Matt & Kat

Another year is nearly at an end. It’s been a good year for us (and a busy one) with plenty of highlights and very few lowlights!

We’ll be enjoying a quiet Christmas day this year, making phone calls back home, eating some good food and packing for our flight on the 26th when we’re off to Scotland. We’re taking a week to see the sights and enjoy the celebrations in Edinburgh on New Years Eve. It’s going to be cold, very very cold – or so we hear from everyone we’ve mentioned the trip to! We’re hoping for a few days of fine weather – especially for the fireworks on New Years and so Matt can get in a few good photo shoots with his new tripod and the digital SLR camera.

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On the way to our work Christmas party earlier in the week, I was discussing the state of public transport in Dublin with a colleague and he suggested I watch this video, made four years ago, that nicely summarises transport in Dublin.

I enjoyed it, hopefully you will too: http://www.youtube.com/v/4YmvevAvhyM

It’s now four years after that video was made, and I could only see one aspect of it that has improved in that time. The busses now accept a smart card so you don’t have to carry the exact change every day, except there are a limited number of smart card types available so you end up paying more than your usual fare if you want to use one for a short trip, and they are not rechargeable, so you have to buy a new one every week.

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I got back from San Francisco (or Mountain View just below San Francisco to be precise) last Thursday afternoon, just in time to take Kat out to dinner for our fourth wedding anniversary. It was a nice welcome home after almost four weeks away. During dinner we were discussing that in June next year it will be exactly 10 years since we started dating! How time flies when you are having fun. We are looking forward to many more enjoyable years to come.

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I’ve been in New York for work for the last two weeks as you should already know from Kat’s last post and happily she was able to join me for the second week. We had a great time visiting many of the typical tourist attractions together.

See her previous post for the details of the first two full days we had sightseeing. For the rest of the week, I worked all day while Kat worked mornings and acted like a tourist in the afternoons. That left the evenings free for us to pick off a few more sights. In order:

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I’ve had 2 great days in New York so far. My flight arrived late and amid torrential rain and turbulence on Saturday night. By the time I got through immigration I was very tired and very very glad to see Matt waiting for me! Interestingly, I had trouble at immigration because they couldn’t get their system to match my fingerprints to the results they already had on their system from my last transit through LAX?! While the border control staff were all very friendly it was still a bit unnerving to have to go to the back office and wait for them to scrutinise my passport! So apparently I have difficult fingerprints… Who knew.

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I had a great Birthday yesterday. It started with a phone call from New Zealand in the morning from Mum, Dad, Chris, Rachel, Andrew and Sarah, perfectly timed so that it didn’t get me out of bed and arrived just as I was about to leave the house for work. In the evening we had some friends around for a bit of a party, a few games and lots of delicious food that Kat cooked. White chocolate mud cake, chocolate brownie, ambrosia and ice cream. It’s a good thing birthdays only come once a year.

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Last weekend we took a trip to Belgium, staying in Brussels and visiting nearby Bruges. As with any weekend trip it flew by too quickly and left us very tired by Monday morning. But we did have a great time away and really enjoyed visiting Bruges, sampling the local fare and snapping photos around the city.

A cheap and nasty Ryan Air flight plus a 1 hour coach ride plus a short metro trip got us into Brussels at midnight on Friday. We were very pleased to step into Hotel Bloom and relax. The funky decor and gorgeous comfy room were the perfect beginning to our weekend. Would definitely recommend Bloom to anyone traveling to Brussels!

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After a week in sunny Malta we are both sporting a healthy glow – a slight improvement on the pale and pasty complexion we have been developing throughout the “Irish summer”. It was refreshing to take a week off and I feel quite rejuvenated after soaking in the sun for a week. It was also great to catch up with Mark and Gill. We met them for 1 week in Malta in the middle of their epic European adventure!  You can read more about their travels on their blog.

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Phew, we had an eleventh hour crisis tonight as we began packing for Malta. With the suitcases nearly full and all in order I went to get our passports from the file in our drawer. One passport was found – mine, one passport was missing – Matt’s.

We searched the drawer, we searched Matt’s desk, with increasing urgency we searched every inch of the apartment!!! The passport remained missing.

We searched under couches, in kitchen cupboards and behind shelves. Nothing. By this stage we were almost resigned to spending our planned holiday in a NZ embassy instead of Malta.

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This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).

It’s been a while since I last acquired new gadgets but I think I’ve made up for lost time with my last weeks purchases.

You may remember that I’ve had my eye on the Openmoko phones since early 2007, but in between shifting across the world and starting a new job I never got around to purchasing one of the first versions. The second version, the “Freerunner”, was released in June this year and I placed an order with Pulster, a local distributor, shortly after. The phones have been in hot demand, so I only received my phone last week, a wait of of almost 2 months, and it turned up missing one of the cables that was meant to come with it. Still some distribution kinks to be worked out.

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