Duke Street Alley

Livejournal is back on the default tabs in my browser. I've been checking in from time to time, but there's something about the content here which is distinctly different to most other social networks, and it's also old and comfortable.

So here's what I'm doing these days, as a sort of general update.

I'm still working in Elucidate, where I'm the Online Marketing Manager. It's a small consultancy company, so I don't get to do much with our own marketing; most of my time goes on clients. Clients vary from very tiny companies who have our services via prize funds up to the national Post Office, An Post. The work suits me very well indeed, I'm largely self-directed within the parameters of the projects I work on, and very often I get to try very cool and interesting new stuff in Adwords, social media, or other bits of onlineness.

We've returned to the SCA. I had a bit of time that wasn't accounted for, and I knew a number of people who were interested in the hobby, but weren't about to investigate without knowing someone involved. So I went to an event, and went to a shire meeting, and lo! I am now Chatelaine for Dun in Mara, and dragging the shire firmly into the 21st century, social media, regular updates, and actually doing stuff. I'm ably abetted in this by sabayone and the rest of my newly formed SCAdian household. Aside from the Chatelaine-ing, I'm doing heavy combat (re-assembling armour bit by bit at the moment) and some A&S stuff, including calligraphy, horticulture, and the making of my own garb, which, let me tell you, is pretty terrifying and also very pleasing.

I'm doing a BA in Humanities in DCU's Oscail Programme. The setup is that you can do between 1 and 4 modules a year, in six subjects, with a few other restrictions on which modules you can take at the same time. When you've done twelve modules, it turns into a degree. 4 modules per year would be a full undergrad course-load; I'm doing 3. I did foundation level courses in Sociology, History, and Literature last year, and I'm doing a more advanced module in History and two in Literature this year.

Studying is difficult when you've done none for three months and it's not an easy introductory course, but I'm getting the hang of it again. I sit down at the kitchen table three evenings a week, and one weekend day, and hammer through the reading and comprehension necessary, and I'll soon be starting the first set of assignments. I really like studying, even when it's tough going.

I'm also running a couple of tabletop RPG campaigns, one weekly, the others less regularly as time allows.

We got a dog, too. Isambard Kingdom Spaniel is a black cocker spaniel. He's mostly past the chewing people phase, and will probably finish the chewing things phase soon. He tries very hard to be a Good Dog, but the details are still a bit fuzzy. He caused some serious stress by breaking out of the back yard on a regular basis, but we've now turned the place into something only marginally less secure than Fort Knox, unless you happen to have opposable thumbs. He gets walks twice daily, and I think he may be coming into his power as a rain god.

And I'm learning to drive, gardening, doing some necessary bits of DIY, playing Skyrim on the XBox and Wurm Online on the PC, my usual amateur meteorology, blogging in various places, and watching some odd bits of TV (Wartime Farm, Parade's End, Arrow, and until the end of the half-series there, Doctor Who) here and there as time allows.

So. What're you at?

K2 is this weekend. On Sunday, I will be cooking a large pot of chili, which will be served with rice, sour cream, and whatever other bits of appropriate side dishes I can find. It will not be very hot - no hotter than an average Chinese takeaway curry, say.

Should you wish to partake, let me know before Friday afternoon, with a comment here, that you will hand me a fiver to cover costs at some point over the weekend. giftederic gets it free because he paid for it in Gaelcon's charity auction, and bastun_ie is trading haggis. I am open to other such deals, of course.

Also, if you know someone who's not on LJ, but wishes to partake anyway, this entry will accept anonymous comments, so they can still comment here and let me know.

In which a week-long trip to Wales is more or less summarised:

We arrived over on the Saturday, having got up early for the ferry. Leaving Dublin was, as always, fascinating; you can see bits of the city you never otherwise do. The crossing was calm and steady and almost completely foggy; I can't judge distances well at sea and in fog, but I'd guess visibility was well under 100m. Coming into Holyhead, it was still foggy.

Holyhead is a grim little town. I don't know what they do to it, but it feels like Trainspotters was shot there. Nevertheless, we were very amused, on the way out of the port, to be passed by a car with a huge window decal for Ensiferum, the same very obscure metal band whose tshirt I was wearing.

We drove down as far as Caernarfon, and stopped to get some groceries and poke around a bit. We were standing in a parking garage staring at the ticket machine (pay in advance, coins only, of which we had none at that stage) when a woman leaving the car park leaned out the window and said, "Would you like a ticket? There's about an hour on it." A very nice welcome to Wales. Poking around a bit revealed several bookshops, one of which was second-hand, vast, and specialising in books about outdoor adventure and exploration. Their all-books-£1-6-for-£5 was an excellent selection; I managed to only hand over £3. We scouted the castle, and parking for it, got the groceries, and also some lunch in a fairly ordinary Chinese, and headed on toward the Lleyn.

Navigation got a little bit interesting after we passed Clynnog Fawr. The instructions said to look for Gryn Goch, a village which is more a short row of houses, and then for a left about half a mile after, just after a safety barrier. We spotted what looked like a likely left, and tried it, but it rapidly went into a near vertical ascent, and left us at the top of a cul-de-sac of the kind which made turning interesting. sabayone is very good at these things, though, and managed it with a minimum of effort.

The next left - which was, indeed, after a clearly visible safety barrier - turned out to be the correct one, and we found the cottage. Trydden Hywel is lovely. There's the old cottage, of which the walls are the best end of a metre thick, which contains the sitting room, and the two bedrooms, and then the kitchen and bathroom are in lean-to extensions. It is far and away the best equipped self-catering place I've ever stayed in; there has as yet been no kitchen implement I've wanted and not found, there are cookery books, plant and bird books, guide books, maps, a beginner's guide to Welsh, a host of novels, cd player, dvd player, flatscreen tv with an impressive array of channels, a pair of bincoculars, and even a stack of boardgames, cds, and dvds to match nearly any possible taste.

After we'd established where everything was, we walked back down to Clynnog Fawr to get some other odds and ends. There are footpaths all the way, which fascinates me; this is a very rural road, and yet there's provision for pedestrians along all of it. CF itself is a small village, with a rather impressive church, and we're told by the guidebook, a dolmen, though we haven't seen that yet. There's one shop, attached to petrol station.

On the way down, we saw what looked like a bird of prey hovering and gliding down nearer the sea. We've since worked out that it was a buzzard, and they're rather common around here; we've seen the same one again and at least two more.

On Sunday morning, we roused ourselves from the very comfortable bed, briefly visited a Sunday market in Pwlheli, which wasn't all that, and toddled off to Beddgelert to start a 10km walk, marked as "Easy" in the Collins ramblers book. The route over was impressively mountainous; twists and turns and the chance to casually look over a roadside wall and down on the back of a soaring buzzard. There are some very fine ruins up there as well.

Beddgelert is a very touristy village, but with good reason; it's very pretty indeed. The walk, on the map, went down the river, through a gorge, around into an old mining valley, up to the head of that, down the next valley to a lake, and back around to the starting point. It did that in reality as well, but failed to mention that the haul up the old mining valley - Cym Bychan - was a long, long upward slog over occasionally boggy terrain, and that the descent to the lake on other side was very steep. In fact, the guidebook says it isn't particularly steep. I'd love to see their definition of 'steep', and possibly also of 'easy', because we were both knackered after it. It was an excellent walk, though, and immensely varied, and the views, particularly down over the lake, Llyn Dinas, were fantastic.

We debated driving home to eat, and also the possibility of eating there. In the end, we looked for and found a table in a very odd little bistro/antique shop, where most of the specials menu consisted of game. I had pigeon, sabayone had pheasant, and it was all excellent. Homeward, then, via Carnarfon rather than the mountain road.

On Monday, we walked down to the local beach, a few kilometres along it, and back up to the house, which was a lengthier ramble than expected, but also very pleasing. We took it easy for the rest of the evening, cooking, eating outside, and watching an impressive sunset over the sea.

[The above was written on Tuesday morning, I think. It's now Saturday evening, and we're back in Ireland. I shall attempt to reconstruct what we else did, although the order in which things were done is getting fuzzy.]

We went to the Wednesday market in Pwlheli, which was better by a considerable amount than the Sunday one, and acquired goods for dinner, and went to a small fishmonger's/deli, in which we got red mullet and anchovies. The mullets ended up being fried, and they were superb.

We drove down to the end of the Lleyn peninsula, being mostly unimpressed by it on the way, and then very pleased with the village nearly right at the end, Aberdaeron, which has a sheltered beach (well covered in stranded jellyfish, which we stepped around), and then being stunned on the way back by the view from the village of Rhiw, from which you can see all the way back up the peninsula, and into Snowdonia for good measure.

There was a massive storm one of the nights, which left trees and branches down all over, and brought the owner of the cottage up in the morning to check if we a) had power, and b) hadn't had a tree come down on us or the car. We'd been inside the metre-thick walls, and hadn't thought it was all that bad. Apparently, there were thousands of places up and down the coast left without power, and we saw trees down all over the place over the next two days.

We visited Chester, wherein I was very pleased by the walls and by the second gallery level of the streets in the older parts of town, while at the same time bemoaning the effect whereby, due to chains of shops, every town in England is now effectively the same. There is a very good old-style sweet shop opposite the cathedral, though, which was well worth the investigation.

We also did a drive up Llanberis Pass, and back through Beddgelert, Tremadog, and back up to the cottage. Llanberis runs past Snowdon on the "far side", from our point of view, so we circled the mountain, even if we didn't as much as consider climbing it. It does appear to attract bad weather; there was almost always an area of rain and heavy cloud in about a six, seven mile radius centred on the mountain itself. This does give rise to some fabulous waterfalls coming down the sides of steep glacial valleys, though.

And we visited Caernarfon castle, which I recommend to everyone, as long as you can handle lots of steps. For the first time ever, I got the museum effect from a castle - the one where I run out of attention span, and have to leave and go do something else, because the cool-stuff-to-look-at buffer is full.

North Wales does not appear to do good pubs. There were pubs, certainly, but they had a distinct impression of having learned how to be pubs from a book, or possibly a correspondence course. A randomly chosen pub in Chester was superior to every pub we saw in Wales. This seems, having done some reading, to be due to the principle of sobriety being a strong one in the Nonconformist religious traditions of the area.

There's also evidence to suggest that the reaction to rock in Wales has historically been to take a pick to it, on an industrial scale, and Wales is made of rock. There isn't a single valley that hasn't signs of slate quarrying, copper mining, lead or tin mining, or other extraction of stuff from the ground.

It was an excellent trip. We were trying to pick out the best bits today on the way home, and kept coming up with more and more new ones.

I'm writing this on the iPhone while I wait for the train. It's not the most comfortable way to write, but it's better than the alpha-numeric keypad. You didn't get a daily entry yesterday, mostly because sestina writing ate my spare time.

So, Monday was a blur of work, and Tuesday was very similar. It's the last week of the month, so time is being spent filling in the gaps, and doing some training with the Intern. He's getting better; still not quite understanding things sometimes, but he has more patience than I do for the slow, uninspiring work of link acquisition, for example. He did a day of pretty much nothing else yesterday, which would have driven me spare.

Monday evening saw some gardening done - watering and weeding, for the most part. Everything is growing well, with the exception of the pumpkins, of which there's one straggly, slug-eaten example showing.

Yesterday evening was largely spent online, talking to people and getting some game writing lined up. And this morning, sabayone is off with a cold, so I'm taking the train in.

I see the hawthorn - the May flower - is in full blast. This year is running late on everything; it would normally be headed for over by now. In other weather signs, I was observing an oak and ash near each other; the oak is in full leaf while the ash is still working on it. That's supposed to indicate a good summer.

Posted via Journaler.

Nine years ago today, sabayone and I had our first wedding. This was the legal one, in the registry office.

I would like to thank her enormously for putting up with me for nine years (and indeed, a good while before that). I love her enormously, and reckon she is the best thing in this or any other world.

Someone was remarking at K2 that I'd been quieter than usual online. I think I stared at them through a haze of beer and game rules, and indeed, I do not now remember who they were. However, they were probably correct in terms of output visible to them. It's difficult to keep track of what I'm doing unless you're on all the services I use, and that's not easy either. Further, a lot of my day-to-day communication goes out on an IRC channel with about twelve people on it, and doesn't really get further transmission. Nevertheless, here's my current usage:

Facebook: I'm not really using Facebook, to be honest. I log in once in a while to check the inbox and confirm any friend requests that are not from completely unknown people, and occasionally scan feeds for people I have no other contact with, but I don't read the whole feed.

Livejournal: I read a lot here, though I no longer try to read everything. I've learned to distinguish between the notions of "I want this person to have access to my journal" and "I want to read everything this person writes", and I'm making that distinction. I post when I have something to say that doesn't go on my other blogs.

Twitter: I love Twitter. It's a global chatroom, where I can filter down to the people I want to listen to, and the conversations between them. Twitter is currently my "main input" stream, alongside Google Reader.

Buzz: I am not making much use of Buzz at the moment. This may change once I have time to work out what it does better than Twitter. At the moment, it seems to include material from people I don't know, sometimes in quite long chunks of text, and that's not interesting. Buzz appears to suffer from several of the geek social fallacies, particularly #4.

Google Reader: This is currently one of my two main inputs. RSS feeds into Reader provide me with about two to three hundred chunky items to read every day, which is just about comfortable. My podcasts also come in here, allowing me to pick and choose which episodes I download.

Wave: Wave is great for event planning and project management. It's not a general communications tool, though.

Email, Inbox: Baseline contact form, this. I don't use email for much these days beyond password messages, the occasional newsletter, and very rarely getting in touch with people who don't respond to anything else.

Email, Mailing Lists: I have not looked at mailing lists much in months. They pile up, I occasionally look at them, but mostly, they don't contain content of interest any more.

Text Messages: I'm not sure where I stand on texts. On the one hand, they're a convenient way to get messages in transit. On the other, they're easy to miss unless I'm actually looking at the phone, and most of the time when I'm in transit, I'm not doing so - I'm reading, listening to podcasts, or plotting something nefarious.

Phone Calls: Yurk. The more I use the phone for work - which is quite a lot - the more I dislike it outside of work. Send me a text or email instead, unless you need an answer right now. Also, be aware that if it's between 07:30 and 09:00, or 17:30 and 19:00, I may not hear the phone ringing.

IM: I have an IRC channel populated with a number of my favourite people. This is an excellent thing. Other than that, IM is seeing very little use from me at the moment. It requires attention in the moment - and if I'm at a computer, chances are I am concentrating on something else. In most cases, it falls into the gap between email and phone conversations - if you need an answer now, phone, if not, email will do fine.

MMOs: Of course MMOs are a communications channel. However, I'm not playing much of any of them at the moment, mostly due to not having time to spare. When I am on, it's on EQII, EVE (in brief bursts), occasionally on WoW, and on Allods, when it hasn't broken itself by patching.

I am not in the shiniest of moods right at the moment. Nothing is wrong in any major way, but an accumulation of minor things - work stresses (largely other people's), the icy-slippy-surface-but-no-longer-snowy weather, the fact that the water is still off here three days after we first noticed, and the difficulty of scheduling games, among others - are putting me into a state where I'm more easily annoyed than usual. So this thinking about The Future goes under a cut tag, because it's probably rather bleak for most people's tastes.

( The Future )

This entry is not f-locked, and I'd welcome contributions from people not on my friends list. Anonymous, untracked comments are enabled, as usual, although I'll be keeping an eye on them.

Incidentally, I feel much better for getting that entry out of my system.

I'm not entirely sure I've ever posted a video before, but this is just far too good to miss.

I am rarely aware of my own accent. I know it's there, and I know it sounds vaguely Irish to most non-Irish people, and vaguely non-Irish weird to the Irish, and sometimes archaic to everyone. I have always used 'ye' as the second-person plural, for instance, instead of the more modern Hiberno-English 'yous' or 'yiz'.

However, in the progress of a recent Living And the Dead session, I noticed that due to accents, only sabayone and shootbambi can pronounced the word 'realm' correctly every time. olethros, carawyn and I always insert an extra vowel - a sort of mini-u - between the l and the m. utterlymundane, being a well-spoken young fellow, gets it right about two attempts in three, but falls on the third hurdle.

Myself, I seem to be physically incapable of excising that extra vowel - and now that I've noticed it in my own speech, I can't un-hear it. Terribly irritating.

We're running the bring and buy stand at Gaelcon again this year. If you're in Ireland, and have games or gamer-y stuff you want to get rid of, please let me know. 20% of the sale price goes to charity - you can give more, of course - and the remainder back to you. Gaelcon's charity fund basically goes to children's charities of one kind or another, so it's a good cause.

Gaelcon happens on the weekend of the 24th of October, so let me know soon if you have stuff.

(If you're abroad, and willing to post stuff, let me know that too.)

I've just finished setting up a new blog. Yeah, I know, I do that every few months, and you're all getting bored with it. However, in this case, it's new and different because it's not for me, it's for work. Check out the Elucidate Blog, add it to your feedreaders, and prepare for an onslaught of about a post a day on Stuff Drew Thinks About The Internet.

Any statements about post frequency here are aspirations, not promises. There will be contributions from other writers as well.

So a kid - a teenager, to be fair - in a school uniform got on the Dart this morning. He looked a bit unwell, red-eyed, pale. He started to sneeze just as the train moved off, and I swear, there was a tidal wave of people moving away from him. He looked around and said, "Dudes. Hay-fever."

A bloke I follow on Twitter (@JohnBatDell) posted a brief competition today - tell him why you're the biggest geek, and win one of these: http://www.dypce.ak.com/html/products/gaming/rocker100/

I replied, concerning Shakespearean MMOs, and the next I know is there's a message saying I've won. Rock!

The date for our annual summer party - now with brick barbecue - has been settled. You should be making your way to our place on the Sunday of the August Bank Holiday Weekend, that is, Sunday the 2nd of August. We'll be starting to cook in early to mid-afternoon, will refuel the barbecue a few times during the day, and will keep going until such time as people leave or fall asleep.

Elucidate are doing a survey of business changes in 2009 in Ireland, and we'll be circulating the results at the IIA congress next week.

If you're in business in Ireland, we'd love to have you fill in the survey.

And feel free to pass that around to other people as well - the more data we get, the more useful it will be!

So, like many people, I'm debating what to do with the DW account. I have it for two reasons before any others; to grab my usual username before anyone else does, and to be able to subscribe fairly easily to other DW accounts.

I could mirror LJ here, but I'm finding I abhor mirrored content. I have enough constraints on my reading time; I do not want to end up reading things twice, and that's what happens if, for instance, I'm reading someone's twitter feed, and they're posting stuff via Loudtwitter or the like to LJ. Mirrored LJ posts from blogs I read in Google Reader are likewise irritating.

I already have blogs for almost any purpose I can think of, and generally speaking, I want my non-personal writings to be out there on 'real' websites, not on services like LJ and DW where, apart from anything else, I can't earn any money from them.

So - for now, this journal will be kept for reading and commenting. If a majority of the people whose journals I read on LJ transfer to here, so will I.

evilrobotshane does a gaming podcast. It's rather good, and I'm not just saying that because he and his co-host had me on to talk about K2. But they did, and if you feel the need to hear about K2 (or just hear what I sound like), have a listen.

It appears I don't hate the sound of my own voice anymore, which is nice. I can't place my own accent, though...

So, sometimes I am more than half convinced I'm in some sort of music video.

This morning, crossing Baggot Street, I was passed by a black convertible sports car, trailing cherry blossom from the raft of the stuff on the bonnet, driven by a woman wearing a white wedding dress and dark glasses, blasting out Bryan Adams[1] at top volume.

Thirty seconds later, a robot dog ran past me.

Now, the robot dog was pursued rapidly by three film students[2], one with a camera, one with a remote control, and the guy with the remote was shouting "fucking thing won't stop!", but still... it was a nicely offbeat start to the working day.

[1] (Everything I Do) I Do It For You
[2] I assume they were students; they were all wearing identical UCD-branded polo shirts.

If you're not playing Legends of Zork, you totally should be. It's what Kingdom of Loathing could be if it laid off the juvenile punning.

And before you dive too fully into it, take a look at my 4 Quick Tips for Legends of Zork.

So I've been feeling coldish ever since we got back from K2 - had a few days late last week when I reckoned I was better, and was promptly proven wrong. After spending last night feverish and coughing, I went along to our nearest doctor today - who turns out to be about eight minutes walk away, actually within the estate, which was useful - and was told I have bronchitis. "All the way down", apparently, and a bit worse on the left. So I have some antibiotics, which are huge pills, and steroids, which are tiny pills of which I have to take lots at once, and special cough sryrup. And I'm to stay home until Monday, at the very least.

Which is a complete bugger, because we're already mad busy this month in work, and there are things I need to have finished by the end of quarter. I can do some from home, but not all of it, and in any case I'm hampered by the fact that I get stupid when I'm ill.

This post brought to you by half an hour's careful typing and typo removal (if there are any left, please be merciful), while listening to the BritAsia music channel, which is great.

Several people in the last week have said they'd read something on my blog, and looked puzzled when I asked which one. So here, for your edification, are the blogs I currently run:

• The Wizard of Dukestreet - scifi, fantasy, and gaming


• House in Ireland - DIY, interior decoration, and gardening


• Firefly MMO - because I live in hope


• A Political Education - my sadly neglected politics blog


• Woodwork Ireland - my even more neglected woodwork blog


• Tython Council - the new Star Wars MMO


• Winter in the British Isles - my winter blog, soon to go dormant for another year
  

And I sometimes post on inannajones' Rocking Grass.

Do you have other, non-LJ blogs you reckon I might not know about? Tell me, and let me put up links.

So, while walking in Donadea Forest Park (which is great) today, we saw a bat, out in daylight - around 16:00-ish - flying around and apparently catching insects. Is that in any way normal? I've never seen a bat in anything other than dusk or night time before.

I woke up about 20 minutes ago with a few bits of writing in my head - some game stuff, and some serious social media thinking which is more for work than for anything else. shandri_cat informed me that since I was awake, I could let him out. So I trotted down sleepily to the front door at the bottom of the stairs, and opened it, and he and I stood there and gaped at the unexpected snow.

I mean, I follow forecasts obsessively, and I know that last night, it was to be cold and clear, and that was it. Indeed, when I was going to bed about seven hours ago, there was a hard frost, and ice in places.

So I bounded back up the stairs to tell inannajones, and she woke up with admirable good grace for soon after 08:00 on a Sunday, and now we're going to have breakfast and go out and walk on the campus before it all vanishes again. This is snow when I have time and leisure for it, and it pleases me immensely.

SNOW!