We started out heading south from Dublin, and made a stop in Glendaloch, a valley with an ancient ruined monastic settlement on the banks of two deep lakes. From there we headed towards the center of the island, and explored the mysterious, crow-infested castle ruins of Cashel. To complete the day's experience, we landed a room in a hotel that was a castle - a converted stone keep that (of course) had a great pub as well.
The next day - now well-seasoned Irish drivers - we struck out early towards the West coast. Our first taste of the Irish coastline was the Dingle peninsula (which was of course at the butt end of many a joke along the way) in Kerry. The drive around the peninsula was spectacular. The roads were extremely narrow and winding, with more than a few sheer treacherous drops off the side, but that just added to the experience. We got to take in some amazing vies of the coastline, eat lunch right on the beach and romp around some prehistoric "ring forts" and "beehive huts" (old stone ruins). We stood along the rocky shoreline that makes up the farthest Western point of Europe, and discovered a creepy set of monastic ruins just inland.
Dingle is known to be one of the most beautiful regions in all of Ireland, and it definitely didn't disappoint. Of course, I very nearly gave Skick a heart attack with some of my extreme driving, but deep down I'm sure she saw it as just pat of the whole experience.
We stayed as long as we could afford, and then struck out North towards our next stop, the Burren. After hopping a car-ferry (cool!) and a bit more driving, we pulled into the town of Doolin to spend the night. Doolin is more like a village than a town, but is well known for its world-class traditional Irish music sessions, or "trad sessions". The owner of our bed and breakfast summed up the town very well, by saying something like, "Ok, so to your left is the town. All you need to know about is that there are two pubs, McCann's and McDiermotts. Both are excellent, and both have great music."
Sure enough, we ate some excellent food (including local salmon) and spent a couple of hours listening to some fantastic Irish music over pints of Guinness. There isn't a more Irish experience to be had (outside of being conquered repeatedly by foreign invaders, I suppose).
The next day we set out to explore the Burren - a stretch of land just south of Galway on the West coast. Although it is not far at all from Dingle, this peninsula was a stark contrast in every way.
The Burren is a rocky, very sparsely wooded, windswept expanse that many consider to be the quintessential "real Ireland". It is an extremely difficult land and climate to live in, but various clans have been managing for thousands of years. It's still very sparsely populated, though, and much of it appears just as it was 3000 years ago. We experienced the Burren under perfect conditions - lashing wind and rain. The entire region is littered with ancient ruins - literally everywhere you look. We stopped at a handful of spots to explore old forts, graveyards, prehistoric stone monuments, cairns and winding rock walls. Some of them saw more tourists than others, so we were able to read up on ancient Irish history a bit as well, which this region is obviously full of given its age.
Right on cue, the rain stopped just as we were leaving the Burren, and we headed further North to Galway. A small but bustling city on the coast, Galway is also known for its music. So, again with the help of our bed and breakfast host, we found ourselves in a local pub listening to a more informal trad session. Instead of any sort of stage setup, this type just starts up right in the middle of the pub, wherever there is room for a few musicians to sit. They sit in a circle and take turns picking the song. Whoever knows the selected song (or at least what key it's in) joins in. It's a great tradition that should definitely be picked up in America.
The next day we headed out in the direction of Belfast - pretty much all the way across the country in the Northeast. We stopped along the way at a couple of neolithic sites - one of them especially was extremely interesting - a 1.5 acre massive stone and earth tomb from thousands of years ago. You could walk inside part of it as well as on top of it, and around the 17 scattered tombs - the whole thing was pretty amazing. Right around there we also almost ran out of gas - this time it was Skick's turn to convince me that it was all just part of the experience...
More to come soon!
9.03.2009
Road Trippin'
Neither of us had ever driven in another country with the exception of short jaunts into Vancouver, and we definitely hadn't ever tried our luck on the other side of the car/street. Needless to say, we didn't know what to expect in the slightest.
I made a cautious and white-knuckled turn out of the rental car lot in our Nissan Micra, and madness ensued. We were thrust into a crazed mass of roundabouts and construction around the Dublin airport that didn't calm down until we were well outside the city limits.
The next five days were an exhilarating, fast-paced road tour of the island country, complete with extremely narrow country roads, pot holes the size of sheep, hairpin turns atop ocean-facing bluffs and more than our fair share of close calls. All with speed limits of 80-120 kilometer/hour. It was awesome.
The countryside itself is an absolute wonder - massive, sweeping bluffs, rocky, windswept barrens, rolling pastures a brighter green than I've ever seen, an endless supply of ancient ruins, winding cobblestone streets and villages tucked into deep valleys. It is a driver's paradise (although not for the faint of heart), and really is the only viable way to experience the country. The public transportation is infrequent and rarely will take you to the more interesting spots, so wheels are the only way to go.
More details to come...
I made a cautious and white-knuckled turn out of the rental car lot in our Nissan Micra, and madness ensued. We were thrust into a crazed mass of roundabouts and construction around the Dublin airport that didn't calm down until we were well outside the city limits.
The next five days were an exhilarating, fast-paced road tour of the island country, complete with extremely narrow country roads, pot holes the size of sheep, hairpin turns atop ocean-facing bluffs and more than our fair share of close calls. All with speed limits of 80-120 kilometer/hour. It was awesome.
The countryside itself is an absolute wonder - massive, sweeping bluffs, rocky, windswept barrens, rolling pastures a brighter green than I've ever seen, an endless supply of ancient ruins, winding cobblestone streets and villages tucked into deep valleys. It is a driver's paradise (although not for the faint of heart), and really is the only viable way to experience the country. The public transportation is infrequent and rarely will take you to the more interesting spots, so wheels are the only way to go.
More details to come...
Dublin at last
After finding our way through customs and immigration, grabbing a city map and catching a bus to our hotel, there wasn't much time left in the day for exploring. We grabbed a quick bite to eat at a nearby pub (more on the food later) and crashed. The next morning, finally showered, rested and clean-shaven, we set out on our first adventure.
Dublin is an interesting city - exciting, international and cultural but at the same time quaint, cozy and intimate. All that aside, though, Dublin is really all about the beer. It is a challenge to find a full-sized city block without a pub in this town, and half of them double as historical landmarks of one sort or another.
The people - rarely met without a pint of Guinness in hand - are warm, witty and bright-eyed. We had plenty of opportunities to banter with the locals, and - as is the case with most everywhere else we ended up visiting in Ireland - they proved to be some of the most sociable people we've encountered.
Still, large swaths of the city have turned into tourist traps of an interesting nature. Many visitors come for the pub experience, so pubs have popped up everywhere with claims of "Traditional Irish Food & Music" that are as thin as the building walls. We quickly learnined that about 90% of the pubs in Dublin are basically worthless for food - bland soup, dry bread and watery stew. The food that is worthwhile - strictly found by recommendation - is fantastic, though. By and large, however, it wasn't until we reached the countryside that we wre able to experience real Irish food.
Historical sites are of course littered throughout the city as well; we explored old dusty libraries, historic book collections, high-arched cathedrals and sweeping stone Universities. All with a backdrop of steel-gray skies and flickering Guinness signs, Dublin was a pretty cool spectacle.
With one less day to explore than expected, we were packing our bags soon and preparing for perhaps the most anticipated part of the trip - the rental car. More on that to come...
Dublin is an interesting city - exciting, international and cultural but at the same time quaint, cozy and intimate. All that aside, though, Dublin is really all about the beer. It is a challenge to find a full-sized city block without a pub in this town, and half of them double as historical landmarks of one sort or another.
The people - rarely met without a pint of Guinness in hand - are warm, witty and bright-eyed. We had plenty of opportunities to banter with the locals, and - as is the case with most everywhere else we ended up visiting in Ireland - they proved to be some of the most sociable people we've encountered.
Still, large swaths of the city have turned into tourist traps of an interesting nature. Many visitors come for the pub experience, so pubs have popped up everywhere with claims of "Traditional Irish Food & Music" that are as thin as the building walls. We quickly learnined that about 90% of the pubs in Dublin are basically worthless for food - bland soup, dry bread and watery stew. The food that is worthwhile - strictly found by recommendation - is fantastic, though. By and large, however, it wasn't until we reached the countryside that we wre able to experience real Irish food.
Historical sites are of course littered throughout the city as well; we explored old dusty libraries, historic book collections, high-arched cathedrals and sweeping stone Universities. All with a backdrop of steel-gray skies and flickering Guinness signs, Dublin was a pretty cool spectacle.
With one less day to explore than expected, we were packing our bags soon and preparing for perhaps the most anticipated part of the trip - the rental car. More on that to come...
8.30.2009
A reflection on the airline industry (or, day 1)
To say that the excitement started within the first hour of our trip would be an understatement. We rounded the corner to our gate at 6:30AM Pacific Time on the 21st to find a 2 hour delay slapped onto our first flight. Thunderstorms in Dallas wouldn't be that big a deal, but we had 3 planes to catch today and all of our connections were instantly in jeapordy.
We haggled with the attendant for a while, after which she assured us that all of our connections were also delayed so we would be just fine. Intuition (aka my gut) was telling me otherwise, but we opted to take her for her word and let things play out.
Fast forward a few hours - we landed in Dallas 1 hour and 45 minutes late, rushed off the plane and were informed that our connection was leaving any second. A mad dash across the Dallas airport left us confronted by a closed gate - we had missed it by 5 minutes.
And the next flight to Chicago had been cancelled.
And there were no alternate flights to Dublin that evening.
So we waited on stand-by (with 60 others trying to get to Chicago) for the following flight and crossed our fingers. The attendant must have taken some pity on us and bumped us way up on the list - after a harrowing wait, our names were called. The next wait had begun.
We landed in Chicago "on time", which meant that if our flight to Dublin left on time, there was no way we'd catch it. We crossed our fingers again and ran across yet another airport. We were both wearing sandals, and the "flip-flop" of our feet on the tile echoed pretty amazingly - they'll surely be telling stores of our flat-footed sprints across the world's airports for years to come.
Of course, we missed the flight by 5 minutes.
Being the last flight to Dublin of the night (it was now 8PM Central Time), we had 2 options: the option the airline gave us (spend the night and next day in Chicago and try catching the next evening's flight), or the option we hoped was possible (re-route through another city). Either way we were shaving off time from our stay in Dublin, but anything was better than losing a whole 24 hours of vacation. So, we picked up the customer service phone and gave it a shot.
The attendant on the phone worked some magic and after a bit of nail biting we had ourselves booked on a flight leaving for London in just a couple of hours, with a connection that would have us in Dublin by 2PM or so. We allowed ourselves to relax a bit and patted each other on the back...way too soon.
After boarding 30 minutes late due to a "restocking issue", we proceeded to sit on the runway for one and a half hours waiting for an "electrical issue" to be resolved. Now generally I'm pretty understanding about that type of thing, but my patience was waning rapidly. There was another plane of the exact same type at the next gate over, going nowhere, doubtless in top electical condition, and meanwhile we got the "just another 30 minutes" treatment a few times.
Long story short, we finally got off the ground, but of course missed our connection in Heathrow. Our flip-flop sprinting had become an international phenomenon.
They had already booked us on a flight 2 hours later, so we did a bit more waiting. Our next flight was - you guessed it - delayed, but this one was really a bit of salt in the wound. We sat and watched as the flight scheduled after ours was boarded while ours had not yet arrived. No amount of cajoling or arguing succeeded in getting us onto that flight, and as I watched it take off, with us on the ground, in the 4th airport of the trip, after having been booked on a total of 8 flights, I took a moment to reflect on the airline industry.
I'll omit the exact words of that reflection for the sake of the faint of heart, but the bottom line is I find it hard to believe that an industry - any industry - can be such a mess. I know there are a lot of factors involved, some of which are beyond anyone's control, but I'm willing to classify that as a bullshit excuse at this point. A major overhaul may be in order.
Fast forward another 2 hours, and we land in Dublin at 6:20PM. Stepping off the plane, I realized this was all just an underappreciated effort of American Airlines at giving us a grand entrance - and a grand entrance we had. We hadn't slept, eaten a real meal or showered in a very action-packed thirty-something hours, were bleary-eyed and stunk to high hell. We stumbled down the stairs, onto the tarmac, and into the wonders of Ireland. Time for a Guiness!
We haggled with the attendant for a while, after which she assured us that all of our connections were also delayed so we would be just fine. Intuition (aka my gut) was telling me otherwise, but we opted to take her for her word and let things play out.
Fast forward a few hours - we landed in Dallas 1 hour and 45 minutes late, rushed off the plane and were informed that our connection was leaving any second. A mad dash across the Dallas airport left us confronted by a closed gate - we had missed it by 5 minutes.
And the next flight to Chicago had been cancelled.
And there were no alternate flights to Dublin that evening.
So we waited on stand-by (with 60 others trying to get to Chicago) for the following flight and crossed our fingers. The attendant must have taken some pity on us and bumped us way up on the list - after a harrowing wait, our names were called. The next wait had begun.
We landed in Chicago "on time", which meant that if our flight to Dublin left on time, there was no way we'd catch it. We crossed our fingers again and ran across yet another airport. We were both wearing sandals, and the "flip-flop" of our feet on the tile echoed pretty amazingly - they'll surely be telling stores of our flat-footed sprints across the world's airports for years to come.
Of course, we missed the flight by 5 minutes.
Being the last flight to Dublin of the night (it was now 8PM Central Time), we had 2 options: the option the airline gave us (spend the night and next day in Chicago and try catching the next evening's flight), or the option we hoped was possible (re-route through another city). Either way we were shaving off time from our stay in Dublin, but anything was better than losing a whole 24 hours of vacation. So, we picked up the customer service phone and gave it a shot.
The attendant on the phone worked some magic and after a bit of nail biting we had ourselves booked on a flight leaving for London in just a couple of hours, with a connection that would have us in Dublin by 2PM or so. We allowed ourselves to relax a bit and patted each other on the back...way too soon.
After boarding 30 minutes late due to a "restocking issue", we proceeded to sit on the runway for one and a half hours waiting for an "electrical issue" to be resolved. Now generally I'm pretty understanding about that type of thing, but my patience was waning rapidly. There was another plane of the exact same type at the next gate over, going nowhere, doubtless in top electical condition, and meanwhile we got the "just another 30 minutes" treatment a few times.
Long story short, we finally got off the ground, but of course missed our connection in Heathrow. Our flip-flop sprinting had become an international phenomenon.
They had already booked us on a flight 2 hours later, so we did a bit more waiting. Our next flight was - you guessed it - delayed, but this one was really a bit of salt in the wound. We sat and watched as the flight scheduled after ours was boarded while ours had not yet arrived. No amount of cajoling or arguing succeeded in getting us onto that flight, and as I watched it take off, with us on the ground, in the 4th airport of the trip, after having been booked on a total of 8 flights, I took a moment to reflect on the airline industry.
I'll omit the exact words of that reflection for the sake of the faint of heart, but the bottom line is I find it hard to believe that an industry - any industry - can be such a mess. I know there are a lot of factors involved, some of which are beyond anyone's control, but I'm willing to classify that as a bullshit excuse at this point. A major overhaul may be in order.
Fast forward another 2 hours, and we land in Dublin at 6:20PM. Stepping off the plane, I realized this was all just an underappreciated effort of American Airlines at giving us a grand entrance - and a grand entrance we had. We hadn't slept, eaten a real meal or showered in a very action-packed thirty-something hours, were bleary-eyed and stunk to high hell. We stumbled down the stairs, onto the tarmac, and into the wonders of Ireland. Time for a Guiness!
8.20.2009
Ready to go
I hardly have enough time to stop and write a quick introduction post for our upcoming trip, but I figured it would be a bit sudden to just resurrect this blog in the middle of a foreign country without any warning. We haven't even really started packing yet, I'm wrestling with a ton of last-minute work projects and trying to take care of a million odds and ends around the house, so it definitely feels like a regular start to a vacation. But no worries - by this time on Saturday, we'll be drinking a Guinness in Dublin!
So here's the tentative itinerary - this will doubtless undergo a number of transformations over the course of the next 2 weeks, since we don't have many reservations except for the important ones (flights). We're planning on starting in Dublin, trekking around Ireland, then flying to Edinburgh and hopping around central Scotland. All the details are pretty much in the air, which is the only way to travel :-)
We're not sure how often we'll have access to internet cafes and the like, especially in the back-country of Ireland, but I'll do my best to keep this updated every few days with details of our travels and maybe a few photos here and there.
Ireland
View Ireland 2009 Planning in a larger map
Scotland
View Scotland 2009 Planning in a larger map
So here's the tentative itinerary - this will doubtless undergo a number of transformations over the course of the next 2 weeks, since we don't have many reservations except for the important ones (flights). We're planning on starting in Dublin, trekking around Ireland, then flying to Edinburgh and hopping around central Scotland. All the details are pretty much in the air, which is the only way to travel :-)
We're not sure how often we'll have access to internet cafes and the like, especially in the back-country of Ireland, but I'll do my best to keep this updated every few days with details of our travels and maybe a few photos here and there.
Ireland
View Ireland 2009 Planning in a larger map
Scotland
View Scotland 2009 Planning in a larger map
8.09.2008
Tatuaggi time!
Well, after over a year of searching and deliberation, both Skick and I have finally gotten our next round of tattoos. We found some exceptional artists at this year's Seattle Tattoo Expo (still running through the rest of the weekend, for any of you Seattlites), and got inked right there on the spot.
Skick's tattooist of choice was Mike from Smiling Buddha, an artist all the way out from Savannah, Georgia for the event. She ended up in quite a...compromising position due to the location of the tattoo in relation to her existing two, but it was well worth it.
The third rose is equally perfect as the first ones, as you can see. Here's the finished product (a little blurry because of how close the camera had to be).
I ended up going with a sister tattooist pair out of Milan, Italy called Stigmata Tatuaggi. They barely spoke any English so I was a little doubtful at first, but their portfolios were definitely impressive so I gave the one sister, Raffaella, a shot. The sketch she came back with was better even than the image I had in my mind, so I of course said "Let's do it!"
Here's a close-up of the finished product - I'm very pleased (and if you can't tell what body part that is from the photo, it's my shoulder).
All in all a smashing success!
Skick's tattooist of choice was Mike from Smiling Buddha, an artist all the way out from Savannah, Georgia for the event. She ended up in quite a...compromising position due to the location of the tattoo in relation to her existing two, but it was well worth it.
The third rose is equally perfect as the first ones, as you can see. Here's the finished product (a little blurry because of how close the camera had to be).
I ended up going with a sister tattooist pair out of Milan, Italy called Stigmata Tatuaggi. They barely spoke any English so I was a little doubtful at first, but their portfolios were definitely impressive so I gave the one sister, Raffaella, a shot. The sketch she came back with was better even than the image I had in my mind, so I of course said "Let's do it!"
Here's a close-up of the finished product - I'm very pleased (and if you can't tell what body part that is from the photo, it's my shoulder).
All in all a smashing success!
7.30.2008
Mac Application Development, Initial Review
I'm about 30 days or so into what I'd consider the "exploratory" phase of learning the Mac OS X programming system, and I have to say it has been quite interesting so far. I'm far from any sort of in-depth understanding of Mac's wide range of core technologies, but with a fairly solid background in C++ as well as a variety of UI-heavy systems like Flash and Flex it was surely easier than it could have been. Even despite all of that, the learning curve in certain areas is unexpectedly steep (and not always necessarily so, from everything I can figure).
First and foremost, the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. One might say, in fact, that it downright sucks. That's not to say that it doesn't define every method and property, but its definitions are rarely more than a brief, enigmatic sentence, and (more importantly) there literally isn't a single example in any of the class documentation. I, as most developers I know, am a 95% learn-by-example kinda guy, which has made the going slow. Incidentally I've even been a bit hard-pressed to find good examples via other sources online, which is probably the most surprising part. Admittedly I've been spoiled from years of web development, but I've definitely gotten used to being able to find examples of even the most obscure sub-class out there in some forum or another. Cocoa development doesn't seem to operate quite the same, however - there are plenty of simple examples but I haven't found more than a handful of advanced code snippets, particularly regarding the UI components. It suffices to say that I have been hammering through these early days on a heavily trial and error basis.
XCode itself, Apple's project development environment, seems to be very well put together. The user interface was extremely intuitive for me from the start, and you really can crank out an app in no time at all without having any prior experience. That is of course to be expected (being an Apple product), as is the solid and simple functionality of the Interface Builder. XCode/ has some similarities in structure to many other recent coding environments such as Eclipse (and thus Flex) and MS Visual Studio, which I'm sure adds to it's accessibility, but I'd have to say overall it's one of the best coding environments I've worked with to date.
And then there's the code itself. I'm pretty torn on first impressions towards Objective-C. In a nutshell it's an object-oriented offshoot of ANSI C, but shooting off in a different direction entirely from C++. That means that it has more in common with C than C++, and has a radically different syntax for about half of anything you may want to do in standard ANSI C. It's definitely simpler than C++, which is a plus most of the time. There are, however, some really weird syntax differences between Objective-C and pretty much anything else I've ever worked with before. I've worked in over a dozen different programming languages over the past decade and a half, and I have never seen anything like this:
[txtOutput setDoubleValue:[numComponent doubleValue]];
That's not to say that there's anything wrong with that, just that it is initially a bit of a maze to decipher what should be a simple line of code. Ok, I take that back - there are a couple of things wrong with it, primarily just that: deciphering it. I don't see any advantage to breaking the left-to-right reading object-method/property system that is used in nearly every other programming language. I am, admittedly, pretty green in this area, and may soon stumble across some hidden advantages yet. In reality, though, I probably won't even notice it after a couple of months (just like every language's quirks).
Lastly, the wide array of built in functionality is truly unbelievable. For example I threw together a quick test app that interacts with (retrieves, updates, the works) a user's iCal in just a few hours, and that's really just the very tip of the iceberg. The frameworks are very well put together and generally speaking (aside from that whole documentation bit) quite easy to use.
All in all, I'm going to reserve judgment for another couple of months of experience, but I'm definitely hooked. I'm generally not as interested in desktop development as I am web development, but there really are some pretty exciting possibilities here that I can't pass up.
Back to work...
First and foremost, the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. One might say, in fact, that it downright sucks. That's not to say that it doesn't define every method and property, but its definitions are rarely more than a brief, enigmatic sentence, and (more importantly) there literally isn't a single example in any of the class documentation. I, as most developers I know, am a 95% learn-by-example kinda guy, which has made the going slow. Incidentally I've even been a bit hard-pressed to find good examples via other sources online, which is probably the most surprising part. Admittedly I've been spoiled from years of web development, but I've definitely gotten used to being able to find examples of even the most obscure sub-class out there in some forum or another. Cocoa development doesn't seem to operate quite the same, however - there are plenty of simple examples but I haven't found more than a handful of advanced code snippets, particularly regarding the UI components. It suffices to say that I have been hammering through these early days on a heavily trial and error basis.
XCode itself, Apple's project development environment, seems to be very well put together. The user interface was extremely intuitive for me from the start, and you really can crank out an app in no time at all without having any prior experience. That is of course to be expected (being an Apple product), as is the solid and simple functionality of the Interface Builder. XCode/ has some similarities in structure to many other recent coding environments such as Eclipse (and thus Flex) and MS Visual Studio, which I'm sure adds to it's accessibility, but I'd have to say overall it's one of the best coding environments I've worked with to date.
And then there's the code itself. I'm pretty torn on first impressions towards Objective-C. In a nutshell it's an object-oriented offshoot of ANSI C, but shooting off in a different direction entirely from C++. That means that it has more in common with C than C++, and has a radically different syntax for about half of anything you may want to do in standard ANSI C. It's definitely simpler than C++, which is a plus most of the time. There are, however, some really weird syntax differences between Objective-C and pretty much anything else I've ever worked with before. I've worked in over a dozen different programming languages over the past decade and a half, and I have never seen anything like this:
[txtOutput setDoubleValue:[numComponent doubleValue]];
That's not to say that there's anything wrong with that, just that it is initially a bit of a maze to decipher what should be a simple line of code. Ok, I take that back - there are a couple of things wrong with it, primarily just that: deciphering it. I don't see any advantage to breaking the left-to-right reading object-method/property system that is used in nearly every other programming language. I am, admittedly, pretty green in this area, and may soon stumble across some hidden advantages yet. In reality, though, I probably won't even notice it after a couple of months (just like every language's quirks).
Lastly, the wide array of built in functionality is truly unbelievable. For example I threw together a quick test app that interacts with (retrieves, updates, the works) a user's iCal in just a few hours, and that's really just the very tip of the iceberg. The frameworks are very well put together and generally speaking (aside from that whole documentation bit) quite easy to use.
All in all, I'm going to reserve judgment for another couple of months of experience, but I'm definitely hooked. I'm generally not as interested in desktop development as I am web development, but there really are some pretty exciting possibilities here that I can't pass up.
Back to work...
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