I haven't had a lot of time to post on my blog, seing as Kristie and I are busy vacationing, but I promised my mom I'd keep her updated with what were doing on the trip (in exchange for her letting me use her digital camera), so I figured now would be a good time to flush out some of my backlog.

 

So anyways, I put up a couple of photo albums, showing what we did. I've included some pictures inline with my comments, but you should look at the slide shows if you want to see more pics.

 

 

After we left St Patrick's Cathedral (see my previous post), we then went an took a self-guided tour of the Guinness Storehouse. They had some pretty neat exhibits, showing information about how Guinness is created. One thing that I was surprised about is that they use three different batches of grains, each ground to a different consistency, which they then mix together to form the grains that they use make the sugars in the beer.

 

After the tour we then went up to the "Gravity Bar" at the top of the Storehouse where we each had a complementary pint of frothy Guinness.

 

 

 

 

After the brewery, we then headed for Phoenix Park, which is the "largest park within the boundaries of a municipality" in the world.

 

The walk was a couple of miles (it took us a while!), and on the way there we got to see some of the "real city", including some pretty well done graffiti, and the more "icky" parts of the river that runs through the city.

 

 

 

However, despite the mess in some parts, most of the city is pretty well kept up. The architecture is also pretty interesting. They have a nice mix of old structures and new developments, something that is very rare back home (New Orleans comes close, but the "new" and "old" areas of the city there are distinctly and purposefully separated. In Dublin, its pretty well integrated.

 

 

 

 

 

On our third day in Dublin, the camera ended up dying on us (we didn't recharge it from the day before), so we didn't get as many pictures as we did the day before, but we did get some. First we went to visit Trinity College, where they hold The Book of Kells, a really old copy of the 4 gospels from the Christian Bible.

 

The campus is really beautiful. However, I think it has to be weird for all the students there, dealing with hordes of tourists while trying to make your way to classes. Luckily, during the busiest times (i.e. now) classes are not in session.

 

 

 

After trinity college we then headed over to "Dublin Castle", which was historically the residence of the Viceroy of Ireland (the guy the British put in charge when Ireland was part of the UK). Now-a-days its part of a larger complex which houses a lot of government offices, although the palace its self is only really used for ceremonial purposes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  That’s enough for now....

 

I'll post some more next time.

There was a large protest in downtown Dublin today. A mass of what apperead to be serveral hundred people, from various left wing organizations, including one associated with the IRA were protesting the arrest of 5 Irish farmers charged with disrupting the construction of a natural gas pipeline owned by the Shell Oil company.

 

I spoke with one individual associated with the protest and he indicated that the groups' primary complaints centered around the "history of preferental treatment" given to Shell , and that they felt the company was not being charged enough tax. He indicated that their short term goals were the release of the indivudals, and that their long term goals were to ensure the "nationalization" of the natural gas industry in Ireland. He also expressed concern that the unrefined gas pipeline placed the Irish people at unncessary risk.

Yesterdat Kristie and I went and did a little sight seeing. First we went and visited the Christ Church Cathedral,  which was first built sometime in the 1000's.

 

The architecture was really neat, and the inside was even cooler. 

Underneath the church was the crypt, where there were several tombs. as well as some of the church's treasures (no pictures were allowed in the area with the treasures... I think they were woried about flash damagage).

 

And they also had an old gallows. I don't think it was an original however.

 

After the Christ Church Cathedral, we walked down to St. Patricks Cathedral, which had a pretty cool park next to it, which I beleive was sponsered by Bailey's.

 

I didn't like St. Partricks as much as the christ church, but they did have some really cool stained glassed windows inside. They are hard to capture with a camera, particularly if you don't know what you are doing, so my photos don't do they justice, but there's a small sample below.

 

Anyways, Kristie is bugging me to get off the computer so that we can go do some more siteseeing, so I'll put more up about the rest of the day when we get back.

If you get a chance you should check out the program Sharp Keys written by Randy Rants. It wraps up the registry hack necessary for remapping key strokes in windows.

 

I used it recently on my new laptop to remap the right alt key as the right control key. The laptop does not have a right control key and instead has an alt key in the place where the control key should be. I kept hitting the alt key when I meant to hit the control key which kept activating menus when I didn't want them activated, and was frustrating me to no end. Using sharp keys I was able to quickly remedy the problem.

I purchased a new laptop over the weekend.

 

I got a Toshiba Satellite M45-165.

 

I'm moving to Seattle in about a month (I got a job working on the VB Compiler at Microsoft), but my girlfriend Kristie isn't coming with until January because she has to finish school and she needs a computer, so I am leaving my IMac behind with her, which means I would have been without a computer. I also have to give my laptop back to my old employer, so I would also have been without a laptop.

 

The solution, of course, was obvious: buy a new laptop! However, I wanted to get something that was affordable but still offered a good deal of power.

 

I looked into buying a power book, particularly because I like Macs, and the Power Books are incredibly awesome. I really like the 17 inch model. They are super cool. Unfortunately the 17 inch Power Books also cost about $2,500 which was outside of my price range. 

 

The only model Power Book that was within the range I wanted to spend was the 12inch model. However, screen real estate is extremely important to me, and I know I wouldn't be able to live with only 12 inches. So after spending about an hour in the apple store drooling over the 17 inch model I pulled my self away and went to Bet Buy to look at the pc laptops.

 

I ended up picking the Toshiba mainly because it was relatively inexpensive for the performance it got:It came with a 15.4'' screen in wide screen format (not quite 17'' but still pretty good), a dual layer dvd burner, a 1.5 mhz Celeron M processor, and a decent amount of ram (512) for only $800 bucks.  I'll have to get some more ram for it eventually, but memory is pretty cheap these days and it’s enough to last me for a while.

 

The coolest part, however, is the screen. It has a glossy covering on it so I can take it outside during the day and still see the screen. That’s a huge bonus.

 

It also only weighs a little over 6 pounds so it also feels really light, it is absolutely quite, and generates very little heat. It’s not a power book, but I think I'm going to be pretty happy with it.

 

Well, this is my new "MSN Spaces" blog. I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet. It popped up under MSN messenger so I thought I'd check it out. In terms of setup it was pretty easy.... Just a couple of clicks and I was done. However, I'm not found of the advertising that gets inserted at the top. For now its pretty non intrusive, and if it stays that way I should be ok.

 

One thing that I like a lot is that its stored offsite. By not having it in my house I don't have to worry about a lot of security issues. In particular, with no server I need no open incoming ports on my router, which makes me feel a lot less vulnerable. I also don't need to worry about making sure the server stays updated with patches, which allows me to configure everything once and then forget about it. For me, the less work required to configure something the better. If I spend less time settings things up, I can spend more time doing things I really care about (like writing software). This is a good thing.

 

I also like the WYSWYG editor in MSN spaces better than some of the other blog software I've seen. Particularly, it uses <div> rather than <P>, so when I hit the enter key, only one new line gets introduced into the output instead of two. This is very good.

 

However, there doesn't appear to be a spellchecker. This is very unfortunate. Spell checking requires pasting into word, doing a spell check and then pasting back. However, pasting from word changes the format of the text, which makes the whole process a bit frustrating.
 
A downside to not controlling the server is that I can't serve up arbitrary content. For example, the edit form allows me to include a photo in my postings but not other types of files (such as PowerPoint presentations, word documents, etc) without having another server to host them from.
 
 
I think I'll run with it for a little while and see how it goes before I make a final judgment, but for now it seems ok.