Really and fucking truly, it was a waste of a day:

The clerk refused the medical because the doctor didn’t tick a box to specify that I didn’t need a given vaccine.

They requested from me a form that I was specifically informed on the paperwork that I didn’t need, forcing me to out and wandering Ballsbridge in search of a net cafe to download it (to the lady in Jury’s: You are a lifesaver, if I knew your name I’d name my nextborn after you).

They requested paperwork from Mariah that I had already provided from her family. Again, she wasn’t supposed to need these papers.

First, I’m angry because of the manifest lack of help from the staff. To help someone is to take responsibility for one’s actions, right? If nothing else, it was a lesson for me in the danger’s on an entrenched bureaucracy. There was a lovely family I met there who were living in a very remote part of Galway. The father was Irish and the mother French, and both of them were naturalized US citizens. Because of this their son didn’t automatically gain US citizenship (as I understand it) or a US passport, as he was born in France, and both the French and Irish American embassies had kept the family running in circles as no one at either embassy was willing to take responsibility for their actions and take the five minutes to help them.

Second, I’m sad at the siege mentality on display at the embassy. I only spoke to one American the whole time I was there and she was (seemingly) a second-level clerk. The security guards were private contractors and all of the administrative staff I met were Irish. We were kept in a portacabin that was a safe distance from the embassy, after being searched, all our electronics quarantined and escorted by a guard at all times.

I’m sure that little four year old girl the guard roared at was actually a ninja who kept coils of shigawire in her hair.

I’m going to call the embassy in a few minutes to arrange a new interview.

/rant

Do you?

You can find all of these (plus teh more!) in my Dublin set.

I’ll start by saying that - I had might craic and I really enjoyed myself.

But…I didn’t feel inspired at all. I took some photos and then tortured something out of them this morning in Photoshop. I gave rein to the uninspired feeling to see where my subconscious took me, only to find that it has a fascination with bleak, black and white, contrasted pieces.

In every photo I put online from Dublin, I find some kind of juxtoposition…

Something old, something new

Between the statue and the cranes, I see detail versus shilouette, light verus shadow, old verus new, and freedom and creativity stacked against stifling organisation. I’m inclined to pay attention to my subconscious, so I’m going to take all of those photos as a sign that the waiting is getting to me. Near to seven months of waiting and working toward a visa and now in the few days before the interview I’m at a free end with nothing much to fill my time before Thursday.

You can find the rest of the Kilmainham photos in my Flickr as always.

Go to here and grab this torrent file.

Its a full 10gb when unzipped. 86,400×42,000 resolution, in full. I threw the much, much smaller 21kx21k at my Linux desktop and it broke everything. Firefox, The Gimp, gqview, Opera and Konqueror all died on it - indeed, Konqueror took my entire X display with it. Finally I just resized it using a the mogrify command-line tool to a somewhat sane size and opened it in The Gimp:

[mark][~] # mogrify -resize 1600×1200 world.topo.bathy.200401.3x*.jpg

[mark][~] #