Made cooler by me – both by my presence in the shot (naturally) and by turning it Black & White. Why do some pictures just look so much nicer when you remove the color?
Anyway, here is the shot (click for larger) taken on the escalator in Dupont Metro as we left the recent blogger meetup in search of more alcohol.
Just for comparison, you can find the original here.
Technorati Tags: Dupont, DC, blogger meetup, Washington DC, pictures, Joe Logon, Black & White
February 24th 2007, the English national anthem played in Croke Park and the most significant game in the Irish rugby calendar was played. I honestly believe that a lot of Irish people would prefer to beat England than win the 6 Nations outright (assuming mutual exclusivity – both would be gravy). This year, with the venue and the historical significance that number probably increased to something approaching 100% of Irish people – even those that don’t care about rugby.
I’m not usually one to gloat but it was just so important to win – no one cared about getting up early to get good seats to watch in Fado’s, in fact we were early and the people that usually do the seat grabbing were beaten in by us. Anyone that knows Jen, Brian and myself would be suitably impressed.
And win they did – it was described by one person as the most impressive display of controlled rage he had ever seen. Ireland blew England out of the water – they had never conceded more than 40 points in the 6 Nations. At times in this game you thought 50 was a reasonable goal, though the final tally of 43 was beyond my wildest expectations at the start of the game.
This is the game that secures the recent team in Irish sporting folklore, assuming the Triple Crown last year was not enough – no one is going to forget this game. I even got a shot if when I realised we were actually going to win…
Shane Horgan is some sort of try scoring colossus, Ronan O’Gara didn’t miss a kick and BOD was his usual brilliant self. Paul O’Connell and David Wallace seemed to be all over the place and I honestly can’t remember anyone having a bad game. Not even the great Jonny Wilkinson could derail the fairy tale. Hopefully they can carry this form through and someone will do us a favour against the French so we can finally win the thing outright – ironically that could mean cheering for England when they play France…..
Though if they finish the season this strongly against Scotland and Italy (regardless of France winning) they will probably have to deal with insanely high expectations in the World Cup. Don’t get me wrong – if we played in Croke Park and every other team that came to the ground caused as much of a reaction I could see us winning it, and I can even see Ireland getting as far as the semi-final. I just can’t see them winning it, at least not in my head – I’ll be there hoping along with everyone else that this is our year 
The rest of the pictures are up on Flickr as always – the picture backlog seems to have been cleared up for now………and hopefully this helps explain why there were so many drunken Irishmen about on Saturday – it was not just a warm up for March 10th and 17th.
Technorati Tags: Rugby, Ireland, England, Pictures, Fados, 6 Nations, Washington DC
Joe has often posted about getting behind in his picture posting, but I have always been fairly good about getting pictures up quickly, at least since I upgraded to a Flickr Pro account. However, I am over a week late getting the latest rugby pictures up, and since I cleaned up my camera over the weekend to make space on the memory card I’ll have to wait until I get home to upload this weekend’s activities.
There is another DC Blogger meetup in RFD tomorrow, and since the last one was a bit of fun I plan on attending this one too, assuming I don’t catch the plague that seems to be going around at the moment or course. Perhaps I will increase the picture backlog even more once I get there.
Technorati Tags: Pictures, rugby, flickr pro, RFD, meetup, DC Blogs
Just picked up tickets for The Kooks at the 9.30 club on May 12th, which should be fun. We also have the Snow Patrol concert coming up in March in the Bender arena, another show I am looking forward to….
It’s been a while since I’ve been this active in terms of attending live shows – I think the Virgin festival last year was my first big show since Thievery Corporation the previous year. I don’t count the Glen Hansard show at Iota because I didn’t buy a ticket and I had no idea in advance that he was playing. Interestingly, Glen recently starred in a film called Once that won at the Sundance Film Festival for “The World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic“, so well done that man.
Technorati Tags: Concerts, The Kooks, Snow Patrol, DC, Washington DC, 9.30 Club, Glen Hansard, Once, Sundance Film Festival
It was quite a weekend, so much so in fact that I took Monday off to recover. We kicked off the festivities at David’s Martini party in Clarendon. Then there were a whole 6 hours or so of sleep before it was time to get up and head into Fadó’s in DC for the Ireland Vs Wales Six Nations match (pictures here) which Ireland won despite not playing terribly well.
The next match is against France next Sunday, again at 10 a.m. EST, so we will be there bright and early – hopefully without the killer hangover this time. The usual suspects showed up – with the Bradleys securing us prime seating. There were several familiar faces from previous years, including Gareth the mad Welshman (below) that you may remember from a previous post.
We finished off the weekend with a relaxing few drinks and some wonderful Fajitas in Martin and Erica’s place while watching Peyton Manning secure his legendary status (and posing stuffed toys in questionable positions). So, all in all an enjoyable weekend, and I am very glad I had this Monday booked off
Technorati Tags: Martinis, Rugby, Superbowl, Ireland, Fado’s, DC, Washington DC, Drinking, Party, Wales
Reed threw a birthday bash on Saturday in his place near Dupont. Since he is rarely in the country for more than a couple of weeks, this had to be fairly impromptu but there was still quite a good turnout. As usual, the pictures are up and are, of course also available on Flickr – Joe has yet to receive a new camera following the “accident” so he took a few of the shots and as a result I am actually in a few.
I managed to drink a different beer every round before switching to the appletinis that Jen and Reed cooked up. I’ve tried to list them here, but naturally my memory may be somewhat unreliable:
Now that I think of it though, I may have had 2 Heinekens. In any case, much fun was had and I got to meet Reed and Ryan’s Dad which was great, though I probably owe him an apology for yammering in his ear for so long – I was certainly a chatty drunk that night.
The Trader Joe’s beer was a surprise – I didn’t know they carried their own brand of beer. From what I remember it was certainly drinkable, though nothing to write home about. With Matt and Ruth coming into town soon, the appearance of Spaten seems timely (in case you missed the link above).
Another first of the night was meeting Maria-Helena – the first Honduran native I have had the pleasure to meet. So, all in all, a successful night and after a lot of sleep and some greasy food in the form of a Five Guys burger today I just about feel up to facing work tomorrow……
Technorati Tags: Dupont, Washington DC, party, pictures, birthday, beer
Drinking Liberally informs us that there is a march to end the war now scheduled for this weekend in DC. That’s the first I’ve heard of it. Now, I’m not particularly political and my education on the US political process and climate is almost entirely due to The West Wing, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Still, I’d expect to have heard something before now………
Hopefully it will be successful, though I won’t be attending myself. Being from a foreign country means this is not a “hot” issue for me. I still disagree with the Iraq invasion and with how the occupation has been handled since but I did not vote the government into power that is responsible for this, nor can I vote against them now or in the future. I have no family in the military and will not be passing on this legacy to my children. So, nothing personal to get worked up about and it ends up as essentially a disagreement in principle – i.e. not something to make me attend a march on Washington…..
Besides all that I’ll probably be sleeping through noon tomorrow after having been out drinking Monday through Wednesday this week and having a party lined up for Saturday night
Technorati Tags: Washington DC, Iraq war, protest, drinking, march on DC
The 24 Vs Heroes question can be put off until next week. Instead of trying to pick between two of my favourite shows, I will be out and about with some people over from the UK. As a happy coincidence a former colleague that left to join another company is back in the picture as that company recently purchased part of my current one and he’s in town to discuss the details of the sale – nice. When we worked for the same company there were some wild nights out, but this promises to be a tame affair with more meetings and a flight home in store for him tomorrow.
Speaking of wild nights……what started out as a quiet couple of drinks in Ri Ra ended up with Jen and I arriving home at 5 a.m. – I got too drunk to take pictures later on, but two of the stops on the tour can be seen in the pictures here or, as always, on Flickr. The picture below was taken in stop 2 – Galaxy Hut – and it’s a nice one of Jen and I with the poor Aussie we dragged along (or is that down?) with us:
Technorati Tags: Galaxy Hut, Pictures, 24, heroes, drinking
My first appearance on YouTube is thanks to the Captain. I have already had solicitations with regards to future work. At least I’ll have something to fall back on if things go badly in my current job….
Unfortunately embedding YouTube video in the blog appears to screw it up – after several attempts I found out that the auto-posting feature from YouTube seems to work but any change I make (categorization, the title etc.) screws everything up – even if the HTML code remains the same – bummer.
Technorati Tags: YouTube, video, hand in mouth
Last night I attended my first DCBlogs meetup in RFD in DC, thanks to an invite from Joe. Apparently I picked a good first meeting because the turnout was quite high – hopefully something that will continue. I met a quite a few interesting people and saw my first blog groupies, something I did not even know existed. Rather than cheating and looking at the members page on meetup I will try to recall people’s details from memory……
After that my memory gets pretty hazy, probably due to alcohol – the tipple du jour was Magic Hat #9 both at the meetup and back in Arlington at Ragtime. I do remember someone called Ross (can’t remember his last name or his blog), someone called Patrick (ditto) and Vanessa (who did not blog). In any case it was a bit of fun and certainly nowhere near as scary as the last online related event I went to many years ago in Dublin which was IRC related…
Besides that, and partially inspired by meeting so many bloggers that do this thing properly, I finally fixed my blog. For some time I have had to put a redirect in place to get WordPress to function correctly at the http://comerford.cc address, previously I had just used a symbolic link to achieve this and the effect was much cleaner. A 302 redirect actually sends you to the http://comerford.cc/wordpress address whereas the the symbolic link keeps you in the original root. Besides being annoying, this can also cause problems for search engines.
The redirection also breaks things like Technorati pings amongst others and so is basically a pain in the ass. However, it worked well enough for me to procrastinate, so I left it. Turns out that allowing symbolic links to PHP files is a security risk and so it was disabled by my hosting company – this was in a bulletin I received, but who reads those?
A quick lesson on the mod_rewrite Apache directive and I have now fixed the problem, and should probably have used that in the first place as it is more compatible with things like PHP includes and such – hooray for me!
Technorati Tags: dcblogs, meetup, Washington DC, RFD, apache, mod_rewrite, PHP, ragtime, blogs, technorati, 302, symbolic links
