dublin skies

When I was coming to Dublin I was "warned" to no end by friends and acquaintances about the "terrible weather" that was expecting me in Ireland in general and in Dublin in particular. "Awful weather" they'd say. "It rains all the time" they'd say. "It's always cloudy" they'd say. When I got here, I was warned again by both Irish and non-Irish alike.

Well, I, for one, like rain a lot. I like the cold too. I like sunny days. And hot summer days. In fact, I like equally both rainy and sunny days precisely because their opposite exists. Variability lets us appreciate what's good (and bad) about the alternatives. Without changes, there would be nothing to like about, say, sunny days. And actually, one of the things that sometimes (only sometimes) irritated me a bit about California (and the Valley in particular) was that the weather was... well, always so damn beautiful. Clear skies and beautiful days were so common that you just stopped appreciating them (hard rain, however, when it did arrive, was just great).

Anyway, what I found after living here is that I really, really like the constant change of Dublin climate. Dublin is right smack in the middle of the Gulf Stream (which crosses the Atlantic) and weather "moves" incredibly fast: what is mostly low grassland can't slow down the currents, so it's very windy (okay, in the Winter, with the cold, I do suffer it more, but so what). I have quite literally seen the weather go from sunny (no clouds) to cloudy, to dark clouds, to rain, to hail, on to snow (!), then back to cloudy, then no clouds again---all in the space of twenty minutes! Isn't that great? (This was in February last year, btw).

And, constantly shifting cloud-cover makes for absolutely astonishing sunrises and sunsets. Like the image above (click on it to see a full-size version).

I took that picture last saturday at dusk, from my balcony, and I tell you: If the price for having sunsets like that every other day is sometimes-unpredictable-and-maybe-irritating weather, let me say: I pay it gladly.

microsoft-motorola announcement coming up

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Microsoft and Motorola are set to announce their partnership tomorrow:

[T]he partnership also highlights the challenges Microsoft faces in that quest as its new partner loses market share amid stiff competition in the mobile-phone business.

The companies expect to announce that Motorola will begin building phones that run on Microsoft's Mobile Windows software, according to executives at the companies. The phone, a "clamshell" style unit, will be the first phone sold in the U.S. that runs the Microsoft software.

AT&T Wireless Services Inc. plans to offer the unit to its subscribers beginning later this year, according to an executive at the mobile operator.

[...]

With Motorola as a partner, Microsoft now has support from the world's second-largest handset maker, behind market leader Nokia Corp. of Finland. To date, Microsoft has relied heavily on HTC Corp. of Taiwan to manufacture its phones, which are mostly sold in Europe.

Before Motorola, the only other major handset maker to announce support for MS's Smartphone has been Samsung. Samsung, however, has pushed back the release of their MS-powered phone repeatedly (according to them, due to technical problems). I wonder if Motorola is going to run into the same problems--probably not, since the MS mobile phone software has gotten relatively decent. As the article notes, apparently the announcement will include AT&T Wireless as a carrier, but Orange had also been rumored to be ready to deploy Motorola-MS phones.

We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if Motorola's phone will feature any of the good stuff we've gotten used to with Symbian (such as Bluetooth). Based on the picture above, it seems that at least it will have a built-in camera with what I expect will be support for Windows Media and such. Various news sites are reporting, however, that it doesn't have Bluetooth, Java, or a camera. Strange.