Thomil's Random Ramblings

The year was 2013. I’d just completed my first year at Apple, the company that had hired me out of my old job and paid for my relocation from Germany to Ireland. Still flush with the feeling of having “moved to the Champions League” of customer support, I decided to treat myself to my very first Mac, an 11” MacBook Air. The original wafer-thin justification was that I’d soon start on the Mac support lines, having started my Apple career on iOS support, and having a personal Mac would make it easier to do my job, although this ploy was so transparent that even Stevie Wonder could see through it. I just wanted a Mac, and a certain constellation of employee discounts had just become available that made said MacBook dirt cheap. However, whilst I absolutely loved MacOS, or OS X as it was still known back then, I really fell in love with the MacBook Air’s form factor. It was compact, light, easy to handle, and I could take it anywhere without it taking up too much space in a bag. I ended up ...

Over the twelve years or so that I’ve lived here in Cork, I’ve written a lot about the buses on Leeside. And if you’ve been following my blog for even part of that time, you’ll know that a lot of the time, this wasn’t very complimentary. Bus services in the city leave a lot to be desired, to put it mildly, from understaffed operators to bus drivers who don’t give a toss about their jobs and city councillors that go out of their way to sabotage even the most basic improvements to the bus network. For the last six years of so, this network has been mostly the domain of 123 city buses operated by Bus Éireann, Irelands national bus operator. The mainstay of this fleet are Eclipse Urban single-decker and Eclipse Gemini double-decker buses by Northern Irish manufacturer Wrightbus, although a small fleet of 15 Mercedes Benz Citaro single decker buses have somehow also managed to make their way to Leeside. These Wrightbus Eclipse Gemini 3 are the mainstay of my local bus route, the 220. They’r...