So I twitter as do a lot of folks at this stage. However, at times so twitters have extensive bouts of twitterific verbal diahorrea and if you are getting updates via your sms you’ll use up the 250 sms in a matter of hours. So to stop this you can give someone a time out. you can put them on snooze 
I found this via Sam Allen’s site.
So living in Dublin, working 12 mins from home, 8 mins to the gym and 20 mins from town why would I need a car. I really don’t! Except when I want to go to Lahinch or visit TC, & Coxy and my crazy mates down in Limerick.
So I looked into renting a car there for the crew reunion weekend. I was gobsmacked at the charges folks were charging and getting away with. Crazy prices, rules, and did I mention idiotic prices. One company wanted to charge me €800 excess on my CC for the weekend cause they only charged €55 quid for a car for a weekend. Budget and enterprise were the most expensive, europcar were the most difficult to deal with, to the point once I read more information I pointed out I could pay an insurance fee and thus reduce the excess on my CC.
I found thrifty. Helpful, great service, great choice and not a rip off. They were so nice the first time I booked a car, they had none left in the smaller size I got a free upgrade no whinging whinging. Last week I booked it again to go to Limerick, and they even collected me as I needed to be back in the office for 2 and have the car parked.
Thumbs up and I’m using them again for June bank holiday.
So I’m now living in Dublin. I decided this bank holiday Monday gone by I should go and see something new up here. I’ve visted the Museum as it’s only around the corner from me in Stoneybatter. Seeing as I had the car (shall post about that later) I thought I’d visit somewhere new and differnt. Asking for suggestions on twitter I got a helpful suggestion from @eske that I should look at going to see Famrleigh Park.
I got there and was amazed at the space and the packed crowds there just relaxing in the sun and it was really nice to see this in Ireland. I guess I take it for granted when I travel and go see these places and pay to get it. Farmleigh is free entry as it is owned by the state.
There is a small short tour (again free) as this house was previous owned by the Guinness Family it takes you through their history and what they did with the house. The grounds are well kept but loads of green space so if you wanted to have a picnic you could, they even put out loads of fold up chairs so folks can sit around and I’m told they often have outdoor concerts.
On a Sunday there is a famers market there which I will have to go back and compare it to the Limerick markt I go to on a Saturday when I’m home. All pics of day are here. Be warned there are lots of flowers as trying to play with my camera and functions and also keep my mother happy with photos not of me sticking my tongue out at people!
So I’ve had my redtrain theme for a long time now and decide I wanted a new theme. Thinking it would be easy I found a nice clearer basic theme and thought I’d try it out. Not sure how I like it now that it’s installed so it may change again. Turns out WP you are a large pita for uploading themes when you misbehave! Yay for Niall though as he nicely unzipped it for me, as I tried to upload it and then unzip, then unzip and then upload and each and every time it just would not shagging work leaving me cranky!
And as promise…the proof it did take place.
Again again
Yes again crew folks have way to much time on their hands. I took the pics as I do after a few tipples, I dislike pictures of myself so I prefer to take them instead all the pictures of the reunion including past crew are here. But John went a step further and made a movie of the wandering hat. The irony being at the end of the night he couldn’t find it.
Many many moons ago I met the greatest bunch of people at college. No not Skynet! Though there is some over lapping with some of the nutters over the years.
Firstly for those who’ve never heard of them, Ents Crew was in theory meant to be UL students working/minding/taking care of/getting students outta trouble/babysitting/having a lot of fun with other UL students run by ULSU. Why? Well it’s sometimes easier dealing with your own peers rather than some other joe soap who you don’t know giving out to you at stupid o’clock in the morning after you’ve had a few beers in you. They also ran Rag Week, Class Parties to Cork and Galway, hell we even brough them home from there too, and took one or two to hospital and sat with them after they had one too many! Yes we have done that!
I may not have been in the same course, have the same interest in clubs and socs as these guys, but we have one thing in common, we all worked Ents Crew at some stage in college. We went to UL, hung out in the Scholars! ( I really miss that place!) I don’t even have to see some of them from one year to the next but when we get together it’s like we’ve only seen each other last week and carry on.
Looking back, I can see that folks either loved Ents Crew, cause they had mates working there and they got them into gigs or hung out with them and had fun when we weren’t working, or you did in fact hate us and were the spawn of the devil as we’d spoil their fun. This isn’t taking into account that spoiling ones fun was in fact due to you being pissed as a fart, obnoxious or a large frigging pain in the arse who went out of your way to cause trouble and piss folks off at 4am standing in a queue bussing folks back to college.
Some of these guys are my closest mates ever and I’d be lost without them. So ever so often we have a wee get together and meet up in large groups. This time it was in the Stables pub in UL (11/12 Arpil). We can’t meet up like this too often as we do infact seem to regress back to being kids and also there is the issue of possibly causing liver failure oh and damage to the bank accounts. For some unknown reason when we get together in large groups it’s like having 30 5 year olds hyper and fueled up on sugary substances ready to attempt anything! I’ll post the video with this post of John and Rob dancing strangely, though how they came up with this routine I’ve still not gotten an answer on! but suffice to say it’s entertaining!
Crew do have some strange traditions though, what we do to one couple many years ago, we do indeed recreate when we get a chance a fleeting opportunity that requires getting 5 blokes to man handle a guy into not moving and another few to get the girl right beside the guy, holding them so they won’t move they are indeed serenaded all to bring back the memories of a previous road trip in Ennis Co. Clare in the West County when they did it to a bedroom door which hide a crew couple! We really don’t have any bounderies!
Amazingly enough though this time, the lads did in fact keep their pants on! For some unknown reason they do like to form a line, turn around and drop their pants in a true Crew Moon fashion 
Roll on the next reunion. I miss them already!
Thursday 17th April - food around 7pm. Location …………do you really need to ask, but in case you do, it’s the Longstone pub!
Paul- ompaul is running another free drink prize, you can of course attempt to bribe him with cups of tea and steak!
“During the course of the evning I will award another pint this one for someone with the best GNU. (GPL Tees count;-) ) “
I’m still looking for speakers to take part in the conference in May, so if you are there come and find me!
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Well I seem to be getting some feed back via the blog, ILUG mailing list and twitter. So many mediums and messages left in multiple areas I said I’d do up a small update of what I’d collected so far. This update is by no means final and I welcome any more suggestions of topics and speakers (hint!!)
Speakers who have expressed an interest and topics they would like to talk on.
Patrick Collison - Fom his language necrophilia, he is willing to talk about badass interactive dev environments — Genera from the Lisp machines of olde, SLIME and such from modern Lisp implementations, Squeak Smalltalk, etc.
Bryn M. Reeves - Red Hat - Magicing LVM back from oblivion under the “Data Recovery”
Alan Cox - Red Hat - still to confirm fully.
Qamir Hussain - Ruby Ireland - Using open source tools in the tech business, i.e. How my business uses them and the advantages/ disadvanges of them.
Noirin Shirley - Open Source - More Than Code; Understanding Open Source Licenses; Open Source - Collaboration Tools.
Php Ireland - hopefully
Topics that folks want to hear about but I need speakers for:
Full list and comments are here.
Microsoft have said they would like to partipcate in this event so I looked for topics for them, suggestions put foward inclunde:
Thanks to all who came, more pics are here. Thomas Pedoussaut(Tpt) robbed his sons toy and Paul O’Malley (Ompaul) bought the pint.
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