Ireland day 1: Dublin (part 1)

So here I am now, in Dublin.
Flight was relatively relaxed, only few turbolences. I was a bit nervous before departure that I have forgotten something important so I would be taken off the plane in the last minutes, but everything went fine.
Isa recommended the three days ticket by DublinBus, the local public transport company, because I'll move to her tomorrow. I had some issues with the ticket's RFID chip, it was damaged so it could not be read. Luckily the bus from the airport(line 747) has its first stop at O'Connell Street, directly on the opposite side of Dublinbus headquarters and exchange was quite easily.
You have the possibility to get a "Freedom of Dublin" ticket for 24 € for adults and 13 or 14 euros for Students. With that ticket you can go on the dublinbus sightseeing and normal bus lines and drop off at any place you like. However, all desired places can also be reached by foot easily, so in my eyes you should think about it twice. As the ticket is valid for 3 days like mine (I paid 13.50 €  without the sightseeing feature) it is only worth if you either want sightseeing by bus or go to the outer regions.
After arrival I went to "The Times Hostel", which is a footstep away from Trinity College. On my way there I passed the O'Connel Bridge, which is wider than it is large.

Holidays in Ireland

Readings free time at University Dortmund is nearly over, it ends on 10th of October, but I still had to take some of the holidays from work, so I decided to spend part of the time into a one-week-trip to Dublin and Leixlip, a small town in County Kildare, Ireland.

Let me mention I never made such a trip before. Of course I've been traveling by plane a few times, but always with friends or family. Now I'm flying alone the first time, to a country I rarely know except from the news or wikipedia. I'm not scared, in contrary! I'm exptremly curious what I will experience and a bit nervous, to be honest.
So, I'll take the plane from Frankfurt Hahn Airport here in Germany to Dublin at 29th September and come back on 5th October. I'll stay one day at a hostel somewhere there,for approx. 15-20 € a night. I only once slept in a hostel before (in Munich) and I guess this will be interesting ;)

From Thursday on Isa, an Au-pair and good friend which I know from my old school, invited me to spend the rest of the days at her. She is a really kind, funny and lovely person(you know, that kind you can phone with five or more hours at a time and never get enough) so I'm very happy that we will finally meet again after 2.5 years :)


I don't really know what exactly will expect me either in Dublin or in Leixlip at Isa, so I'm very curious about all this holiday thing.
From what I guess Isa and me will have a lot of fun, because we have a lot of things in common, so I am very glad we have contact again since a few weeks.
We will see :)

Well a few things I know fore sure: In Leixlip it will be about 10-15°C outside temperature, with wind and rain, Guinness beer(I can't get enough of this wonderful stuff!) and the mysteries of different kinds of whiskey which will reqire some personal research, including an intensive case study...

Hopefully I get the opportunity to post some pictures and experiences omy f trip in here, so hang on!

Cheers,
Tobi

Going AdSense-free

Hello everybody,
some of the best ideas you can get by just cycling.
So while cycling home, I thought about my blog, what to write and about the adverts, too.
When I started blogging, I thought it would be a good idea if people can show they like my blog by clicking one of the adverts. The point is, this did (expectedly) not work out for me and to be honest, I like your personal feedback more than any money.
Plus, I discovered AdSense and Google Friend Connect lets the page load in about 6 seconds and I hate nothing more than slow web pages.
So, to protect your privacy and improving your reading experience I removed all adverts from the page. Now it takes 3 seconds with Firefox and 0.5 with Chromium.
If you love my blog, just feel free to leave me a message or comment, you'd make me very happy by doing so. Nevertheless if you think you cannot be thankful enough, just feel free to have a look at my whishlist on Amazon :)

Hopefully you are now able to really enjoy reading this blog, plus I have a little candy for you: You will not have to wait much longer for the next post, only a couple of days maybe!
So just have a visit here from time to time or directly grab the RSS feed from the right column :)

Upgrading to KDE SC 4.5

Recently KDE SC 4.5 came out and as I always try live on the cutting edge of software, I tried to update it which first ran me into the fact KPackageKit wouldn't update half of the whole KDE.
I found out by some googling(shame this became a verb! Forestling should become one...) that the reason is that the kubuntu-ppa might contain older packages than kubuntu backports, so the solution was to just disable all source which were no kubuntu archives.
For upgrading just add
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu lucid main
into /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubuntu-backports-ppa using your favourite editor or KPackageKit and run sudo update apt-get update (KPackageKit does that for you automatically).

If you are lucky you just have to run
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
If this does not work for you, just try alternating those two, eventually with the -f parameter until everything is installed and then reboot.

I discovered today that the ibus package wasn't installed, too so I installed it and run ibus-setup. We will see what that brings :)
KDE SC 4.5 runs a bit smoother, but sometimes it consumes peaks of 20% of the 1.8 GHz CPU of my T42p (which is still a good laptop :) ).
Have fun!