the blog of brendan o'ceallaigh
Well we have been back from the south of France and Barcelona for a while. We have had “The Irish Christmas”. We have even welcomed in 2007.
All this went on and I had been ignoring my blog. Apologies to all. To be honest not a lot goes on in this part of the world during the winter. it gets a bit cold and a bit dark and we just trudge on and drink and try and keep ourselves sane and well 😉
I now know where Gwen would live if she wasn’t living in New Zealand or Ireland, the south of France… She loved it. We were in the country about half an hour, all we had seen was a tiny airport and some motorway and Gwen announced “this place is beautiful”. What more can I say.
My parents house is lovely, on the edge of a sleepy little French village with nothing going on, which is the beauty of it. We ate smelly cheese, drank beautiful cheap wine and soaked up the atmosphere for 5 days. Just lovely.
We then hopped onto a train and landed ourselves in Barcelona. What a beautiful vibrant city. The architecture, the culture, it is a real treat and I would definitely recommend it. The food and wine is just as good as France and a little cheaper too. It was great fun having Veronica there with us and we made the most our ageing bodies would allow of the legendary night life.
Well we have been back for a while now and getting back into the swing of things. But then we got a chance to go across to Galway, which is on the west coast of Ireland and do a little more holidaying. We took a ferry out to Inis Mor (pronounced inish more) which is a little island about off the west coast. It is a gaeltacht which is Irish for native Irish speaking community. I have wanted to see Inis Mor for years and I have to say it is beautiful. We were not disappointed. The sun shone down on us and we cycled all over the island. We even had a pint and caught the end of the New Zealand v’s South African match… The less said about that the better.
That evening Gwen had a chance to meet up with Matt Moore, a school friend of hers from New Zealand. He is now living in Galway with his Irish Missus’. It is really a small world after all.
Not much more to say for the moment except check out our photos which I have added to the website – www.bocsite.com Enjoy 😉
Just a quick note to let you all know that the new job is going great. We are both working away and likeing Ireland a lot at the moment. I have been down to Cork on business twice now… My company is treating me very well and I am happy with them.
We are about to head off on our first European holiday together. We are flying over to the south of France, near Beziers for 5 days and then getting the train to Barcelona in Spain for 4 days. We are both really looking forward to it.
I do have some new photos to put on the website but I am not going to get a chance to put them up until we come back, sorry Joan. But I promise to put up the holiday photos and the waiting batch as soon as we get back.
Au revoir
That’s me. I am now looking after a nice little network and getting my head around a couple of new servers and some solutions that I haven’t worked with before. As the position is new there is not a lot of pressure, just a big backlog to work through. They have even asked me to fly down to one of our other offices to “advise” on their new network and say “Hi” to the folks. I will be doing this exactly 1 week after I started. How good is that?
The people I am working with are all very nice and I have to say that I am really enjoying it. There is a good atmosphere in the office. I am a little bamboozled by how many tasks I have on my “to do” list but as most are at the stage of “do when I get to it” its great, very little pressure.
I know that I am writing this after only my second day and therefore I’m still in the honeymoon period, but hey let me enjoy it 😉
Oh and the outsourced IT guy that looked after the servers that was in today to do a brain dump to me was impressed that I was running the excellent Dapper Drake (Ubuntu/Gnome/Debian/Linux) on my recycled (Thanks Sharon) laptop at home. So my little geeky side even got a smile today.
Just a quick note to let you all know that I am now employed again!
I will be in charge of IT for a property development company based in Clonskeagh. I will be able to walk to work with Gwen and they seem like lovely people.
I’ll let you know how it goes. I start on Monday…
I am happy as Larry!
It was actually great because I got offered a few jobs at the same time and was able to choose my preference.
Cool eh?
Believe it or not we are having beautiful warm (25 degrees) weather
here in sunny Dublin. It really has been brilliant with the city putting on its best summer face and Gwen and I have made the best of it. This weekend we were treated to a load of free wine tasters and nibbles at our local sopping centre (Europe’s biggest). I think you’ll agree the place was looking well.
We then made our way into the city centre and ended up at the Tall Ships festival at the Liffey Docklands. 
There were loads of stalls and even one selling beer, so we were happy as you can see. We happily just enjoyed the nice relaxed atmosphere, the sun and the music. This city really is a great place when it pulls out all the stops.
We also celebrated our two year anniversary this weekend. Yes it has been two short (or long, depends on how you look at it) years since we first went on that fateful date after my first Friday at work. Who would have thought our drinking competition, I mean date, would end up with us engaged on the other side of the world…. I think I am sobering up, quick Gwen pass the wine ;-).
We had a lovely dinner in Dun Laoghaire (good luck getting your lips around that one Kiwis, its pronounced Dun Learee) at the 40 Foot restaurant on Saturday evening and a Champagne lunch at home on Sunday just to keep it simple ;-).
A quick note to all (read anyone) in NZ and Oz that I haven’t been in touch with, apologies but just keep watching this space.
I’m still waiting on feedback from both companies that I have interviewed with, seems like the biggest wait of my life, but as we all know “good things come to those who wait”…
Well as most of you know I am in the endless interview process at the moment. So here’s a little update. The big company that I am going for finally got back to me today and I have my 3rd interview with them tomorrow morning. Needless to say I am a tad nervous.
I also have an interview next Monday with a completely different company. Nice company and we’ll see how it goes.
I will keep you all posted 😉
Well I have finally put some more photos of our life on-line. To have a look just go to my site and have a look at the menu.
For a sneak peak here is one of the shots of our apartment.
I went down to the shop the other day to buy some food for dinner and came home with broadband. Well Ireland certainly has changed.
What I got was a little box with a Clearwire wireless modem. You just plug this baby into your computer Ethernet port and away you go. From moment of purchase to surfing the net I’d say there was a very expectant 15 minutes.
The service has been good so far and for the ease of purchase, instant activation and setup I have to say the cost of Euro 30 per month for the first 6 months is fair. It will go up to Euro 40 per month after that. For my money I have an alleged 2MBPS connection and a 20GB download limit per month. This will drop back to 1MBPS and 10GB after the 6 months. I am also hoping that competition might mean that the playing filed might change.
If anyone that knows me is going to get Clearwire please let me know first because I can get a month rental for Euro 1 if I refer anyone 😉
I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes…
Laptop. My super sister donated an old laptop to me and I have wiped it and it is now a dual boot running Win 98SE and the excellent and easy to install for Linux n00bs like me Ubuntu ;-).
I have learned a lot in the last 2 weeks and have most of the programmes, or even better open source or GPL versions, running under Ubuntu. All I’ll say folks is secure and virus free web browsing is at last in my grasp and mostly for free.