ around to get them to fit. In reality we couldn’t get everything to fit in the people carrier. Thankfully, Grannymar was on hand to take the excess items that wouldn’t fit, otherwise it would have been the returns desk.

So we got most of our purchases back to Dublin with us, Grannymar is storing the sofa-bed for what we plan to use as a spare room/home office. Thankfully it will fit in either my own or Elly’s car so it shouldn’t be to difficult to get it back to Dublin. Which is probably just as well because as I type it’s the only bed we own.

For the amount that we spent, we got an awful lot, enough bookcases to cover a wall, Dining table and chairs, a sofa bed, an armchair & footstool, Light fittings for almost every room in the house, a dressing table, a crockery set, a very cool magnetic spice rack thingy and a load of other little bits and pieces. Jaysus that sounds like I’m on the Generation game

As for the shopping experience, I’ll be generous and say that shopping in IKEA is unpleasant (if it wasn’t for the price I would never shop there again) I may post again about that, I think this one is long enough for now.

Wow! what a couple of days it’s been. Since last Friday morning, we (Elly and myself) have…

1. Snagged our future home
2. Discovered an amazing sale in IKEA Belfast
3. Been to IKEA Belfast
4. Bought 2 loads of furniture
5. And last, but by no means least, possibly even most importantly, been to my nephew/godson’s confirmation.

All in all it could be described as a busy, expensive and exceptionally tiring  weekend.

On tuesday last, Ireland witnessed one of the worst traffic accidents in our history. It’s been covered plenty on breakingnews.ie so I’m not going to go into details here, my sympathy goes out to all those involved and their families and friends. This was a truly terrible accident, myself and Elly passed the scene about 10 minutes before it happened. I hope you’ll forgive me for feeling relieved that we weren’t involved.

Something positive has to come from a tragedy like this and I hope it’s helped others to think about the way they drive, the way it has made me think about how I drive. The question that comes to my mind is “so, how fast should you drive in fog?”

Tonight, I did some calculations and worked/puzzled this out. At 120Kph you move a little bit more than 33 meters every second. That’s obviously far to fast to be travelling if you can only see 20m or 25m and thats still only a light fog. If you come up to a stationary object it’s already too late to brake.

So what speed is safe?

Lets say you can see 20m. That’s about 65 feet. What distance can you stop your car in, from what speed? is 70Kph slow enough? Well, you travel about 19.5m in 1 sec. Could you react and stop your car in 1 sec? I know I don’t want to find out.

Even at half that speed you only have 2 secs to react and avoid something thats happened 65 feet ahead. Think about that next time you start your car, I know I will.

Lets make that the positive thing that comes from this, think about how you drive. Not just the speed, your road manners as well. Indicate when you’re going to make a turn or change lane not as you do it. Don’t stay in the overtaking lane if you’re not overtaking and leave earlier so you’re not in a hurry. and maybe we’ll all help make our roads safer for us all.

Last night was a blast, catching up with people that I hadn’t seen in a while, people I knew but had never met, Bloggers I have read but never met and even making some new friends.

I think it’s fair to say all who attended had a great evening, so without further ado it’s time to share the link love. First up the results from the Irish Blog awards blog.

Unfortunatly, Grannymar came away empty handed although, Twenty’s post today gave her a big grin and a link so I think that made up for it. Both her and Ellybabes managed to meet Twenty himself. I managed to miss the opportunity and held a reverant distance, partly because I was worried I might get a beatin’ but mostly cause I enjoy his blog and thought that maybe speaking with him might in some way might shatter that illusion. If you have any idea at all what I mean by that.

The other thing I would like to mention, and I know loads of people have already blogged this today, but it deserves the attention. Bernie Goldbach won ‘The best Contribution to the irish blogosphere’ And without a second thought thanked everyone, but refused to accept it as it should have been awarded to Damien. Cue the first of two, very deserved, standing ovations for Damien Mulley during the evening. My hats off to you Bernie, not everyone would do the same in your position.

My thanks to the organisers for a great evening and I’m looking forward to next years event already, who knows there could be a horrific blogging related incident that wipes out all the good bloggers so the likes of me has a chance.

Yes, I’m off to The Irish Blog awards tonight, I was thinking that this would be a reasonably casual affair. Boy was I wrong! My Sweetie (Ellybabes) and her Mum (Grannymar, nominated in the Best Podacst and Best podcaster categories) have invaded and taken over the Kitchen.

They could be preparing for war, for all I know. The warpaint is out, there seems to be a lot of discussion and debate over God only knows what and it’s only 2pm!!! the awards aren’t kicking off for another 4 hours, this is serious preperation.

Me, I’ll pop off in a while for the 3 S’s (2 of them are shower and shave, the third, well, I’ll leave you guessing) Pull on some pants and a shirt hell I might even go the whole hog and splash on some aftershave seeing as how it’s a formal occasion :p

That’s what I love about being a bloke, Preparing to go out is soooo much easier.

Anyways, If your heading along then I’ll see you there, if not, come back tomorrow and I’ll hopefully have a report on all the important thing’s that happen this evening.

Good luck Grannymar

Yes, it’s one of those posts. A couple of links to stuff that I thought was funny today and not a lot else.

So without further ado, first up is a post over on Holy Schmoley! A great little video, takin the mickey out of those God awful ‘I’m a Mac’ ads. I love a mac user that’s prepared to poke fun at ‘The Almighty Steve’

My Sweetie poped this little gem in her Google reader shared items feed for me. Thank you sweetie! Maybe I should do the same?

And finally, The ever classic Penny Arcade produced a great new strip today. Takin a wild guess, I’d say they ain’t to keen on the PS3.

So, I had a few technical difficulties of my own making and it took me a while to get thing’s back up and running, but as we all know life doesn’t stop just ’cause your blog is offline and I have been busy. here’s a quick round up in no particular order…

Our old media centre PC decided it had enough and shuffled off this mortal coil

We built a new Media Centre PC

We switched phone, broadband and TV providers
I spent a day in St. James hospital (Turned out to be nothing serious:))

Christmas

New Year

Wedding planning

I started my new Job

Another Barcamp

Honeymoon planning

More wedding plans

But at least I’ll have a few posts worth to write about next week. While My sweetie is away for a few days for work reasons.

What with all the debacle this week between eircom and Smart Telecom, we’re now in the market for a new voice carrier as we had been a very happy Smart customers for over a year now.

Prior to that we were eircom’s customer for 18 month’s give or take and I’ll be cold in the ground before that every happens again. I got the impression from repeated “technical issues” going unresolved until the regulator, Comreg, stepped in that eircom couldn’t care less about there domestic customers. Strangely, our migration to Smart coincided with a polar change in the quality of service.

Since Smart took over our voice traffic we have not had an issue since, compared to every 2-3 months previously.Unfortunately, Smart could not provide us Broadband so we were in the unusual situation of having our voice services from Smart and our Data from eircom.

Now, I’m not a petty man, really I’m not (ask Elly if you won’t take my word for it ;)) but from what I have heard reading various articles and blogs this week it would appear that eircom turned off Smarts voice customers ’cause Smart hadn’t paid there bill, then hired 500 hundred new temporary “switcher” staff the same day and I even heard a rumour that eircom had actually refused a payment from Smart. To me this stinks of Anti-competitive behaviour short of sending a masked men with AK-47’s round the smart offices, I can’t actually think of any way it could have abused it’s position more. As a result I will be cancelling my broadband with eircom and seeing as how if I have a land-line I’m paying eircom line rental one way or another That’s gotta go as well.

This leaves me in a rather difficult position, despite living in the greater Dublin area with many broadband providers available to me I have a choice of 3 apparently, once you rule out DSL (cause they need a land line) and satellite (latency is too high for good voice) 2 of these (QBS and Digiweb) are listed on the governments Broadband website. The other, NTL, isn’t listed for some reason.So far we have only confirmed that NTL can provide us service, but the others will be contacted and checked out as well before a final decision is made. As for the voice service well again there are 3 choices, Skype, Blueface and Skytel, actually thanks to Tom Raftery maybe only two.

What’s our holy grail for voice?