Drive Through…

Well it turns out I am the worst restaurant critic ever after producing just two reviews of the places we’ve eaten at since moving over here. So, here’s a quick attempt to cover the rest in no particular order:

Eden

Eden is a lovely, lovely place but they clearly need to work on their website which is showing a database error just now. We’ve eaten there twice now; the first time being after our wedding due to a voucher we had as a present. Serving contemporary Irish/European cuisine in a two-floor restaurant located in the heart of Temple Bar, Eden has apparently been sold on by its original owners but we still found it to be a great place to eat. I particularly liked the Gravlax of vodka cured Salmon starter and the special of Haddock on a bed of Chick Pea salsa I had on our first visit. Our second visit was for Valentines Day and even though it was supposedly a set menu the choice was excellent. Dinner for two including wine and dessert comes to around the €60-70 per head mark. Service is attentive but restrained. My glass was never in danger of running dry which is always the sign of a good restaurant.

Maloti

An Indian restaurant on South William Street, we stopped into Maloti one night before a gig. It’s a fairly upmarket Indian, with contemporary decor and whilst the food was fine, I found the portions rather small and it didn’t seem fantastic value for money. In particular the size of the dishes containing the condiments served with poppadums was laughable. All in all nothing special, but maybe just nicer to look at than your average Indian restaurant.

Seasons @ The Four Seasons

We have a small book of the 100 best restaurants in Dublin at home. It’s produced by The Dubliner magazine and most of the reviews appear to be here. One night, having decided to eat out the coming Saturday I threw the book to Lana and let her choose the venue. A few thumbs through and one phone call later and she proudly stated it was all sorted. “Great, where are we going?” said I. “Oh, the Four Seasons” she proclaimed. After I returned from arranging the extension to my credit card I managed a response back! The Four Seasons in Ballsbridge is one of Dublin’s swankiest hotels, as evidenced by the Ferrari 599 GTB and various Bentleys parked outside as we arrived. It is also home to the Ice Bar, apparently one of the places to be seen. Thankfully the restaurant itself is a bit more refined and indeed the furnishings are very grandiose. It was fairly quiet when we arrived, but became busier as the evening drew on. After ordering our dishes and wine we were served an aperitif of beetroot cappucino. I had a starter that consisted of a tasting dish of scallops, each presented separately in it’s shell. Each was accompanied by a different sauce, including one that came natural and with caviar. For main I had quite simply the finest steak I’ve ever eaten. Bad memory robs me of what else we eat (as I said, I’m a rubbish food critic!) but it was all gorgeous. The service, naturally was outstanding. The price? Well there wasn’t much change out of €300 after tip and that was with only one bottle of keenly priced Rioja. That’s the last time I let Lana choose!

Elephant & Castle

In stark contrast to the Four Seasons, Elephant & Castle is located in Temple Bar. Whilst it looks fairly unassuming from the outside and with a very basic interior, it’s probably our favourite place to just turn up and eat at. Open until 11:30pm every night and not taking reservations, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to eat here, though I imagine they get very busy at weekends. The menu doesn’t reflect the surroundings and this is definitely not your average fare. There’s a decidedly eclectic slant to a lot of the food with dishes such as Roasted Quails with Glazed Cabbage and Cider sauce available. However, Elephant & Castle also holds no pretensions and there is something for everyone. In particular they serve probably the nicest chicken wings I’ve ever had and the burgers are gorgeous too. If you want a place to have a casual meal with mates, you can’t beat it. They are also open from 8am on weekdays for breakfast - something that makes me regret with live out of town.

Aya

A Yo-Sushi style conveyor belt sushi place, Aya is located just around the back of Brown Thomas on Clarendon Street (by the way, Yo Sushi themselves have a place in the Dundrum shopping centre) It is pretty standard fayre as far as sushi goes. We opted for the Sushi 55 option which for a fixed price allows you to fill your boots with 55 minutes of conveyor belt related action. It includes one drink and if memory serves green tea is thrown in. We were sat a fairly long way from the hatch the conveyor belt spat out from and it proved to be rather frustrating as we saw prospective dishes whisked away by more fortunately located punters. The dishes themselves are sorted into different price bands, indicated by the colour of the plate (with sushi 55 you can just take your pick and not worry) and they are not limited to sushi - the odd dish such as sesame chicken comes past as well. All in all it is fun, but I’d still go somewhere like Yamamri for decent Sashimi by preference. They also sell a range of Japanese foods and ingredients as well.

The Port House

Located on South William Street, The Port House is easy to miss. From the outside it just looks like a few tables and chairs outside a small pub, but step inside (and down) and you are transported into a dim but beautifully candle-lit cellar tapas restaurant. We went on a weekday evening and whilst we could walk in and get a table, it was still buzzing inside (I don’t think they take reservations) The menu offers a wide variety of dishes along with a range of daily specials. We sampled the garlic chicken wings, patatas bravas, spanish meatballs, calmari and a gorgeous pintxo with roast beef amongst others. I washed it down with a carafe of the house Rioja. The food arrived very quickly once we had ordered, but we were left for about 20 minutes after being seated before our food order was taken. Dishes are keenly priced at around €4-7 per dish.

They say that time flies when you are having fun. Well it’s been over a year now since we upped sticks and moved to Dublin. In that time we’ve settled into our flat, got married, got stuck into our respective jobs (more on that below…) enjoyed our first Irish Christmas together, bought another car and lots more.

By and large we’ve not looked back. The move has been great for many reasons. Dublin itself is a great place to live, and we are pretty well positioned in Lucan. It’s been very convenient for commuting as we both work outside the city anyway. Getting into town is simple, being only 15 minutes in the car or slightly longer by bus.

I got dug into work right from the beginning, building up a team to go and deliver new function in Lotus Connections. After a summer of stops and starts we really got going around September with a firm plan of what we were to produce. That culminated in the release of Lotus Connections 2.0 last month, about which you’ll find more over at the synchronous blog. It was a rollercoaster ride, and it’s fair to say it dominated my life for the last few months or so, as evidenced by the lack of activity on this blog.

Lana started working as a staff nurse in a community residential facility for seriously mentally disabled adults in Maynooth after we returned from our honeymoon in September. As usual with nursing she was working shifts which in this case were 12 hours long including every other weekend. This saw early starts for both of us often, until she got her own car - a Toyota Yaris - earlier this year. Whilst not a replacement for the Mini she had in the UK it’s a nice little car that seems spritelier than it’s 1 litre engine would suggest.

However, the rather punishing nature of the shifts took it’s toll and contributed to Lana’s decision to quit that role, so as of now she’s looking around for what to do next. One option on the table to to go back and further her education in some form or other, but it is early days in the decision making process!

In terms of culture and social life, we’ve taken advantage of what Dublin has to offer, but have not spread our wings too far out into the rest of the country as of yet. Whenever somebody asks me about how living here compares to back in Southampton my answer typically revolves around the fact that you are never lost for anything to occupy your time here. Like any capital city, Dublin has a wide choice of things to do. It’s not uncommon for us to both get in from work at 9pm on a weekday and then decide to head out into town for food. There’s always somewhere new to try and I can comfortably say that we’ve eaten in more places than we ever tried in Southampton (mainly because there was a fairly limited choice of places to try!) We’ve been to the zoo, been to various gigs and probably been to the cinema more than ever (there’s one right on our doorstep, as there was in Southampton) It’s probably also fair to say that we enjoy the fact that things are a lot more accessible here. You can go shopping until 8 or later pretty much any night of the week and there’s a lot of choice in where to go.

I’ve been playing football with a work team in a league over the past year, as well as making a good effort to improve my (awful) golf including taking some recent lessons. Initially I found Dublin to be a very photogenic place and that encouraged me to take the camera out often. However this year work has intervened and I’ve just not found the time - something I want to remedy very soon.

Of course there are some downsides to life over here, but they are really just annoyances. I’ve commented previously on the standard of driving, and it still gets to me, but I’ve started to realise that life is too short to get too wound up about such things! Like pretty much everywhere, the current global financial situation is having its effects felt here. Petrol has risen from about €1.15 to €1.30 per litre (which admittedly is still cheaper than the UK) and other motoring costs are much higher here. Housing prices are going down, which is ultimately good for us as we bide our time before buying - wanting to take as much advantage as we can of the fact that we won’t have to pay stamp duty as first time buyers.

Then there is the weather. In fact maybe that is the biggest change between Southampton and here. Being (relatively) coastal, Southampton benefitted from a very reasonable micro-climate and it didn’t seem to rain that often. Dublin on the other hand sees most of the the weather coming in from the Atlantic, allowing central parts of Ireland to benefit from the rain shadow of the West coast. Unfortunately the shadow seems to run out somewhere just short of Dublin!

So all in all things are going very well. When we we planning the move we were open about the fact that we wouldn’t stay if it wasn’t working out. It is, and I can’t see us going anywhere anytime soon.

So, as stated in the update to the previous entry, I’m now planning on getting an iPhone 2 as and when July 1tth comes around and I can get a fulfilled order. The begging question then is what to do with the 16GB iPod Touch I already have. My initial thoughts are:

• Keep the Touch as the main sync’d source of my music and video, thus keeping it paired with the iMac at home
• Set up the iPhone with my work MBP to sync stuff like podcasts, videocasts, photos and applications from app store

Basically use 32GB of storage, across two devices, for different purposes. With twice the battery life.

The iPhone will live with me, and I might sync a small amount of music to it as well. The touch will come out on trips. When I’m on a train/flight etc and want extended amounts of video/music. Also when I’m sat working at my desk.

Another potential would be to use one for music and one for video. I’m ripping more and more video from DVD to an iPod Touch/iPhone friendly format using Handbrake, but at the moment I have to juggle the 16GB of space on the Touch between that and the music library which is 32Gb on it’s own.

Unless you live in a cave, you have probably seen that yesterday Apple announced the new iPhone 2 with 3G wireless, built in GPS and a few more features.

Now, the iPhone has been on sale in Ireland for a while now, and the way it has been sold by O2 Ireland has been a bit of a rip off to say the least. See my previous blog entry for more details.

So, with the release of the new iPhone, is this a chance for them to redeem themselves? Apple have stated the price for the 8GB version of iPhone 2 will be a maximum of $199 or the equivalent in another currency. The 16GB is a max of $299. So, what do we get when we go to o2.ie?

Well, first you get a latest news link:

Clicking on the link takes you to their general iPhone page:

Note the banner ad style item at the top of the page. No spec details. Does not link to anything. No pricing information. No register interest link. Nothing.

And what’s below? That’s right, their sales banner for the old iPhone. Yes, O2 Ireland are probably the only people in the world who are actually still selling the original 8GB iPhone, and for you, the lucky punter you can get it for just €299. That’s $463 at current exchange rates. But hey, you get free delivery. Oh and don’t forget this is still without Visual Voicemail, no free wireless deal and just 1GB per month of data. Want the beefier (but still old) 16GB phone? No problem - that will be €499 ($774) please.

Maybe the actual sales page highlights the fact that these are the old models which they clearly have too much stock of or something and are trying to shift before the masses clue in? Nope. Their details product page shows no actual detailed information about the phone at all. Visually there is practically no difference when viewing frontal shots of iPhone 1 or 2, and there is nothing on that page which states this is the old phone.

Never have I encountered a situation where the old phrase Caveat Emptor rings truer. O2 Ireland should be shamed for this attempt to cash in on the buzz generated by the announcement of the new iPhone. They could certainly learn from their sister company in the UK. They have been very quick to provide updated sales information with all trace of the old iPhone gone. In fact their deal look great and it will be very interesting to see how their pricing (8GB free on selected tarrifs, 16GB £99 on £45/month or above tariffs) compares with the eventual details from O2.ie. The latter deliberately tried to fleece their customers with the original iPhone, even by their own admission. I hold out little hope they will improve their behaviour.

Update:

So, the top banner ad now links to the this press release. Relevant details:

Tuesday June 10, 2008 O2 today announced that the iPhone 3G will be available in Ireland on July 11. The iPhone 3G device price will be subsidised and priced according to which of the existing three iPhone tariffs a customer chooses to sign up to. The subsidised device prices will start from just €49.

So, subsidised price, good…

iPhone 3G will offer faster browsing speeds on the move over O2’s HSDPA network. It will be available in an 8GB model and a 16GB model. The 8GB iPhone 3G will cost just €49 on the €100 monthly iPhone tariff, €99 on the €65 tariff and €169 on the €45 tariff. The 16GB iPhone 3G will cost €129 on the €100 monthly tariff option, €169 on the €65 tariff and €229 on the €45 tariff. All iPhone tariffs include anytime minutes, texts and a 1GB data bundle.

So, the tariffs remain the same. The base €45 per month tariff only offering 175 minutes and 100 texts. Still pretty paltry. The 1GB data limit still applies, and no mention of Visual Voicemail yet.

They have, to their credit, announced a wifi deal:

In a separate announcement today, O2 and Bitbuzz, Ireland’s leading Wi-Fi service provider, have agreed a new deal to provide O2’s iPhone customers with free access to Bitbuzz Wi-Fi hotspots throughout the country. The deal, which is for an initial duration of 2 years, will cover the provision of Wi-Fi internet access at all Bitbuzz locations in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland – 155 in total. Under the new deal, access to the Bitbuzz service will be unlimited** for O2 iPhone customers,. Access will be available from July 11 2008.

This is good if you live in Dublin, not so good elsewhere. For instance, 93 of their hotspot locations are in the capital whilst the rest of the country is patchy at best. Still, I already get free Eircom wireless through my broadband account, so that’s no big deal. It does mean I would have even more wifi coverage were I to get an iPhone.

So, the million dollar question. Will I? Well, probably yes. The cost of entry is sufficiently low now. For the level of usage I have the €45 tariff is good enough and I’ll live with, but complain about the 1GB limit. I’ll be ordering a 16GB iPhone 2 come the first of July.

It’s still a bit rich to continue to sell the old phone so blatently without making it clear that people are not ordering the new one.

After getting a humbling number of people over to Ireland for our wedding last year, 2008 is proving to be the payback year for us. So far we’ve notched up three weddings in three countries.

The first was the evening do for the brother of Lana’s bridesmaid Rachel. This one was fairly local, being just up the road in Trim, County Meath.

May saw two weddings, the first of which was of our friends Dan and Alison, held in Salisbury. It proved to be a great day and it was lovely to catch up with a number of old friends, and their respective babies!

Then just a week after we were off to Switzerland for the wedding of Lana’s cousin Jeremy to Maria. We flew direct from Dublin to Zurich and then hired a car to take us to the village of Weggis on the shores of Lake Luzerne. Weggis is a hugely picturesque place with typical mountain scenery and Swiss architecture. The wedding itself was relaxed and perfectly formed, with the service conducted in both English and German. After that we were taken on a two hour boat trip along the lake to view even more of the scenery, as well as drink and chat of course.

Unfortunately we had to head back to Zurich and back home on the Sunday and missed out on a trip up the mountain by cable car and train.

The weekend just gone has actually been my first in Dublin for over a month. I have one more weekend off next week, then back to the UK for the wedding of our friends Mark and Becky in Southampton. Then one in Northern Ireland in July, possibly one in Estonia in August, currently taking bookings for September, one in Reading in October, November is free, then we wrap up the year with the wedding of Lana’s brother Graham to the lovely Tiffany in Washington DC in December.

The 2009 count is already at one. Hopefully there won’t be many more, we can’t afford to have a holiday with all this wedding related travel! Not that we’d ever complain though, it’s great to see friends and family get hitched, and always a good excuse for a party!

Long time no speak.

Two months in fact.

What have I been up to? Well mainly work to be honest. Nothing much more exciting than that. We have been pretty much entirely heads down getting Lotus Connections 2.0 polished. Here’s a video about it:

There have been a couple of work-related highlights. A trip to Porto, Portugal to speak at an internal conference came up in April. Porto is a gorgeous place and I think Lana and I will definitely try to head over there (Ryanair fly direct from Dublin of course!) for a few days at some point. The second highlight is the fact that my work laptop is now a Macbook Pro! I can’t tell you how nice it is to be able to use OS X on a daily basis for work…

Outside of work, the last few weeks have seen a lot of my focus being put on my mum and dad back in the UK. Mum had a fall a few weeks ago and broke her shoulder. She has subsequently had a successful operation, though caused some concern when her blood saturation dropped during surgery and subsequently spent a little time on the High Dependency Unit. However, she is now home and well on the way to recovery. I’ve made a couple of trips back to the UK over the past few weeks, and the current one has seen me here for over a week now. As well as my mum having her op last week, my dad had also been ill, and after a visit from the doctor, ended up going into hospital himself on the same day as the operation. Hence I ended up having both parents at different ends of the same hospital, and having to keep the truth from my mum in order to keep her as calm as possible before she went under. All in all it was a pretty stressful time for all concerned. Thankfully however both are on the mend, although my dad is still in waiting for his inflammatory markers to return to normal after being diagnosed with Barret’s Esophagus and a hiatal hernia.

During the earlier visit to see them I also popped up to Sheffield for my friend Dan’s stag do. I’ll most likely be in the UK for the coming weekend, then the weekend after sees us fly to Southampton for Dan and Alison’s wedding in Salisbury. The weekend after that we have another wedding in Weggis, Switzerland as well. All in all I’ll have spent precisely zero weekends in Dublin in May!

When working at home I invariably end up sitting at my desk working on the Thinkpad whilst my iMac plays music to me or tunes me into BBC Radio 5 (especially PMQs on a Wednesday)

I’ve recently set the iMac to display the iTunes artwork screensaver, and have found myself entranced by it. For those that haven’t seen it, the screensaver shows a mosaic of album covers (40 at a time on my 24″ iMac) and flips one over every couple of seconds to reveal another. My main fixation has been a desire to see a screen full of artwork from what I consider to be good music. Like any music collection, there are a few black sheep in amongst the 830 albums and singles that live in my library. That Simply Red CD seemed like a good idea at the time…

It is quite distracting to sit there and stare at the Gabriel album, willing the screensaver to choose that one to flip over next. The bad ones seem to stay the longest, and Apple plays with your mind by always seeming to make sure there is a bad egg on the screen at all times. It’s not even like I rate my music, how does it know??

A little while ago I reached breaking point and had to just put everything else on hold and wait for that perfect moment:

(Large version on flickr)

I can’t say I’m completely happy with it. Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance are dodgy to say the least, whilst The Darkness and Catatonia are both albums I’d probably not want to be seen listening to nowadays.

However, the more interesting game is to try and spot serendipitous arrangements of albums. This is highlighted nicely in the above screenshot by this example:

If defunct mid-ninetines Bristolians The Crescent and erstwhile singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt ever got together to release a gatefold double vinyl album this must surely be the artwork!

Incidentally, you may wonder how you capture a screenshot of a screen saver? Well on OS X it turns out that if you press Cmd-Shift before starting the screen saver by pressing “Test” in the preferences panel, you can then take as many shots of the screen saver in action by keeping Cmd-Shift held down and pressing 3 for each shot. Nice. And yes, it did mean that I kept my fingers down on those buttons for about 20 minutes in the production of this blog post…

Since I edged into my 30’s (I’m currently 32) I’ve been aware that I’ve started to put on a bit of a paunch, and my double chin is definitely more pronounced than I would like. Evidence is clear in this photo taken in January:

So the time has come to do something about it. I’ve thought this before, and excuses for not keeping a good diet and exercise regime come thick and fast. So this time I’m going to be open about how things are going on this blog. Don’t get me wrong, you won’t be getting a daily weigh in and pedometer count, but I will be making a concerted effort to provide regular updates.

So, let’s set a baseline. As of Saturday 8th March I weighed in at 13 Stone, 7 pounds (189 pounds, 85.72 kgs) I am 5′ 10″ (178cm) so that gives me a Body Mass Index of 27.16 (according to the BBC calculator)

Now, all good plans need to have a goal, so my goal is to get my weight down to 11 1/2 stone (161 pounds, 73 kgs) though I’ll be happy anywhere between that and 12 stone. Why? Well the last time I felt really fit I was around that weight. So that’s looking to lose two stone (28 pounds, 12.7 kgs) which would give me a BMI of around 23.

Another motivation for doing this is the fact that I just don’t feel as fit as I used to. This is most evident when I play football. My stamina levels are nowhere near where they used to be. To this end I am making a concerted effort to do more exercise. Generally I hate gyms, however one thing I do like is swimming. To that end we have just joined a local gym which also has a 25m pool. When I was a kid I swam for a local club, training three times a week and competing most Saturdays and Sundays. Even into my early 20’s I swam fairly regularly, twice doing the BT Swimathon - a 5000 metre (3.1 mile or 200 lengths of a 25m pool) charity swim. Whilst a lot of people find lane swimming boring and repetitive, I love it, and due to my competitive history in the sport I push myself further than I would on a treadmill or rowing machine. On Saturday I went for the first time. At the outset I set myself a goal of doing 50 lengths, or 1250m in 100m sets with a minute recovery between each one. I alternated between front crawl and breast stroke for each 100m. I have never been able to swim crawl slowly (I used to be a sprinter specialising in 50m or 100m races) so there’s currently no way I could do it all with crawl. After the first few sets I was really suffering both with my lungs and muscles. However I broke through and managed to complete my programme. I even did the last 100 as a medley. However 1 minute recovery time for every 100m is tooo long. When I was a kid we’d normally do 200 or 400m sets at 75% effort with 30 second recovery!

The aim over the next few weeks is to keep this up, reducing the recovery intervals between the sets and working towards doing more of it using crawl and actually measuring my 100m times so I can control the intensity of the sets. At the moment I’d say I was swimming the crawl at about 75% but the breast stroke sets at considerably less. The ultimate goal is to get myself to the point where I can start going along to the masters training sessions held every Wednesday night and actually take part in some proper training, but I am a long way from that.

So whilst swimming is my main exercise of course the other side is getting my diet in order. Swiming isn’t the best exercise for pure weight loss as it tends to do more to tone you up. If I don’t reduce calorie intake then I’m not going to go anywhere. I’ve already been modifying my diet for a couple of weeks with mixed success. My weight has come down by a good few pounds so I’m on the right track, but the whole point of blogging about it is to make sure I keep going. If you don’t see an update be sure to hassle me

For no particular reason other than I saw Roo’s What’s in my bag and felt left out that I’m not travelling anywhere any time soon. View on flickr to see notes.

O2 Ireland are bringing the iPhone here on 14th March.

Some points:

• No unlimited data plan. 1GB per month limit. 2c per MB after that. That works out at just over €20 for an extra GB/month.
• No visual voicemail
• €399 for the 8GB, €499 for the 16GB
• €45 per month for the cheapest tarrif giving 175 minutes and 100 texts per month. 18 month agreement.

So, am I going to get one? No. Why?

• I already have a 16GB iPod touch that does just about everything I need bar making calls
• My Nokia N80 suits me fine.
• I’ll wait for the 3G iPhone to come along thanks.
• The handset prices are too high, coming in at more than £50 more expensive than you’d pay on O2 UK for a 16GB model.
• I’m a Speakeasy (PAYG) customer. Those contract rates look stupid compared to what you get on O2 in the UK. £35 for 600 minutes, 500 texts, unlimited data and visual voicemail. I’m not about to sign up for 18 months of what o2.ie are offering.
• No indication of any wifi hotspot deal such as O2 UK have with The Cloud.

All in all the term rip-off springs to mind.