I occasionally wonder to myself why I don’t blog more these days, and I
think the answer is that I’m not convinced that other people would be
interested in what happens to me from day to day. For example, when
writing the books, all that is really involved is a massive amount of
time in front of a computer. The finished product is cool, but the
process of producing it is actually quite boring.
(Although I feel that I will one day write up my universal theory of
project management… The short summary is something like: “project
management is about removing obstacles to delivery of the project — not
deadlines, hassling, gantt charts, or general futzing”. Or something
like that.)
The Dublin trip is similar. I had a good time, although am very tired. I
flew Virgin Atlantic premium economy from San Francisco to Heathrow, and
then BMI to Dublin. Virgin is great, BMI suck even more than I could
have imagined. For example — they advertise that they have the best
on time record of any LHR flying airline, but they were late every
time on my trip. Oh, and one of the planes had a power generation engine
which didn’t work, so we had to deplane in the dark. Oh, and no food. So
much suck.
(Oh, and who knew that the EU had instituted US style 3 ounce / 100
millilitre zip lock bag policies? I didn’t.)
BMI also seem to have a policy of hiring midgets as flight attendants.
They were all young women of about five foot tall. I guess that’s
convenient in a short aircraft, but where does one find a large stock of
midgets to hire from?
The hotel in Dublin was fantastic. It’s called the Berkeley Court, and
there is no point in saying much more about it because it’s being torn
down to build office buildings and apartments. How crap. I can’t imagine
owning one of the lovely Victorian terraces across the street either
during or after the construction of yet another identical looking office
building.
Dublin seems to be all about economic growth at the moment. There are
plenty of identical looking office buildings around — some of them even
built on top of sites of historical artifacts like Viking settlements.
Apparently they didn’t even stop to dig up the old things before
concreting over them.
I liked Dublin though.
It was also odd to see Sinn Fein posters all over the place. I find the
transition from the political wing of the IRA to being a main stream
political party to be quite strange. (That sentence used to be more
harsh, but I edited it down).
Another odd thing was to discover the stereotypes are true (to a certain
extent). There are plenty of drunk folk on the streets on weekends from
about lunch onwards.
I got lots of tourist stuff done in Dublin, but didn’t see much of the
countryside. Perhaps next time. I did see the National Museum (bog
people!), the Chester Beattie National Library (ancient religious
texts!), Dublin Castle (Sinead O’Conner in concert preparations!),
Malahide Castle, the south wall, and other stuff I don’t remember at the
moment.
So there you go. I figure no one finds these posts interesting, so I
will continue to write them solely when it amuses me.