Thomil's Random Ramblings

It’s strange. You can live in a certain place for years and years, possibly your entire life, and yet there will still be locations in that particular place that you’ve never set foot in, due to a variety of possible reasons. There are still quite a few places like that for me in Cork, from the Lough to generally a lot of locations on the South Side of the city. One of the biggest such omissions in my almost ten years in the rebel city has always been Marina Park. Stretching along a kilometre of the River Lee’s southern banks between the South Docks and Blackrock, the area always fascinated me, yet I somehow never managed to get there. Well, on January 3rd, 2022, that finally changed. After a thoroughly wet and windy Christmas and New Year’s here in Ireland, I had enough of being stuck in my place and decided to head and take advantage of both the good weather and the recently refurbished TFI Bikes. History But before I go into details about my exploits, what actually is Marina Park? W...

  And just like that it’s over, We tend to our wounded; we mourn our dead. People left and right wonder if this really means freedom (Not yet?) Apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda for bastardising Hamilton there. However, I feel as if this quote best sums up the developments over the last 48 hours here in Ireland. In a sweeping announcement on Friday, January 21st, 2022, Micheal Martin announced that the vast majority of COVID-19 related restrictions would be lifted effective 6 AM on the following day, January 22nd. Just as quickly as they had been introduced, social distancing guidelines, restricted opening times for pubs and restaurants, or the work-from-home mandate were relegated to the recycling bin. While mask mandates remain in place for the time being, they are due to be revisited at the end of February and are likely to fall by the wayside then. This is all brilliant news, but for some reason, I can’t really get myself to celebrate this. Two years after the world turned upside...

Yep, a water bottle. That’s what it’s gotten to with this blog. *sigh*  Anyway, snarky opening lines aside, I can totally understand that the concept of a “smart” water bottle might at first glance seem to be peak tech bullshittery. Once you take a closer look at the idea however, it makes a surprising amount of sense, leaving the tech bullshit field to cryptocurrencies and NFTs. I work in an office job that is hardly physically taxing, yet I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve forgotten to drink water because I was too engrossed in my work, often to the point of dizziness and headaches. I know from conversations with colleagues that I’m far from alone in that regard. I did try setting up regular reminders but they just don’t cut it for me. Now while I had noticed the Hidrate Spark before while browsing through the websites of several large online retailers, The price had always put me off. These things are expensive! To be honest, if it hadn’t been for my company’s regular C...

Well, 2022 is starting off with a Bang, that’s for sure. By now, the reports and images about the cataclysmic explosion of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in Tonga have spread around the world. Tsunamis have devastated the coastal regions of nearby islands, with the island of Atata near Tonga having apparently been completely flooded. The explosion was heard as far away as New Zealand and even Alaska, while the ash cloud produced by the eruption reached well into the stratosphere, topping out at 20 kilometers and being clearly visible on satellite images and recordings, even at the lowest magnification settings. Radar imagery taken by Earth observation satellites meanwhile shows that the volcanic cone built up by the mostly underwater volcano in recent years and that had linked the islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha’apai has simply ceased to be. Not a trace of it remains above water, while the two islands themselves have been greatly reduced in size. This sequence, captured by N...

This is really turning into a Cork-only blog over the recent weeks. Today is yet another article dealing with the city on Leeside, although for a change, it is not Cork City Council that will be the object of my scorn. That is directed at the wonderful gentlemen in Cork County Hall, the formerly highest building in the country. High is an apt term as the county council must have been high as fuck when they came up with their latest get-rich-quick scheme. But before I write myself into a rage yet again, I think a bit of backstory is in order. Back in 2019, Cork city expanded its boundaries following a years-long battle with the County in a much-needed expansion. This expansion had been fought tooth and nail by Cork County Council, who had spent much of the preceding decades building up an iron noose of business parks and shopping centres around the city in an attempt to syphon off rates from the city. Naturally, county councillors did not want to give up this source of income and instea...

You know, I haven’t done one of those off-the-cuff blog posts in a while, you know, ones where I just write what I think without delusions of grandeur or pseudo-profound insights. So I figured why not make this post one of them? That’s why I originally started blogging all those many years ago anyway. If there’s one thing that I’ve noticed over the ten years that I’ve run both this blog and my German blog, it’s the inexorable rise of comment scammers.  I first noticed them a few years ago, after my trip to Dubai back in 2016, which is hardly surprising given that my Dubai trip report is still one of the most successful article series on my blog five years later. I’ll be the first to admit that I originally kept a few of the less obnoxious examples of these things around on my blog in order to drive up interaction and hopefully also make my blog more attractive to the Google algorithm. I’ve since taken a more hard-line approach to them, deleting them whenever I see them pop up in m...