DjMagra’s stuff ‘n’ stuff

Ok, that title isn’t going to make anyone fall off their chair, but, something quite cool is happening at the moment. Jon Snow is presenting the Channel 4 News live from inside the Arctic Circle. Again, in this day and age, that’s nothing extraordinary, however, at the start of the bulletin, he apologised in case viewers experienced slight drops in sound or video, as, due to being unable to secure airtime on a satellite in order to broadcast, they are presenting the TV news via a regular internet connection. Not satellite, nothing special, just plain old internet. Their connection must be pretty quick, but, that’s really need, in a geeky kind of way!

I’m an extensive user of RSS, and, up to now, have been more than happy to use Thunderbird as my RSS client, given I spend a large part of my day stuck in TB reading mail, it’s a natural choice. However, at the moment, I’m regularly switching between three different computers, and there’s no easy way of treating RSS feeds like IMAP folders, and being able to manage them no matter what machine you are logged in from. This results in my feeds becoming out of sync, when I add a new feed on one machine, I have to remember to add it on another machine. More annoying still, I as I read stuff on my work machine, my home machine knows nothing about it, meaning that quite often I’m reading stuff twice etc.

So, today, I decided to re-try Google Reader. Last time I used Google Reader, I wasn’t impressed, but, today, I imported my Thunderbird OPML export, and hey presto, everything worked exactly as I wanted it. Admittedly, I now have to read via Firefox, but, the time I don’t spend in TB is usually spent in FF anyways, so, that’s not such a bad thing. If you’re in the same position as I am, I suggest that you give Google Reader a whirl.

One of the nice things about living in the countryside is peace and quite. One of the not so nice things about living in the city, especially somewhere as big and brash as London is the assault on your senses, especially your ears. Every day I try to brave it for a little while, treating the noises of every day life as part of the overall London experience, and every day I quite rapidly jump back into the sanctuary of my noise-cancelling headphones and my iPod.

But, you’d expect that once you head to bed, and close up the sound-proof windows in your nice apartment, that you could get some sleep. I’ve been to places where you can hear everything your neighbours are up to (Kassie can tell you all about that too!), or where you have rowdy neighbours who insist on making as much noise as they possibly can. But, that’s not something you expect living where I do.

So, imagine the shock to the system I had at 5am this morning when deep in my sleep I could hear the incessent whine of a fire alarm. It took me quite a while to realise what it was, but, as soon as I woke up enough to realise, my heart started pounding, and all I could think about was whether I could smell smoke. It wasn’t my fire alarm (which we’ve managed to set off more than once - who puts smoke / fire alarms right over a cooker anyways!!) so I dragged myself out of bed and fumbled around for a bit, trying to decide what to do.

Eventually, there was no sound of anyone else moving, and I was unable to get through to the concierge in my apartment, so, I took it upon myself to get out and see what was going on. The apartment down the hallway was where the noise was coming from, again, I couldn’t smell smoke, and the door was cold, so, I hoped that all would be ok and headed down to the concierge to let them know and investigate.

Turns out, the problem was a faulty smoke alarm, and that the apartment was unoccupied, but, OMG, that just never happens out the country. I don’t miss home because I’m loving living here too much, but, if there’s one thing that I do miss, it’s the ability to get some peace and quiet sometimes!

We spotted this in Leicester Square yesterday and got a giggle out of it!

Well well, it’s been a while, as usual, since I’ve put up and update on how things are going here in London, so, I figure I ought to right that.

Things are going amazingly well here, I’m absolutely loving every minute of it. I can’t believe I’m hear almost four weeks already, time just seems to be zipping by so so fast. I have well and truly settled in now though, there’s been no visitors over for a while, work has settled down, and I’m starting to get my head around all there, and my apartment finally feels like home. I say that because for the first few weeks, I didn’t have it properly kitted out, my fridge seemed to be constantly empty and it just didn’t feel right. Now though, sitting on my sofa having a beer looking out at Canary Wharf and The City in the background seem completely normal. Ok, on occasion, it does still look like a postcard or something, but, that’s to be expected I guess.

I didn’t initially think this would be the case, but, a lot of my work time is going to be spent out in the Docklands, we’ve kit in various data centres out there, so, quite often my commute to work is a 10 minute or less walk from home! So delighted I actually settled on living out in the docklands now. If I need to come to the office, it’s about 25 minutes or so on the DLR and Tube, now bad at all (a 25 minute commute to the office coming from living in Ireland is a joy!).

Something I’ve noticed about moving over here is the amount of building going on everywhere. Again, coming from Dublin where they would build on your foot if you stood still long enough, it’s not entirely unusual, but, I didn’t think that building would be as manic in London, given how established the economy here is. But, in the Docklands especially, but everywhere else in the city also, there seems to be cranes lining the sky. Added to that, everything that is being built is modern and high rise, it’s all really exciting. There are three separate high rise building that I know of at least under construction in Canary Wharf at the moment, and I’m really looking forward to seeing these go up over the coming months and years.

I haven’t quite established a pattern for normal life at the moment, after work usually involves heading to the shop to buy some food, cook that up, clean the apartment, do some washing, watch a DVD and head to bed. That’s not what I moved to London to do, so, over the coming weeks, I’m going to make a concious effort to get out to the gym (it’s a few floors below me in my apt, so, I really don’t have an excuse!), join a hockey club, and get out taking photos. I haven’t even taken my camera out of my bag since I arrived here, so, that definitely needs fixing.

Weekends are going to be more of the same. This weekend is a bank holiday, so, I’ve got rugby with Ciaran lined up for Saturday, watch the Grand Prix on Sunday, followed by Sunday afternoon Rollerblading in Hyde Park, and then Monday the camera is coming up to Notting Hill for the carnival, so, expect some good pics from that hopefully!

Anyways, that’s enough for a mid-afternoon ramble. Hopefully that’s updated people slightly on what’s going on. I know I always say it, but, I do hope to get some more regular posting going on here shortly too. I had my phone line installed the other day, and my broadband is on order, due for install on Wednesday, so, after that I’ll be online in the evening a whole lot more - yay!

It’s slipped down my priority list slightly, but, for those who haven’t heard yet, my MINI Cooper is still for sale.

Living over in London, I haven’t been able to chase it as much as I would like, it’s advertised on carzone.ie but that’s about it. Does anyone know where else I could be advertising it, where I could successfully offload it asap?

If anyone is interested, I have three tickets for this Saturday’s Damien Rice gig in Marlay Park up for grabs, priced at face value (EUR 50). If anyone’s interested in buying one, two or three of these, can you drop me a mail to tickets@daraghmcg.org

Yep, I’m still alive and kicking and loving London. I’ve just been completely flat out since I arrived here, both inside and outside of work. Everything is going great, job is really cool, London is really cool, and my apartment is really cool! The weather has been fab ever since I got here too, though, that’s all about to change tomorrow!

Anyways, just thought, given Gill has been onto me saying that she’s keeping an eye on the site for updates, that I should really take a moment to put something up here! I’m going to order my broadband for home now too, so, hopefully updates for everyone back home should become a little more regular!

Heh, cool. I’m currently sitting aboard ‘The Flying Scotsman’ on my way from London to the Peterborough office for some meetings. I fired up the laptop to do some reading, and noticed that there was a WLAN available, and, here I am, surfing away on a train shooting through the English countryside, that’s pretty neat!