The better part of the world has nominated the 2nd Sunday in May as Mother’s Day. But not everybody. Sweden, for example, is honouring the pacifism of there mothers on the last Sunday in May. Ireland and the United Kingdom on the fourth Sunday in Lent, today. These days it might be celebrated like a mothers day every where else, but it wasn’t about motherhood originally. During the 16th century, people returned to their mother church for a service to be held.

So there are kangaroos in Austria!

Känguru-Jagd in Kärnten (16. 3. 2006)
Neuerlich Känguru-Jagd in Kärnten (19. 3. 2006)

A late Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everybody I frogotten yesterday.

So how was? Well, this kind of set the tune:

Drink till ‘ya green!

A few impressions from the parade.

Afterwards we went to a pub to warm up a bit.

Not feeling all that great, actually I am a bit ill; I decided to go home and take a little break before the rough stuff starts. We will meet up around 8.

The weather forecast doesn’t look very promising. Yesterday the temperature suddenly dropped and it looks like it is going to stay like this for the next few days.

Tomorrow will still be very cold, with fresh to strong East to Northeast winds persisting. There will be sunny spells, but scattered showers also, especially in the East and South. Some of the showers will still be wintry, especially over higher ground, but they’ll become more isolated as the day progresses. Maximum temperatures 5 to 8 Celsius.

Which would be one of the coldest days this year so far. But you never know over here, the sun could still decide to come out and transform it to a truly wonderful day.

What ever the weather, this is the program for the days to come.

A college back home once called me “Whisky Drinker” and suggested that this was our main motivation for moving to Ireland. Well, it surely wasn’t the main reason, but it is a nice warm feeling to get good Whisky in every pub. Oh, and have I mentioned that Midleton is only 15 minutes away from Cork?

Home of the Old Midleton Distillery, where most of Jameson is coming from these days.

There is lots to hate about IKEA, the so called revenge of the Swedes. Starting with the way customers are herded through the entire hall like bulls through the streets of Pamplona. Or the way everything is designed to seduce you to buy little stuff you never were looking for in the first place. But that is not what this is all about.

In the last two months we spent quite some time looking for furniture. Yes, rented apartments over here are usually fully furnished. However, being a new apartment means that some things where still missing, and we simply didn’t wanted to wait a year till everything comes together. But back to topic, we where simply stunned by the selection of nice looking furniture for fair prices. Wardrobes and tables made of solid materials and looking like somebody thought about the design. And we happen to know that the two ultra-comfortable leather sofas in our living room cost just 1.100 Euros all together. Of course you can get solid, real good looking furniture in Austria, but it will cost you. A lot actually, as you either end up with some over-priced designer item or have to hire a carpenter to build it for you. So most of the time you will search through the big furniture multi stores and it doesn’t really matter if you go to Leiner, Lutz, Kika or IKEA. You will find pretty much the same simple, press board, ready-for-pickup-in-flat-pack furniture in all of these shops. Oh, and what is the decor of the season? I think it is pine. But for some reason there is nothing between. So what has IKEA to do with all of that?

Somebody with some inside of Swedish marketing once told me that barely anybody knows the value of furniture. It is quite simply no grocery, nothing we buy on a daily basis. That is a problem, how do you tell people you sell low priced furniture if they don’t know what well priced furniture is? So it comes that the 1 Euro Frankfurter and Coke became one of there most important marketing strategies. The food is cheap, so the furniture is cheap too. But is it? I am pretty sure it actually is. For once it is efficiently made, but even more importantly is the fact that the woman, who dragged you there in the first place, usually ends up buying some useless overpriced thingy. Which means that they don’t really need to make a lot of profit on the piece of furniture you actually came to buy, if any at all. At IKEA a simple dinning table with 4 chairs, like JOKKMOKK (what ever that means), costs just under 100 Euros. But here in Ireland you will find a variety of not only different but really great looking tables and 6 stools starting from 150 Euros. A friend of mine, who is from Austria but spent quite some time in Ireland, admitted that it is surprising how you can furnish your house with style for a budget over here. By cutting edges, IKEA is indeed a bit cheaper and I believe that the other big chains started to cut edges as well, in order to keep in competition. But by doing so they got rid of design, feel for material and variety.

Recently, Irelands first IKEA opened near Dublin and I just hope that they keep their small shops and their selection.

I want to blog about sky and the future of TV. So I do. For all my German TV watching friends, Sky is the British version of Premiere. Actually, Premiere is the German version of Sky, as it is much older, but never mind. For everybody knowing neither, it’s simply pay TV.

You can choose from a number of entertainment packages. Depending on how many you select, you pay between 20 and 90 euros a month. Then there are the usual pay per view Box Office channels that restart their program every 30 minutes. And, just like any other digital satellite receiver, Sky offers an electronic program guide.

With a few very nice features. For once, you can select programs into your personal planer and if you have Sky+ you can select them to be recorded. Thanks to a handy feature called serial link, you will no longer miss a single episode of your favourite series.

Another nice feature of the program guide is unlike any other I’ve seen so far: you can not only group by channels but search programs by A-Z. So what program do you want to watch? To make things a bit more manageable, one can groupe them by categories, so do you want to watch Top Gear?

Or how about Scrubs?

Of course there is a HD service as well. And because the box is wired to the phone or Internet, you can use it to read your emails and browse the web. Well, the later for some strange reasons only limited.

One can also play any kind of video game. From games like “Who wants to be a millionaire” to online poker. Most of them are very simple games, which you can play with the TV running in the background, but some of them are actually quite fancy.

Personally I prefer basic games, like Tom and Jerry or the classic Loony Tune Adventure.

Yes, it has a bit of an NES feel to it. But that actually suites the controls, which feel like the buttons of a remote control. Which they actually are.

So far so good, all the basic boxes are ticked. But what makes it so special then? Why do I like it so much? Where is the difference?

May I Introduce Sky Interactive. Try to imagine a normal weekday, you come home from work, put your feet on the coffee table and want to watch the newsflash. Of course there are dozens of 24 hour news channels. But that is not what you want. On CNN, for example, runs a program called Business International right now. But I am interested in a 15 minute newsflash. So I go to BBC interactive and select the News Multiscreen.

Do you want to see the headlines, the full news or a discussion about the topic of the day? Or how about sports, weather or entertainment news?

Select the topic and the stream starts.

You can even select the report within the news flush and read up some more detailed information’s. The same goes with sport as well, particularly handy during the Winter Olympics.

Oh, and it does full screen as well, in stunning quality if I might add.

You can browse through trailers of upcoming series and add them to your planer and so on. Press the green button during a trailer and you will never miss an episode. You can even access your personal planer over the Internet during lunch break, if you forgot to record something. And there is a commercial aspect as well. During a commercial you press the red button, and get additional information, play a demo level, arrange a test drive or buy online. The opportunities are endless.

Overall it feels a lot like a DVD menu system. But that is okay, most people can use a DVD player, so it is only logical to base it on this technology. My favourite interface menu is indeed the one of BBC. It looks a lot like one of these Paramount DVD’s that lists the scene selection as feature, but that only means that it’s functional and it is the content that matters.

I always said that TV, as it exists today, is doomed to die. Nobody wants hundreds of channels which play crap. And the concept of zapping makes my mind hurt. I want to see what I want when I want. I don’t have the time to wait half day long, for the two shows I actually want to watch to start. Sky in it’s current form is somewhere in the middle. Still offering the concept of channels and zapping and at the same time has one foot in the door to show you the future and what interactive TV is really about.

In Austria this day is called Faschingsdienstag, Austrians version of Carnival. A time when people disguise themselves, run through the streets and act crazy. All in good faith to expel the winter, of course.

But in Ireland this day is simply called Pancake Day. And guess what, people eat Pancakes! I looked up wikipedia to find out something interesting to tell about this day. But actually all I found out is that Pancakes are made to use up milk and eggs, which are not eaten during Lent and would otherwise spoil during this period. Oh well, hope the guys in Austria had fun, the Pancakes where nice though.