With fuel prices soaring, these last two months have been devastating for airlines. Today another airline, Euromanx, the airline of the Isle of Man declared bankruptcy. In April ATA, Aloha, Skybus, and EOS have been among the other victims of this crises. Smaller carriers are facing bigger financial challenges as the costs of operation keep increasing, while the revenue from passengers doesn't match this cost increase.

Money Blue Book Blog has some advice on how to protect yourself against companies who are at risk of going bankrupt. In essence the advice is to use your credit card for any payments where there’s a risk of the company going bankrupt, be it an airline, a tour operator, or any other similar business.

I've decided to give Twitter another try. For those unfamiliar with the service, twitter is a website where you can post (or send) a small message to people who are interested in hearing it. For people to see your messages they have to subscribe to your posts by following you on twitter. These messages can be viewed either from the twitter website, or using special twitter clients, or even getting them on the phone by SMS.

Originally the service was intended to let your friends know what you're up to. It was something similar to setting you status in facebook, or your personal message in MSN Messenger. Now apart from it's original use, twitter is used to send all sort of messages, like for example links to interesting sites, or asking questions to people who are following you. It's a sort of cross between instant messaging, chatting and mini-blogging.

I tried twitter a couple of months ago, way before it got all the hype. I used it mainly for posting my status to friends, but since there weren't many of my friends using it yet it was pretty useless. Now I'm giving it another go, hoping to make some new friends. If you want to follow me on twitter to see what I'm up to this is my profile. I still have to figure out how to find interesting twitters though.

Now with twitter I have to decide what should get blogged and what should get twitted :) Well, for posts more than a sentence long I'll have to blog them, but I might start posting less general appealing links (like computing links) on twitter more than on the blog.

Get her one of these Roomba iRobots... Click image for video

This weekend it was the turn for an Irish trip. We decided to go to Westport, in the west (duh!) of Ireland in County Mayo. The trip from Dublin took around 4 hours, with a short stop-over for lunch in the lavishly decorated PV's pub, in Longford. The GPS on my IPAQ worked perfectly and took us exactly to the entrance of the Glenderan B&B where we were staying.

The B&B was an excellent choice. The room was newly furnished with old style furniture, and was tastefully decorated with hand-made candles and dried flowers. The attention to detail like the two wine glasses, digital TV, supply of tea and coffee, and room service, made this place one of the best B&B's I've ever been to. The breakfast consisted of a selection of cereal, a choice of full Irish breakfast or yoghurt cheese and fruit, and tea or coffee. It's also well priced at 38 Euro per person per night.

Westport is a nice local Irish town which even on a bank holiday weekend was not full of tourists. We got the impression that even though the place is well catered for tourists with a considerable number of B&B's, it's mostly Irish tourists that visit the place. We got further proof of this when we went into a pub on the main street on a Saturday night, and people were looking at us like we had 5 heads.

Westport is also a good starting point for visiting other attractions spots in Mayo. On Saturday and Sunday we visited Achill Island and Croagh Patrick. Achill Island is a postcard picture of the typical Ireland, with rolling green hills, 40 shades of green and an Irish traffic jam with sheep blocking the road. The place is scenic, relaxing and easily toured by car in a day. It reminded me a bit of the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

Croagh Patrick is the mountain (hill for people who live in places with real mountains) where St. Patrick reputably spent 40 days fasting. The mountain which is about 8km away from Westport is a popular pilgrimage site, and some people walk up the mountain barefoot as an act of penance. This must be a really awful experience considering how many rocks of literally all shapes and sizes litter the path. With our hiking boots tightly fastened, we walked up the mountain on Sunday morning in a rare day of glorious weather. The slope gets quite steep at the end, but it's something most people can do. It took us about 2 hours to go up and about the same time to go down. You can rent a stick before starting the ascent, something that's highly recommended if you don't have your own walking stick. On top of the hill there's a small white chapel which is open on the last Sunday in July.

Pictures to follow

I know the blog is turning a bit into ...off to [here] and back from [there], but who cares. Well this long weekend I'll be off to the west of Ireland in Westport. Hopefully I'll be able to bring back some good pictures to show off.

In the mean time keep well.