Upside down

Monday, I found out my best friend's Mum died.
Early hours of Wednesday morning my Father-in law had a heart attack.

He's stable now, thankfully.

It's been a long day.

I'll maybe post at the weekend or something.

A surreal week.

Fountains of Wayne

Last Thursday Me and Mrs M traipsed off to Dublin for a day out, meet a friend, have a nice meal and go see Fountains of Wayne play the Ambassador in Dublin.

What a great day. We got to the hotel, parked our stuff and went out to get some lunch. We ate in La Med which is a wee place in temple bar ( I know ,it is tourist hell round there) as we have been there before. A nice way to start our micro holiday. After watching the tourists take numerous pictures of the temple bar from our lunch table we ventured out into the sunshine to have a look around.

I ,of course, had been very sensible and had gone prepared for rain.

My feet were cooking in big boots and the raincoat had been left in the hotel already but no spare footwear.

We wandered the streets for a bit and I took a few pictures. Film, I'll get it developed and scanned tomorrow.

We visited the gallery of photogrpahy and I ended up buying two books on street photography.
The exhibition that was on was good too. Not great emotive subject matter but the presentation was good.

We then took off up the road and into the porterhouse where I had a pint of Wrasslers XXXX stout.

The heavens opened and blinding shafts of light emanated from above.....

That is the nicest stout I have ever tasted, beats the rest by far. It had an after taste of liquorice, but only after the first taste. It was more bitter than other stouts I have tasted but with a marvellous depth of flavour.

I only had the one pint unfortunately.

We had to go back to the hotel and get freshened up.

Then it was off to meet a friend in the IFI ( was the IFC but they changed the name ) for a drink.
Two pints later we toddled off to dinner in the Mermaid Cafe on Dame St.

A very tasty meal was had. This was our third time and we get the same table, in the window (makes it look busy) as we always eat at 6-6.30. The reason for this is we are only ever in Dublin to go see a band.

The main event then-

We got to the gig early and were able to get up the front (not something I have done in a long time) for the support (The Minutes) - pretty good. Then FOW came on and it was bloody brilliant. We were singing along and I yelled loudly after every song, so much so that Chris Collingwood dedicated "This next song to the loud guy over there" and pointed at me.

Three pints of stout and half a bottle of wine'll make me loud but I've never had that sort of response before!

They didn't play my two favourite songs but ya can't please all the people all the time etc etc.

It was a great gig though.

Stinky malinky

Mrs M and I visited St George's Market in Belfast last Saturday. Some aromatic Irish cheese was purchased. So aromatic, in fact , that it had to be kept inside two different types of containment.
Goodness knows how it would smell if it was off.

Last night we sampled it along with some chutney and bread and an olive or two. A glass or three of wine also.
Cratloe, Gubbeen, Daru and a cheddar I cannot remember the name of. Of course, I couldn't remember which was which. That was before the wine as well. I liked them all, though one of them, I'm thinking maybe the cratloe or the gubbeen perhaps had a very strong flavour indeed. One of them was softer than the other and had the stronger smell. I enjoyed them, there is still plenty left, but not of the cheddar, Mrs M liked it very much.

I thought that if we didn't sit down and make a meal of it we wouldn't really eat much of it.
I have myself a little lunch planned for the weekend whilst Mrs M is off gallivanting.

It made me realise that the plastic wrapped cheese we buy from supermarkets is pretty much that, plastic. Still, it has it's place. I can't imagine eating a cheese roll with the hard cheddar we bought. I might try one of them in some cooking a la Cafe Paradiso in Cork. I did say try, my cooking is nowhere near that level of expertise. It never will be as I don't like the idea of being a kitchen worker. I wouldn't like the hours.

I had some real coffee for the first time in over three months on Saturday too. I bought some Captain Cooks coffee from SD Bell's stall in the market. Verrrry dark roast, some might say burnt.

I had one cup at 8pm on Saturday night and it was really nice.

I went to bed at 3am.

Blinkin' blimey flip !

I swear I was clenching my teeth.

....and you can buy this stuff over the counter?

Yow.

I'm saving it for weekend use only, roll on the weekend.

MAC DADDY

I went and bought a Macbookpro 2.16Ghz.
Ouch, my wallet is still weeping.

Fancy looking machine. ... The Mac desktops in the shop looked really sci-fi, I thought.
I need the portability of the laptop though. It'll take me a while to get used to the new operating system as opposed to windoze. I look forward to not having to tinker under the bonnet with OS X.

Aperture seems like a good program to work with RAW, but as I said I am still learning all things Mac and the associated programs. Mrs M is jealous of the new shiny aluminium machine. I'll get it set up to go online and then she can sit with it on her knee and surf.

I also went and bought a 500GB external drive to backup my photos. Wonder how long it'll take to fill?

Teknology

I need a laptop for the sole purpose of photographic manipulation.

I have weighed up my options and thought long and hard about Windows versus Macintosh.

I am not happy with all the reports I am hearing about Vista. I mean, they release a new OS and still it isn't right. I have enough fun wrasslin' with XP. ( Sarcasm, moi?) I hear that Vista makes a horlicks of RAW images metadata. Man, I can do without that kinda crap. Keepin' my head together with using all this software for my photography is enough without being the IT guy to keep it all runnin' smoooooooth.

I am gonna go and spend the money on a Macbook.

I also have an old PC that I thought I could put linux on......then I realised it doesn't have enough RAM. Fit for nuttin'. Any older versions of linux that'll run on 128MB RAM ????????

Cox's pippin anyone?

One of those" thank goodness" moments.

I had tried everything I knew to no avail.

I then resorted to what I should have done in the first place, hindsight, eh?
I did a XP ( should that be an XP , like an hotel...?) rescue install.

BINGO !

Problem fixed. PC still acting a bit slow and glitchy but that is a basic housekeeping problem (overloading the poor thing).

I burnt a knoppix linux rescue boot disk in case of emergencies and backed up all relevant data (photos applications etc) stored on the C drive onto another separate physical drive. Shoulda done this before.

Tongiht I try to resurrect the interent capability. Fingers crossed.

Oh, I have posted more photos , go see........

Infernal machine

Before I start, I am not posting this from my home PC.

My home PC has decided not to recognise the keyboard at the password login screen. All attempts last night at fooling the machine into working were to no avail. Ok So I don't have unpassworded accounts, hey I'm security conscious. It also has buggered things up rightly.

AAARRGHHH.

ahem

I tried last known good config, I tried turning off the user password, I tried every bleeding USB port on the damn machine. Nuttin'.
The mouse is ps2 and it works fine. The keyboard works fine up until the OS Logon screen then it takes it's ball and goes home.

I have done some research this morning and things are not looking good, ie : I will have to spend an evening or two fannying about with the damn thing until I get it fixed.

I spent about a week last August having to cope with a corrupted OS after putting in a separate hard disk. Reinstalling windoze is not my idea of a pleasant evening or two indoors. Ok, finicky machine I can deal with but this new problem is out of the blue and an almighty pain in the ass.

I am not a happy bunny right now.