This is a personal blog for friends and family. It will contain little or nothing about airlines or travel technology. Instead this blog is about personal news, events and photos. Probably very boring. Not even my Mother reads it! Return to Mark Lenahan's webpage
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Restaurants in Rio
This holiday I've mostly been sleeping, running and eating! So far we've been to the following great restaurants (I won't bother mentioning the not so great ones):
Academia da Cachaça Greatly expanded in size, still a great informal Brazilian "tapas" style cafe. Best Caipirinhas in town.
Giuseppe Grill Great beef and seafood restaurant. A bit pricey by Brazilian standards.
Restaurante Giuseppe Same owners as the grill, and just around the corner, but the menu is more traditional Italian. The gnocchi is fantastic!
Mini Mok Sushi and other Japanese treats. Very small place, very tasty food. Recently changed name from "nobu" but the menu is the same. Nothing to see on their website yet.
Fellini The "kilo" across the road, probably the best restaurant of this type in Rio! You select from a large buffet and pay by the weight. (WARNING: terrible website)
I think next we'll have to try some of Mindy's recommendations:
Siri Mole (I hope the food is better than the website.)
In other news: I've been keeping up with the running, I train for 3 days and then take a day off, yesterday I managed 22.5km, but I was fairly slow given the heat! If it gets too hot I have the option of paying R$40 for the gym across the road, but I've only had to do that once.
Yesterday was a great day to start our holidays. Bright and sunny all day but without being too hot (never got above 25 degrees). We got into the apartment around 8am. I unpacked and slept for 3 hours (no sleep on the flight), then I went for a quick run around Lagoa (the lagoon) just at sunset. Finally Academia da Cachaça for my caipirinha!
The weather in Rio is not so good today unfortunately. I ran in the morning (along the beach) without getting wet but it has been raining on and off since then!
I'm writing a blog, hurrah! (On my Nokia N95 which I never bloged about before - more on that soon)
I've still got nothing to say, boo! (partly why I stopped bloging)
Anyway, we're going to Rio, currently killing 3 hours in CDG, which means we're shopping.
Check back in 24 hours, there's more to come. After we land and I decide between sleep, run or caipirinha. (unless something interesting happens before that - unlikely, or I get really bored shopping - quite likely - a review of terminal 2E dining options maybe?)
I went for a run up around Howth with the IMRA (Irish Mountain Running Association). Kevin and some of his mates came along. All of them were faster than me! It was a lot harder and more dangerous than any of us expected. I think we were all about 20% slower than we estimated at the start. Despite being fairly experienced "flat" runners we knew nothing about hills. Anyway, we'll probably do it again because it was also great fun, there's nothing quite like reaching the top of a climb or charging down a narrow mountain path.
I almost caught the brother at the end, had I known he was only a half minute ahead I might have made a better push towards the end, maybe next time...
You know you travel too much when the guy in the Cafe on Pier C knows your order...
Actually that is an exaggeration, he doesn't know me, I don't travel that much, but this month's itinerary makes it feel like it. This week Oslo, then Munich next week, then Munich again the week after, then Oslo again.
My training is going to fall further and further behind, I did an hour on Saturday and before that nothing since New Year's Eve. Got my new Asics Gel Kayanos for 2008, hopefully that will motivate me. They are up to number XIV, not sure if they are a bit lighter and harder than the XIIIs or if I'm imagining it. My running buddy in Oslo has sacred me with stories of snow, slush and black ice. Might not do a lot this trip, though generally it is a great city for running, especially West along the coast.
I was going to post a review of Valve's Portal, part of The Orange Box, but I'm not a good review writer so I'll link to a couple of good reviews instead:
Zero Punctuation (Yahtzee's usually scathing weekly video reviews)
All I'll say is I played it all day in one go (it isn't very long) and I was comepletely blown away, the most fun I've ever had in a game. I'd like to try and explain that to non-game players, if you are a gamer and haven't played it yet please don't read this blog, it really will spoil the surprise... (also, what the hell are you waiting for? Buy and download Portal from Steam!)
Portal is not a simple 3D puzzle game as it is billed, and how it starts, but something far more sinister. The puzzles are really a test being performed on you in some kind of millitary weapons reasearch test centre and failure is fatal. The game gradually tansitions from a linear set of 18 puzzles into to creepy sci-fi survival horror, with a large dose of black comedy. From the start you are instructed by a recorded female voice (you later learn this is not a recording but an A.I. monitoring your progress called "GlaDOS"), then as the levels progress you start to see evidence that the test centre, and the A.I., are not well maintained: broken equipment, dirt, gaps in walls. A real eye opener is when you actually find some loose blocks and you can step outside the test area into a small area of dirty scafolding, locked metal doors, empty paint pots and coffee cups, a transistor radio (left on by fleeing workers?) and some disturbing graffitti. By the time you get to the last test you are seeking ways to escape! Sure enough GlaDOS's promises of cake and a big party on completion of the tests turn out to be lies, and "she" tries to kill you!
What follows is probably some of the best one-sided, passive-agressive, psychotic, black comedy dialogs I have ever heard. Never has a game given me goosebumps, creeped me out and made me laugh out loud at the same time. While you try to escape through a massive, dark, industrial, and dangerous "back stage" maze of pipes, wires, scafolding, machines, and deserted offices, GlaDOS is monitoring your moves, taunting you with bad advice, trying (hilariously) to persuade you to kill yourself. GlaDOS's constant chatter is both disturbing and hilarious, at one point she says "what you are doing is wrong, unlike you, I can feel pain". She also claims, "if you were a good person you wouldn't be here" (having weapons testing on you?). It is all rather like the scene in 2001 a Space Odesy where HAL9000 tries to persuade the very mute Dave not to switch him off. Finally when you defeat GlaDOS, you escape the testing centre, and the game ends.
Then you hear that song, by now the most famous video game music ever, for the end credits.
The song was so good I watched the end credits in rapt awe and want back to the last save point before I defeated GlaDOS, and fought through, just so I could listen to the song one more time.
"Still Alive" was written by Jonathan Coulton a "nerk folk" singer of growing repute, and sung in the game by voice actress Ellen McLain who is the voice of GlaDOS throughout the game. So bear in mind the song is sung from the villian's point of view. Now that you know the context, I encourage you to listen to the words carefully. This is GlaDOS, announcing she is "Still Alive", psychotic as ever and not even slightly penitent about her actions! It is equally creepy and funny, while on one hand you deplore her machivellian attitude ("for the people who are still alive"?!) on the other hand you can't help but feel some empathy for an obviously lonely, isolated and essentially empathy-free intelligence.
If you liked that, you can find a bit more of the story of the song and how it came about in this interview with Jonathon Coulton in CVG. You should also check out his webpage, I particularly like the song Code Monkey, which you can listen to here, probably the saddest and funniest song of unrequited nerd love ever sung.
Not long left in my holiday, I'll be leaving on Sunday night and back in work next Tuesday!
I made the mistake of bringing work with me, about 5 days worth (or so I thought). This worked out well before, it is a nice place to work, but this time the nature of the work didn't really suit taking it off site. I spent longer than expected trying to access systems, sending emails, on calls, finding docs, reading bugs, etc. Anyway, it is almost done now, I'll have my last few days not thinking about work.
Not too hot today, maybe 22 degrees. Just had a walk along the beach. Now I'm having a late lunch in a a place called Botequim right in the middle of Leblon. The menu is quite like Academia de Cachaca, but it is primarily a bar, so the food is not quite as good. Handy location though.
I haven't been running since the 31st. That day I did 16km in 80 minutes (very pleased with that time) but the next two days I was laid up with a rotten head cold. Still sniffling a bit. So escaping Irish winter didn't mean I escaped the cold!
I made a photo album of today's walk around Jardim Botanico. Some of these pics are pretty similar to ones I took some years ago, but it is a much better camera this time!
I'd file this one under "not really news". So there was a CIA man in London in 1955 receiving communications from the Irish government. What about the dozens of operatives actually in the country at that time?
Not really, I'm just kidding, but it reminding me of something...
I'm not sure if it was an urban myth or not, but I've heard plenty of stories about "the local CIA man" down the years, normally in the pub. The way "the local CIA man" character is described is as follows:-
Doesn't do a normal day job, or has some minor job that couldn't fill a person's time
Collects news paper clippings and fliers and posters about local or national events, societies, meetings, etc.
Sends said clippings to a post office box in Dublin or London every couple of weeks
Goes to meet some guy in Dublin once a year
Receives a cheque in the post every month
Goes to the pub (often "this very pub") for a knees up when the cheque arrives
Can't be bothered keeping the whole thing a secret but if you are a Garda or someone like that he'll deny it
I guess the appeal of this mythological character is that he (always male) is so plausible. If I wanted to keep tabs on every possible political or cultural movement in the world prior to the Internet and a global PSTN, and I had organisation skills and budget though finite man-power, and it was common knowledge I was doing it anyway, this is exactly how I would go about it. I could have a couple of dozen such characters in each country and of course they themselves would have no way of knowing who they really worked for. Working for the CIA would be politically acceptable in Ireland at the time, and the best cover for a "handler" of any kind to use, but telling them they worked for the Kremlin or MI5 or the Mossad would not have gone down so well.
The story has several appealing elements - "the lazy bum gets lucky", "sticking it to the man", etc. also it might be taken as a comment on one paticular Irish notion of secrecy, namely that secrets should be between the locals and the authorities, not between locals themselves, the "us and them" mentality. Also the core plausability and it's stark contrast with 007 movies would add to the entertainment value.
Usually though the main purpose of recounting this myth is as a lead in to the "Murphy the Spy" joke. I'll have to tell you that one in person...
The problem is that many years ago I had a wishlist on Amazon.com.
I can no longer access or delete that old list because the email address the Amazon account is based on is long gone (it was my old @iol.ie one). The list is many years out of date, I have a lot of the stuff already and some of it is not even for sale any more. I can't get the old iol.ie address back, so I can't get the Amazon account back. If anyone searches my name in Amazon they see the old list first! Any suggestions?
Step 1: Any former VTI, Eland, SITA crew in the Dublin area are going to gather in Porter House on Thursday 20th of December (2 weeks from now).
Step 2: Once gathered together they will probably drink beer (or bicardi and coke).
Step 4: World Domination! (Or maybe not, it depends if anyone comes up with a fool proof step 3 that doesn't involve doing anything difficult, or for that matter actually leaving the pub..., otherwise better just stick with step 2)
I'm not sure why I'm bothering writing about this because I won't actually be there myself. Myself and Andrea have a prior engagement!
Gary K (gk_hackflag) is probably doing something similar the very next night, don't know the venue though.
Daniel Carey of Mayo news interviewed me about my marathon experience and it came out today. I'm famous now! The interview came out very well, pretty much exactly what I said and it has a good word to say about Mum & Dad, Paula and Kevin and provides URL of our web site and the donation page, which is great.
I'm slightly embarrassed though, I understood that I would be one of multiple runners interviewed rather than having the spotlight on myself. With 11,000 entrants I think there were many runners from Mayo probably more well known and certainly faster than me. Anyway, no real cause for complaint.
I just noticed, the results page is back online, and a few quick queries (search by category) yielded some interesting facts:-
F70 - Five women over the age of seventy finished, three of them under 5 hours
M80 - Three men over the age of eighty finished
M75 - Two men over the age of seventy five finished in under 3 hours and 30 minutes
F60,F65,F70 - 58 women over sixty finished, one of them, Hilary Webber from the UK, beating me by 7 minutes
I actually admire those runners more than the elites who regularly beat 2 hours 30 minutes, whom I never even get to see. I don't really care about going any faster, but I'd love to still be running in 30 years time.
