Ryan’s Ramblin’

Sunday: Dave and I slept in till 11 or so, after being kept up late by the loud jerks in our hotel… basically gave ourselves just enough time to shower, pack, and get checked out by noon. We drove off to see the Ross Castle, which was gorgeous, and took a fair few pictures. Then drove back to Killarney, and stopped at a gas station for some provisions. Water was a necessity, and got a yummy chocolate orange muffin for breakfast! Oh, and Dave picked up some juice, which turned out to be concentrated - you see, you can buy various concentrated juice products here, where you just add water (similar to frozen concentrates at home, except more watery). Regardless, he got a bit of a shock when he tried drinking it undiluted! Then it was off to Dingle, and Slea Head. The car got stuck in soft sand at Inch Strand, and there were some seriously narrow roads on the way to Slea, but the scenery was GORGEOUS. We spent a good hour hiking around Slea Head, and then Dave went and played in the ocean while I took pictures of some of the surfers and the crashing waves. We realized a bit late, however, that we still had a good 3+ hours of driving ahead of us, and it was almost 6pm! And we had planned on visiting the Cliffs of Moher that day as well on our way up to Galway. Whoops! No time for that, so we scooted off to Galway directly. After a bit of circling, we finally found our hostel, the Kinlay House, which was a FANTASTIC deal and just perfectly located for our needs (those needs being - party!).

After settling into the room a bit, we zipped off to Eyre Square, and hit three of the (absolutely dead) bars there briefly. Then it was off for a wander down Quay St, where we hit several bars over the course of several hours, drinking several pints and seeing several good live bands. I was shocked at the quality of the bands available in just about every venue we hit. Good fun was had, and we ended up closing out The Quays bar, but then it was off to sleepy land!

More to come, later…

TMNT Teaser Trailer. I was right smack in the middle of the TMNT craze when the first series came out. I loved the first (and second, I suppose) movie. The third movie was… painful. This new CGI film looks pretty damn awesome. The bit at the end is what sold me on it.

(via MeFi)

Not that you knew I was gone, oh my 5 or 6 readers who might still be around. Since I was only gone from Saturday-Tuesday, and my last blog entry was… (checks) Thursday. And that was just a hype post for Chris’ travel site. Yes, I’ve been a lazy blogger. But I have a pretty good reason, at least lately. Dave is visiting from Toronto, and he’s been here for about a week and a half now. And we have been busy. But for the past 4 days, we went on an epic road trip, going through 17 of the 26 counties in Ireland (Republic Of). Here’s a quick rundown of our trip (pictures to be added later, once I’ve processed them and uploaded to Flickr):

Saturday:
Slept in after a night of serious partying on Friday. Managed to get out of the house by about 1pm, destination: Blarney. We were going to kiss the stone, by gum! Arrived in Blarney (6 of the counties already covered, including our start county of Dublin) at around 5:45, with the castle closing at 7. We figured we had plenty of time, and got cocky. Spent WAY too much time outside the castle, taking pictures of the castle itself, and the grounds, etc. By the time we ended up getting to the castle doors, it was 6:45 and they had just locked up! D’oh!!! Dave was pretty pissed. I figure it was a pretty funny story. Oh, and I managed to hit my head on the (very hard) rock doorway in the watchtower outside. D’oh! From Blarney, it was off to Killarney. It was a pretty uneventful drive, but I was starting to get a bit tired after being on the road for so many hours. The thing is, in Ireland, you just lose your sense of scale completely. I’m used to home, where for most major destinations, you’re looking at a (at least) 2 lane (each direction) highway all the way there. In Ireland, you start out on a nice big two or 3 laner until you’re about half hour out of the city, then it’s 1 lane all the way. With speed limits dropping to 50km/h in small towns, and stoplights causing traffic backups for a good half hour. So even though we only travelled 226 miles on Saturday, it ended up being about 6 hours of driving.

We checked into our hotel (the supposedly fancy schmancy Gleneagle Hotel) and lazed about on the couch for a while, and then headed into town. Good times were had, and we ended the night fairly early, walking home to our hotel, where apparently the party was still in FULL swing. The hotel bar was PACKED! And there were kids running around everywhere! At 3AM! Needless to say, our “fancy schmancy” hotel had fairly uncomfortable beds, extremely thin walls and ceilings, and was exceedingly hot. I was unimpressed. And waking up on Sunday morning was fairly painful.

More to come…

TNNWorld.com is just recently launched. It’s a pretty comprehensive travel site, complete with your usual photos, destination reports, “What’s on” informatoin, and travel deals. The site itself is pretty slick, and the ads are nicely unobtrusive (as compared to some other travel sites, especially). Now, I have to admit that I’m not completely impartial when I talk about this site, as Chris and his dad are the two main dudes behind it (and a photo or two of my own may show up on there from time to time), but I think it *is* a pretty damn good site. And eventually, from what I understand, there’s going to be contests up there as well to win trips. It’s still fresh, so don’t be surprised to find bugs on the site, but the amount of content on there is pretty impressive for how young the site is.

DSC_0390 01

Last week I went to see Eimear’s brother’s band, The Chakras (their webpage is being created at the moment, so that link is to their MySpace page, which has sample music. The new single is remarkably good). Since I’d just gotten my 50mm f/1.8 Nikon lens, I thought it’d be a great chance to try out some low light photography. It was an interesting experience, and I spent a lot of time fumbling around with different settings trying to make it easier to take shots. The light was pretty low at Whelan’s, with occasional insanely bright flashes, which made for some interesting attempts at metering/catching shots. I ended up taking something like 160+ shots. There’s only 108 in my photoset (many of which could probably also go) because about 1/3 of my shots were either completely underexposed or completely overexposed. It was a lot of fun though, and the music was pretty rockin’. One thing I noticed, though: hipster dancing. is. so. weird.

Kyle MacDonald managed to trade from one red paperclip to a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan. Truly amazing, and he did it in less than a year! Way to go, Kyle!

This had me chuckling: Eddie Izzard on religion - it’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any Eddie Izzard comedy, but I recall from hearing about him in the past that he’s supposed to be pretty controversial. This was funny stuff, but not really “GASP! I can’t believe he SAID that!” controversial.

(via Lileks, who makes pretty much the same observation)

Yeah, France deserved the win. They played a much better game. Of course, with Zidane all headbutting people, and players missing penalties, France definitely lost the game, as opposed to Italy winning it. But what can ya do? Still a fairly entertaining match. Now, don’t have to worry about it again until Euro 2008.

This test just confirms it:

Pure Geek 34 % Nerd, 56% Geek, 13% Dork

For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in Geek, earning you the title of: Pure Geek. It’s not that you’re a school junkie, like the nerd, and you don’t really stand out in a crowd, like the dork, you just have some interests that aren’t quite mainstream. Perhaps it’s anime, perhaps it’s computers, perhaps it’s bottlecaps, perhaps it’s all of those and more. Your interests take you to events and gatherings that are filled with people you find unusual and beyond-the-pale, but you don’t quite consider yourself “of that crowd.” Instead, you consider yourself to be fairly normal. Which, you are. Congratulations! You’re the one on the RIGHT! Also, you might want to check out some of my other tests if you’re interested in any of the following: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Professional Wrestling Love & Sexuality America/Politics Thanks Again! — THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

I finally changed things up a bit here. My last template has done me well, but I decided it was time to go all “Wordpress 2.0″, and get some widgets and stuff to make things a bit easier the next time I want to change templates. I like the new one - nice and simple. There’ll probably be some tweaks here and there, but for now, this is it!

I heard a radio announcer this afternoon make the following statement: “And tonight, France attempts to win their way into their first World Cup final in 8 years”. They made it sound bad that they hadn’t made it in the last 8 years. Of course, for those of you not familiar with how the World Cup works, that means they didn’t make it to the finals in the last World Cup, but they did make it to the one before (since it’s only every 4 years). Let’s put this into, say, NFL terms. “And tonight, the New England Patriots try to win their way into their first Superbowl championship game in two years”. Pretty ridiculous, right? But I guess it’s not really that unusual for sports announcers to say silly things. At halftime in a previous game, one of the analysts said “what they have to try to do here is win this game”. Brilliant. I should get paid to say this crap!

The 6 Most Feared but Least Likely Causes of Death. Did you know that there are only 1,909 confirmed shark attacks between 1580 and 2003? I didn’t.

Nikon D50 Infrared conversion. Very, very cool stuff, but not something I would be even remotely comfortable in doing.

D50 Self Portrait 02



So, this weekend I got my new Nikon D50. I ended up just getting it with the basic 18-55mm kit lens, which doesn’t get the best reviews, but will do me fine for a while. This camera is RETARDEDLY popular right now, which was shown by the fact that there was only a single black D50 available in all of Dublin (ok, in all of downtown Dublin, at the reasonably priced shops). I absolutely LOVE it! So far I only have 45 shots taken with it in my Flickr stream (out of 140 taken total), I plan on having many, MANY more An interesting thing I noted, as well, is that the new camera seems a bit more “widescreen” than my Ixus 55 is. The ixus produces images with a 4:3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio, whereas the D50 is a 188:125 (1.504:1) aspect ratio. I wonder how they decide these things?