It looks like it was sold out, and Ticketmaster were emphasizing with me in advance. I wonder if 'Rip off service fee' is in their captcha dictionary too?

Just two buildings visited this year: Earl's Court on Cork Street, which served as a bit of a reminder of Apartment living for us, and Busaras, which was impressive.

Here we are, en familie just about to head home from Holles st.

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. Síofra wanted to bring him home last night, and was quite put out when told that he had to stay in the hospital.

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.

So I popped into the famous Morrissey's of Abbeyleix for a cup of coffee on the way back up to Dublin last night. The coffee was nothing to talk about, the pints looked tasty though, and not a panini in sight.

All seemed well in the world until I made to leave. And then I saw it, in the far corner of the bar. It had cast aside the biscuit tins and cornflake packets and glared down on the room with it's silvery blackness.

They had put in a feckin' plasma screen. In Morrissey's! Is nothing sacred?

At least it was switched off, a repeat edition of Pimp My Ride or somesuch would have been a cultural collision too far.

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..

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.

Not to mention the holiday which we've booked to a villa here: (KMZ)

It wasn't all work though. I did get to sup a few pints in the local CAMRA-approved pub, The Bitter End. Nice beers, especially the Cuddy Lugs bitter. It's a nice pub too, it reminded me of The Loft in Falcarragh.

I'm back there again in a couple of weeks, which will give me a chance to try out the rest of the beer menu.

Now it's time for an overdue holiday, we're off to London and Glasgow, flying with Ryanair, EasyJet and Aer Lingus. As a compare and contrast exercise the flying itself will be interesting.

Despite spotting a reference to the gig back in August, when I was in Damascus, I held off on getting tickets until early September - big mistake as by the time I went to ticketmaster the gig was sold out.

But by hook or crook I managed to get in. Complimentary seats in a box, no less. (Thanks Dave!) Sure there was a big of lighting equipment to the side of us, and we were pretty tight to the left of the stage, but avoiding the equine dentistry is par for the course in these situations.

They opened up behind a curtain (very reminiscent of Kraftwerk that) which was both back and front-lit. A huge roar came from the crowd when it went up during the second song. The mixed crowd were loving it, even the 3 month old baby that a woman in the Circle was cradling (more power to you woman!) who slept through the lot.

The music was quite fantastic, from the quietest of moments tinkled out on one or other of the 9 keyboards on stage right through to the full-on rock-out closer (Popplagið, the closing song on () ) on which the lit curtain came down again half way through. The lack of recognisable vocals puts me on a par with most of the crowd for once; just luxuriating in the noises that these people are making.

Sure the graphics and lightshow weren't up there with Kraftwerk or Bowie (whose are?) but this was about the music, and the music was good.

Next up: Mogwai in January

We were a few minutes late in the door, the beer in Conway's being much preferable to the not-worth-the 20-minute-wait muck they were selling in the Ambassador - so much so that we spent most of the gig sucking back G&T's.

The band themselves, well, they looked the part, and sounded it mostly, but it was a bit uneven to my ears. Some of the slower stuff was verging on the boring, and while the faster stuff really got the crowd going by the end of the gig, I did leave a tad underwhelmed.

Thoughts on Sigur Rós to follow...

I'm to spend at least a week in Cumbria doing GIS stuff with CAD data, flying out next Monday. All going well I'll be back there again for another week or two in early December.

I'm going to have to plant a large forest to atone for all of the carbon I've generated by flying this year. (According to the basic calculator on Carbonfootprint.com I've run up over 12 tonnes so far this year, perhaps I should support carbon-free energy such as, um, nuclear)

So if things look a bit funny it's because I'm up to my elbows in CSS files.

(Content? whassat?)

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...