Yesterday I began to receive text messages from a number I didn’t recognise, from a person called “Jay”. These messages were full of descriptions of what Jay wanted to do to me - and they were disgusting! Normally when something like this happens, the first person that I would talk to is my husband, but he was very busy with work. So I turned to my other quickly accessible network - Twitter.

The reactions were quick and they ranged from supportive to advisory:

debbiemet @ellybabes Oh gross. Can you report the number and get it blocked?

lexia @ellybabes Sorry to hear. Time to call the guards, I think

PixieVonDust @ellybabes a friend of mine had that hassle. Reported it and gardai got address and went round to guy and gave him a talking to.

Tupp_Ed @ellybabes five messages would be enough to make a complaint, I’d feel. Success depends on whether the number is a bill or pre payone.

This morning I found myself thinking about why Twitter keeps us coming back, even with the large amounts of downtime and the current pagination and IM issues. Is it our need for acceptance and reassurance?

Personally, I use Twitter for several different reasons:

• A place to vent when I haven’t the time for a full blog post
• An answer to questions that Google can’t manage
• Advice on products, services or issues
• A path to reassurance when feeling low
• A method to track the movements and activities of my friends

There have been a multitude of blog posts from very influential bloggers on this very subject and also comparing the relative benefits of Jaiku/FriendFeed/etc. Yet there’s something about Twitter that nobody can put their finger on, that even when it abuses us, we keep crawling back for more…

Are we all suffering from Stockholm syndrome?

From BBspot.

Things have been very quiet on here lately, mainly because work has been nuts and we’ve been prepping for our honeymoon. Unlike most couples who head off for a few weeks on a beach, we’ve decided to do things a little differently.

Tomorrow at 6am we set off on our European Odyssey for the next three weeks. A road trip that will take in roughly 4,500 miles, 8 countries, 2 F1 Grands Prix and a drive around the Nordschliefe.

We’re both Formula 1 nuts and when Spa was restored onto the calendar this AND placed back-to-back with Monza - well, how could we say no?

We head out from Dublin Port over to Holyhead and then drive straight through England to the Channel Tunnel. First night is in Calais and then up in the morning for a mad dash across into Germany to the old Nordschliefe race track at the Nurburgring. Although the track is no longer used for Formula 1 races, it’s a popular spot for car enthusiasts to take their own cars around. While it would be nice to take the new Type ‘R’ around, we’re going to settle for being driven around it by a professional BMW driver in a nice new M5!

From there it’s on to Amsterdam for a few nights and then we drive down through Germany to Wiesbaden. My mum lived here for a few years in the 70’s so it will be nice to see it for that reason. We continue on to Innsbruck, taking the route through the smallest vertical section of Austria.

In Italy we then stay in Bergamo while travelling back and forth to the Grand Prix at Monza, where George is praying for a Ferrari 1-2. I said that he could have that one as long as Hamilton wins at Spa! After race day at Monza we are going to drive the traditional route from there to Maranello, the home of Ferrari. In days of old, people would try to race the telegraph home to deliver news of a Ferrari victory.

We will stay in Maranello for a few days and hope to tour some of the local factories - Ferrari, Lambourgini, Pagani… and perhaps balsalmic vinegar, parmesan cheese and lambrusco wine? Tempted yet?

From there it’s time to drive around the coast via Monaco and up to Aix-en-Provence for a night in a villa in the olive groves. Then a bolt up through France to Troyes, where I lived and studied for a year, for a brief night with my ‘french mother’. Troyes has great factory outlets, so perhaps a spot of shopping there? We have the car, after all.

Maastricht is the next stop on our tour where we use it as a base to shuttle back and forth to Spa for the Grand Prix. A little bit of rain and the redesigned track could give us a lot of fun! After this weekend it’s but a short hop back to Amsterdam to relax for the last few days of our break. We come home via Calais. Luckily we get back on a Friday night, so we’ll have the weekend to relax before we head back to work (urgh!).

All of this leads up to me saying that posting may be non-existent for the next few weeks, but at least you know why…

All evening I’ve been doing everything I can to put off writing this post… reading RSS feeds, catching up on twitter, emailing people, even housework, just ‘cos I didn’t want to put these words down on the screen.

A few weeks ago, the hubbie George acquired himself a new car. We’ve had a few issues with the dealer getting it re-registered as Irish (we’re currently running on Scottish plates), so he didn’t want to say anything about it on his blog until everything was sorted out. But now due to a little incident, I have to out him and say that we are the proud owners of a 2002 Honda Civic Type R - in shiny black of course! I’ll leave it up to him to tell you the saga of acquiring the car and insurance in his own time…

We were up visiting my mum this weekend, and yesterday he lent me the car to take her out for a run and show it off. It was only the second time I had been allowed to drive the car when he wasn’t in it. Mum decided the route to show me some new roads that had been constructed near to her, and we headed off. Down the main road to Mossley and then on to Carrickfergus, then turning back across the back roads to come home.

The run out was fine, and the back roads are twisty and turny so I was having great fun on the way back, until we came up behind a slow moving tractor. I held back for ages until I found a safe place to drop down the gears and overtake it. The road was reasonably narrow, but I felt pretty safe overtaking, especially with the power and speed of the Type R.

As we passed the tractor there was suddenly a huge thump on my side of the car. I didn’t panic and pulled back into the left lane and glanced over to see that the drivers mirror was hanging off. I can only assume that there was a tree branch sticking out of the verge on the right that I didn’t see, that I thumped with the mirror. I was immediately wracked with guilt - how was I going to tell George that I had damaged his new car??

It was pelting down with rain and there was no where to pull in safely, so I continued on the five mins it took me to get home. I parked the car with the mirror away from the window of the house, so that I could get out and check the damage before confessing to George. On the rest of the drive home I had been stressing about just how much damage had been done - it’s an electric heated mirror - what was that going to run me in replacement costs?

Luckily, when I inspected the damage, the mirror casing had simply been bent in, and went easily back into place. However, the glass was smashed and was dangling off. I quickly inspected the paintwork for damage, there was none… It was time to tell George.

With a huge lump in my throat, I approached the house and tapped on the window. George appeared at the door and I was lost for words. “We’re both OK, but I had a small accident with the car” I mumbled. “It’s alright, I don’t think it’s too bad, but I was overtaking and knocked the driver’s side mirror”. His face fell and he raced to get his shoes. By now, I was shaking, how mad was he going to be? I apologised over and over, saying that I wouldn’t blame him if he never lent me the car ever again.

Once he had inspected the car, he straightened up and hugged me, telling me that it was alright, no major damage, and the main thing was that mum and I were alright - I’ve never felt so relieved in all my life! I’m so fortunate to have such a loving and forgiving husband - and once again, just for the record - I’m really sorry!

It’s been another week without posts, mainly because I was working on moving Mum’s blog over to a self-hosted platform and transferring her from Blogger to WordPress. The main reason was her love of podcasting - while there are a lot of services out there that offer free podcast hosting, such as Evoca, they have limited numbers of minutes available. Mum has filled up several free accounts, so we needed to move her to a permanent home.

After doing a bit of research, and seeing the WordPress plugin that Grandad has been using, I decided that a move to WordPress was going to be in order if this was all to work. Luckily, the latest version of WordPress (2.2) has be written to cope with the import from ‘New’ Blogger accounts, so the transfer was pretty painless in the end.

I’ve selected a nice summery clean theme for Mum, which her visitors seem to like, but she’s not so sure herself. Still, since there are so many themes available out there, it will be easy to switch her over to another one if she changes her mind. The new Widgets area in the latest install makes it easy to rearrange the Sidebar info, be that over the one or two sidebars that you have in your chosen theme.

Mum’s using Audacity to record her Podcasts, and I’ve provided her with a bunch of tutorials so that hopefully she will take the next step and be able to edit her recordings if it’s needed. At the moment her podcasts (while interesting) are straight read-throughs of blog posts. I like this, as it adds feeling and additional elements to the post and you feel like it’s a memory being told just for you.

The podcasts are then being exported as mp3 files and loaded to my hosting account. There’s a great little plugin for WordPress that I found called simply ‘Audio Player’ that allows the mp3 to be called with a simple tag. I wanted to keep things simple for Mum and have as few steps in the process as possible, especially since I only had a few hours to teach her the new method. She seems to be quite comfortable with it and we’ve had a few podcasts already this week.

Not one to be outdone by his mother-in-law, George spent yesterday evening playing with his theme and upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. He’s made a few changes, mainly to his sidebars, but has had some issues that he’s been unable to resolve, which mean that sometimes the sidebars appear and sometimes not. Hopefully as he posts some more, NOT using the Rich Text Editor, these will resolve themselves.

A few months ago I was in the car with my hubbie, heading down to Laois on the motorway. On Irish roads we see a lot of tailgaters, and I noticed about five cars traveling very close together. A car pulled out in front of this chain to overtake, but was traveling much slower than the group of five. They all had to brake quite hard and I thought that the guys at the back were about to run into the others. This gave me an idea, but more about the background first…

Most people don’t think of the time needed to both react and brake when traveling at speed. After a bad multiple-car accident that happened in thick fog earlier this year, the hubbie did some calculating of just how quickly you cover distances and how quickly you can stop. He was shocked by the calculations and realised that a lot of people drive too close to other cars in this country.

There are a couple of things that never seem to be taken into account in the reaction time calculations, firstly non-road distractions and secondly braking force.

Let me explain… A good reaction time is under half a second, but that’s only if you are fully concentrating on the road. In modern cars we can easily be distracted by onboard computers, lighting a cigarette, tuning the radio, changing a CD, even looking at your kids in the rearview mirror - next thing you glance back at the road and there’s brake lights and you’re approaching them quickly and you have to slam on your own brakes.

The second point I’d raise is the fact that there is no indication of just how hard the car in front is braking. The brake lights are a binary system, on or off - the exact same whether you are just tapping the brakes lightly to adjust speed or braking hard to avoid an accident or incident ahead.

So back to my idea - I turned to George and mentioned that surely it would be a good thing if the additional brake light at the top of the rear windscreen worked on a graduated basis. For example if there were five sections to the light and the heavier the braking the more of them that lit up - all five lit being a full emergency stop. George wasn’t keen on the idea and pointed out that different cars brake differently and that you could never get the manufacturers to agree to a standard.

Well, now a company in America has released SuddenStop. It’s a license plate frame that can calculate G-forces, and when you suddenly decelerate its LEDs go nuts, flashing brightly for three seconds and alerting the driver behind you. There’s no wiring and anyone that can handle a screwdriver can install it in about two minutes.

The battery should last for 15,000 hours and as a nice touch, they’ve added a test button so that you don’t have to get your mate to drive behind you while you brake heavily to test that it’s working.

I think it’s a great idea, and it’s a shame that it’s only available in the US at the moment. Of course US license plates are normally affixed with a surround and they are metal, compared with the plastic that we use in Europe. But I’m sure that some young entrepreneur will find a way to build this into EU reg plates in the near future - and it would be a great and cheap way to make our roads a little safer…

Oh God, I’ve been meaning and promising to post this for ages, and now that the wedding is out of the way I no longer have an excuse!

Our wedding was originally planned for 120 people, but as a lot of them were from overseas we ended up with 85 at the ceremony and meal. But anyhow, it was still kept to under €10k, which in today’s world is something of a miracle. I can’t guarantee that you can do the same for your wedding, but here are a few tips that might help (and a few geek notes along the way…)

Firstly, find out who in your friends and family you can tap for expertise. Send out a general call to all you know asking for advice, recommendations and suggestions for service providers. To that end, here are my top ten money saving tips!

1. I was able to ask my mother (grannymar) who is an excellent seamstress to make my wedding outfit, and as you can see - she did me proud!
2. My cousin, RichardM, is a wedding photographer. I didn’t want too many formal shots or any ’staged funny’ shots, so going to someone I was comfortable with was a great help, I could be completely clear with him. Most important advice here, have a clear list of any family/friends shots you really want and make sure they know they are needed. Give a copy of this list to the photographer, bestman and chief bridesmaid so that they can locate people in advance and therefore avoid stress for yourself.
3. My aunt is a florist so I was able to get my bouquet from her. Research in advance what styles and colours you would like and have an idea about the size - I went for side plate size (photos will follow soon), but what I hadn’t realised was just how heavy the bouquet would be by the end of holding it for an hour of photos.
4. Ask around and see if anyone knows a D.J. or band and compare rates. Try to see the band/D.J. at a previous gig if possible and give them any requests at least two weeks in advance. Having both a D.J. and band will push the costs up to well over €1000, we went with D.J. only and it was €350 for the night - a massive saving. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the music and the floor was crowded all night.
5. Make your own invitations. We went with plain card and designed and decorated our own, but you can also buy packs that come with invite, menu, placecards etc. Try and find out if anyone you know does calligraphy, always looks best on the placecards.
6. Take the headache out of doing your seating plan and managing your RSVP by using simpleseating.com it automatically takes people who you mark as not coming off the table assignment and displays everything in a nice visual manner. Also makes it easy to share your seating plan with your wedding planner / mother / groom wherever you are.
7. Check our the corkage charges at the reception venue. We found that it was cheaper to bring our own wine and let them open as many bottles as needed. I actually went to Lidl during one of their wine sales and picked up 24 white and 24 red and they went down a storm. Even if it doesn’t save you any money, it gives you more flexibility in your wine choice. We also brought soft drinks for the children and non-drinkers, hotels will normally not charge corkage on these.
8. Serve your wedding cake as your dessert. We cut the cake before dinner and then it was plated and served to the guests as dessert, which resulted in a saving of €1.50 per person to us! It may seem small, but all the little savings soon add up!
9. Decorate with helium ballons instead of flowers. Part of our hotel reception package included them putting flowers on all the tables, but I wasn’t sure about them fitting in with my colour scheme. I contacted a local party equipment firm (and availed of my work discount of 10%) and they decorated the function room for me for €250. This included a bunch of 4 on each of the tables, a small double arch over the cake table and a large twisty arch (solid ballons, no gaps) with flowers and netting behind the top table. I then completed the look by printing up my own menus, and designing my own favours (tall, solid bottomed shot glasses with little wedding themed stickers on them, filled with mini-eggs - because I hate sugared almonds!) and scattering little hearts in purple & silver over the tables (these were my colours).
10. Our biggest saving overall for the reception was doing buffet food instead of serving to the tables. We saved over €20 per person by doing this and no-one complained at all, in fact some people were seen to head up for second and even third helpings! People were able to pick and choose what they wanted from the hot and cold food selections, and they still served the top table so that the parents didn’t need to get up.

Get wedding insurance! Due to illness in George’s family, we were considering having to move the wedding date (luckily we didn’t have to). In the case of anything going wrong you’ll be incredibly glad that you bought the insurance. Shop around online and you can pick up coverage for a €20k wedding for as little as €200.Now for the geeky stuff as promised!

We used WeddingWishlist.ie to put together a nice little wedding website with the ceremony and reception info, accommodation, maps and our wedding registry. The choice of shops to choose from for the wedding is limited, but the cool thing is that you can also set up ‘Couple Funds’ which your guests can contribute to. We did this for our honeymoon hotels, grand prix tickets and our ‘new flooring funds’ for our new house.

Finally, on my blog I used a nice little applet from whenismywedding.com to count down the days to the wedding date - handy so that you can keep a track of just how many days you have left to panic!

I hope that this info is of use to some of you out there, and if you have any questions then just leave them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them!

As the bride sneaks in a quick fag…

Photo credit: Triona Ryall (Bridesmaid)

Five years ago I was at a dark place in my life. Mum was ill and I had just quit both my job and my friends in Scotland and moved back home. Then you came into my life like a ray of sun, and I’ve bathed in the brightness of your love ever since.

You are my husband and best friend and these are my vows:

I vow to take care of you and comfort you.

I vow to stand up to you when I think you are wrong.

I vow to support you on the bad days and celebrate with you on the good.

I vow to encourage and inspire you, to laugh with you, and cry with you.

I vow to love you with all my heart and to always hold you in highest regard.

These vows I give to you today, and for all the days of our life.

From an article on the BBC website today:

There are calls for the European Union to ban the making of cars that can go at more than 101mph (162km/h).

The proposal comes in a report to the European Parliament on EU plans for a law to curb CO2 emissions from cars.

MEPs will vote on the plan this autumn but the BBC has seen an early draft of the report, which will be released to parliament later this month.

Its author, British Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies, says 101mph is 25% more than the top speed limit in most EU states.

What rubbish is this? My 1999 1.6l Ford Focus can go faster than that. My hubbie’s 1998 1.5l Honda Civic can certainly go much faster than that. And what happens in Germany? There are unrestricted sections of Autobahn there where you can drive as fast as you like - what will the next suggestion be - tachographs and GPS tracking systems in all new cars to ensure they never exceed 120km/h???