A goodbye to what I call a wonderful January.

In Austria the choice of radio stations was hopeless. Most people are listening to Ö3, which is one of these radio stations that plays the same 10 songs in an endless loop. When the monopoly fell and other stations came along, things started to get a tiny bit better. Krone Hit and Live do have a better variety, but more like in current hits plus older ones, not like in introducing new ones. I ended up listening to FM4, which claims to be an alternative music station, just that it isn’t. If you want to hear some alternative music, you should tune in to Ö1, but most of the time, I do not really want to listen to Didgeridoo concerts. All I want is to hear more and new bands. Something FM4 does offer. Sunny side up, which runs every Weekend from 10 to 12 is by far the best program I ever used to hear. But it isn’t always that great. FM4 also tries to play a lot of local and songs in German, in fact, 50% of there program is made up by these songs. But there aren’t that many good bands who make music using German lyrics, so you end up with a lot of cheap German Hip Hop.

At first the choice of radio stations in Ireland seem better, but after a while I realized that they are just playing slightly different songs up and down. Still over all I would consider the program over here as better. I mainly listen to Red FM and 96 FM, which are both local stations, tune into the live stream if you want. Today FM, which happens to be a Dublin channel, is not too bad either.

However, most of the time I still listen to FM4 over the live stream. Isn’t it funny how the Internet is changing trivial things like this? I hate to miss the morning show because of the time difference but the overall morning program is just great. The moderation is completely in English, and the local news report keeps me in touch with the Austrian politics.

Whiskey Butter?

Yes! And it actually tastes quite sweet.

So this is what January looks like in Austria.

With temperatures usually far below zero, the landscape is often found covered with snow. Occasionally the clouds open up for while and it all is very romantic in an strange ice cool way.

And this is what January looks like in Ireland.

Green, with temperatures around 10 degrees.

And if the clouds open up over here, you can sit with friends in a café and enjoy the wonderful Saturday afternoon.

Really, if you look at the weather in Austria, the weather report in Ireland feels wrong somehow.

But that doesn’t mean, that I don’t like it.

I found this link somewhere on the Internet.

According to this site Ireland has won the very noble “Husband of the Year Award”. And at first the scene does look very Irish, but don’t let that fool you, take a closer look at the picture.

Beer crates like that are indeed very uncommon over here in Ireland. And can you recognise the brand? Yes, it is indeed Stiegl Bier. I’ve never ever seen Stiegl Bier in Ireland, not once, and if this picture was really taken in Ireland I beg you to tell me where I can find this beer, but to be honest, I bet it was indeed taken in Austria.

And the third! I blogged about this topic before, and still believe this is a very useful feature, but I would like to add something. With November we finally moved into the apartment of our desire. - Yes I know, I promised pictures. Bits and pieces are still missing but I plan to deliver some pictures soon, promise.

Now back to the topic: Two days ago, at around 9pm the in house fire alarm started ringing. This proved, once again, to be a nice occasion to meet everybody. Apparently, it wasn’t burning, but nobody knew the code to reset the alarm either. So we waited for half an hour till the landlord came to reset the alarm. I still don’t know what triggered the alarm, maybe a malfunction, or maybe somebody burned his spaghettis?

The problem with all this is that when the fire alarm went off this morning, just before I wanted to jump under the shower, nobody was outside. It smelled like burned toast. So I decided to shave first and shower later. If fire alarms keep going off, they stop to alarm people and just get annoying. It is the same with earthquake forewarn systems, if they don’t work reliable, people will ignore them the next time. To work, these alarms need a greater tolerance and a reset button that will still work once the whole system is alarmed. It’s a new building, so maybe it is just a matter of configuration, I certainly hope so.

Since we have Internet in Ireland I started to use Skype rather heavily. And to the surprise of some of you, I absolutely love it. The reason why some will be surprised about that fact is because I never liked instant messengers. When the instant messenger boom started over 5 years ago with ICQ (I know ICQ was launched 1996, so what - nobody used it back then), the only good feature I’ve seen was that you could see who was currently online. A nice feature when you are in evening school and want to know who of your colleges were still up at 3am. Beside of that, it was useless. Every time somebody asked me: “But don’t you think it’s cool that you can write everybody a message they will see when they use the computer?”, I responded by asking if they remember for what the “Post Office Protocol 3″ was designed for. Really, if every body had already agreed on a common protocol to exchange messages, why invent a new, incompatible, one? And things got even worse when Yahoo and Microsoft launched their versions of an instant messaging software. Given, the voice chat function of the Yahoo massager was nice, of course the MSN software was offering such a function as well, but Yahoo’s voice chat was the only one that actually worked.

So why do I like Skype then? Have I changed my mind? Well, No. At first Skype may appear to look like an instant messenger from 5 years ago and offer the same useful function as ICQ, you see who is online, but can you actually send somebody an instant message? No. Yes you can use it to chat, but even if I don’t like that feature much, I must admit it is very useful. Often you just can’t talk, and chatting is a reliable way of communication. Another difference is the issue of security. Skype ciphers every communication with a 256 bit key, it’s just a nice warm feeling to know that not everybody can listen to you or read your sent files. The keyword of Skype is phone calls. Yes, they made voice chat actually work. Not only work, they quality is quite simply stunning. But we are not quite there yet. So why do I like Skype that much? The answer is simple, it helps me save money. SkypeOut lets you call people on regular phones all over the world, and that remarkably cheap. I can now call people in Austria for 1.8 cent per Minute. That is cheaper than when I would call them via landline from Austria. I used pre-call number services like Alpha Telecom before, and some of them are as cheap as 6 cent per minutes, but Skype offers much better quality for even less. And that’s why I like it.

But where is home? Our roots in Austria run very deep. Family and friends are just one reason, but there is also the flat we still keep. However, the last few times we visited it, since the day we left with the Land Rover, it didn’t really quite felt like home. Hard to say why, but with most of the entertainment equipment in Ireland and the room temperate turned down to barely over 10° Celsius it didn’t really felt quite the way we left it. But the current visit is the longest so far, the room temperature is up again, and the little TV and old Stereo system don’t seem that strange anymore it really feels like a home should, cosy, warm, familiar.

So what about our new home in Ireland? Well, it still lacks a bit of personality, but with our stuff spread all over the place, it gets there. At this point, the most important question should be, do I miss it? The flat itself, no, I’m afraid not. I do miss some of the stuff that’s there, but the place itself, not really.

So where is home? Where do I feel home? After I moved over to Ireland, my girlfriend told me that home is where I am, I couldn’t have said it better: Home is where we are. Austrians in general tend to create them self a nest for the rest of there live, and I wasn’t any different. But now I start to rethink the concept. I still want to keep a place to store the books and other possessions that can’t move along with us. But for a lot of new possessions, the importance of move ability becomes a factor.