Gerard McGarry

A black and white photo of Dublin's O'Connell Street, with the Spire Of Dublin in the middle. The spire is also known as the Millennium Spike.

On the left hand side can be seen the General Post Office, or GPO which was the scene of the Easter Rising in 1916. They say you can still see bullet marks from the skirmish, although I've never looked too closely!

Slate magazine has a great slideshow about how the Spire came about and showing how it was errected.

Meet Molly Malone. Hard to miss this statue on the corner of Grafton Street and Nassau Street in Dublin, due to the fact that she's quite, ahem...well endowed. And usually surrounded by camera-toting tourists like myself.

The old gent in front was busking there, hoping to capitalize on Molly's fame, no doubt.

Anyway, Molly Malone is also known in Dublin as "The Tart with the Cart", "The Dolly with the Trolley", "The Trollop with the Scallop", "The Dish with the Fish" or "The Flirt in the Skirt". Yes, those are all references to her being a fishmonger by day and a prostitute by night.

Believe it or not, the statue was only installed in 1987, making it a fairly recent fixture. It was designed by Jeanne Rynhart.

This was just before we took out tour of the Guinness Storehouse at St James' Gate. Once you go inside though, there's a cool effect where they have video in place of the old windows. As you're waiting in line, you see the silhouettes of workers going past and olde worlde carts and horses.

I shot this walking along Nassau Street in Dublin late at night. Quite pleased with how the colours turned out after I had minimal success messing around with slow shutter speeds earlier that night.

I loved the design on these Guinness tickets, the fact that they sport some vintage Guinness adverts, and that each one is different. I don't know how many different versions are available, but considering they've got a couple of centuries worth of promo material, they shouldn't be running out of ideas anytime soon.

We took one of those tours around the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. Since Guinness is a drink I passionately avoid, the reverence with which the brand is treated can be quite bemusing. However, it's fascinating to see how the Guinness identity has been developed over the years.

Part of the lore of Guinness is the 9,000 year lease that Arthur Guinness signed for their premises at St James' Gate in Dublin. They say that he was so confident in his fledgling business that he happily signed the lease.

Such confidence! Did Guinness really foresee his business outlasting the Roman and Egyptian empires, Christianity, and most of recorded human civilisation, or was it simply standard form to make such ridiculously long leases back in the day?

The original lease was signed on 31 December 1759, and this is on display at the Guinness Storehouse at St James' Gate, pictured above.

Lisa and I took a couple of days off last week and went to Dublin. We did the shameless tourist thing and took one of those guided bus tours around the city. You may laugh, but it's a great way to get acquainted with the city and you don't wear out your feet in the first few hours.

This is a picture of St Ann's Church on Dawson Street. The point that was repeatedly hammered home on the tour was that it was the parish church of Mr Bram Stoker, who was born and raised in Dublin. It's a striking building, although what I've done here is to knock the stonework into straight black and white and slightly enhance the colours of the doors and passers-by.

This is the view of the river Gave de Pau in Lourdes from the Hotel Paradis. My favourite thing about the entire view, believe it or not, is the lettering on the Hotel Lys De Marie. Groovy...

The quality of this photo is truly terrible - it was taken as a panoramic image on my mobile phone - but it shows my parents in my father's hospital room in Lourdes.

This was taken around the 15th or 16th of April. After hearing that he'd taken ill on holiday, I got on the earliest available flight to France. I was picked up at Lourdes train station by the priest who was with their tour group, and told he had a serious tumour. Of course, my father and mother had no idea at the time, but he must have been quite shaken, because I remember how glad he was to see me.

Digging through some of these photos, this feels like the start of a short, intense period of our lives. The sudden illness, the flight to Lourdes and the subsequent battle to get him home and hospitalised.

Firefox can be customised in many ways using the about:config URL. But sometimes, you may mistakenly enter a value or you may want to reverse an entry completely.

However, if you've ever tried to delete a custom entry, you'll know there's no option labelled "delete". It's actually the "Reset" option you want to choose if you want to remove a custom entry. Here's how it's done: