PeeBlog » daily life

Photo Tours in Munich

paul — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 09:02:54 +0000

Yesterday I had the chance to pop on a personal tour of Munich, with a nice lad called Dave Douglas. Dave runs GuidedMunich.com, which offers photo-tours with a twist. With the decline in the price of DSLR cameras, more and more people now posses one. Dave aims to teach you how to use your camera, in the tourist setting of Munich. The idea is quite a unique one, because well you get photography tuition from an expert photographer, while being brought around Munich by someone who has some great insider knowledge of the city. It’s a nice mix, especially if you are visiting on a limited time schedule.

Pictures of Munich

Here are some of the images I took on the trip. Despite it being an overcast day, we still managed to work with the light that was there, and in some pictures used it to a good effect.

We went through all the different modes of my Canon, and we tested out some of the more advance things I tended to avoid in the past, such as Exposure compensation, and when to use shutter vs. aperture priority.

Dave climbing to get that picture

So if you are looking for interesting things to do in Munich, I would advise you to check the tour out.

Ballymaloe relish at the airport

paul — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:56:25 +0000

In Cork airport it’s easy to find Ballymaloe relish (and rashers, sausages and smoked salmon), as it’s all in the duty free shop. But when you use Dublin airport, things are a little bit more complicated because of the scale. Last week I was there, and I eventually found some hidden in a small shop called Wrights of Howth. It’s located in between the two security checking places, on the main concourse. If any of you love this stuff as much as I do, I’m sure this post will welcomed. !

My Ballymaloe

Here is a picture of my latest haul !

Flannerys Hotel Galway a review

paul — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:38:19 +0000

seeing as I posted this on Roomex about Flannerys Hotel Galway, Best Western, I might as well add it here. One other note, Best Western does price matching apparently on their official website, but it really wasn’t worth the hassle of going through them, when RoomEx was cheaper. You would have to pay the full price, and then request a refund explaining where you could have gotten a better price.

Review of Flannerys Hotel Galway

Keeping in mind it’s a 3 star hotel, I would say it was still below satisfactory. I was staying in one of the non renovated rooms, which really could have done with a sprucing up. The bathroom is from the 80′s or 70′s. The bed was comfortable, but the linen looks like it was past its best. In a hotel when the linen starts piling it should be thrown out.

Interestingly enough these guys give you a RTÉ Guide for your incredibly small TV. One positive is that there is free WiFi everywhere, not just in the lobby as advertised.

Breakfast is less than average. The buffet style is not really a buffet style, as someone puts together your Irish breakfast for you. I’m guessing this is a cost saving idea (rather than a safety issue). The fruit salad was no great shakes either, as it was mostly apple chopped up, no bananas, berries or anything else. Don’t attempt to drink the coffee, as it tasted either like it was instant coffee, or it had been standing in a metal pot for a 1/2 hour. A Nespresso machine, that costs about €0.30 per cup would go a LONG way. Thankfully on my 2nd morning I wasn’t even offered coffee, but sadly I missed out on the toast too. The selection of juices was nice (apple, orange, cranberry and pineapple), but they failed to offer water as a drink. The breads and few pastries weren’t tested.

Food at the restaurant wasn’t anything spectacular to report, and the attitude of one barman would lead you to think that you were putting him out when ordering drinks or meals. Prices for food were around the €12-€18 range, and simply not worth it for the level of service offered. I offered to pay my bill when ordering at the bar, but instead, I get interrupted while eating, and a bill is put on the table instead. I’m guessing the bar staff could do with a bit of re-training.

The verdict

Would I go back ? No, probably not. The price to service is certainly not something I was entirely happy with.

Outdoor swimming pool : Schyrenbad in Munich

paul — Tue, 11 May 2010 14:13:09 +0000

So the summer is finally here, and in Munich a great things happen. Biergardens open, people are on their bikes, but best of all the summer outdoor swimming pools (Freibad) open. These are generally open from May to September and are well worth a visit. Last Saturday I was dragged along by my Ironman friend, and we went to the Schyrenbad at 9am for a swim.

It’s located at Claude-Lorrain-Straße 24, 81543 München, and the nearest U-Bahn is the U1/U2 at Kolumbusplatz.

Above is a picture of the kids pool with a slide and below is the adults pool, with a lane market for the serious swimmers. The Schyrenbad is open daily from 9am-6pm, and on warm days it should be open until 8pm. I’m not 100% sure as to what constitutes a “warm day”. Entrance fee is €3.50 for adults. As far as I could see the pool is only slightly heated, so it’s not for the faint hearted.
It’s worth a visit on those hot summer days !

Maria Einsiedel

Another great outdoor pool is Sommerbad Maria Einsiedel which is located at Zentralländstraße 28, 81379 München. This is to the south of Munich near the Thalkirchen (Tierpark) U-bahn station on the U3 line. Maria Einsiedel has a stream running through it which you can jump into and will carry you through the park attached to it. The stream has been split off from the Isar, and is quite refreshing.

A healthier me

paul — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:22:36 +0000

So now I’m 30 and I think I need to start to get a little bit more healthy and to take a closer look at my old goals for loosing weight. Over the last 2 years my weight has bounced around a 10kg range, from 72kgs to 82kgs. And looking at some resources online for my weight, they state that I should be between 62kgs to 77kgs for my height. See below for a weight range calculation of what your ideal weight range is for your height. Now a 15kg spread is quite significant, so I am going to place myself in the upper third of the range and say that my goal is around 73kgs, right now I am 80kgs.

1 ) Detox

The first part of my plan to shed a few pounds is to start a fresh and clean up my diet a little. After 2 weekends of celebrating my 30th and a friends stag party the following weekend, I probably have consumed the best part of my own weight in beer last month ! So coffee and alcohol have been taboo for the last week, and I feel much better for it. And the next step is watch what I am eating a little closer. This involves ::

eating a proper breakfast
eating a smaller lunch, and less carbs
having a proper dinner

Don’t worry, the beer part is temporary, it’s just so that I will be in the best shape for the Oktoberfest and other parties later this year.

2) Exercise

The next step is to start to be a little bit more active, and then goal is to get in at least 3 sessions of exercise per week. I’m joined a gym, but sadly I’ve never been, so that needs to be fixed first. Also I plan to do a little cycling, swimming, running and badminton.

3) Rinse & Repeat

One of the hardest things when loosing weight is to actually stick with it. Hopefully posting things up here will help me to shame myself into sticking with things.

Ideal Weight Range Chart

Height		Men		Women
Feet & Inches	Metres	Kg	lbs	Kg	lbs
4′ 7″	1.40	…	…	40 – 53	88 – 116
4′ 9″	1.45	…	…	42 – 54	92 – 119
4′ 11″	1.50	…	…	43 – 55	94 – 121
4′ 11½”	1.52	…	…	44 – 56	97 – 123
5′ ½”	1.54	…	…	44 – 57	97 – 125
5′ 1″	1.56	…	…	45 – 58	99 – 128
5′ 2″	1.58	51 – 64	112 – 141	46 – 59	101 – 130
5′ 2½”	1.60	52 – 65	114 – 143	48 – 61	105 – 134
5′ 3½”	1.62	53 – 66	116 – 145	49 – 62	108 – 136
5′ 4½”	1.64	54 – 67	119 – 147	50 – 64	110 – 141
5′ 5″	1.66	55 – 69	121 – 152	51 – 65	112 – 143
5′ 6″	1.68	56 – 71	123 – 156	52 – 66	114 – 145
5′ 6½”	1.70	58 – 73	127 – 161	53 – 67	117 – 147
5′ 7½”	1.72	59 – 74	130 – 163	55 – 69	121 – 152
5′ 8½”	1.74	60 – 75	132 – 165	56 – 70	123 – 154
5′ 9″	1.76	62 – 77	136 – 169	58 – 72	128 – 158
5′ 10″	1.78	64 – 79	141 – 174	59 – 74	130 – 163
5′ 10½”	1.80	65 – 80	143 – 176	…	…
5′ 11½”	1.82	66 – 82	145 – 180	…	…
6′ 0″	1.84	67 – 84	147 – 185	…	…
6′ 1″	1.86	69 – 86	152 – 189	…	…
6′ 2″	1.88	71 – 88	156 – 194	…	…
6′ 2½”	1.90	73 – 90	161 – 198	…	…
6′ 3½”	1.92	75 – 93	165 – 205	…	…

Some pictures from Fashings 2010

paul — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:09:39 +0000

During the week I received my new toy, the latest pride and joy, a fancy Canon lens (EF 70-300mm 1:4,0-5,6 IS USM). Not wanting to miss an opportunity to take some interesting pictures as Tuesday was Fashings (the German version of Carnival), I took my kit into the city to put it through its paces. Here are some of of my favourite snaps from the day.

In Germany (Munich & Cologne in particular) they tend to go a little mad in the streets with lots of crazy costumes and a bit of prosecco and beer thrown in.

Profits.ie – fail

paul — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:44:46 +0000

We all hate spam, it wastes time both the sender and the receiver, hurts businesses, mine in the respect that I have to again waste time, and yours, because I know I will never, ever, ever work with you. And you know what’s worse than the fact that I will never work with you ? It’s the fact that I will tell everyone I know what a usesless shower of crap your company is as they have to resort to stupid / illegal marketing tactics to get their word out.

So without further ado here is the email I and a few others received today from Profits.ie (sorry, no link love either).

Good Morning,

We have had phenomenal interest in the Sales & Marketing Course we have been running for the last few weeks. So much so, that we are AGAIN running it this Friday 19th (Between 9am and 1pm)

In the Wicklow Enterprise Park training room in Wicklow Town.

Before sending this email we have already 5 confirmed companies on the course. We have an engineering, retail and accountants already signed up

So I have 5 seats left. That’s all and they will go quick. Due to time constraints this may be the last time we run this. We normally only run this for our own clients.

Please let me know ASAP if you are interested in coming. It’s a hand’s on course in how to do cost effective (LOW COST) direct marketing that gets results.

A taste of what you will learn

· Why direct marketing is the cheapest advertising & gets far better results

·

· Proven Sales letter techniques and tips

· List formation and filtering

· Database creation techniques

· Direct mail techniques that work

· Applying a systematic approach to your marketing

These are just a few of the things you’ll learn. This is a course on LOW COST sales & marketing for small business.

If you want to know more give me a call.

The last 5 seats will be allocated on a first come first serve basis.

CALL NOW to confirm your place

Regards

Charlie Melia

Sales Director

Profits.ie

Unit 17c, Wicklow Enterprise Centre

The Murrough,

Wicklow Town

Phone:- +353 (0)404 66433

Mobile:- +353 (0)86 387 1767

Lo-Cost CRM and Sales Automation

The formatting is all theirs, including the red text. And as for Direct mail techniques that work, I think you’ve missed the boat, the pier and the whole damn harbour ! This is now how you do business Charlie !

Register 365 – fail

paul — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:12:54 +0000

Today I got a email from Register365, saying that for security reason they are disabling the online web folder manager. The sneakily make it sound like they are just disabling it until it’s fixed. But in reading this it also sounds strange that they don’t disable it straight away if it is such a threat. Here is the email I just got :

Dear paul savage,

Thank you for choosing Register365 as your hosting provider of choice.

IMPORTANT SERVICE NOTICE

At Register365 we take the security of our customers’ hosting services
very seriously and as such we would like to inform you that our
engineers have discovered a potential security flaw in the WebShell file
manager. In order to preempt any risk of a security breach that may
affect our customers’ websites the WebShell feature will be turned off
as of Midday on Tuesday 9th February 2010 .

Please note this is a precautionary measure and FTP will continue to
work as normal and your websites should not be affected in any way by
this action.

If you need any support on how to use FTP clients to upload files to
your site please refer to our knowledge base articles located at

http://www.register365.com/knowledge/view_folder.php5?section_id=312

At Register365 we strive to provide the best quality of service and
infrastructure to all our customers and as you may already know, we have
been working hard to deploy a new shared hosting cluster based on state
of the art technology and delivering the most stable and secure hosting
environment on the Irish market. If you would like to find out more
about the new hosting cluster available with Register365 and how you
could migrate to the new platform for FREE, please contact
support@register365.com.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact our
support teams through the usual channels.

Kind regards

Namesco Ireland Limited (trading as Register365)

To that I submitted a support case as the service email came from “noreply@register365.com” .

You are disabling it indefinitely ? or just until you can patch the service ?
This is unclear in the email I got from you.

and to that I got the updated report that they are not fixing it, with some extra padding about saying it’s too difficult.

Good afternoon Paul,

Thank you for your email.

It’s being disabled indefinitely I’m afraid as it would be too prohibitive to have a patch developed, tested and deployed at this late stage in our H-Sphere platform’s life cycle.

We haven’t taken this decision lightly but the issue that has been identified could potentially be quite serious so urgent pre-emptive action was needed. Disabling the webshell feature for the foreseeable future seemed the most expeditious and safest solution.

We apologise again for any inconvenience caused.
Kind Regards,

Nathan P.
Support Team
Namesco Ireland Limited

An unconvinced customer

Somehow I am not convinced here, if it’s a security issue why not disable straight away, and why no provide an alternative ? It really doesn’t sound like any level of customer support or attention to security. If it’s a security hole, disable straight away. You are now suddenly not providing a method for people to edit their files outside FTP’ing them, this for many people is not an option because of company firewalls. All in all it seems like Namesco Ireland Limited / Register365 couldn’t give a toss about their customers.

Cork Flooding

paul — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:43:28 +0000

Here are some pictures of the recent Cork Flooding, taken on November 20th 2009. These pictures are taken from Jurys Hotel on the Western Road in Cork. You can see that river Lee has burst from both sides and joined in the middle.

The first view is a view down Western Road towards Washington St. You see that there are cars that have water almost up to the widows !

Here is the view of the bridge at Jurys Hotel, and looking out towards the County Hall. UCC was also closed for the day due to flooding in some of their buildings. Here are some pictures on flickr of the UCC Flooding.

The view across to Dyke Parade, which is also flooded.

It will be interesting to see what dirty will be left from the flooding, which will also be smelly mess in a few days.
P.S. I’m not too sure who took these photos as they were forwarded on to me, if they are yours please let me know in the comments.

Map of Cork

Here is a map of where the pictures were taken from (for your reference)

View Larger Map

Using a Moka Express

paul — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:13:30 +0000

Here is a quick guide as how you can make a great cup of coffee with an Italian Moka. Originally these wonders were first made in 1933 by Alfonso Bialetti, under the name “Moka Express“. Our one below isn’t from the famous manufacturer, but the design is similar. Sometimes Moka’s are incorrectly spelt as Mocha, but that more refers to a mixture of coffee with chocolate. Here is our Moka Express.

For good coffee, you need good beans. We are using Lavazza beans, namely their espresso blend. This is a mixture of 30% of Robusta beans and 70% Arabica beans. Lavazza is apparently Italy’s favourite coffee blend.

The best grinders are canonical grinders, as they don’t heat up the ground coffee unnecessarily. Sadly our grinder isn’t, but it gets the job done.

The Moka Express has 3 parts, consisting of a boiler, which is a holder for the water, a metal filter for holding the ground coffee and an upper part used for holding the coffee once it is brewed.

When you are grinding your beans, make sure it is almost ground to a powdery consistency. This will allow you to pack more coffee into the metal filter. This coffee below needs to be more finely ground.

Coffee that is ready for the Moka.

Here is the metal filter filled up with coffee. It is important to fill it up to the top, and to also compress the coffee down. Compressing the coffee into the filter will ensure that the steam from the boiler will pass through the coffee at a high pressure.

Place your Moka on the stove on a full heat. This will cause the water in your boiler to boil as quick as possible.

Generally you should keep the lid down to avoid the coffee flying into your face and boiling you. But here is what it looks like.

The coffee will continue to bubble up and fill the upper part.

And all that is left to do is to enjoy your espresso, or add a bit of water for a weaker, but still tasty cup of coffee.

Alternatives to a Moka Express

And for those of you who are too lazy to use a Moka, and want to use something a little easier to use, but still want a good cup of coffee, I would suggest a nespresso machine. Nespresso coffee comes in little small pods (see below) which contain ground coffee sealed for freshness. Pop these little capsules in the machine, and out comes a rather nice, aromatic coffee.

The variety of blends also you to give your guests a nice cup of coffee depending on their tastes and preferences. Nespresso also offer decaffeinated capsules, these are the red ones normally. Nespresso rates their capsules on a scale from 1-10 for strength, these are listed on the side of the boxes, with 10 being the strongest.

So what’s your favourite way of making coffee ?