Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Keith Lawrence's LiveJournal:

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Monday, November 30th, 2009
11:29 pm	NaNoWriMo ...so. Having decided not to go for NaNoWriMo last year (due to all the other things I had to do during November, such as finding somewhere to live in a foreign country), I wasn't too sure until the week before whether I was going to do it this year. But, as fides pointed out, if ever there was a year to do it, this is it. It ends in half an hour, but I am not writing anything more. Having hit the target 50,000 words in the first week, I've since gone on to hit 125,000 - that is to say, 2.5 Nanos. The story isn't finished yet, but tomorrow I'm going to take a break for a day. Current Mood: accomplished (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
6:24 pm	Irish Times! When I got up to the Cruagh Wood car park this morning, Shay (the chair) asked me if I'd seen the Irish Times this morning. The reporter who'd come to see the path-building a month ago had her story on page 6 of the weekend review supplement, and the picture included me lugging a rock. I spent the morning in slightly less brute-force work than the past two weeks - repairing some bits of the path that had come loose (or possibly been vandalised). The big rocks at each side of the path need to lock together well to prevent the sand from being washed out, and there were a few places where rocks had come loose or weren't ideally placed, so I helped with finding better fits and remaking the sides of the paths. Fewer wheelbarrows again, though, so in the afternoon I carried rocks up and down the path. We're almost at the bend before the style will go in - I'll miss the next session, perhaps in a month when I go again, I'll be there for the finish! The joys of a mountain of work - The Irish Times (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
5:43 pm	Making more path Managed to cycle further up the mountain this morning, but still quite a lot of walking. Fortunately, unlike a fortnight ago, there were seven barrows and only one of them went wrong (right at the end, puncture). One of them wasn't particularly good (too narrow to get a good hold on), but it was still better than nothing, so there wasn't nearly as much solo rock-carrying today. A good thing too, since the rocks in the new load were considerably bigger (one was so big, indeed, that it took three people to shepherd the wheelbarrow down the path). I don't know how long the path was by the end, but I wouldn't be surprised if we doubled the previous length - quite apart from the wheelbarrows, the slope of the hill meant that a good length of the path only needed big rocks on one side. Pictures from last time: Loading a barrow (before anyone tells me to lift with my legs - I was pulling down the higher rocks, not lifting at the point the shot was taken) The path itself (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 12th, 2009
10:35 am	Working on a chain-gang So something new for Mountain Meithail yesterday: building a path which will eventually become part of the Dublin way. Another long cycle/walk up to Cruagh Forest car-park, then thankfully a slightly shorter stroll to the site than the last two times. The path has basically 4 components: Big rocks, little rocks, grit, and a groundsheet. Big rocks go on the outside to constrain the path, then the groundsheet goes down, little rocks go on top of the groundsheet and finally grit fills it in to make a nice smoothish path. Apparently when it rains and people walk on it the grit will pack down and solidify into a sort of pseudo-concrete type of thing (not as hard, but nicer to look at). There were 5 barrows between roughly 20 of us, and two of them failed almost immediately (either the bolts hold the wheels on sheared off, or they stripped their threads), which meant that the little rocks and grit - which couldn't be carried by hand - got the barrow treatment while about 8 or 9 of us spent the whole day carrying big rocks from the pile by the road down to the end of the path. The astute observe will realise that as the path grew, the distance we had to carry the rocks got longer and longer - and in fact the path grew at an amazing rate. In five hours of work we took the path from nothing to 87 meters long. Eventually the path will be 370 meters long, looping round to meet a road at the other end and including at least one (possibly two) stiles. At some point (I assume) we'll switch from carrying the rocks from this end out to carrying them from the other end back - but probably not at the halfway point, since at least in this direction we're carrying them downhill. This morning, of course, I woke up with an exercise hangover - my arms have the strength of a newborn kitten, and my leg muscles ache like anything. I am grateful it's Sunday. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
9:29 am	Various facts about Ireland 1) On Balinteer Road there is a high-voltage warning sign which reads "DEATH RESTS ABOVE". 2) This is what our corner-shop considers a meal: (I like the fact that the ready meal is considered unimportant for illustration purposes. "Just wine and ice-cream, that's all you need"). (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
11:35 am	Not so hot... This morning the Wii Fit board optimistically told me not to fall asleep while sunbathing. While this is undoubtedly good advice (I fell asleep in the sun once when I was little, and got really severe sunburn), it's not very likely in Dublin at the moment. Unlike the UK, the only way you could be harmed here is if you fell asleep with your mouth open and drowned. We woke last night to an inordinately loud clap of thunder which set off car alarms and so befuddled us that my dream was completely obliterated - I knew I'd been having one, but couldn't remember any details immediately afterwards - and Faith said that the world seemed "like a cartoon" for a few seconds after she woke up. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
9:35 pm	Round Ireland without a mini-bar (part two) The coach trip from Cork to Galway lasts exactly three hours and fifteen minutes - we departed exactly on time at 12:00, and arrived in Galway bus station at 15:15 precisely. Good work, Citylink coaches! fides had stayed in the Galway Jury's Inn on a previous trip, so knew where we were going, and in about 15 minutes we got there. We checked in, and discovered that unlike Cork (where our double room was smaller than F's colleague's single room), we had a pretty good room. For one thing, it had the best view in the whole hotel, a floor-to-ceiling bay window right about the word "Jury" over the main entrance. Our view was the quayside by Spanish Arch, and if you want to see some amazing inaccuracy I recommend you look up Galway on Google Maps and switch between the satellite and map views. The downside to this fantastic room is that where we could see out, everyone else could see in - and there were a lot more everyone elses than there were in Cork. Unusually for the Irish cities I've been to so far, Galway actually seems not to be ashamed of the sea. They have beaches you can get to, and the whole south side of the city is full of roads that run along quaysides. Parks extend out pretty much to the shoreline, and there are a few long causeways and piers that seem to be open to the public. As a marine-friendly city on the atlantic side, they'd been picked as a stopping point for the Volvo ocean race, who'd been in town for almost two weeks by the time we got there. Most of the people at the conference Faith was attending had been there before or lived in Galway - none of them had ever seen it so busy, apparently. The night we got there we met up for dinner with the other conference attendees. It was a fairly european conference, as it turned out - very few people only spoke English (of which I was one, together with F and her colleague, although F did gamely introduce herself in French to the one French-only speaker). There was a lot of French flying about, also some Italian, and the French-only guy's wife had accompanied him and she turned out to be German. The real-real downside to the room showed up later than night when we got back - being over a busy area in the middle of a festival does not make for a quite night. The Garda seemed to have suspended the no-outdoor-drinking rule in a rare display of non-kill-joy-ery, and the noise didn't really quieten down until 2 or 3. Luckily the bed was much better than in Cork, so we did at least manage to stay asleep once we got to sleep - and woke up with our alarm call rather than two hours before it, amazingly! Friday! Faith got an early lift to Galway University, while I strolled down to the main attraction as far as I was concerned: The Atlantaquaria! Not a bad place, all things considered - not the best aquarium I've been to, but not the worst. They had a very active Lesser Octopus (or Kliener Tentinfisch, as I learned the german name for it is) - not hiding, but either playing in the stream of water from the water inflow or trying to escape. They also had baby cuttlefish - which I would dearly, dearly loved to have seen, but unfortunately there is basically no way to see a small creature which is sand-coloured and likes to bury itself in sand if it doesn't want you to. (Octopus aside: Bored octopus learns to black out an electrical supply) After a couple of hours the aquarium was all tapped out of things to see, so I wandered back along the coast to the hotel. Swallows were flying up the piles of rocks that separated South Park from the sea, then along for a few meters, then back down. It reminded me of nothing more than skaters popping up at the top of a half-pipe. Galway is not particularly unusual in terms of bird life, but it is oddly blessed with ordinary birds that you don't usually see together. Within about 100 meters of the hotel you could see fresh water birds (herons, coots, swans, mallards), town birds (pigeons, starlings, hooded crows - although I've never actually seen them before), country birds (swallows), and coastal birds (cormorants, herring gulls, and chocolate-headed gulls). It was slightly surreal, like a really compressed illustration in a nature book. In the afternoon I strolled around town for a couple of hours trying to find something to eat (it's not that there wasn't anywhere, I was just didn't really fancy a trendy restaurant full of boating enthusiasts, which was what most of the choices amounted to), before retiring to the hotel for a nap. After an hour or so F unexpectedly turned up, having discovered that the conference people weren't coming back to the hotel but were going straight to the restaurant - she'd tried to phone me but her phone died, and mine had died anyway, so she rather heroically decided to skip out of the last talk and leg it back to the hotel in the hope that she'd find me. We got back to the university in time to get a lift out along the coast to a seafood restaurant where we ate nice bread and drank nice wine and then had a good meal. Our final day in Galway, Saturday, was an outing organised by the University to which I was also kindly invited. Meeting up in the lobby we took a pack of cars out to Cong Ashford Castle, the once home of the Guinness family, now a very fancy hotel. The castle is on the banks of Lough Corrib, the biggest lake in the republic, on which we were to take a boat trip. The boat was kind of medium-sized, not a gigantic tour boat, but fairly nimble. We went out across the lake, which is absolutely full of islands: 365, apparently ("One for every day of the year - and I guess a magic one which appears on leap years", said Sheila, another of the attendees). The island we made for was Inchagoil (from the Irish for "Island of the Foreigner" - the foreigner in this case being St. Patrick). Despite the slightly choppy weather we landed and went ashore to see the two stone chapels, and the Stone of Luguaedon - supposed to be the second oldest Christian inscription in europe. Our tour was cut a little short by the captain calling us back to the boat, the weather getting too bad to stay. It was certainly different from the week of boiling sun we'd had - the wind so strong as we came back across the lake that you couldn't face into it with your eyes open, and so loud that you could stand 4 feet from the speaker blaring Irish maritime music and hear nothing. Then back to land, where it turned out that the "light lunch" or "buffet" was in fact a full sit-down meal in the hotel's extremely fancy dining room. The food was nice, although slightly ghetto-chic in the way things are now - of the main options, once was fancy fish and chips, and one was fancy cheeseburger (I had this). Surprisingly cheap! We also had never-ending wine glasses, in the sense that the senior staff member from Galway just chose a white wine and then bottles of it just kept coming. Deadly! I have no idea how much I drank, but over the period of the dinner it wasn't enough to make me make a tit of myself, so that was fine. Finally back to the hotel, and (as it turned out), someone from Maynooth was at the conference and was driving back to Dublin, so rather than get the train followed by a 40 minute walk to the LUAS stop F and I accepted her offer of a lift. Home! (PS: The road signs to Cong have the Irish first, then the English. So they actually say Conga Cong, which I'm sorry to say made me think of Mario Kart for a good 10 minutes). (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 8th, 2009
5:24 pm	Compelling Spam Subject... LOOK HERE OR GET AIDS ..uh, if you say so! (Comment on this)
10:08 am	Round Ireland without a mini-bar (part one) Since I haven't seen much of Ireland except for Dublin yet, I took up fides offer to follow her on her work-related trips last week. After seeing clarehooper and alisdairo onto their coach to the airport, we trecked across Dublin to the station just in time to get the 16:00 train to Cork. Whoever built the Dublin-Cork railway did a pretty good job of hiding it in a ditch for most of the way, so the view wasn't particularly exciting, but it was at least clean, relatively empty, and punctual, so it wasn't too bad. Our hotel in Cork was near the university, but the other side of the city from Kent station. Of course, the other side of the city in Cork is only a thirty minute walk, so it wasn't much of a hardship. Cork looks pretty much like Dublin, except empty. The river Lee cuts through the center of the town and makes it very open, so it's fairly easy to navigate back to a given road - just go from wherever you are to the river, then walk along until you find something that looks right. Like Dublin, most of the shops on the main streets are what you'd expect to see anywhere in Britain (possibly anywhere in Europe now), but there is a maze of little pedestrianised alleys south of the river that contain more interesting shops. On the Tuesday (our first full day there), I rather ambitiously tried to see if I could walk to Little Island or Fota. I didn't make it, although not for lack of trying. Sadly, the road out of town has a curb alongside the dual carriageway, but it just ends at a big roundabout that leads onto the motorway - no alternative road that I could see on my tourist map, so unless there are some other hidden ways it's cut off to walkers. In retrospect I should maybe have stopped the backpacked-up guy coming the other way - a bill poster I talked to told me that he'd spoken to him and the guy had walked there from Dun Laoghaire (it had taken him 33 days). So I took the road north and walked up the Glanmire road to Riverstown. For the first couple of kilometers the road goes along a nice river which was rather confusingly flowing the wrong way (tidal, I guess). It was mud flats part of the way up, and I was nerdy-happy that I'd managed to identify one of the wading birds as an egret (confirmed by a sign further up the river). There was also a rather cool roadside shrine/grotto thing - I didn't really spot it when I came to Dublin as a visitor, but since I've been living in Ireland I've definitely noticed a lot more religious business by the roadsides, in traffic islands, and so forth. Around lunchtime I started to get slightly walked-out, so I turned round and headed back to the hotel, after what was essentially just a 20 kilometer wander, then played Patapon 2 until fides got back from her day at University College Cork. We had a little while to get ready, then dinner with F's colleague and one of the people who'd helped organise their days at the uni. The next day (on the suggestion of their university contact) I spent the morning looking around the UCC campus, which is pretty nice. It's not too crowded, and they seem to have done a good job of separating the buildings so that old and new ones don't clash too much. I was supposed to have a look in the Hofnan Chapel, which according to F has some pretty amazing tiling inside - but when I popped my head inside it looked as if there were still a few people praying and so forth. I'm no great respecter of religion, but I do have a great sense of being out of place, and I think that if people build a special building to go off and do their religion quietly it's a bit gauche to barge in on them. There was also an exhibition at the on-campus gallery: "Grin and Bear It: Cruel humour in art and life" which I had a stroll around. It was an interesting mix - mainly of modern art and old editorial cartoons. A lot of it, of course, wasn't the remotest bit funny, just cruel - and of course, modern art is a bit hit-and-miss. I'm never quite sure whether I think it's better or worse for art appreciation to be grounded in the technical ability of the artist as appreciation for traditional art seems to be, but I get more sure of it when I'm looking at modern art. There was also, interestingly, what looked for all the world like a fan-vid about Superman masquerading as high art - just clips from Superman 1, 2, and 3 over 5 for Fighting's "It's not easy". I had more of a wander around Cork in the afternoon, including hunting down the English Market, which is a covered market of the sort that you don't see much in England any more (well, not in the places I used to go). Quite a good place to buy meat if you lived locally, not so great for buying food if you're in a hotel room and the only way to heat things up would be to empty out the kettle and place the meat directly on the heating element. I also noticed that lots of the adverts and the political posters were very tailored to Cork jingoism: "Real broadband, Real cheap, Real capital" for Meteor's roaming broadband service, for instance, or "A Real voice for the Real Capital". (For those who don't know this pointless piece of local politics: Corkites believe that they should be the real capital of the Republic). That evening we ate at Zanzibar, a little restaurant hidden on the top floor of a building in one of the little alleys. It was pretty good, the food being not only cheap and good quality but also plentiful (the starters were the size of main courses, and the main courses were so big that none of us could finish them). The next day fides and her colleague Shawn zoomed off to a quick meeting at the university, then came back at 10:30 to check out and zoom off to another quick meeting on the north side of the city. I wandered around town for an hour and met them at the quay to catch our coach to Galway. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
8:44 am	Bridge to nowhere So yesterday I went out to do some volunteer work with Mountain Meithail, a volunteer organisation that does path repair and so forth in Ireland's mountain parks. They work once a fortnight on various projects - yesterday's was building a bog bridge (or boardwalk) in the Cruagh Forest. Now, this is in cycling distance of our flat - just. It's only 9k away, but it's all uphill. We met at 10:30, so my plan was to leave at 8:30, which would give me an hour and a half to get there and at least half an hour's rest. If that seems a long time to cycle 9k, I would suggest you try it. (In fact it only took me an hour in the end, but I sped up a bit since the time I tried it to see if it was doable). What I hadn't realised was that that wasn't the build point - so after I'd rested I had another 20 minutes walk up what the organiser described as "a gentle gradient" - inaccurately, in my humble opinion. Everyone else drove up, but as I'd started a bit early I was there in plenty of time, just knackered when I'd intended to be fresh as a daisy. The bog bridge is made of railway sleeper-sized lengths of wood - 2 pieces side by side form the deck, and between each set of sleepers another sleeper crossways supports the bridge. So there were three work-groups. One group of 2 or 3 people at the top was extending the bridge. The next, about 8 in total, was split up into pairs to carry the sleepers from the pallets at the bottom to the working edge. Everyone else (me included) was on staple duty - hammering staples into the deck of the sleepers in order to provide a grip. I managed about four and a half sections during the day, with one brief break to help out with carrying crew (with typical luck I got what the other half of my pair described as "the heaviest log yet"). The bridge is to extend about 400 meters up the side of a hill, so carrying the log just half that way (there was one group of lifters carrying from the bottom half-way, and another from half-way to the top) was pretty harsh. I just did one, but the other guy in my pair had been doing it all day. I have no idea why his arms hadn't been pulled out of their sockets. It was interesting, though, and good to get out and do something practical. The view from the top was fantastic, I will definitely have to go back and just walk up at some point in the future. The cycle back was awesome, too. It may be uphill all the way there, but it's downhill all the way back... (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
9:45 am	Some of my old work on the BBC website Little feature about NPL (my previous employers) on the BBC website: Scroll down until you see a car full of balls. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
11:06 am	Velociraptor Awareness Day Remember, Velociraptors are quite small. Don't let them jump up at you and you'll probably be fine. Utahraptors, on the other hand, are freaking enormous. Have a contingency plan ready - I recommend getting to the first floor of a building (that's the second floor for countries which don't use C-style zero-indexing for their buildings), taking a few doors off their hinges and barricading the stairwell. Current Mood: Aware (of velociraptors) (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
10:13 am	Pictures from Dublin ...so this is where they live! Either that or it's an animalised version of Silent Hill, with, you know, Pyramid Head as an otter or something. In England, people worry about cyclists on the pavement. In Ireland apparently they are most dangerous when engaged in arts and crafts. I want to sign up for a spinning jenny class at my local gym. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
1:42 pm	Mount Anville Park Took a quick walk to stretch my legs in the 40 minutes I had spare at lunchtime (watching a workshop fides is running). In 20 minutes out and back from the flat you can get to Mount Anville Park, almost to Booterstown. You can see the sea! Plus, a lovely view over most of the east side of Dublin. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
4:52 pm	An Email From Work Amey are currently planning invasive works to inspect the spaces above the ceiling tiles in labs, corridors and offices to identify what services are running where. This work is needed to a) update and verify the as built building drawings. b) Identify the access needed areas for servicing plant equipment in the ceiling voids c) Identify location of hot and cold water pipework and review the state of cladding on pipework with a view to replacing cladding to reduce condensation drips onto ceiling tiles. d) Identify badly placed plant equipment with a view to moving at a later date. ... E) FLUSH OUT COLONIES OF CEILING CATS. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 9th, 2009
1:22 pm	Busy Lunchtime Paid money into the bank Ate Sent birthday card to my mother Ordered router for Dublin Drew a continuous-line portrait of one of my colleagues Drew a charcoal image of a pine-cone ...of course, in the same time clarehooper probably wrote a paper, swam 100 lengths, and took out three patents. Current Mood: cheerful (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 30th, 2009
10:48 am	The end of a ... decade Just handed my notice in. I've been working at NPL for almost eleven years, over half of my working life, so on the one hand it's probably a good time for a change anyway, but on the other hand lots of my friends are there. Ho-hum. Current Mood: resigned (ha ha) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
1:28 pm	The inauguration - a slightly late observation. Cheney is in a wheelchair now? Could we band together and buy him a Chinchilla cat and have done with it? (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 12th, 2009
10:41 am	Coooold - actually, not all that cold. It snowed on Saturday, so I faffed about a bit and watched Battlestar Galactica while other people did the vital job of warming the roads up for me. Then I drove to Southampton via Staines, picking up Julie on the way - on the basis that I'd have someone to mutter at if there was a water pipe problem in the flat as well. Fortunately, not! Unfortunately, the guy upstairs had had one: the waste pipe from his kitchen had somehow managed to freeze solid, and when he had tried to do some washing that morning the washing machine's first lot of water had hit the blockage and backed up, flooding his kitchen (a little), and our bathroom (a little - it's directly under his kitchen). I would have been pissed off if I hadn't been fearing worse, but I was actually pretty pleased, since a) it wasn't as bad as the Nerdvana leak (which itself was pretty benign, all things considered), and b) I didn't have to do anything about it (Ken upstairs was fixing the fault himself, and Julie offered to sort out the bathroom floor while I packed things in the kitchen). Spent a lazy Sunday watching BSG and idling packing boxes full of books (I have a three-target system now, I'm splitting my books into a Donate pile, a Store pile, and a Dublin pile). Paul, who has been lending me his BSG discs (convenient, since I'd seen series 1, so he can watch one series while I watch another), seems to have been bitten badly by the weird way the series has been packaged in this country. He bought series 1-4 on a whim, then sat down to watch series 1 over a weekend only to be greeted by "previously, on battlestar galactica" - not realising that there was the mini-series before series 1. He dropped off series 3 and 4 with me on Friday, together with the film ("Razor") and an instruction that it came between the two series. It does (not chronologically, but in the order you're supposed to watch them). I can tell this, because the series 4 boxset he has actually includes it - and it's not *strictly* series 4, because it's only 10 episodes. In America they've had a break, and are just now starting to show the rest of series 4. I assume in Britain it'll be marketed as series 5. Could people not just make their mind up or something? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 9th, 2009
9:56 am	Still cold Went out at lunchtime yesterday to buy replacement parts for the cracked plumbing, and put it all in. Stupidly hard for what is in fact a pretty simple job, but there were all kinds of ridiculous gotchas - for instance, the new ball valve and the new ninety degree joint were only tightly fastened when they were pointing 180 degrees the wrong way. I couldn't tighten it any further, nor loosen it without it leaking. So I sanded a bit off the valve until I could both tighten and align the parts. Sadly, there was then a tiny drip leak from the joint. Grrr. I can probably fix that the lazy way, with a bit of plumber's mate. And I certainly don't have water gushing out all over the place when I turn on that part of the system. It was pretty grim work, though - cold, wet, nothing going quite right. I could do without that at the moment. Anyway - it's basically done, but there's a drip to deal with. For the moment I'm keeping the water in the kitchen/utility room turned off at night and when I'm out of the house. We'll see what it's like when the cold snap is over. (4 Comments |Comment on this)