Last night Jan and I went to the Dublin Science gallery for a lecture “The personal side of personal robots” by Dr Cynthia Breazeal. Dr Breazeal is from MIT and is the director of the Personal Robots Group. She studied Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and now specialises in Social Robotics and Human Robot Interaction. I thought I’d write down what I remember of the talk and link it up so I can do some more reading through the research later.

The topics covered gave us an insight into what is going on to bring robots into our homes. Starting with looking at the history of robots through seeing that robots are already in some of our homes, for example the roomba. Next up is where is the current research is going on and where it’s heading to. Surely we all want robots at home and soon. Asimo as part of a family

The desire for robots to be in the home brings up a range of questions outside of the current tasks of existing robots. Scientists now have to look at the way robots will interact with humans to achieve tasks and make that interaction interesting for the longer term.

Dr Breazeal’s research has been covering social intelligence including having a parent for a robot and making the robot an infant. Then she is able to test the robots ability to mimic and learn by mapping to that parent. We saw the robot Leonardo at this stage. Not only did the examples with Leo show him learning the difference between safe and dangerous and divergent belief systems with positive reinforcement, Leo is fluffy, cute and just gorgeous. Dr Breazeal was very excited when the demonstration video was played that showed Leo using information he had just learned from a teacher to solve a problem. She emphasised that this was ground breaking behaviour.

The next fascinating robot shown to us was ‘Autom’, This robot was designed to be integrated into peoples lives to help them reach long term weight management goals. Results from experients with Automa showed people preferred to interact with the robot than pencil and paper and still more than a computer program with exactly the same information provided. More interesting agian was the the participants named their robots and even dressed them. Some even needed to say goodbye when they were taken away again. This showed emotional relationships with the tools in their homes and something I think those of us desiring a robot buddy want.

The goal of how to have a robot integrated into the owners social network was worked on with ‘Autom’ where the data Autom collected could be shared with the health maintainers support network, including nutritionist or doctors. Having a robot become part of the team or group of contacts as well as being a useful communication tool is something I’m looking forward to.

Dr Breazeal’s current research is into having robots become another communication method for us. The robot used in this case is “The Huggable”. The huggable is designed to enhace the users current social network. One example use case of the huggable was to introduce touch into remote communication, for example a parent away on a business trip who could still read and interact with a book as well as the child.

Examples of robots used as theraputic, communication enhancing tools were ‘Paro‘ who is a baby seal given as a pet to people with alzheimer’s. Paro makes me feel sad even just looking athim but I think he’s wonderful. The famous dancing keepon is working towards helping children with autism.

Finally there was an experiment done with the MDS models. These experiments were to see how humans react with robots depending on facial expressions, shaking hands, female vs male traits etc. Basically how trust worthy the robots become in these situations.

One key point I got from Dr Breazeal’s lecture was that doing experiments with robots and humans is helping us understand human behaviour as well. She mentioned that some of the results they found don’t have matching results with human to human behavior, that work would still need to be done.

Finally it was question time. Jan was very curious to hear about what work was happening to get out of the uncanny valley, Dr Breazeal says that there definitely is work in that area. I asked what robot should the hobbiest be aiming to get started with. Dr Breazeal recommends the mindstorm nxt and their programming language scratch.

There are a lot more thoughts going on in my mind and I’m sure Jan is just as full of robotics ideas and experiements and wishing we could be getting on with that right now. I know we’d love a robot that could interact in the way we see in the movies, even more so I desire for tools that can help with our daily lives. Not only chores but organising myself, managing my tasks, a PA, cooking assistant, information prioritiser, document manager but ofcourse most of all… a trusted robot friend.

youtube video of the keepon:

October 31st is Halloween which is celebrated widely here in Dublin. As I walked to the airport I was passing pirates, ghosts, ghouls. I was amused to hear from American friends about little children dressed as Sarah Palin (eek!). I made my bus to the airport with plenty of time, I sat on the top floor and was surrounded by quite a large family. They told me they travel to Dublin once a year. They go shopping, to the zoo and other attractions and have a really good time.

Jan and I were part of maybe ten people aboard our British Air flight to London. Going to London from Dublin is a bit like getting a train to the Central Coast in Australia. It was pretty quick and painless. We stayed in a tiny little hotel room near Victoria Station. The hotel didn’t even have a reception and we had to check in at another hotel up the road. We watched some British TV before sleeping.

Saturday November 1st - We had a ‘quick and cheap’ breakfast at Wetherspoons at Victoria station. We were then shocked to find thousands of people lining up to buy tickets for the underground. Also because of line closures it took us well over an hour to make our way to Zaheer and Alias place in West Harrow.

We had a great afternoon with Zaheer and Alia, we worked with Zaheer in Barcelona. We got to check out their new house and shared some delicious food together in their kitchen. We even lazed around a bit playing PS3 avoiding heading out into the nasty rain storm outside.

By evening we were back in London, walking up 193 steps at Covent Garden Station. It was pouring rain but we went out into it to do some window shopping. We found a cool arcade that had a shop just for ‘Little Big Planet’. Covent Garden and the west end are very cool and we saw some cool shops and plenty of entrances to see musicals too.

We walked down oxford street then ate some sushi at sushi train for dinner. I’ve missed simple sushi, not that it cost less than it would in Dublin. Then we saw the musical Wicked. We read the books recently and were very excited to be seeing the musical version. The musical is different to the books which I found a little frustrating, but it was great fan service. We had a great night, had a few wines at intermission and I bought the program which I love. I really want to see the same musical again in New York when we go some day soon.

Sunday morning we had Cornish Pasties which are so delicious and we made our way to the London Eye. We didn’t like the long queues or the security checks (including bomb checks on the ride itself). During the slow ride there was plenty of opportunity to take pictures:

View from the top:

Next after some coffee at cafe Nero with a wax Jamie Oliver looking over us we went into Madame Tussauds. This is such an awesome attraction. It was like a star frenzy with people trying to get their photos taken with different stars, it’s also quite silly in there, I bumped into the models a few times and appologised to them. Some of them look so real, especially when there’s a few in the room. The photos don’t look real though, must be light reflectinig off them.

Finally we made our way home, we sat on the train with boxes of sushi, delicious. We were home early enough to spend a few hours before bed watching some shows and getting ready for the week.

Monday October 13th - Jan flew to Hamburg for work and I planned a week at home, I could finally get stuck into some of my hobbies. I could spend some time by myself and have a great week. I had a fridge full of left overs that would last all week too. I did have a good night watching heroes but hit the sack soon after it finished without even stepping into my craft room.

Wednesday October 15th - I met up with Laura and Martha at the Long stone for an unofficial Geek Girl dinner, it turned out to be a nice night chatting. There was even some talk of having a few more events here in Dublin.

Thursday October 16th - I went along to Annamaries scrapbooking crop at Whitehall. On the bus I went up my favourite street ‘Great South George’ and I enjoyed seeing three old ladies infront of an old fashioned sign for the amsterdam beat club. The first was leaning against an upside down chair she was carrying and the other two were resting on their shopping trollies (you know the two wheeler granny ones). They were having an animated conversation but my mind saw this as a moment from the past days, something I wish I could have captured on film.

At the class Annamarie brought along a bunch of books and sketches and the idea was to put together some layouts using the patterns. I did quite a few layouts with halloween and autumn themes that I’ll now have to figure out some photos to go with them. It was a good night to be out and chatting with the girls too, plus there was delicious apple pie and cream with our tea.

Friday October 17th - Jan was back. Quiet night at home. Jan brought lots of wine and chocolates from Germany.

Sat Oct 18th - Unfortunately we slept all day and then lazed about all weekend.

Oct 20 - 24th - I can’t remember what we did this week, I bet it was lots of watching west wing, entourage, my name is earl, grey’s anatomy, Mad Men, Tin Man, Dr Who, TorchWood, The Daily Show, Colbert Report, keeping up with election gossip, Arrested Development. Wow we’re TV addicts :D. Twitter says I also did a lot of reading about open source, PHP, MySQL, SEO, Robots and web technologies. I also won the work lotto, about 50 euros, all in coins, which I’ve been using to pay for my bus rides in the morning.

Friday 24th - I had lunch at a chinese restaurant with the guys, It was quite quirky, definitely a family place where the cook put the food in containers like caserole dishes and mixing bowls to serve them to us.

Oct 25th - 27th was a long weekend, we made a big stew and ate that all weekend with different breads and hommus. We bought Okami for wii so played that for a few hours.

Monday 27th - I tried to be productive and made Nanna a birthday card, planted 30 daffodil bulbs and dyed my hair.

Tuesday 28th - We had tea over at Tim and Bob’s place and collected our new washing line. It was so cold on the brief walk my toes felt like they’d snap.

Wednesday 29th - My work social club had an event for charity at the Laughter Lounge. Jan came along too and there was plenty of drink and four comedians (Australian, American, British and Irish). We all had a great night. I found it amusing to catch up with my workmates who have been learning english to see how much of each comedian they understood. They had no chance with the Aussie guy who spoke so fast. Jan and I tried to speak as quickly as he did to try and baffle them but they could understand us fine.

Thursday 30th - I was excited to find Paddy Power had “White Christmas in Dublin” at 4-1. That would be so awesome. However I was very disapointed to find that the Niel Gaiman book signing event had become ticketted in the last day or so and had sold out. This night was the Ireland Ubuntu Release party at the Long Stone so we went along for a few drinks and to chat about Open Source for a few hours. It was a great party in the end with people mixing and showing off machines and software all around the room.

Friday 31st - I was very impressed with the Dutch coin made entirely with open source. I had lunch with the guys at Zatoons, the local sit down kebab restaurant.

Oh yeah and the weather has been absolutely abismal, freezing cold and wet. It also is dark all the times I’m not at work.

I just listened to the PHP User group Panel discussion from the Unconference session at ZendCon. While I listened I took some notes to try and help our Irish PHP Users Group be awesome like some of the other groups out there. I reckon the podcast and great tips it contains will help other User Groups out there too (not just PHP).

Wow there doesn’t seem to be any other PHP developers out there
It may be that most PHP developers are freelancers. Due to the competitive nature of the business they don’t want to get together to discuss for fear they will lose customers. Why socialise with the enemy. Most freelancers get work by word of mouth. Actually wouldn’t this make it better to get together with others to share work when there’s too much? Hopefully the user groups can promote the idea that sharing information and working as a community is good for the industry for EVERYONE. There is a suspicion that more developers are out there and don’t ever hear about the user groups because there isn’t enough marketing.

Another problem is there isn’t normally PHP development shops set up. I know there are a lot of examples but this is a perception when comparing PHP development to JAVA for example.

Finally Developers may come from being hobbiests or from being designers so don’t know the channels to join the PHP world, and therefore don’t end up finding out about the user groups.

Things that discourage developers to come along

• Being too far away
• Being at a bad time of day, too early or too late
• the members being a clique
• Not having a regular time and place can be too confusing
• members being too experienced - The high level talk that occurs is scary for newbies
• Lots of talking - no doing - People want to get out and do things in the community and get frustrated with talking only

Ideas for User Groups

• Do more hands on stuff like the bug hunting days - Take a look at the bug lists of frameworks out there, get some more advanced or involved developers to come along and explain how to go about triaging and making patches.
• Discover and explore open source applications together, show newbies how to get involved in the project, help them dig into it and make changes.
• Encourate regular users to present, give everyone a turn, sure some may not be so good at speaking but who knows.
• Run events/workshops specifically aimed at newbies, people starting out
• Explain the path of the PHP developer from newbie to guru
• Invite speakers - Adobe, Zend, IBuildings, people from open source projects
• Set up as a non for profit organisation based around the user group - this helps companies make donations and in some countries be able to claim the donation against taxes.
• Have a mother site for the country or area then this will point people to specific area user group websites. Umbrella groups and Sub groups or chapters.
• Use the tools of the web - twitter, facebook, mailing lists, IRC, forums
• have your user group site come up on google for [country]+PHP or [city]+PHP
• Organise Events / Conferences
• Have social events based around pizza, coffee or beer
• Make sure to get feedback from the community, what do they want? What do they like and dislike about what you’re currently doing

Why PHP Users groups are good for you

• Speaking at a user group is great for your career, showing that you know something.
• Help you become a better developer
• they give you access to tools
• Give you access to contacts for payment or to work together on projects
• The presentations can be very informative and introduce you to new concepts
• It helps grow PHP as a viable technology for the whole community
• As a freelancer belonging to a usergroup can help with sharing contracting work between the group.

PHP User Groups and the Sponsors

• Sponsors can help the user groups by centralising the conference/event organising efforts - e.g. Mark de Visser mentioned as part of the ZendCon conference process they were sent in many excess talk proposals, it would be great if the local user groups could access the good speakers that lived locally
• Sponsors can help advertise user group events - if they are sending out a newsletter to PHP developers they could send them information about PHP community events in their area
• In return the community can refer people to the companies e.g. about certification, services, products, information, training
• User Groups need to let sponsors know exactly what they will get for their buck, how many people attend events, how many on mailing list, topics that come up, how they will be presented at the event. Concrete Facts
• Recruiters may want lists and job boards, access to people changing jobs
• Charities may be interested in sharing resources because of the open source aspect of PHP, and the fact they may have access to open source specialists for their own needs. Example premises for holding events.
• The user groups need to remember to request stuff, not just sit around waiting for items and sponsorship to flood in
• Remember to thanks sponsors (on mailing lists, at the event) and come good on the promises/agreements

Sponsorship Ideas and Tips

• Books from publishers e.g. O’Reilly
• Recruitment companies
• Companies that use PHP - PIZZA!! or BEER!! or COFFEE!!
• Zend - Training, Studio, Products, Vouchers, Certifications
• PHP|Architect - Magazines, Training, Books
• Sugar CRM
• Ibuildings
• Universities - Space - Attendees from student community
• Sponsors may want one of their staff to do a talk, for example a new author may want to do the circuit or a consulting company may want to promote their knowledge
• Borland
• Local PHP hosting companies

Promoting the PHP User Groups

• Get onto master user group sites for your local area
• get your events onto php.net
• Share presentations among the user groups in your area
• PHPClasses shows maps and lists
• PHPusergroups - though may be unmaintained and events not vetted
• Future Idea - having php.net tell people about events in their area by map

Other Notes

• People that come to PHP User Groups are usually there individually, they aren’t being sent by their employers
• The PHP User Groups that were represented have around 30 people attending meetings/lectures regularly.
• Dalas had a nice thing going where they would have a follow up event after a talk at a coffee shop/book store to discuss the ideas further.
• People come for what they can immediately gain e.g. a talk on a specific topic. and stay for the networking

Again, these are notes I have made while listening to the podcast made at Zendcon unconference session about PHP user groups I hope they are useful to you.

Do you have any other tips for PHP User Groups?

On Thursday afternoon I left work early and went for a fun podcast with Josh Holmes. I was a bit hesitant because the event was based around Silverlight and I’m not interested in closed source proprietary products. However the podcast was about web technologies and there were two ruby developers, two python devels, and Ken joined me to make two PHP developers. We had a good afternoon chatting and I look forward to listening to the resulting podcast.

On the way to the podcast I took my time wandering up Great South George’s Street which I will now declare my favourite street in Dublin. It just feels like a frozen piece of history. Some of the signs are so old and there’s foundation stones stating the buildings are hundreds of years old. There are so many interesting cafes, venues, bars, it’s just a delight to watch people go by and see the unique shop fronts on this street.

Thursday afternoon I went window shopping. I really thought I’d come home with all my winter clothes but the shops were so packed and I didn’t have enough time before my favourite stores closed to try on things. I’ll have to get back some time soon.

Thursday night our friends from Australia Jannie and Jack came to visit. We stayed up and caught up and I was much amused by their extreme dislike of Prague and how they were treated as tourists.

Friday after work I walked through the pouring rain, drenched up to my knees to meet Jan, Jannie and Jack for dinner. We had a nice meal at ‘Venu’ on Annes Lane. We had a booth and enjoyed the sleek surroundings including some ferries in the decorated trees. The meal was OK, Jannie and I had garlic king prawns, though they were so stuck inside their shells that it was very frustrating to eat. Jack and Jan chose a mediteranian mix of olives, cured meats bread and hommus. Again I copied Jannie and had delicious lamb skewers with couscous and pineapple chutney. We drank together two bottles of the New Zealand house wine of the day. Each couple shared a desert as well. A luxurious though homely meal out. We completed the night with a last drink at O’Donoghues where I have wanted to go for a while. O’Donoghues is famous for starting the careers of many well known folk singers from Ireland. There are many pictures on the wall and a great atmosphere once inside. Unfortunately there wasn’t any live music but we did enjoy chatting and our Guinnesses.

One big news item for the week is that I could have bought two Australian dollars for each one of my Euros! I can now wake up and say ‘Another day another TWO dollars!’.

Saturday, quite late we made it into town for a coffee at a cafe with “Probably Dublin’s Best Coffee” written on their awening. I’d like to review it as Probably Not. We then continued on to meet up with the last tour of the day around Trinity College, luckily we only were running five minutes late and heard nearly all of the tour around the old campus. I got the feeling that studying at Trinity was by far a more special experience than my University Days. This week Trinity was rated as number 49th best university and I was pleased to see my UNSW ranked number 45!.

Trinity was founded in 1592. Famous attendees are e Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde. I guess the main thing that makes old traditional universities so interesting are the traditions. Not walking under the bell so not to be cursed with badluck and stuck at university forever. Eating commons, a meal that is given free to Scholars and Fellows. Being able to marry in the campus church soon after graduation. Grades being called out from best to worst in the exams hall. Lawns that only certain people can walk on. It’s very interesting and the architecture of the old buildings is worthwhile too.

The tour left us at the entrance to see the “Book of Kells”. I think we all were impressed with how old the book is and he delicate artwork on each shown page. I’m particularly interested in book making and preservation.

Jan and I absolutely loved the Long Room above the exhibition which is 65 metres in length and has a barrel style wooden roof. There are two floors of book cases, each labeled and ladders to get to the small books at the top. The largest books are stored at the bottom creating a wonderful effect. Throughout the room there are books open on display with delicate drawings of plants from around Ireland. There are marble busts including one of Jonathan Swift.
One display is the oldest surviving harp, constructed from oak and willow. Another great display was the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic and we took the time to read it. I felt the wording was pretty cool, it tells the story and I bought the postcard for my album.

We took a little time to go through the tourist oriented shops inside and out of trinity. I ended up buying a little book to carry with me to make notes of my travels. Sometimes I feel inspired by something or want to read up more later then completely forget. We also bought some buttlers chocolates to share (by cutting into four) when we got home.

We had a good night in. We ate roast chicken and veges by candlelight at the dinner table then settled into the loungeroom with apple pie. We watched ‘Hercules Returns’ an Australian classic comedy that has finally been released on DVD. and then a very on topic movie “Michael Collins” which was about the 1916 uprising and the events that followed here in Ireland.

Sunday we drove down to Dun Laoghaire and had brunch at Harry’s cafe. Another very late start and thank goodness for all day breakfast menus. We also enjoyed a walk around the town and along the seaside a bit. I wasn’t very impressed with Dun Laoghaire, I thought we”d be eating out under umbrellas watching pretty boats go by. But this doesn’t seem like the place for that.

At work I’ve been learning more about PHP, SEO, Design Patterns and computer science in general, It has been a thrill to be learning and pushed forwards again. Working for myself saw me doing things the same way too often because the problems I was presented with weren’t as challenging, original or new.

I’m very interested in how to integrate the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) best practices into the software development process so that it all just becomes a natural way of doing things. I think the most interesting thing for me has been how much material there is to read and how little it really says. I’m trying to just pull out the key points and this is more difficult than it should be. Hopefully it will be rewarding though, and that all the work I’m doing will make some change in how we all do our work. Ofcourse SEO is generally rewarding because as the “right way” of doing things are implemented the site will do better in the search engines because they look better to robots AND as a side effect they’ll be easier for humans to use them too.

With design patterns the funniest thing was finding I have used quite a few of them but didn’t know there was a name for designing code in that way. I’m happy to learn more about them now, learn them off by heart and probably even remember the titles for them. I enjoyed this article about the Strategy and Factory patterns.

I’ve been reading Ivo Jansch’s “Guide to Enterprise PHP Development” and I attended an IBuildings lecture a few weeks ago(IBuildings is a pretty cool company huh?). Anyway I’m very interested in the part about training employees to be more efficient in the same way you’d optiimse and fine tune a server that wasn’t running at it’s best. On this note I’m doing research into training, certification, conferences and tools for making myself more efficient at work. I’ll be studying for my MySQL Developer Certification soon and I can’t wait to learn anything new I can about that either.

As part of learning more about Enterprise PHP I’ve done some investigation into frameworks. I’ve always liked the idea of creating my own set of tools to share among all my code. I plan to read more about Zend and PEAR over the coming months and hopefully use them too. The main tool I’ve been working to improve is my editor, and to hopefully use an IDE - I’m interested in this because currently I use Notepad++ on windows. For the last week or so I’ve been struggling to work with Zend Studio with no success, I think mostly because of the large amount of code I’m trying to introduce to it. I’m not sure what advantage I’d have with Zend Studio over Notepad++, I believe my next step will be to try eclipse with PDT.

In conclusion I hope to improve the way I do things and learn as much more as I can over the coming months to be a better developer in the future. I also hope I can document my thoughts as I go to help other people along the way as well.

The start of October marked our third wedding anniversary. We decided to celebrate the night before it, October 1st, at home. Strangely three years was an important milestone for us because we’d decided it was the amount of time where we’d break even for all the expense and effort of the wedding itself, also we’d said that three years is a pretty decent time to have stayed happily married to start with so YAY us. Jan cooked ginger chicken with pineapple and rice and I brought home some sticky date pudding and bourbon custard. We ate at the dining table by candle light, Jan had decorated with roses and bought us a box of chocolates as well. It was a nice night in.

October 2nd we went along to our Linux User Group at the Long Stone. Again we got to meet some new people and chat about what’s been going on in the open source world.

Work has been good and I hope to get my thoughts about what I’m doing there clearer and write a post about it soon.

Yesterday October 4th I went to Lainey’s Scrapbooking Class at Donnycarney we created another layout in a vintage theme. Ideally I’ll put some photo of my grandparents on there. Late that night we called our parents to catch up and talk about the month gone by.

Today I would love to organise my scrap booking projects. I have been feeling mad recently about my inibility to do anything towards my goals to do with hobbies. My little office at home is abandoned and I spend any free time I have sleeping or lazing about watching TV. This needs to change.

Facebook has announced that it will open it’s international headquarters in Dublin. I wonder what this means for me as a web developer.

I’m hoping it means they hire a bunch of PHP developers and the Irish PHP User Group Flourishes. Hopefully with more large companies around that use PHP we’ll have a great community to help build our own skills and contacts. I can’t wait to go along to some technical event held by Facebook!

I have been finding Facebook less important to me than I initially thought it would be. However I read that Facebooks traffic is up 50% over the last year on Search Engine Watch. I was an early adopter of Facebook and I was excited. Now I feel the need for something much better to come along something more relavent to me and my life.

Will Facebook the website become more relavent to me now that it has a headquarters in Europe? In thinking about their announcement I assessed how I use Facebook lately. I open the website in the morning and at night, and after pressing ignore on all the applications and strange things people invite me to I then flick to my Friends section where I read what people have been up to. Once a week or so I check out the feeds to see other peoples comments and photos and such. I wish I didn’t have to go to Facebook for this, I wish it was more integrated into my life, part of my igoogle desktop or something like that (ofcourse facebook can provide these services).

On that note I think I’ve been becoming happy about the Tech community here in Dublin. With the Irish PHP User Group, Irish Linux User Group, Open Coffee, Geek Girl Dinners, Ruby User Group and work events, Ireland has felt more like the Technical Capital of Europe I imagned before I arrived.

Finally I will do some more investigation on how Facebook works, how PHP is involved and the chances of PHP developer community growing in Ireland.

What does Facebook opening their International headquarters in Dublin mean to you?

Monday 22nd September - Because I was home alone for a few nights I stocked up on food at Marks and Spenser, a fancy supermarket on my way home from work. My favourite meal was a seafood lasagna filled with prawns and goodies that Jan wouldn’t eat.

Wednesday 24th - Jan came home and we met in the city for the PHP User Group. I like catching up once a month with my new PHP Enthusiast friends.

Saturday 27th - After the company day out I spent the weekend exhausted at home, we tried to sort out some goals for the coming year, some ideas for where we’d like to travel, New York, Washington, Prague, Budapest, Milan, Canary Islands for Guadec.

Monday September 29th - After some winter clothing shopping we met Luis at The Wool Shed Australian Bar on Parnell Street for a stand up comedy night. We had a large delicious meal from a menu that offered hilarious items such as ‘The soup of G’day’, G’an Get stuffed potatoes, BLT (Bloody Lovely Tucker) and A Bloody Good Steak. The comedy show was such good value, for five euros there were three acts and the MC. The MC was Damo Clark from Perth, the first act was someone Jan had seen in Edinburgh, Dean Scurry, unfortunately he told many of the same jokes, though I loved his take on job interview questions. Eleanor Tieman was next who made audience members do impromptu acting. We left a little early to get our train home.

On Friday September 26th we had our company day out. We met at the office 9am like usual then filed onto buses and were driven out side of Dublin to Kildare and Carton House, a luxury hotel and golf club.

“the beautifully elegant Palladian house is set in over a thousand acres of stunning parkland, and has attracted a long list of glamorous guests from Queen Victoria to Grace Kelly.” - Carton House Website.

We were teased with temptations of a day of golf, spa treatments and relaxation however we all knew we were there to do team building exercises.

Dressed in tracksuits we were split into teams. I was on the red team and our first activity was laser Clay pigeon shooting. We took turns aiming heavy rifles at the sky to hit the clay targets, there were different games during the rounds including speed, and hitting the most times, . I was pretty hopeless at it, I’d like to try again though, to get more practice.

The second activity was four wheel off road driving. Pete drove first and took us through some mud tracks across ridges and down into large water filled dips. It turned out we all had to have a go, and this was my first time driving a car since I was a teenager doing lessons. What a blast. I didn’t change gears on my own but I kept the car at the right speed and was good at the maneuvers to get us through.

The third activity was all set on ropes and wires. We had to get our team across rope bridges as quick as possible, we piled onto a platform and had to use a flying fox to get everyone to the other side across a gap. Finally we had to get everyone through a set of holes in a rope ’spiders web’.

We were glad for a break at lunch time where we caught up with the other teams over soup and sandwiches. The team activities were pretty good at mixing team work with meeting people we hardly get to see during our work days.

The fourth activity was puzzles, giant wooden peices to be put into a cube or positioned to solvethe towers of Hanoi. A ball puzzle where we were blind folded holding ropes to balance the board while one team member guided the rest to get the ball free. And more.

The fifth activity was Jacobs Ladder. This was wire hung logs that got further and further apart. The goal was to get four members of our team as high as possible. To get up we had to work together, help climb and pull each other up towards the top. The guys that went first from our group got to the top and Catriona and Noellia climbed up even further and stood on the top rung with nothing above them. My team got about four rungs up and then ran out of time and abseiled down. Another awesome experience.

The sixth activity and final challenge for our team was Blind Driving. My second attempt at driving as an adult, this time blind folded. The team sitting in the backseat had to give the blind driver instructions to weave in and out of bamboo stick goals on a field.

All the groups gathered together for the final activity, the Leap of Faith. One person from each team would climb up a wooden poll, stand on the top, shout down instructions about how far they thought they could jump and grab onto a trapeze. About ten people went up and took the leap including the CEO who made a speech at the top then lept to grab on successfully.

After this there was a brief award ceremony and some prizes given out for best shooter, best climber, best at adventuring and many booby prizes. We then shared some champagne from the winnings and slowly made our way up for hot showers and we all got snazzed up for the night out.

After a drink in the golf club bar we hopped back on the bus and everyone was EXHAUSTED. Conversation was pretty quiet as we made our way back into Dublin and to the restaurant Ely. We had plenty more to drink and watched the videos of our day out. A group of us after the bar closed headed to ‘Howl of the Moon’ nightclub for some more drinks, dancing and fun. When the nightclub closed I had a very chatty taxi ride home.