August 07, 2007
Hello Altan
It's a boy.
Altan Eamonn Cantwell, born at 14.29 on Monday 6th, and weighing in at 3.3kg (or 7lbs 4.5oz in old money). Mum and son doing very well. SÃofra wanted to bring him home last night, and was quite put out when told that he had to stay in the hospital.
More photos to come
Posted by Richard at 10:08 PM | Comments (6)
July 10, 2007
The pressure is on..
Deadlines looming, forecasts to hit (or miss, more likely) and meetings to attend. But enough about waiting for the baby to arrive..
With Siofra packed off to my parents for the day, we headed to Lock's for the first time on Saturday for lunch. It's been getting good reviews and we were impressed. It's a step-up price-wise from L'Gueuleton (which seems to have pushed it's prices up a bit lately too) but the food, at lunchtime at least, is very interesting and very well put together. My main was a ham hock wrapped in green leaves with cream sitting in a chicken stock which was very tasty indeed. Roisin thought that it was a bit salty, but I'm a bit of a fiend for the NaCl. One of the mains was a 'Blossom', but I neglected to ask what exactly it was. My dessert was an interesting combo of nuts and raisin icecream with carrott and ginger cake. The coffee is absolutely top notch, far better than anything I've had lately.
The room is very nicely done, warm beige in the main, with a banquette running the length of the wall in the main downstairs dining room. There is a small bar area in front of the open plan kitchen (where Mr Maguire was perched) There are a couple of rooms upstairs too, one has a 12 seat table that would be a cert if our lotto numbers come in, while the other has very nice views over the canal.
The menu follows on from L'Gueuleton in making no distinction between starters and mains, but at lunchtime there are two soups which cost from 7-8, with the other dishes coming in at around 14-16 and desserts from 7-8. The wine list is fairly tilted towards the mid-range with not much below 30, but there is a fairly extensive selection of half bottles. All-in-all you could do a two course lunch with a glass of wine for about 30 a head. Indeed you could just order the antipasti plate between two and a coffee and get away for a tenner. We'll be back for an evening meal.
Following on from lunch we had a bit of a wander around Portobello, before repairing to a local for a pint which made for a slightly wobbly journey home. It's a very nice part of town, and if we were celebrating a lotto win in Lock's we would also be scanning the local streets for 'For Sale' signs. It is a shame though that there are no decent boozers between the restaurant and home though. Leonard's Corner bar is ok, but a SCR branch of Walshe's or The Lord Edward would have been perfect.
Posted by Richard at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)
July 03, 2007
Couch About Car
After a weekend in Nenagh I'm in Cork today, next week should see me in Longford and Donegal. So, not quite to the four corners of the country, more like two corners and a bit of a wander around the middle.
According to my beer-mat, I'll have to plant 300kg of forest to atone for my carbon emissions. That's this summer's gardening taken care of then..
Posted by Richard at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)
July 02, 2007
Cobwebs everywhere..
About bloody time, eh?
Well, I've switched ManAboutCouch HQ over to a Mac (or should that be MAC is now Mac powered), but that's not my only excuse; new house, baby #2 on the way, overload at work etc. etc. It makes for zero blog time.
I'm not going to promise any change to that, but if I have time I'll put some more content up here.
Posted by Richard at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2006
I know, I'm just too lazy...
I really need to update this more often. Quite a few things going on.. There's a GIS Conference on in the National Centre for Geocomputation in NUI Maynooth next week which I might go to.. There's a couple of restaurants from The Dubliner's 100 to review.. Gigs coming up: Bob Mould in a few weeks.. I wasn't exactly blown away by Mogwai a fortnight ago (unlike the last time I saw them, when they were loud enough to blow away hundred-year-old cobwebs from The Olympia's rafters)
Not to mention the holiday which we've booked to a villa here: (KMZ)
Posted by Richard at 10:17 PM | Comments (1)
November 10, 2005
Redesign
I'm mucking about with the design of this page, experimenting with 3 column layouts (verdict: too busy looking), colours (verdict: that career in interior design isn't looking so promising now, is it?) and widgets (verdict: lets learn to walk first)
So if things look a bit funny it's because I'm up to my elbows in CSS files.
(Content? whassat?)
Posted by Richard at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2005
Painful Upgrade
Ouch. That took about 3 hours more than I thought it would.
The front end might look the same, but the backend of this blog is now Movable Type 3.2.
It seems to me that there is an opening or two for technical writers at the software publisher The install instructions are, um, lacking in clarity.
Granted, I made a bit of a mess of the previous install and it's now much cleaner back there, but still...
Posted by Richard at 12:58 AM | Comments (0)
October 18, 2005
Conference Week
The first of two events I'm attending this week was Irlogi's GIS Ireland 05 which was on today in Croke Park.
If I was to take a single thing from the event it would be that these are indeed very interesting times for the GI industry.
Mike Goodchild of UCSB, who is one of the founding fathers of GIS and the author of a number of seminal works in the field gave a fascinating brief intro to Google Earth.
Key points: Google Earth does some things better than desktop GIS, and there are more people hacking away using the Google Earth API than there are staff working at the major GIS software vendors.
Antoin O'Lachtnain gave a presentation on Postcodes, including best practice and a look at how they do things elsewhere. He was preaching to the converted I think, as most people there would be well aware of the benefits of such a system.
Another highlight for me was the presentation on the generation of 'Small Areas' for statistical reporting by Stewart Fotheringham of the National Centre for Geocomputation in NUI Maynooth (under whose sponsorship Mike Goodchild is spending 8 months here) This was good old fashioned inspiring spatial analysis of the Stan Openshaw variety. Almost rekindled a desire in me to return to PhD-dom (almost, then I remembered the mortgage, creche fees, shopping bill...)
Now here's hoping that Thursday's event is as good
Posted by Richard at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2005
Home
Myself and the team leader turned up at the Air France Ticket desk at about 5.30am. There were tickets available, no problem. There was even availability on the connecting 12.40 into Dublin, meaning I'd be getting home 3 hours early!
The ticket desk guy wasn't used to selling tickets(!) so they took about half an hour each to process. It was a Herculean task of concentration that required the furrowing of brow and much sucking of teeth, finally after an epic of stamping and transcribing the precious items were handed over. Luckily for him there were only the two of us from the cancelled BA flight looking for tickets.
The BA desk next door was empty when we arrived, but a worried looking staff member had just turned up as we were leaving. He knew that he was about to have a very bad day.
The connection in Paris was pretty tight, I had about 30 minutes to get from one plane to the next and I did myself no favours by jumping on a bus which took 15 minutes to get to the other terminal when I could have walked there in 5. Terminal 2F is a pretty amazing piece of architecture, but with minutes to go, I had no time to appreciate it properly.
My return flights were confirmed today, going through Heathrow both outbound and return. I think I'll pack a few sandwiches..
Posted by Richard at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)
July 09, 2005
Exhausted.
Bloody hell, that was a long day.
Drive to airport, an hour with overpriced latte for company, another hour in a fairly grubby 737 (guess who I was flying with) followed by a 3 hour drive on A and B roads through some pretty impressive scenery. If we weren't running late and had a better clue of where we were going it would have almost been enjoyable. As the GIS expert I decided it wouldn't be a good idea to blame our late arrival on getting lost.
Once the meeting was done it was time to do it in reverse. The difference was that instead of pasty looking stag and hen people milling around the airport in matching t-shirts and hangovers, the smell of drink was coming from the 'Ibeefa' crowd who were downing pitchers of cheap lager while awaiting their delayed flight.
I wandered over to the newsstand and was amazed to see a copy of The Economist with it's front page devoted to the previous day's bombings in London. The magazine is goes to press on Thursday, I think, and arrives on shelves on Fridays. So a front cover and a number of articles relating to the bombings must have meant that there was some furiously tight-to-the-wire cramming going on. Either that or they had a number of editions, some of which were out of date before they hit the newsstands.
Posted by Richard at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)
July 07, 2005
Are they trying to tell me something?
First it was the 5 week job in Damascus, now they want me to go to Sellafield!
Ok, not quite Sellafield, but pretty damn close. It's going to be quite a drive too, 3 hours each way and I'm doing the driving.
Posted by Richard at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)
July 05, 2005
Google Earth
Wow.
Really.
Another pie that Google have dipped their fingers into. They've taken the next step after Google maps and moved on to imagery with Google Earth.
The data is pretty good. The imagery, for Dublin at least, appears to be about a year old. I'm basing that on the Luas Red Line, which seems to be still under construction. The neatness comes from Google's interface wizardry. There are a number of deft touches, like the fly-through zoom it uses as the user jumps from place to place. The terrain model is impressive too.
The Google Maps street data, which matches up almost perfectly, is a little older - my guide here is the Coombe Bypass which I have yet to see on anyone's digital map.
I wonder how MapFlow feel about this development in their market?
Posted by Richard at 02:33 PM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2005
Sligo, June
A weekend spent under Benbulben, now that brought back a few childhood memories. A 12 year old me slid halfway down that mountain on my arse.
After the amount of drink we had, I wouldn't have been fit to do the same again. That night porter really should have switched off the beer pumps...
Posted by Richard at 10:57 PM | Comments (5)
June 15, 2005
Ear Test
Got my audiogram done today. I have severe to profound hearing loss, some of which extends into the speech range. That explains a lot.
I'm to be fixed up with an appointment in Beaumont where they should be able to help me with some state-of-the-art digital hearing aids. Not the small ones though, I'll be needing big satellite dish yokes.
Now the wait for the appointment begins, it could be a year.
Posted by Richard at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)
March 31, 2005
Chrome
Having established that this all works, now it's time for some chrome: a logo, complimentary colour scheme, some widgets and a blogroll.
Content? Whassat?
Posted by Richard at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2005
*tap* *tap* Is this thing on...?
Ah, yes, that awkward 'what to write now' moment. To be repeated on a daily basis until lethargy sets in.
Posted by Richard at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)