It's time to renew my car insurance; the letter advising me of this tells me I can do it online. And so I go to AA Ireland's payments page and attempt to enter my details - only to discover I can't enter my policy code as it's a 10-character string and they have, for some reason, capped the relevant input field at 9 characters. Classy.

update: ( Read more... )

Overheard on the DART: male garda stops a young, female learner driver as she is driving unaccompanied on a motorway while texting someone on her mobile phone. Says something like "I suppose you were texting the boyfriend". She says she doesn't have one, or words to that effect, and so the garda asks for her number and lets her off with a warning. ( Read more... )

Apparently one of our elected representatives is embarrassed at being arrested for driving under the influence. But it's okay; one of his fellow TDs says he had apologised profusely, and was aware that it is inappropriate to drink and drive. Well then! I'll be sure and remember that the next time I feel like putting my own life and the lives of ( Read more... )

Our current minister for transport feels that there will be sufficient traffic in Dublin in 2011 to merit banning private cars from the city centre during LUAS/Metro works. This despite the fact that petrol is now running at a rough average of €1.25 per litre, biofuel is proving to be a great way of triggering rising food prices, and oil in ( Read more... )

I drove somewhere in the order of 500 miles in the last two days, from Dublin to Cahersiveen (via Mitchelstown, if you're interested in poking at Google Maps). Some notes on the trip:

• Dublin has mountains. Kerry has Mountains. Yes, they're all under 3,600 feet tall, but in Dublin, the mountains huddle together for mutual support, while in Kerry you ( Read more... )

As previously mentioned, I've been going back through old LiveJournal posts applying the Web two-point-oh tags (and thusly building a votagulary); occasionally I stumble upon myself being sufficiently funny to make me laugh out loud, which fact I even commented on back in November 2004. Anyway, I am reposting an excerpt here from a December 2004 ( Read more... )

When you're "rollin'" with your "homie" in the shitty little car that is all you can afford because of the cost of insurance for young male drivers in this country (which cost is strongly contributed to by your behaviour in said car) and you decide to demonstrate that, despite its decrepitude, it's still a penis extension by doing one of those ( Read more... )

To the motorcyclist who dramatically swerved around my stationary, signalling-to-change-lane car yesterday before glaring over your shoulder at me: riding a motorbike gives you the ability to weave between lanes of traffic. It doesn't give you the right. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, doing so is illegalBy the same token, when a sign says "bus lane ( Read more... )

If you've ever wondered what sort of stuff the drivers on a movie crew do, you should watch the feature-length making-of documentary that comes on the Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest 2-disc DVD set. The packing of the trucks onto container ships has to be seen to be believed, never mind the fun they had driving around on Dominica...

Your tithe dollars at work