I’ve just purchased a Garmin Nuvi 270. It is part of the entry level range of Garmin devices. No bluetooth, fm transmitter, traffic data, teasmaid or any other superfluous features. It just does a good job of directing me from point a to point b. It is also very small and unobtrusive.

What’s more it works in most of Europe and the US/Canada as well thanks to the built in maps of both continents, something you don’t get on TomTom save for the top of the range 930. US coverage is very useful given the fact we are currently on holiday in New England, in Washington DC in December and I also have the odd work trip out here. Garmin’s Irish mapping is also meant to be much more up to date than TomTom’s and they have loads of Mac friendly software for playing around with.

So, why did I get one after previously saying I wouldn’t? Well mainly because I have come to find them useful outside of the UK or Ireland. We’ve had Hertz Neverlost a few times in the US and mainland Europe and it is very useful for finding your way around somewhere strange. The ability to find points of interest is also useful.

I really can’t see me using it much at home as I can always pull out the iPhone with Google Maps there to so some quick route planning. However given that the iPhone doesn’t do turn by turn and data access whilst roaming is an expensive no-go, having a full fledged GPS unit for travel is worthwhile.

First up I’ll be at the IBM Lotus Premium Support Seminar in Boston, MA on Wednesday 27th August where I’ll be presenting with Heidi Votaw, Program Director for Social Software. We will be talking about “Leveraging Social Software to Boost Innovation and Productivity Today” with an obvious focus on Lotus Connections 2.0. Unfortunately this is an invite only event.

Next, I’ll be at the IBM Lotus TechJam event being held at IBM in Staines, UK on Wednesday 2nd September where I’ll be doing a dive on Connections 2.0 with a definite technical slant. I’m not entirely sure how people can sign up for this event, but you can try contacting Dave Hay via the blog link above.

Finally (for now I guess) myself and my colleague Karim Heredia will be at the UK WebSphere User Group meeting in Edinburgh on Wednesday (why are they all on Wednesday?) 17th September. This talk will be titled “Lotus Connections – the WebSphere perspective” and will focus on deployment and administration considerations as well as how you can extend the social computing power of Connections out into other applications. You can join the WUG and sign up for the meeting on their web site.

The first was the evening do for the brother of Lana’s bridesmaid Rachel. This one was fairly local, being just up the road in Trim, County Meath.

May saw two weddings, the first of which was of our friends Dan and Alison, held in Salisbury. It proved to be a great day and it was lovely to catch up with a number of old friends, and their respective babies!

Then just a week after we were off to Switzerland for the wedding of Lana’s cousin Jeremy to Maria. We flew direct from Dublin to Zurich and then hired a car to take us to the village of Weggis on the shores of Lake Luzerne. Weggis is a hugely picturesque place with typical mountain scenery and Swiss architecture. The wedding itself was relaxed and perfectly formed, with the service conducted in both English and German. After that we were taken on a two hour boat trip along the lake to view even more of the scenery, as well as drink and chat of course.

Unfortunately we had to head back to Zurich and back home on the Sunday and missed out on a trip up the mountain by cable car and train.

The weekend just gone has actually been my first in Dublin for over a month. I have one more weekend off next week, then back to the UK for the wedding of our friends Mark and Becky in Southampton. Then one in Northern Ireland in July, possibly one in Estonia in August, currently taking bookings for September, one in Reading in October, November is free, then we wrap up the year with the wedding of Lana’s brother Graham to the lovely Tiffany in Washington DC in December.

The 2009 count is already at one. Hopefully there won’t be many more, we can’t afford to have a holiday with all this wedding related travel! Not that we’d ever complain though, it’s great to see friends and family get hitched, and always a good excuse for a party!

Given that both Lana and I were effectively working over the Christmas and New Year period, we had always planned to treat ourselves to a mini-break in the early part of 2008. After ages debating if we should push the boat out and go on an exotic holiday or maybe have a European city break we came to a rather strange decision. We’ve been in Ireland for over six months now and have hardly had any chance to explore. Therefore we decided to have a weekend break somewhere local. The beauty of this idea was that it meant we had no wasted time on planes bookending our break.

The really bizarre part is that we chose a venue only about half an hour’s drive from our front door. Powerscourt is a country estate in the Wicklow mountains, just South of Dublin. Last October a new Ritz-Carlton hotel was opened on the site and that’s where we booked ourselves into for an overnight spa package. I’d been fortunate enough to stay in a Ritz-Carlton once before for work, so knew we would be in for a treat.

On arrival at Saturday lunchtime we were informed that we’d been upgraded to the club floor and a larger suite, which was a nice surprise. After arranging our spa treatments for the following morning we went to check out our room. Lana was in heaven with the New England style decor (I’m going to be in trouble when we get our own place…) whilst I marvelled at the various technology including LCD touch sensitive control panels for everything from room temperature to the curtains and three LCD TVs including one in the bathroom mirror! Then we checked out the breakfast options:

Needless to say we wouldn’t be ordering that

Included as part of our upgrade was access to the club lounge with free food and drinks provided throughout the day. Think of an airport lounge within the hotel and you are about there, except with much nicer furniture. The rest of the hotel is simply sumptuous from the lobby area with solo harpist down to the spa and pool and the pub down in the basement. As you would expect there is an overall air of opulence and money which probably doesn’t go down to well with Irish values, but there was enough evidence of people taking lunch and coffee in the lobby to suggest that you don’t have to be staying there to soak a bit of it up. The helipad being built out at the back is probably taking things a bit far though.

One of the main attractions is the restuarant: Gordan Ramsay’s first foray into Ireland. Unfortunately we booked our stay rather late and had no chance of getting into dinner on a Saturday night. Reading Traveladvisor reviews about the hotel this seems to be a bone of contention that the hotel does not have a restaurant that guests can be guaranteed to eat at. However there is a portion of the expansive lobby that turns into a bistro at night, and then there’s always the pub. We chose to supplement our free food and drink with some room service whilst chilling out and relaxing in our room after returning from browsing the Avoca shops within Powerscourt.

On Sunday we rose early to get breakfast in the restaurant (no caviar choice there!) and then headed down to relax by the pool before our spa treatments. I went for a “deep cleansing back treatment” whilst Lana had an advanced facial. Needless to say we both came out feeling thoroughly refreshed and relaxed.

On leaving on Sunday afternoon we were home within 30 minutes. No airports, taxis or baggage to lug around and no delays! Whilst it is great to travel, sometimes taking advantage of the delights on your doorstep is just as much fun and much more relaxing.

That’s a grand total of 23,137 miles, much more than I thought. I dread to think how many miles I used to clock up back when I was in a job which took me all over Europe for two years, with frequent US trips and a jaunt to South Africa added in. This time around there were only four segments of work-related flights: Heathrow to Chicago return and Chicago to Minneapolis. The rest were all for pleasure including flights from Heathrow to Rome, Stockholm and Boston.

Unsurprisingly after our move to Dublin we’ve been fairly regular customers of Ryanair, flying to three different UK destinations: Luton, Bournemouth and Leeds-Bradford.

A quick tot-up shows that I’ve flown with the following airlines in 2007:

Aer Lingus x1
American Airlines x3
Fly BMI x1
British Airways x2
Ryanair x5
Air France Cityjet x1

My award for best airline goes to British Airways for ease of check-in and in-flight service. They gained big bonus points for giving us champagne when flying back from Rome on Lana’s birthday. Top BA tip: if you ever find yourself checking in online for one of their 757s then row 26 is the one to go for.

Worst goes to American. I’ve only ever flown to the US on American, US Airways and Virgin. Up until this year I always rated AA above the others. However I’ve subsequently changed my mind. This has nothing to do with the fact that my best man phoned them up to inform them we were travelling on our honeymoon with them to no avail Seriously though, their in-flight service is surly and sometimes downright rude.

Best airport? Well I would say Detroit Metro Wayne County purely because it has a 1 mile long terminal with a monorail inside it, however I was there in 2006, not 2007. Therefore I’ll have to say Rome Fiumicino – clean, efficient and with a good range of shops.

Worst goes to Heathrow. This pains me to say as I have a love affair with LHR that went sour this year. My first ever flight was from there in 1986 when my dad took me on a surprise trip in a British Airways BAC 1-11 with Patrick Moore to watch Halley’s Comet. It is probably the airport I’ve travelled out of most, but this year I had to do something I’ve never done before: transfer through it. The flight connections centre is a complete, unorganized mess. Additionally, every single flight I’ve been on into or out of LHR this year has been late. I’ve given up counting the number of times I’ve heard the captain of a flight say that delays are due to air traffic hold ups at Heathrow. It is running too near to capacity, and I’m not sure a new terminal and runway are going to help that.

Finally, 2008 is getting off to a flier already (excuse the pun!) This weekend coming we are travelling from Dublin to Luton for the weekend. On the 19th I fly off to Orlando for work, we are planning a holiday in February and already have a large number of weddings lined up for later in the year including ones in Switzerland and Washington DC! Even the UK weddings we have will invariably mean two flights: one for the stag do and one for the day itself.

Edited to add a Dublin-London City flight I forgot!

However lately I’ve been ultimately frustrated whenever I’ve had to go through LHR. The first frustration is with how simply overloaded the airport is with regards to air traffic. It feels like every time I’ve been on a flight to LHR we get delayed taking off due to air traffic control restrictions i.e. there are just too many planes to land. The most recent example of this being on Thursday morning whilst taking a BMI flight from Dublin. We boarded on time for the 0905 departure and were then told by the captain on the plane that Heathrow had put a stop on our departure until 1010. Of course, BAA themselves are campaigning for a third runway which presumably will alleviate these problems. I’m not going to argue the rights or wrongs of that (it has been an emotive subject and recently sparked demonstrations.) especially as I have relatives who live in one of the villages which would be obliterated by the plans. However it surely makes more sense to improve capacity at LHR than some of the other plans. The last thing London needs is more people being pushed out to Stanstead which is just too far away to really be considered a London airport, or worse yet a fourth one (sorry Luton doesn’t count as far as I am concerned!) Incidentally, our flight back to Dublin on friday suffered a two hour delay due to knock-on effects of the plane being delayed earlier, probably for the same reason. I struggle to remember the last on-time flight I took into or out of LHR.

The knock on effect of increased flight traffic is increased people traffic in the terminals. Whilst I’ve not found this too bad when travelling through one terminal into or out of London, we recently had to navigate the flight connection centre when coming back from New York on our honeymoon. We arrived on American into Terminal 3 and had to transfer onto Aer Lingus out of Terminal 1. We left a healthy 2 hour connection time. The flight in was late (can you guess why? Yes, LHR air traffic control restrictions) what’s more we didn’t have a stand! I don’t believe that has ever happened to me at LHR before, let alone on a transatlantic flight. The net result being that a bus ride from a remote part of the apron subtracted more time from our connection. Another bus ride took us from T3 to the flight connections centre in T1. We still had enough time however. That was until we saw the queues to get through security. We arrived at the Aer Lingus desk to collect boarding passes 15 minutes after the flight closed and they had already given our seats away to standby passengers (this wouldn’t have been a problem had we been checked straight through on checking in at JFK, but that’s a rant for another time!) All in all it took about 1 1/2 hours to transfer from one flight to another between two terminals, on a Sunday morning. It used to be that leaving yourself two hours to connection at LHR was plenty enough, but the sheer number of people there nowadays makes it something of a lottery.

So, I’ll be trying to avoid LHR from now on. There’s more than enough choice in how I get back to the UK from Dublin every now and then. Unfortunately options for long haul travel are less flexible. Direct flights from Dublin to the US tend to be 50% or so more expensive than flying to LHR first, and whist Schipol might be an alternative (and a much, much nicer airport to boot) it adds even more time onto the transatlantic leg.

For the honeymoon we flew to Boston and spent ten days touring New England before fying back from New York. We drove over 1200 miles in all, taking in six states. I spent a lot of time behind the lens, shooting about 1000 frames. We took along the iBook and so I did some quick processing of some and stuck them up on flickr as we went along. I want to spend a lot more time going through them now we are back, so expect more Here’s a slideshow of them (which should update with new ones as I add them):

I originally wanted to buy a new lens whilst over there, and had my eye on either the EF-S 10-22 f3.5/4.5 or even better the EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS I tried the latter out in Calumet New York (B&H was closed as we were there on a Saturday) and it is a lovely lens, but in the end I decided to wait and think about it a bit more, despite the tempting exhange rate. I did buy a couple of little bits, including a diffuser for my 430EX Speedlight and a 32″ reflector.

Lana went all the way to the Southampton Apple Store at the weekend, just to buy me the newly released Apple keyboard. That’s why I’m marrying her. The fact she was also going there for her hen party is just mere coincidence

The keyboard is one aspect of Apple hardware I’ve never been entirely happy with. I’ve owned the black keyed version which came with the G4 PowerMac range and both the wired and wireless versions of the most recent design. In all cases I’ve struggled with the rather heavy nature of the key action, and also the way they seemed to be too closely packed together for my hands. Hence I was immediately interested in the new keyboard when it was surfaced on Engadget, and then announced last week.

The concept of putting a laptop style keyboard into a standalone form-factor is genius, and the thing really is unbelievably thin, but at the same time very sturdy. When you put it side-by-side with the old keyboard it makes the old one look positively obese. It’s truly a triumph of design. However, with any keyboard, the proof is in the typing. I must admit that I’d always looked at the keyboard style of the current Macbook range with some skepticism (and hadn’t really spent any time using one) compared to the more traditional laptop keyboard design of the MBP and the Thinkpads I’m used to using at work. Despite my earlier comment, the spacing between the keys just didn’t look natural. However I pleased to say that it works like a charm and my typing on the new keyboard is smooth and quick. There is a satisfying feel and response to the keys, and you certainly don’t get the feeling that you have to press them down hard like I did with the old style Apple keyboard.

I went for the wired version for the extra keys (most notably a numeric pad) and simply because I have no need to go wireless. Aesthetically, I have to say that the new silver and white design, whilst probably made to look good with the new iMac, works very well with the older one with the silver of the iMac base and white of the main unit matching the base and keys of the iMac perfectly. Check for yourself:

Apple have released a software update for OS X 10.4.10 (the minimum supported level for the keyboard) which adds support for some of the new buttons for Expose and Dashboard. Some people have complained that some functions have moved F-keys, but I don’t find this to be an issue. I’m also particularly please that the Apple key has been officially labelled as “Cmd” as I always struggled with remembering that Command=Apple.

Overall, I’m very impressed. I’m seriously considering buying a couple to use in work…

The one thing we have now done is sort out our honeymoon. Eschewing convention, we are going to fly to Boston where we will spend nine nights touring around New England before ending up in New York for a night or two before flying home. Sitting on a beach for a couple of weeks isn’t really our style, and whilst honeymoons are meant to be a relaxing recovery from the wedding itself this is far more fun. Lana is looking forward to staying in the Inn at Harvard, along with visiting Salem, whilst we are both looking forward to spending some time exploring Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. We’ve been to New York before, but it will be nice to finshing our short trip there.

We are hoping that nine nights will give us plenty of time to leisurely wend our way along the 250 miles or so between Boston and NY, with the odd diversion along the way. If anybody has any tips on great places to see, stay at or eat in then please let us know!

There were two aims for day two. The first and foremost was to visit the Vatican. Now neither of us are Catholic, so this was not a desire born out of any specific religious intent, but more to admire the architecture and works of art, and to get some good photos of course. The second aim was to try and find an engagement ring. We’d visited Tiffany’s on day one, and whilst they were lovely, they were also expensive for what they were. Whilst Lana made out that she would be happy to go back to England and find one there, I was on a mission to get one from Rome. In my mind it would make the whole experience complete to propose and sort the ring whilst out there. To that end I’d been reading up in the guide book to find out likely spots to search in. We’d done the areas around the main shopping district, and found a little jewellers on the Via Dei Corso, but they didn’t have anything Lana liked. I’d read about the fact there was a Jewish ghetto area somewhere around the River, near to Campo Dei Fiori. Thinking that it would be nice to find the Roman equivalent of Hatton Garden, that was my aim. Of course the guide book also told me that the Italian equivalent of VAT on jewellery was 35% Maybe we should have gone to Amsterdam…

We took the metro to a stop nearby The Vatican and arrived safely, despite deciding to get some shots of the graffiti covered metro trains and incurring the ire of a policeman on the busy platform. After a short walk we arrived at St. Peters Square. Again we were treated to a beautiful warm sunny day which provided good light for photos, though we were a bit late in getting there so it was quite harsh as well. For those who don’t know, there are essentially two must-see things at The Vatican. St. Peters Basilica, and The Vatican Museums. The museums consist of six miles of galleries packed to the brim with artwork by countless masters. At the end of it all is the Sistine Chapel, with Michelangelo’s famous frescoes. Whilst it would be great to do this, I didn’t want to spend all of such a nice day inside. In any case, the museums were closing at 12:20 on this particular day, so our decision was made for us. We queued up to get into the Basilica instead.

The Basilica is the central church in the Roman Catholic faith there therefore of course presided over by The Pope. There’s more historical information on Wikipedia than I could hope to put down here, so I’ll concentrate on the visual aspect of it. It is truly stunning. There are a number of monuments, sculptures and frescoes by the likes of Michelangelo and Bernini. The central focal point is the Papal altar, covered over by an impressive baldachin designed again by Bernini.

The alter is also directly underneath the most famous part of the Basilica, namely the dome (or cupola) which served as a model for most of the other famous examples such as our own St. Paul’s Cathedral. Once outside again, my desire to climb up to the dome itself won favour from Lana, and we paid the €7 to get a lift halfway up, followed by about 350 stairs. As you neared the top the stairs became steeper and narrower, twisting around the inside of the dome. The view from the top however was well worth it.

After our descent (interrupted by a visit to the souvenir shop on the roof of the basilica) we walked back across the river to have lunch in a restaurant in the lovely Piazza Navona. The food was awesome, and being able to sit outside and just take in the atmosphere was lovely. We asked the hostess and a waiter about where they would go to buy an engagement ring, but neither gave us any concrete locations or advice. As such we headed off on something of a wild goose chase down to Campo Dei Fiori, across the river and then back again. Just as we crossed back over the river at about 5pm I was ready to give up hope. We ambled down a side street back towards the way we originally came when I noticed a small jewellers on the right. We had a look at their diamond rings but nothing took our fancy. Luckily however this was just the first in a whole street of small jewellers, and it appeared that in a moment of serendipity we had found the little Jewish quarter we were looking for. For reference the street was Via Dei Pettinari. One one particular shop we found the ring, and after some bartering with the owner, who spoke no English, it was sent away for resizing and was ours by 7pm. We’ve since had it valued in the UK and it appears we got a good deal. Not that the monetary value of it is the important thing. I was more happy with the fact that we had now sealed our engagement whilst still in Rome, effectively rounding off our trip in the best possible way.