My wife wanted to see Ireland in June. I grumbled, "But summer is the most popular time of the year to go there." I prefer to see a place during the off season. Besides, it's always raining and cold in Ireland. Our weather book predicted 16 days of rain in the month and an average high of 63 degrees F. Why not visit Turkey, Belize or Italy? But she insisted.
Good thing I know to listen to my spouse. We traveled to Dublin during the worst drought in five decades. There was no significant rain for three weeks prior to our arrival and only one day during our ten days driving the Emerald Isle had any precipitation. Rivers slowed to a trickle. The situation got so severe that we heard on the TV that over 100,000 fish died in the Thames.
We rented a car and left the capital the second day. We enjoy finding the small towns and the narrow roads in the countryside and it took us three days to get to the southwest corner of the island. We were having dinner in Killarney, watching the sun set on the longest day of the year, when we heard a gentleman lecturing a woman and boy at a nearby table.
?Hurry up and order.? ?Why the rush?? the woman asked. ?We have to make the ferry at 2 a.m.? ?But, Dad, we just got here!? The man took a breath and replied, ?Look, we've got to get to London tomorrow.?
I looked at my wife and raised my eyebrows. ?I've got to hear about this,? I whispered. I leaned over to the other table and said, ?Excuse me, I overheard you say that you're catching a ferry. When did you arrive??
The fellow explained that they had arrived that morning, had driven across Ireland and now had to get back to England as quickly as possible so that they could rejoin friends and continue on to France. ?We just had to see the west side of Ireland.?
I accepted his explanation and left the group to their rushed meal. Ireland in a day. It might be possible, but I certainly wouldn't want to spend nine hours making two crossings of the country ? in the same day.
Every trip has at least one pinnacle moment, the point that defines the rest of the trip. We can look back at that moment and realize, ?Yes, that's when I realized that this was a truly unusual time.? It helped to have an ?anti-matter? opposite so close to us. Surely the universe would explode if we shook hands with our cosmic opposites. Instead of rushing through Ireland, we covered fifty miles in eight hours of wandering between B and Bs.
Indeed, my wife had selected the perfect time to go. We had expected chilly nights (an average of 48 degrees), crowds and rain. The drought kept away most tourists and we Floridians endured a delightful ?heat wave? (the asphalt in some towns turned to liquid because there had been a week of consecutive days reaching 88 degrees Fahrenheit). The locals who met us complained that we had brought our weather with us, along with the OJ Simpson trial, which dominated the Irish television news.
The day we left Ireland, the sky turned grey over Dublin and we learned that the rivers started running again. I might have wanted to visit the rainforest, I might have been in the mood for a Caribbean cruise. But I wouldn't trade that unfortunate time linked with memories. After all, not much harm was done. The fishing tourism season resumed and the strange ?Floridian? weather pattern ended. It was as if the island had warmed up to make us feel at home.
Steve McCrea (an English teacher)
I went to bed last night at 2am because my anti virus software started to scan my system and since this takes up a lot of resources I figured that when I woke up the next day that everything would be done. Boy, was I wrong. I've been using computers for a very long time, a lot of years. I do Spyware scans, Adware scans and virus scans every day because I am running Windows as my main operating system. I need to seriously think about getting a Mac instead.
Every day now this maintenance routine takes longer to complete. I don't have some enormous hard drive, I only have about 160 gigs total but 40 gigs are free and 20 gig is for another operating system so in reality I only have to scan maybe 100 gigs. I saw a 1,000 gig hard drive at the computer store and I have given some serious though to getting one but if it takes almost an entire day to scan 100 gig just think how long it would take if I had a 1,000 gig hard drive.
I have a lot of Windows programs installed on my machine but most of them are also available in a Macintosh version. I could get one of those new Mini Mac's and still have part of the drive running Windows. I would have the bigger part of the drive running Mac OS though. The only reason I don't switch everything over to Linux is because the GUI runs a lot slower than Windows does. But in reality Windows was Bill Gates stolen Mac OS. Mac OS was the first of its kind, an operating system with a GUI that ran a lot easier than doing everything at command line like Do and Unix.
Some Day in the near future all applications will be web based not just things like word processor, spreadsheets and desktop publishing b ut hopefully things like Dreamweaver. When this happens in the near future then whether you are using Windows or Mac OS everything will run. Switching over will almost be completely painless.. I foresee this happening by the year 2010 but to have to go through another 3 years of scanning daily for Spyware, Adware, viruses and trojans is something I cannot grasp.
Macintosh still has some of the same threats that windows has but on a much lighter scale. For every 120 Windows threats the Mac maybe has 1. The Mac has always handled memory a lot better than PC's and the Mac is the preferred system for anybody that works in design using graphics. PDF documents will run on Windows and Mac's. Without web based word processors then you would need to take all your doc files and convert them to a Mac format but now with Web applications I don't think this will be a heavy concern.
Using a computer is something that most people do just a couple hours a day at most but no more since it takes so damn long for my computer to check for viruses. It used to take maybe an hour or two at most but it never has ever taken 20 hours before. Hell, I could have major surgery done in a lot less time then it takes my computer nowadays to check for viruses. When you compound this with having to check for Adware, Spyware, and trojans we are talking about a major time investment if you are using a computer that has Windows on it.
Both Jake Solochek & Jeffrey A Solochek are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.