Gerard McGarry

A picture from the inside of Mussenden Temple in Londonderry, looking out over Downhill Beach from the window. The silhouettes are my daughter and a little friend who wandered into the shot. I just love the way they're both looking outward over the coast.

A few months back, we took a trip to a fair at Downhill Estate. I've been waiting for years to get a chance to see Mussenden Temple, a small round building that overlooks the ocean.

The temple is a part of the estate, and features prominently in any tourist literature to do with Northern Ireland. And so it should. The setting is breathtaking - right on the cliff edge - and the sight of the coast stretching out for miles. Well, let's just say it was worth the wait.

On the day we visited, the Temple itself was open to visitors, but sadly completely empty inside. All that remains are bare bricks and what I assume to be the stumps of columns that must have been inside. According to what I've read, the building was designed as a summer library - can you imagine having a place like that, in such a dramatic location to sit with your feet up and read books all day?

I wonder where I can get one of my own...?

Another angle on the entrance to Portumna Castle.

A front-facing shot of Portumna Castle. From the informational DVD on display at the castle, the outer walls of the castle would have been painted white and the cornerstones painted a dark, possibly black colour.

Although the entire downstairs is now completely open-plan thanks to changes made by a devastating fire in 1826, it once would have been panelled all the way down, creating a hallway with two large rooms to either side. A staircase at the bottom of the entrance hall would have led to the upper floors.

I love the elegant steps leading up to the front doors of the castle, and the view of the formal garden from the doorway is beautiful.

The boys and I have just come back from a short trip to Galway. On the second day we stopped off at Portumna, a quite little town that Lisa and I discovered on a Shannon cruise about 9 years ago.

Portumna Castle was built around 1618 by the de Burgo family and provided quite nice lodgings for them until in burned to the ground some 200 years later. No word as to whether the fire of 1826 was started accidentally or otherwise, but it left the house devastated and roofless.

Something that's rarely mentioned is that a new castle was commissioned and built. Funny that the replacement castle also burned down and was completely removed - "the stone from the ruin was used to build the Catholic Church in the town square in 1958."

Anyway, I was keen to see how the efforts to reconstruct the castle had come along since Lisa and I wandered into Portumna almost a decade ago. I'm not sure how the restoration project is funded, but it hadn't changed much.

I discovered some forgotten photos on my camera yesterday, including this one of a kiwi fruit I carved to have a face.

It was a bit of an experiment in fruit carving done back in May and supposed to look like Lisa's younger brother. He was really amused. Not. But it is quite a good likeness...

How does an Atheist deal with death? Two things have made me think about death and Atheism lately: a reading of Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion and the news that my father has terminal cancer.

Personally, I don't think my approach to death has ever been challenged by the death of a close relative. I've only attended a handful of funerals since my grandmother (on the McGarry side) died back in 1985. Of course, back then I was a fully subscribed Catholic, but I can only vaguely recall her decline and death. I might tell that story someday.

But for almost half my life now, I've been subscribed to an Atheist worldview. In later years, I've mixed in a little Buddhist philosophy with this: Buddhists don't shy away from the process of ageing and death, they accept it and embrace it. I read a few years back that some Buddhist monks meditate on skulls as a reminder that life is finite. Why pretend otherwise?

What to do about Twitter? Do I want more followers? Do I need more followers? Everybody says you need loads of followers?

The truth is, I'm an old-timer in terms of social media. I've witnessed the rise and fall of MySpace, and countless other services being launched and failing to gain traction. I dread to think how many dormant accounts I have littering the web.

So, do I want to get into another social media site, playing the numbers game yet again, clamouring for friends and contacts because friends and contacts equal influence.

The thing is, Facebook and Twitter seem to be more genuine social media sites. They're more about people than connections and gaming the system. That's why I get quite defensive when I read sites like TwiTip, which seem to endlessly repeat the message that you need to accumulate as many followers as humanly possible.

Drupal's default way of displaying categories really bugs me. They compile all the categories into an unordered list, which adds a lot of pointless complexity to the theme.

Coming from the WordPress school, I'd much prefer to have a comma-separated list of categories. Well, after an epic battle with my node.tpl.php file and much searching on the Interwebs, I've come up with a solution. It's based heavily on a code snippet used in this Lullabot article.

Essentially, what we need to do is parse through all the terms, build a link for each taxonomy term and then use the implode function to build the comma separated list. Here's a sample of the code I'm using:

When I set this blog up, my intention was not to go overboard on SEO or anything like that, so I created a basic set of categories, none of which were particularly keyword-rich. The list of categories stands at:

• At Home - Seldom used, was originally intended for personal stories, but I realise I rarely post those (here, anyway)
• At Work - Originally intended as somewhere for posts about work and things I was doing in professional life. I've used this as a home for my tech tutorials as well though.
• In My Head - A category for philosophical flights of fancy. Ironically, or fittingly, it's become a dumping ground for random posts rather than anything poignant.
• On Blogging - Contains some good tutorials and posts about blogging.
• On Web Design - Another favourite category containin my notes and thoughts on web design. Has some good Drupal discoveries I've made recently.
• Unreality TV - Used for the odd update on what we're doing over at Unreality TV. Includes a good post from the Leon Jackson year of X Factor.