More Dublin International Film Festival and less time to write about it.
Started the day with The Good German starring George Clooney. Good film.

Ended the day with As you like it another brilliant treatment of Shakespeare by director Kenneth Branagh. This may yet be my favourite film of the festival, excellent film, see it soon as you get the chance.

Other commitments meant I didn't get to see Maggie Gyllenhaal starring in Sherrybaby but I expect she will make it to our cinema screens in due course. Princess, a Danish animated film (not to be confused with Princesses a Spanish language film also showing at the festival) was unfortunately cancelled due to delays sourcing the prints but may yet be shown towards the end of the festival, although I had bought tickets to see Princess it coincided with As you like it so events may yet work out in my favour. There are so many films to see I cannot possibly see them all but I will certainly try.
Sunshine by director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) had been cancelled before the festival even began and any reappearance seems highly unlikely from what little information I have gathered.

The Dublin International Film Festival opened with Jindabyne a film starring Gabriel Byrne and the Dubliner was there in person to introduce the film and open the festival. On the way in I spotted actor Patrick Bergin waiting in the lobby and although I'd be willing to bet there were a few other notable people in the crowd but he was the only other famous face I recognised.

The festival organisers made their obligatory thanks, then an attractive blonde spokeswoman from Jameson introduced the three winners of their short film competition, the top three can be seen on the JamesonFilm website. Michael Dwyer introduced Gabriel Bryne and he gave short introduction to the film, and the difficulty of getting it made as with so many independant films, explaining how funding had been dropped on three seperate occasions before the film eventually went ahead.
The film is based on a short story by American author Raymond Carver called "so much water, so close to home". The story is a serious drama, dealing with a tragic death and the failing marriage of Stewart and Claire Kane played by Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney. Mr. Bryne noted this was their third onscreen marriage, two of which were unhappy. Laura Linney was seen unhappily married in The Squid and the Whale the Surprise Film of the festival last year and it was noted that she had been a guest at the first Dublin International Film Festival. The story moves along at a leisurely pace setting up the characters and scene with care and attention. Stewart Kane and his friends go on a fishing trip only to find a dead body floating by the river. Shocked and stunned by the discovery they are at a loss as what should be done. They decide to leave the body in the water knowing it would deteriorate rapidly in the heat if they brought it ashore, and they use fishing line to tie down the body and prevent it from drifting away. Rather than head back report their find immediately they attempt to get back to normal and continue fishing as planned. On their return to town they receive little sympathy and are surprised by the harsh reaction they receive for not reporting the dead body immediately. The situation only adds to the strain already on Stewart and Claires marriage.

The story is dramatic and serious tragedy but with enough moments of light comendy not to be too oppressive. The acting is strong and subtle, the film has already having won several acting awards. After the film Gabriel Bryne was presented with a lifetime achievement award, the first of a new series of awards called Voltas (in honour of the first Irish cinema) given out by the festival.


April films official website for Jindabyne
http://www.april.com.au/jindabyne/
Wikipedia Page for the film Jindabyne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindabyne_(film)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382765/maindetails


P.S. The quality of photographs taken by camera phones is poor enough to begin with so if any experts know how to prevent Nokia phones from down-scaling photo's before sending I would really like to disable this intentionally crippled functionality or learn of other ways to get better quality pictures out of a camera phone. If I can figure out some way to do this you can expect more pictures to go with my writings.

Climbing in Dalkey Quarry with Jack, Jenny, Luke, Colin, Ursula, and Alan.

Routes climbed: Paradise Lost, and F Route
(and an icy scramble down a corner of the quarry)

Jack was not attacked by a ravenous mountain goat but a gremlin did steal his crabs (aka carabiner).
Coly was hugged by all. Not because anyone likes him, just because his legendary blue jacket is so warm.
Luke went back and reclimbed Paradise Lost successfully completing his first outdoor lead climb.
Alan "milkbottle" got (more) sun burnt, in Ireland in February, with frost, snow, and ice, on the ground.

Luke, Colin, Ursula, went to 'casa de Alan' (as Coly put it) and enjoyed a meal of Chili con Carne.
Many laughs were had, good climbing, excellent day.

Sometimes you see things and it feels obvious they must exist only you may not have noticed them before. Dublin has plenty of live music, more than the tourist trap music of Temple bar. The trick is knowing where too look.

After several failed attempts to meet my old friend Jonathan Tennant for a pint - he running around like a mad thing trying to sort out his show for Radió na Life - we eventually decided to meet in Mayes pub on North Fredrick Street. He mentioned there would be a session, of the musical not drinking variety, but I didn't realise it would be signing only, unaccompanied by any music.

It was different and very entertaining. Singers take turns and perform old tunes people seemed to know and original tunes, including a humourous tune one about the alcohol induced misadventures of a certain Aussie Rules football player after the compromise rules match against the Gaelic football players.
Not knowing any of the songs I remained more quiet than I have ever been before in any pub, but with some of the easier tunes I made an effort sing along at the chorus as did most people. Perfoming is welcomed and encouraged but not a requirement.

Next time you are in the mood for traditional Irish music perhaps you will check out the Góilín singers club, most Friday evenings from 9 o'clock, upstairs in Mayes pub.

Installed Novell SLED on roughly twenty machines. The network had mysteriously gone down - most likely it is somehow related to the Akademy network needing to be isolated from the main network - which meant we had to abandon the original plan to get a working image and network install it to the rest of the machines. Installing from DVD wasn't too bad but since Novell default to Gnome and does not provide a clear and easy option in the installer to make KDE the default we had to leave out Gnome entirely. We did end up with several machines running the default Gnome setup and we added KDE and the necesary development tools after the fact. Hopefully users will know to click on the label "Session" and choose KDE before they login if they do not want to use the Gnome default. None of the Novell machines include KOffice and I'm sure there is other popular software we are missing. We will need to install the ice cream distributed compiler for the Akademy compile farm and various security updates so hopefully we will have a chance to install extra software then too.

After that we started on bag packing. Each person attending Akademy should receive a black fabric bags with the KDE logo emblazed on it. We have odd numbers of things so not everyone will get exactly the same things but I hope we can count on people to share and make sure the valuable equipment like universal power adapters get shared with those who most need them.
we should have more than enough copies of Linux Magazine #69 (DVD not included) for everyone.
Other bits and peices in the pack were Helix stickers, a map of Dublin, and various bits of advertising including fliers from Trolltech extolling the virtues of QT 4.1 although it has already been superceded QT 4.2. If any developers are actually reading this I do hope they will upgrade to QT 4.2 as soon as possible and take advantage of QDialogButtonBox and take advantage of the potential to better integrate QT applications with other enviroments.

Not much more to say for now, plenty more organising left to do for Akademy and I look forward to meeting lots of KDE developers from Friday onwards.

Great big power cut a few minutes ago, took down the computers and apparently the shoplights on Grafton street all went off too.