Matt and Kat Brown

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I had a great long weekend in Whistler catching up with Christopher (or Brownie as he’s now called, I was reprimanded several times for using his full name!), meeting his friends and remembering how to snowboard. My flights from Dublin to San Francisco and then on to Vancouver were uneventful, and the Delta airport hotel that Chris had arranged for me to stay in overnight before catching the 5am Greyhound up to whistler the next morning was one of the best rooms I’ve ever stayed in.

I arrived in Whistler at about 7:45am and met up with Chris, by the time we’d picked up the jacket and pants that I was borrowing from one of Chris’ friends, checked in to the hotel, had some breakfast and hired a board and some boots we didn’t actually make it up the mountain until about 11! We went up Blackcomb on Thursday, which was also Blackcomb’s first day of the season, and a popular one at that, by 11am when we got up there the fresh unmarked slopes were already heavily mogulled! Blackcomb and Whistler really are huge skifields compared to what I’m used to, we barely had to wait in a queue all day and only the lower half of the mountain was open! The snow quality was equal and perhaps even superior to what I’m used to, but according to the locals (ie. Chris) what we had was nothing compared to what it would be like later in the season once the real snow has actually arrived!

Friday saw us heading up Whistler mountain, starting with an entertaining Gondola ride with some of the local snowboarders. It was another great day of boarding, although I’m really not used to boarding in between trees and dealing with the deep powder that accompanies it. You have to keep up your speed to avoid sinking while also avoiding trunks that appear in front of you from the middle of nowhere! I seemed to spend most of the time in the trees digging my way out of the hole of powder that I’d fallen in to. The day ended slowly with a 1hr queue to get back on the Gondola to head down the mountain, as there is nowhere near enough snow to be able to board/ski all the way down to the base yet.

The rest of the time there I hung out with Chris and his friends, it was good to meet Dan and Paul who went on the Alaska road trip with Chris and hear all the stories again from different perspectives. They definitely had a great time and a very busy trip! I managed to get Chris to sit down long enough to sort through all the photos that he’s accumulated over the past few months and write them to a couple of DVDs, so when I get some time in the next week or two I’ll start uploading them to his blog for him.

I left Whistler just after lunch on Sunday, and made it back to Vancouver airport in time for my flight, despire the 2hr bus trip taking just over 3 hours thanks to the congestion from Vancouver’s Santa Parade! I can still say I’ve never missed a flight in my life although I was getting a bit worried at one point.

You can find all my photos under the Whistler tag, I’ve still got a few from yesterday that I will upload tommorrow, but most of them are there now.

I’m staying in an apartment in San Francisco, right down near the waterfront beside the Bay Bridge. It’s a very nice, modern complex, the only downside being that it’s just over an hour north of the main office in Mountain View. I’m currently on the shuttle bus heading down to work for my first day over here, the bus has wireless which works OK, although it’s a bit of a bumpy drive which makes reading from the screen somewhat unpleasant.

More news later once I’ve had a chance to get my bearings and decide what I think of California!

As Kat alluded to at the end of a recent post I’m travelling again to visit “head office” in Mountain View for two weeks.

This coming weekend is American Thanksgiving and due to various flight timing quirks the best option for me to be in San Fransisco by Monday morning (ready to work and not too jet lagged) was to fly before the holiday weekend. Hanging out by myself in San Fransisco for the holiday weekend didn’t sound like much fun, but it is the perfect opportunity to pop up to Vancouver/Whistler and catch up with Christopher before he departs back to New Zealand sometime next year (assuming he doesn’t come up with another scheme to stay in Canada for longer…). So I’m currently sitting in San Fransisco airport waiting for my connecting flight up to Vancouver. Ironically I’ve already flown across Canada this morning on the way to San Fransisco from Dublin, but unfortunately more direct flights between Dublin and Vancouver are not really possible to do.

I get back to San Fransisco late on Sunday evening (along with all the other holiday weekend travellers) and then spend two weeks here, leaving on the 7th Dec to arrive back in Dublin first thing on the 8th about 5 hours before we leave for our “Christmas” holiday in Austria! I’m hoping my return flight doesn’t get delayed for any reason!

I’m looking forward to catching up with Chris again (almost 1yr since I last saw him) and if his latest emails are to be believed they’ve just got the first of the seasons snow so he has a rigorous snowboarding schedule planned which will undoubtedly put my fitness to the test!

Stay tuned for more news once something more exciting than sitting in a plane or an airport happens…

Sorry to keep you all waiting for the photos of our trip to Paris last weekend. I’ve been busy putting the final touches on a new bit of software that I’ve written to nicely display all our photos on this website. You can find the result via the “Our Photos” link above.

The new gallery organises our photos via ‘tags’ rather than into discrete albums. Every time we take a photo, we download it from the camera into an application called F-Spot which organises the photos and lets us tag them with tags to describe the content. A tag is just a short one or two word descriptive phrase and we can attach as many tags to a photo as we like.

Once we’ve tagged all the new photos we then go through and give the best ones a special tag called ‘Favorites’ which marks them to be exported onto the website. Then there is some magic that you most probably don’t care about that takes place to copy the phone from our computer up to the webserver where you can view it and comment on it. The big benefit of this new process is that it takes much less time to get new photos up on the website than it previously did, so after future trips you now have justification to hassle us if the photos aren’t online after 1 or 2 days.

The key point to remember is that our gallery doesn’t have albums anymore, it has tags. So to see all the photos from our recent Paris trip you just click the word ‘Paris’ that appears in the tag cloud on the front page of the gallery. If you’re impatient here are all our photos tagged ‘Paris’.

One final point, if you’re using Internet Explorer to read this, then you’re partly to blame for why it took me so long to get the new gallery working. Internet Explorer is a broken, slow, insecure and ancient web browser that is the bane of any web designers existance. To make webpages look good and work properly in Internet Explorer takes hours of extra effort above and beyond what is required creating the page. By contrast all the other browsers like Safari (for Macs), Firefox and Opera work perfectly with minimal effort.

Save my time, and make the entire Internet a better place, if you’re using Internet Explorer you can switch to Firefox with one easy download. It will even automatically import all of your bookmarks from Internet Explorer so you can still find your favourite sites easily. Simply click here, then click on the big green button, run the installer and then say ‘yes’ when it asks if you want Firefox to be your default browser. Thank You

Phew! It’s the weekend at last. After getting back from Paris at midnight on Tuesday we were straight back into work on Wednesday and playing catch-up for the time we were away. Now that it’s Saturday – the chores all done and cosy inside looking out at the drizzly grey Dublin day – I have time to sit back and think over our trip to Paris and finish writing about it. So, here we are….

Day 3 in Paris we decided to take to the Seine river for a different view of Paris. We took the Batobus which is a boat that runs daily up and down the Seine stopping at various points where you can hop on and off as you wish. We were fortunate to get a beautiful sunny day on Monday and it was very pleasant cruising the river and watching Paris glide by.

We stopped off at the Musee d’Orsay hoping to visit there and see some more art – unfortunately the Musee d’Orsay is closed on a Monday We settled for finding a local Patisserie and nibbling on chausson aux pommes (also known as apple turnovers to us English speakers). It was quite funny ordering food and generally using French in any situation – neither of us really speak any French and I’m sure we managed to butcher the names of lots of different places and foods! I had an idea that Parisians would be unhelpful or disapproving if we couldn’t speak French but I was surprised and grateful to find that people were accommodating of our poor French and would speak English to us without a problem.

Another misconception of mine before we arrived was that Paris is a dirty city. I found this to be very untrue. Perhaps it appears that way because Paris has recently hosted an international sporting event and had the street sweepers on overtime? or perhaps it appears that way to us because Dublin really is a very dirty city. Whatever the reason, we saw very little litter, no dog poop and nobody blowing smoke in your face as they walk along the street… by comparison to Dublin, Paris was squeaky clean!

We hopped back on the Batobus and cruised to the Ile de la Cite which is one of two small islands in the middle of the Seine. The Ile de la Cite is historically the center of Paris, the home of Notre Dame Cathedral and now where the Paris Police and the Courts are based. We visited Notre Dame – a very ornate building and interesting to walk through. We also visited Sainte-Chapelle which is a less famous church but no less stunning. Ste-Chapelle was built for Louis IX to hold ‘the relics of Christ’s Passion’ (i.e the crown of thorns). It has towering stained glass window panels covering all walls that depict different sections of the biblical story from Genesis all the way through to Revelation. Very beautiful in the midday sun!

We went out in the evening in search of an authentic French restaurant to celebrate with an anniversary dinner. We had a very nice meal which included french onion soup, steak (not blue), and creme brulee. Yum yum.

On Tuesday we started the day by walking to the Arc de Triomphe. We made our way up the 284 steps of the spiral staircase to the top for a great view of the city. From the top it feels as if you are in the very center of the city with 12 avenues branching out from the roundabout that the Arc sits in the center of. Watching the chaos on the roundabout below was quite interesting. Parisian drivers are not afraid to use their horns!

Tuesday afternoon we headed back to the Musee d’Orsay. We found it open and busy but didn’t have to wait too long as the queues were moving fast. We were pleased to find that we qualified for the youth rates (18 to 25yrs)! This almost made up for being ripped off earlier in the morning by being charged 12 euro for two hot chocolates at a cafe on the Champs Elysees. The Musee d’Orsay was great. Highlights for me were seeing collections by Van Gogh, Degas, and Toulouse Lautrec – some of my favourite artists! While not as big as the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay still proved to fill a good few hours. We left with weary feet at about 4:00 and spent a few hours relaxing before we needed to head to the airport for our flight home.

Our trip to Paris was great. We enjoyed every day and would definitely go back some time.

Matt is coding some changes to the photo gallery application that we use. Hopefully you should soon see the newest photos and also a few changes to the way the gallery looks. Please feel free to leave some comments and let us know what you think once it’s all up to date. Adieu!

We’ve just returned from our 4 day holiday in Paris. Our trip was wonderful – it’s only a shame we couldn’t stay longer! We managed to miss the French transport strikes which started just after we left.

Paris is both beautiful and romantic – a perfect place to visit on our anniversary. I found Paris to be a city steeped in history, cultured and refined but also bustling and alive! During our 4 days we visited plenty of the city and enjoyed all of it

We arrived late on Friday night after taking the long bus ride from Beauvais Airport – the remote airport that Ryan Air uses for their Paris flights. Our hotel – L’Ouest Hotel – was good, not the newest or the flashiest but our room was more spacious than others we’ve stayed in, the staff were friendly and the location and price were excellent. I would happily recommend it as a low budget place to stay in central Paris.

We started our first day in Paris by walking up to Sacre Coeur and through Montmartre. It was fun to walk the narrow streets around Montmartre and through the painters square where artists display their work and sketch portraits for the tourists. Many years ago this area of Paris is where artists like Picasso, Monet, and Van Gogh produced their work. It was a tad too touristy with the crowds of foreigners and kitchy souviner shops but still fun all the same. The view from Sacre Coeur at the top of the hill was great.

In the afternoon we took the Metro over to the Eiffel Tower. We decided to pass on going up the Eiffel Tower as the queues were long and the wind was cold! After getting the obligatory snapshots with Paris most famous monument we walked along the Champs Elysees and back to our hotel to rest. After dark we took an ‘Illuminations of Paris’ coach tour- a drive around Paris to see all the beautiful buildings and monuments with their night lights. The Eiffel Tower stands out especially at night when it is lit up and flashing with an overabundance of bright sparkling lights – bling bling!

We reserved our whole second day in Paris to see the Louvre. We arrived early and headed straight to the Grand Gallery to see the most famous painting at the museum – the Mona Lisa. She is small, covered in protective glass and surrounded by snap happy tourists. After this first stop we made our way methodically through room after room after room of paintings. The Louvre is overwhelmingly big and you definitely couldn’t see all the collections in one day. Quite often during the day I found myself walking with my head back, admiring the ceiling! The Louvre building itself is a work of art. Originally a palace, some rooms were incredibly ornate and very impressive. Photographs are not allowed in some places but in others we were allowed to use the camera without the flash. It was a very long day at the Louvre but well worth it.

There’s so much to write about! We’ll fill you in on the rest of our trip with some photos soon.

Nous allons à Paris pour un long week-end. Il devrait être amusant! Nous allons prendre beaucoup de photos pour vous montrer une fois que nous y revenir.

Goodbye