superlate

Apparently I just enjoy doing my travel blog. It all seems so long ago now (especially the parts I’m still going over). But that’s ok because it’s nice to just sit here and think about the cool stuff Giffy and I got up to on our OE. We’re kind of thinking about another one, since one of my bosses was telling me that I should be considering going further a field for my training, but not seriously talking about it since that’d be a while away and we’ve got more interesting things to talk about at the moment.

Back to the travelling. So our next stop was what Giffy and I have used as our answer to that inevitable (and inedible) question, “where was your favourite place you visited?”. ( Vienna )

I'm supprised this became an issue.

"Superlate is blacked out: Stand up against "Guilt Upon Accusation" for New Zealand. http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html"

I note Stephen Fry is on there list of supporters :)

What can I say?
Bill Gates releases mosquitoes on crowd
Sometimes, nights are long. Not that I'm complaining. Pretty happy no dying children tonight.

May as well take advantage of it while it continues.

( Venice )

All in all, Venice was another great destination. On the down side of it, it was very expensive (even compared to Rome) and walking around the city you do get the feeling that anyone who actually lives there full time must be in the service/tourist industry. Not a lot of room for regular life peoples. With that said, the reason that the city is so touristy is that it's a beautiful, fascinating city so don't let the tourists put you off. Also, it may or may not be sinking, so you should go soon; just in case.

I've had a couple of busy nights so I lost my momentum a bit. No matter, back to the posting.

( Verona )

That wasn't so long this time - barely needed a cut. Getting through it slowly. Only Venice, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Trier, Paris, Leon, Bern, Zurich, Munich, Berlin, Lolland, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Belfast, Derry, Dublin, Cork, LA and SoCal to go.... *sigh*

Night at work continues not too bad *knock on wood or at least what ever this desk is made out of*. May as well just kick off again.

In the interests of this not taking me a million year or, more likely, this never getting finished, I'm going to try and be a bit quicker with my descriptions and recounting and generally be a bit briefer (which I'm so good at of course).

( Firenze )

So much for keeping it short

I'm on nights again for the first time in ages (if you don't count the all day and all night and all day again shifts in Ireland which I try not to think about) and LiveJournal is not blocked at work! So I figure I should try and take advantage of this time and try to get some more of my travel blog done. However, I've partially finished the next part of my travel blog at home and I don't have it here so instead I shall tell you all the tale of my own experience with loved ones going off to the hospital.

( terror and relief )

Anyway, finally back to the travel blog. I hope I still remember something...

So, on to the second day.

( Hats Theatre, The Esqualment of Lhask, American Gladiator Best Friends, Indigo City )

All in all, great experience again and perhaps one of my best Kapcons yet.

Once again, I wander away from my account of my travels to talk about something more recent. I plan to go back to my travel log (but last time it didn’t happen… oh well we’ll see how it goes). Instead, I bring you a brief account of my Kapcon Weekend.

( Syn, Re: Ducks, Long Lost Boys, LARP )

Maybe I’ll break this into 2 posts…

Next on our list of European must-sees was Roma. Rome’s an impressive place, crammed full of culture, religion and tourists. A healthy intolerance of other tourists is something to cultivate while you’re travelling. Lots of people make the age old choice for intolerance on the basis of race when deciding exactly which tourists one dislikes the most. A common theme is “oh those damn Americans”, which is followed closely by “urgh the Germans! Don’t get me started on the Germans”. For me it’s mostly, “Argh! I hate those guys who got here before me!”

( dance... Roma )Yeah, so, Rome was pretty cool.

Hmmm.. I'm not sure what I feel about the election situation. I had hoped that National would have slightly less percent and then we would have had a heavily Green reliant Labour government. I always feel conflicted about National led government because in reality, it benefits me but not the people in society I think need more help then me.

Ah well.

Moving my log along, we arrived in Napoli to more fine weather. Our time here was characterised by seeing really awesome old stuff and eating really good old stuff. The seeing came from Herculaneum and Pompeii – crazy just to walk around in the homes, shops, baths, temples and brothels (featuring pr0n) of the ancient Romans and really neat to see the frescos and mosaics largely preserved by the devastation of Vesuvius. I’m sure the … maybe irony? maybe just interesting phenomenon of having this incredibly destructive force preserving these places in a way nothing else could has been remarked upon/observed many times, but it wasn’t lost on me either. One of the things that struck me was the way the statues and frescos (especially frescos of still life) haven’t changed for a couple of millennia. In fact, there was a large period we’ve observed in museums/art galleries when things got considerably less sophisticated. I suppose I’d never had the reason it was called the Dark Ages so obviously illustrated to me. It was also nice to see some of the stuff I had studied in college classics right in front of me in their original form. The mosaic of Darius’ army being routed by Alexander the Great particularly stirred memories. We spent half a day at Erculano and a full day at Pompeii; both super awesome.

( eating old stuff etc... )

From Madrid we went to VaughanTown, an English language school for Spanish people with conversational level English. They come in the hopes of opening their ears to different accents/colloquialisms and for a total immersion week of English. The English speakers come for the promise of a free week in four star resort and a chance to meet a bunch of Spanish people. Days mostly consist of having 50 minute conversations with the Spaniards about anything and everything and going for walks around the resort or off to the national park (which was nearby) or nearby towns. ( Brief words on VaughanTown and the many words on Barcelona )

After all that, we flew of to Naples. Maybe one day I’ll get this up to date again with the country we’re actually in. In Prague now. It is good.

So, after our time walking in Spain, we took some time to relax in Madrid. We had a double room high above one of the main streets with a little balcony and we took our time relaxing in the sun which persisted for our time in Spain.

( Madrid )

So now that I’ve talked a bit about walking the Camnio, I want to tell you something about the history and legend of the Camino. We did a little bit of research about how much stuff we would need but basically just got to Sarria (our starting point) and started walking, knowing relatively little about the history of the Camino. It is probably one of the oldest pilgrimages in the Christian world and Santiago is considered by some (mostly the people who know about it/live there) to be the third most important religious city after Jerusalem and Rome.

( Read more... )

All of you computer people out there. Can anyone solve an issue between my wireless card and my computer (external because my computer is old).

If I leave the Wireless card plugged in to the computer an error message will flash up. I took a photo of it but I am unable to put it anywhere to show people - if you think it will help I will e-mail it to you.

It say "A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer
DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL"

It then goes on to say that I may have installed the hardware incorrectly, however this wireless card was working for 2 years up until yesterday (It had worked just the day before).

When I turn on the computer it says that it has recovered from a serious Error with the following details:

Error Signature
BCCode : 100000d1 BCP1 : 01EC334C BCP2 : 00000002 BCP3 : 00000000
BCP4 : 01EC334C OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 2_0 Product : 256_1

The following files will be included in this error report
C:\DOCUME~1\user\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER6135.dir00\Mini092908-07.dmp
C:\DOCUME~1\user\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER6135.dir00\sysdata.xml

Computer works completely normally if the card is not inserted. The error will occur after a variable length of time once the card is plugged in, sometimes straight away, sometimes after up to 2 minutes. Trying to plug the card into the computer if it is on or off or if it is within or outside range of a wireless network not seems to make no difference. Also using different slots on the computer does not change it. AVG, AdAware and simply running the windows check disk program (all with the card out to prevent the crashyness) have not helped.

Can anyone tell me a way I might fix this? Remembering that I cannot connect my computer to the internet but I do have internet access and a USB drive.

Worth a crack Nigel.

So, it’s well past time I felt I should blog again. I have been thinking about it and I might just have to blog what has happened to us recently instead of having to go back to earlier things. If I try to talk about everything, I think I shall write about nothing.

( Walking the Way of St James )

In an ideal world, I would have kept this more up to date and now I wouldn't feel like I have so much to catch up on. On reviewing my blog, I see that the last thing I really talked about was the first time we went to London. Since then, we've been in London two more times, tripped all around the Southwest of Ireland and are just about to complete our UK road trip, including such highlights as Edinburgh - Inverness - Loch Ness - Glencoe - Stirling - Kirby Lonsdale - Cambridge - Reading (and GenCon UK)- London - Baysingstoke (with Portsmouth, Stonehenge and Winchester) - Oxford - Bath. In that order.

We go to Bristol after this and maybe will have a day trip somewhere depending on what there is to do in Bristol. Then to Cork to sort out tax and luggage. Then to Spain (Santiago, Madrid, Barcelona) - Italy (Naples with Pompey and Herculean, Rome, Venice) - Vienna - Prague - Paris - Southern France - Switzerland - Germany - Denmark - Amsterdam... and that's about it. +/- Croatia/Greece/other places.

Not too much time to do all this. Back to NZ in December.

It is nice that we can just be on holiday for all this time. No more work for us.

Tired now. Cannot focus to write. Shall go and talk to our host here in Bath. She, like all of our hosts so far, is awesome.

The power of 400 babies. In a can. Turbopun



Real content sometime soon.

I haven't done one of these recently. So I present to you the all singing, all dancing, Patrick Wolf.