I had in mind to write this absolutely fabulous post about our trip to Ireland, but the problems with my computer made me loose two whole days, so now you have to be satiesfied with a post written in a hurry.

We started with a seightseeing tour in Dublin - Irelands capital, with a local guide. She told us a lot of local things that we wouldn’t have known otherwise. Some personal views of things too, which always is nice.

Dublins castle built in the georgian time era were quite interesting with historical portraits and absolutely fantastic furniture. Then we thought we were going to Guinness museum to learn about and taste the famous dark brew, but hah where we cheated on that one… They’ve taken that out of the schedule for some reason. Bummer. But we were compensated in the evening, which we spent with the other travellers with a dinner and a fabulous Irish cabaré. The Irish dance is truly amazing. How on earth do they do it, their legs is working fast in some kind of mix of ballet, folk dance and stepping. There also performed a very fun wellknown Irish comedian, which name we’ve forgot. He use to travel to the U.S. too with his act. He gave us a lot of laughs. He defenitely had that extra twinkle in his eyes, having fun himself.

Next day we left Dublin to get out in the countryside. We made a stop close to Cashel to taste homebaked scones and drinking tea at a farm, where the owner demonstrated driving the heard of sheep with his sheep dogs. Just outside Cork we visited Blarney Castle where we got the oppertunity to achieve the gift of eloquent by kissing the well known stone in the area but we didn’t kissed it. We thought that we’re already have that gift. Maybe. *lol*. After dinner we visited one of Killarneys well known pubs that is characterized of music and singing. We love how happy the irish folks are when they’re singing.

The third day we first took a ride in horse carts early in the morning. The coachman were a real irish man who looked like he were going to fell asleep all the time. Most likely he came directly from the nightly singing in the pub, because he looked as blurry as the weather…. Then we took a guided tour in the 19th century Muckross House along the beach of Muckross Lake. Then on to one of Irelands most spectacular areas - The Ring of Kerry - with Irelands highest mountain, Macgillycuddy´s Reeks. But we wouldn’t really know, because guess what??! YES, you guessed right! My bad weather curse strucked again… The weather conditions were the worst thinkable, rainy, windy and with such a thick fog that we couldn’t even see that we were high up on the mountain!!! The path was passing through Glenbeigh with palmtrees and beutiful beaches - so they said, we didn’t see anything… Driving towards the offside Waterville and the colorful village Sneem.

The fourth day we were travelling towards Tarbert to take the ferry over the river Shannon. Continued along the coast line of Clare to Cliffs of Mother - the rocks with the height of 700 feet over the atlantic ocean -and the weather were still bad at first. But our experienced and very serviceminded driver took us to our lunch first instead so that hopefully the weather cleared up - and it did, so we could actually see the cliffs! Wooohooo! This evening dinner was the medevial banquet with memorable entertainment in Bunratty Castle.

Comment: We did wear our Medevial outfits at the banquet in the evening! Every one complimented us for our very suitable outfit. It was so fun that we wanted it to last longer, but the time schedule striked again…

The fifth day we continued from Shannon region to Dublin area again. We almost missed out one of the main reason for why we chosen this tour: The National Stud in Kildare - the famous stud with Irish horses in Kildare. They have taken away that from the schedule too! But our so serviceminded driver arranged a visit there anyway and also managed to make the entrance fee lower for us. Now, do you think that the weather were with us there? Nope. Rainy and very cold. Not many horses to see either, which surprised us a lot. Nothing much to take photos of, because the stallions in the paddocks were to far away and The Japanese garden - well, it was rainy and cold and made our hands stiff…

The last evening we spent on our own in Dublin at a pub that showed the soccer game between Sweden and England. Surprisingly enough, the irish folks were cheering every time Sweden did good! Together with us. I saw a whole game from beginning to the end for the very first time in my life! And I have to say that I think Sweden only played good soccer the last 5 minutes or so. They played too defensive, just dragging out the time.

Summarizing our experience of the trip:

- Never go on a bus tour like that if you don’t like to go up real early in the morning, at 05.30… It was such a stressing schedule. We were spending the whole tour trying to stay awake on the bus. We often failed and slept on the bus. Probably snoring too :-)

- Ireland is a beautiful country, but not as green and hilly as we expected it to be. Maybe we were on the wrong places, but this was a tour in the southern Ireland. If it is any Irish men here: Sorry to say it, but Scotland beat Ireland thousands times around.

- The Irish people is very nice fellows, they seems to be more cheerful than the Scottish people, so I guess it’s scored 1-1 between Ireland - Scotland on if you count that fact :-) But they are both very friendly.

- Despite the fact that we were on a bus with a rather high middle age, we must.. uhum… admit that even the 90 year old man with his 88 year old wife were more lively than we were. They were FANTASTIC. I do wish that we will be like that in that age! (Which I doubt).

- The Irish Guiness. Ahhhh. What can we say: it’s truly divine. The Guiness served here in Sweden is not even close to that one. Even the English men said that it were better there than in England. So we drank a lot of Guiness during the tour.

Cheers to the Irish Guiness :-)

NOTE: Have a look at our photos from Ireland, but be aware of the fact that we had difficulties like sitting on the bus all the time and… uhum…the weather conditions… which stopped us from photographing many times during the trip.

Lifecruiser on Ireland 2006

1. Fårö is our favorite island outside Swedens east coast above the island Gotland in the Baltic Sea, where we go every summer in July. At least. Last year we were there 6 weeks.

2. If you translate the word Fårö it means Sheep island. Though the permanent living folks there don’t call the sheep får, they call them lamm (lamb) even if it is an adult sheep. I have no idea why. But there is a lot of sheep there. I mean lambs… And the lambs have very cute little lambs.

3. Fårö’s beaches is on our top beaches list, even when we compare it to beaches abroad. It’s the sand that does it. Fårö’s sand is outstanding, very very fine with a lot of sand dunes. And it’s just enough shallow when you’re going for a dip in the sea. I dip the whole of me, but Mr Lifecruiser mostly dip his toes….

4. You can always find the best weather and water temperature conditions on one of the beaches, since you have beaches in three different cardinal points. The island is shaped like a bumerang. The beaches are Sudersand, Ekeviken and Norsta Aura - which is several kilometers long and happens to be our engagement beach.

5. Fårö has awesome areas with big rocks (sea stacks I think it’s called in english) that is called raukar, that truly rocks :-). Digerhuvud, a nature reserve, is the biggest of them 3,5 km long and it’s Swedens biggest. Langhammars have some cool formations. some of them are 8 metres high. The sunsets are unbelievable in these areas. Very romantic!

6. Amazingly idyllic fishing hamlets can be found all over the island, since the local people have been living of what the sea could offer. They’re still doing some fishing.

7. It has a remarkable drifting sand area called Ulla Hau, that nearly buried the island in sand if they hadn’t planted trees and other plants in the early 1900.

8. Fårö took it’s shape around the Iron age, but the islanders of Fårö were first registrered in written documents in the 16th century.

9. Norsholmen is another area which is fauna protected and a real heaven for birdwatchers at the breeding season. No vehicles is allowed here and you have to keep at the few paths at the peninsula. At the end of it there is remains of a limestone industry. Limestones is very common on both Fårö and Gotland. There is also a Medevial cemetery and graves from the Iron Age. And a rosty ship wreck.

10. There is several places to go in the evenings to have fun too. One of the most famous, but most modest places are Kutens bensin, fuel for the soul. The best gas station and rock’n roll club in the world ;-). There you can meet bikers, rockers, tourists and local farmers listening to a genuine 78 rpm SUN RECORDS Single that was once touched by Mr Elvis Presley himself! The owner is a real collector of things from this period and there is a lot of stuff laying around that truly are fascinating to see. You just have to admire this man’s commitment.

11. Fårö only is about 114 square km, so it’s a small island. They have a very nice church, several lighthouses, one grocery store open in the winter, two in the summer - with very long lines because of all the tourists. It’s very popular among tourists.

12. It’s a very popular resort for famous people too and hm, some swedish politicians…. *making some funny faces*. The most famous person is of course our film maker Ingmar Bergman. He hide out on an own part of Fårö.

13. We rent our own little heaven at a local farmer, which Mr Lifecruiser has done for about 21 years now. He is a real pearl, so we love him. No Fårö without Per. He is a hard worker, but he goes to the Philippines during a couple of months in the winter nowadays when he don’t have so many animals any longer and that’s very good for his old aching body. It’s a tough life out on the island year round.

♥ WE’LL LIVE, ENJOY… LOVE… FÅRÖ LIFE 3-31 JULY!

Photos Fårö summer 2005
Photos Fårö summer 2004
Photos engagement on Fårö Feb 2004
Tourist site about Gotland

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

Life is fun. At least if you’re virusfree and have a working computer. Which I have. Now :-)

It took me a while to fix it. Totally fresh install on formatted harddrives, because I had so much crap on it and the old Win installation were not quite functional since a while back.

And yes, I had backups. On most the important stuff. I think. We’ll see if I miss something later…

I did run a lot of online virus scans, just to make sure there is no virus there any longer.

I opened the computer to dust it too. Probably the dust made it park the head in the drive and freeze it, so better to clean it while I was on the go. Or as I use to say: while my pants were down anyway ;-)

Now comes the tricky bit, to keep the computer as clean as possible and not begin to load it with all kind of unnecessary stuff…

I don’t bother to install Norton Antivirus again, it take too much space and I decided to install avast antivirus instead. I really like what I’ve seen and heard about it so far. And it’s free - awesome!

I will stick to Lavasofts AdAware to check for spywares and malicious content, it’s very useful.

avast home edition at avast.com
Ad-Aware at lavasoft.com

Did I ever tell you about my VIRUS FREE YEARS?

I’ve been using computers and Internet since the beginning of Internet and have some very fond memories from the virusfree years I’ve had. So many years and so much fun surfing.

Now that’s just a memory. It’s getting more and more complicated to protect your computer. It’s not only viruses, but malwares, spywares and all sort of things.

The other day I accidently clicked on a link in a spam comment on this blog and it opened my browser - which I closed at once - and *swosh* my computer got infected for the very first time, by a Trojan called Trojan.Zlob. Appearently it’s very difficult to get rid of. And very many seems to be infected with it. *heavy sigh*

It is a backdoor designed to give the attacker remote control over a compromised PC. It changes essential computer settings and modifies certain files. Zlob starts automatically on every Windows startup and stays hidden in background. It waits for remote connections and allows the attacker to download and install additional software, execute certain commands and manage the entire computer. Zlob can be very dangerous.

And yes, I have an antivirus software installed, Norton Antivirus, but obviously it didn’t manage to stop this one, even though Symantec claim that it does.

What is worse is that I had to do an online virus scan to find out what it was infected of, because Norton Antivirus Scan don’t detect the trojan at all. It wouldn’t let me do a scan with AdAware (my Spyware software) either and my browsers (both IE and Firefox) were shutdown with an error message so I couldn’t perform the online scan either at first.

I found (by running RegKleaner) that it keeps installing something called Spyware Soft and put it in the Autostart too. I managed to get rid of that, probably temporarily.

I’ve been reading about this Trojan on the internet and it seems like it’s a lot of steps needed to go through to get rid of it, with a lot of fuss and while I was writing this, I was running another spywarecheck on the computer, when it just stopped. Blue screen syndrom. Reboot problems, because it tries to boot from CD-ROM suddenly.

I know how to fix so it reboot properly from the hard drive, but I don’t want to, because the virus will still be there. I’ve been trying all day to fix this horrible beast.

I don’t have the time or energy to format my hard drive and try to do a completely fresh install of Windows, for the moment.

I’m using Mr Lifecruisers work computer right now, so I guess I’ll have to lean on that for a while until I can fix mine.

My computer is just a memory for the moment. *sigh*

I think I’ll just go to bed… (it’s 02:00 am)

I don’t like that there is a lot of bloggers that don’t seem to be aware of - or choose to ignore - the copyrights rules on the internet. I guess they don’t think that they will be discovered.

I’m also quite annoyed by the fact that some people hotlink to our pictures on this blog (I can see that in our statistic software on the server) - stealing our bandwidth that we’re paying for. So I’ve begin to put up this picture for them instead:

I just change the real pictures name to something else and this one to the name they hotlink to. Quite embarrassing for them, but also informative.

I could have just changed the name of it, but I think that this way is more effective. After all, there are many people out there that is not even aware of what they’re doing. Now they get to know.

There are other ways to do it too, like the hotlink option in the cPanel at the webhost or directly in the .htaccess file, but I’ve had some problems to implement them and this works for now.

Recently I stumbled over some very good summarizing information about the copyrights at Godbit, that all bloggers should be aware of.

Rules of Thumb on the Internet:

(These are rough guidelines, but they’re good ones)

- If it’s on the internet, it’s copyrighted.
- If you didn’t originate it, you don’t own the copyright.
- When in doubt, ask for permission.
- Or be certain as to fair use (and cite the original author).
- Or look for works available under a creative commons license.
- Don’t infringe copyrights.

Read what more Godbit writes about Copyrights
Webmasterstop about hotlinking and cPanel
The Site Wizard about hotlinking and htacess
Our earlier post about Copyscape

NOTE: You’re welcome to download :-) this picture of mine if you want to use it yourself when being hotlinked.

1. Tomorrow, Friday the 23rd of June, we celebrate midsummer here in Sweden. Many workers begin their annual five weeks vacation now, so of course we like to celebrate it :-)

2. From the beginning it was more of a way for the farmers to celebrate the start of the summer and the fertility season. They offered floral decorations to the nordic goddess of fertility, Freja, to get healthy growing crops.

3. Now it has become the most Swedish of all traditions. If we ever really appreciate and love the Swedish Flag, this is the day. You see it every where, even as a table decoration.

4. Mostly the festivities is held out in the countryside, which means that Swedish citys - even our capital Stockholm - is more like ghost citys this holiday. People is deserting from the city at the latest the day before. It’s rush traffic out of town.

5. The main traditional thing to do, is to go out picking flowers and making wreaths to place on the maypole. The maypole is a tall pole with a cross on it, which we dance (quite silly :-) around singing some very traditional songs. This is so traditional that we do it even if it rains. And it does. Often. Not only where I am…*lol*

6. Midsummer is also the time when the swedish people which still is left with some folk costumes, dust them off and wears them. Once in a year time. Maybe also for some wedding event or something similar. It’s very popular with weddings at Midsummer.

7. Now we comes to the next most essentials besides Love: The traditional Midsummer Menu. It is boiled new potatoes, different sorts of pickled herring, red onion and soured cream to start with. The main course is often some grilled meat or salmon. As dessert it’s the first strawberries of the summer with whipped cream we really associate with Midsummer - or summer generally.

9. We drink cold beer and spiced schnapps (snaps in Swedish) to that and every time we refill the glasses, it’s time to start singing again. We like drinking songs (snapsvisor), and there are really speedy ones sometimes…. Oh, and did I mention that it usually comes some rain during the festivities? So it’s very common that we carry the tables with all the food in and out between the showers! *lol*

10. In the evening the dance is starting. The ideal is an outdoor dance floor situated some where beutiful, maybe at the shores of one of our 100 000 Swedish lakes. It’s a magical night and also very romantic. Many Love storys in Sweden starts (or ends!) this night.

11. Young girls were earlier practically vacuumcleaning *lol* the meadows for seven different kind of flowers on the way home from the dance, since there is this saying that: if they put the flowers under their pillow that night, they will dream about their future husband. Nowadays I’m not so sure any more, if the girls don’t want to get married or if they just believe in this tradition ;-)

12. Midsummer Night is the lightest day of the year and in Northern Sweden the sun never sets - i guess they get compensated for the dark winters when they hardly have any daylight at all. Here in Stockholm the sun will set, but it will not become completely dark.

13. We’re going to celebrate it with good friends in their home outside Stockholm, more like the countryside, a really traditional Midsummer with it all (so it won’t be any post here tomorrow, Friday). They have two horses at their home too, so they said we even will take a trip with a horse and cart. Awesome!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

Thanks to Kelly I did this silly Blogthings question, that actually fits really well in the description of me…

You Were Actually Born Under Year of the Pig:
No worries, you’re not really pig-like in your personality. (Though you have been known to have a healthy appetite!) You are highly intelligent - forever studying and gaining knowledge. You have a heart of gold and you are appreciated by many.

You Should Have Been Born Under Year of the Dog: You are totally loyal, faithful, and honest. However, you don’t trust others to be as ethical as you are! Straight forward and direct, you really aren’t one for small talk. You are a great listener - and an agreeable companion when you’re in a good mood!

What Year Were You Born Under?

Well, I have to admit that my feet sometimes feels like pig feeth and my nose is funny shaped and I have this funny twist on my tail…. We’ll skip that part *lol*

So, am I suppose to roll around in the mud now since I’m such a pig…?