Dave's Journal, Sep 2018
Sept19: still decompressing from UK vacation. Not that it was stressful, but it drained a bunch of energy, plus some minor jet lag effects.
The United Kingdom is even less "united" than the United States!
In Ireland, all the signs are in Irish Gaelic with English shown below - a clear sign that English is NOT their first language. The people of the Republic of Ireland are fiercely independent of England.
The (many) UK newspapers are trashy tabloids (especially in London), dishing dirt. Very incendiary writing. Entertaining, but trashy.
The Brexit conflict may start a revolt, like the French revolution. Governments may topple, heads may roll.
The people are very nice and friendly. Lots of people from all over the world. Lots of Russian accents. Our desk guy in London was from Italy (Italiano vero).
The beer and wine are plentiful and diverse.
Public transit is 1000X better than anything we have here. Signs are weird until you lock into their mentality, then it's obvious. Train rails criss cross, and stations are shared by the different lines, so you can get to anywhere from anywhere easily.
Shoes apparently are a big fashion item - everyone seems to be wearing their own unique shoe styles.
We did not see much outside the cities, but what little we saw was beautiful country.
(1) Dublin is for young people who like to party and have relentless fun. (2) Edinburgh is more classic and laid back and cultural. (3) London is same as New York, Rome, Chicago, whatever.
Note that it is Edinburgh, not Edinburough. And you pronounce it "Edinburrrr".
Mentally, I am still over there.
Like previous vacations, the memories get better as they age.
I had 2 things to do this morning: (1) copy about 350 image files onto a memory stick and (2) see if the tech side of my brain still works.
Problem was that the specific files were scattered about a very large folder and I had to write a script to pick them out of the crowd and copy them away.
It's been about 12 years since I wrote an AWK script, so I dredged out my book and studied. As always, the task took one hour and one minute.
And, as usual, AWK was able to do this in one command line:
awk '{printf("cp %s /media/dave/LIVE/JPGimagefiles/%s\n" , $1, $1)}' JPGfilelist.txt >>filecopy.txt
That created a file of 350 commands that did the copying for me:
cp DSCF7014.JPG /media/dave/LIVE/JPGimagefiles/DSCF7014.JPG
cp DSCF7054.JPG /media/dave/LIVE/JPGimagefiles/DSCF7054.JPG
cp DSCF7055.JPG /media/dave/LIVE/JPGimagefiles/DSCF7055.JPG
cp DSCF7111.JPG /media/dave/LIVE/JPGimagefiles/DSCF7111.JPG
.......
Sometimes I miss doing techy stuff like this.
Had my 6-month cardio checkup (as long as I stay on meds, I need these like a hole in my head).
My numbers were great ( BP = 134 / 74 , resting pulse rate = 78).
Doctor K is a very good person to deal with. No BS. We talked about my EKG graph and I learned how subtle differences can tell the experts that "something is going on". He said that sometimes he actually takes out calipers to compare the frequencies of the pressure spikes. As an engineer, I felt good about that comment.
Anyway, I should probably not die from heart failure within the next 6 months (my next visit).
Dublin is the weirdest place. Been there twice now. First visit (2009) was the most miserable day of my life (though no fault of Dublin's). Then back again two weeks ago. Not the best 3 days of my life, and the city is not scenic; it has trainloads of history but still it's a working class city, that does NOT feel like you're on vacation, but it does feel like you belong there. A city of little places that kind of embrace you.
I'd go back again, to see more of it.
Chrissy & Mike are losing a 150 year old willow tree, and it's sad to see. A major chunk of it broke away today, and the rest is looking poorly.
My belly was having a very bad day, and going to a brewery for lunch was absurd (I drank tap water !!). It was a shaved head, T-shirt, beer belly, baseball cap, high-stool kind of place with six sports screens going on overhead - I fit right in.
Took a break at Rick's for a few short cornhole games. Deb and I sat it out - she under blankets, me in the car.
Then off to dinner - ate chicken sitting at the bar (no tables available). Everyone there knew everyone else - like in "Cheers", and I envied people of that nature who can discuss for hours whatever pops up on the overhead TV screen or their own plans to save the country from the other guys.
I popped more belly pills this day than ever before.
It wasn't my day, but on the bright side, I didn't die.
