Happy Anniversary My Sweet.

I love you.

Elly and I on our wedding day

“So where are myself and Elly off to?” I hear you ask. The city of Amsterdam, one of our favourite cities in the world and the place that we got engaged. We’ve been there a good few times over the years and we’ve seen a lot of the museums before. Thankfully there is a (kind of) new one for us to see this time, Hermitage Amsterdam.

I say kind of because The original Hermitage museum is in St. Petersburg. I have always thought that it was in the Kremlin as that’s what our tour guide told us when I was in Moscow in 1990, but maybe the 20 years have taken there toll on my memory more than I thought.

Either way that Museum tour was one of the most amazing of my life, our guide barely stopped the whole tour and I know there was a lot more to see. I could have stared at the Imperial Faberge eggs all day, such amazing pieces of craftsmanship and pure beauty, I cannot describe and no photo I have ever seen can do them justice. But I’m waffling now. In short, I’m giddy with anticipation

I mentioned we’re going to a music festival, Jam in the Dam to be precise. Two concert halls under one roof and a full set from all the bands each night, which is great because if you miss a band one night, you get to see them the next. I’d love to be able to go to all 3 nights but these days I’m grateful to even get 1 night.

There is only one act on the lineup that I’ve heard of before (I will be getting myself upto speed on the rest of the lineup before we head off so expect some post about them as well) but I’ve been a fan of Les Claypool since I first heard Primus play at the battle of the bands in San Dimas, California… oh wait a minute, that was in a movie… Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Primus were barely even on screen but the music grabbed me and it’s never let go since, they still sound as fresh as the first time I heard them. Bands come and go and over the years Les has moved on to other projects and I have purchased almost all of his albums since.

If ever there was a band that I would travel through time to hear it would be Primus, even over the chance to be at Woodstock, so there was no way I was going to miss the chance to see Les play, especially since it’s his first European gig since I discovered you could use the internet to keep tabs on your favourite bands.

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to wait until March but in the meantime hears the track that grabbed my attention so fiercely 19 years ago…

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.

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.

There are a lot of plus sides to it, not least of which is a 32″ widescreen monitor to surf the web with. But that’s only a small plus, first off what does a HTPC do for you?

Well a home theatre personal computer is exactly that it’s a computer for your home theatre, or in my case, living room. How does this add to your home theatre? for a start it’s 1 box for your DVD player, all your music, digital photo’s, TV recording’s and Home Movies. That’s what Windows Media Centre 2005 will do out of the box. Is it difficult to setup? not really, you can do it all from the remote once the operating system is installed.

For me there are 3 killer features…

1. My Photos – allows basic photo editing and slideshowing your photo albums
2. My Music – The Music collection
3. My TV – schedule and watch TV recording’s

The last of these gets the most use in our house, although having a photo slide show as wallpaper means both myself and Elly get to see those precious moments plenty.

I love the Music portion of Media centre, it was a bit time consuming to get all the info and album art sorted out but once thats done, it makes it so easy to find your favourite artists’ or albums. I’ll post another time about my personal experiences tagging over 20 Gb or about 10,000 individual audio files, it’s actually not as time consuming as you might think.

Where Media centre comes into it’s own is working hand in hand with our set top box for TV. it means outside of Grand Prix, neither myself or Ellybabes watch TV “live” anymore. Instead we record all our favourite TV shows and we can watch whatever takes our fancy at that particular time. So much better than spending 20 minutes flicking through channels till you find something worth watching.

This is really easy to do, just search by keyword till you find the program you like and select “record series” you can even tell it to record all showings on all channels or just new episodes, but once you take those 2 minutes to decide that, media centre just does it. The NTL set top box is far less reliable, needing to be rebooted at least once a week.

What if 2 shows are on at the same time? first media centre tries to find an alternative showing of either show, if it can’t then, it decides what to record based on the recording priorities the user sets. So for instance, we’re huge “Bones” and “Boston legal” fans, to make sure we don’t miss an episode these are top of our priority list.

Whereas “The Simpsons” which is on so many channels and almost daily, it’s near the bottom of the priority list as there always being re-shown.

What all this means is that when we sit down to relax and watch some telly what we want to watch is always on.

So is that it? well not entirely, there is a lot more to it than that and in a future post, I’ll touch on the why I chose Microsoft Media Centre and the benefits that it will bring when we move into our new home.

Still at least this time I don’t have to go looking for T-shirts as well, thanks to T-Shirt Hell. I have ordered off them before to check the size and quality etc. so I just logged in and bought a load of great T’s in no time. Job done. Well, except for the trousers, shoes, Shirts and Jackets that I apparently “need” :p

There are some designs on there site that I would never wear for obvious taste reasons, (in fact some would say they are not suitable for public consumption) but they are all funny and they’re great quality T’s as well.

Still it got me to thinking about which of T-shirt hell’s shirts would most suit my favourite ‘local’ blogger.

Ellybabes

or how about

and finally, the one that I think is probably gonna get me in trouble

So have I got it right or have I just seriously insulted my new wife? time and the comments will tell

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.

So far on the schedule we have, Stonehenge, Dunkirk, Nurburg, Amsterdam, Wiesbaden, Innsbruck, Monza, Maranello, Monte Carlo, Cannes, Aix-en-provence, Troyes, Maastricht, Spa Francorchamps, Gouda, back to Amsterdam and then home. We intend to drive this! I think it’s about 6650km before we drive around any of the places we’re visiting. Are we mad? Ask me in October

Some of the more astute readers will have recognised that a few of these places would have significance to Formula 1 fans like myself and Elly. Yes, we are taking in not 1 but 2 Grand Prix. What’s more there the last 2 european races of the 2007 season, add to that the fact that Monza and Spa are 2 amazing circuits which have always had amazing races and your starting to get a picture of why were calling this a holiday of a lifetime!

We were at the european GP in Nurburg last year, so why are we returning? Well, were actually heading for the old Nordschleife circuit. We have managed to get a ticket for the Ring Taxi. Which if your not familiar is basically 1 Lap of the old circuit in a BMW M5 with 1 of 3 possible ex- BMW test-drivers at the wheel, a guaranteed sub 10 minute lap. Who knows I may be inspired to take my own car round and see if I can manange a sub 10 minute lap on the fiercest race circuit ever.

We’re also planning to spend a few days in Maranello, the home of Ferrari but also the birthplace of the performance car, where the legend that is Italian Sports cars was born. Were hoping to do a tour of the various manufacturer’s one of the days this covers Ferrari, Lambourghini,
Pagani and more.

For now, I think that’s enough details but don’t worry, I will be talking more about this as we get more details tied down.

I took a few snaps of the masses as we all waited for our first sight of the parade.

Elly took a few shots in black & white. This one was just some random child in the crowd, but he seems to be enjoying himself:)

As the parade arrived Elly was closer to the rails and started to snap shots in both mono and colour.

Mono wouldn’t have been my choice for a parade but I don’t think either of the next two shots would have worked as well in colour

I’m not sure which one was scarier!

One thing, I noticed that surprised me, was the lack of any Irish Dancers. What’s up with that?

Well there were some interesting St. Patricks

These last 2 are my favourites I just love the colour and the energy. I am at times jealous of Elly’s ability to just pick up a camera and snap great shots, especially when she hogs the camera for an entire afternoon :p

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.

Unfortunately, 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 reverent 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.