Ever since my Dvd player stopped working, I have been scouting on the internet & elsewhere for another one. The one I had is more than eight years old and what I have been able to figure out with my little search until now is the fact that the DVD technology has surely come a long way. Earlier there was no concept of stuffs like dual layer DVD or even lightscribe media. I bet some people still have got no clue as to what lightscribe media is. But thankfully that number is in minority. It’s important to keep abreast with the latest technology or else there is a real chance that you might miss out on something quite useful & in fact mandatory in today’s fast changing world. As far as my search for a new DVD player goes, I am looking for something which is value for money. However, it does not imply that I would settle for something which is not the top of the line. By all means I would want something that can handle all the latest DVD media & can play it smoothly. I mean the last thing I would want is my movies to keep hanging or worse not playing.

The Boyne Valley and its surroundings, situated in a loop of the River Boyne, some 20 miles north-west from Dublin, a few miles west of Drogheda, County Meath, is one of the most important Irish locations as far as historical heritage is concerned, from pre-celtic to medieval times. In this area you can find the pre-celtic tumula of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, the Hill of Tara, where the ancient Irish kings settled their kingdom (actually, there is not much to see in Tara nowadays, but the site is inspiring), Monasterboice with its High Crosses, the Mellifont Abbey, and many other interesting things.

Newgrange is the best known Irish passage tomb. It was constructed around 3200BC, this makes it more than 500 years older than the Giza Pyramids in Egypt and 1,000 years more ancient than Stonehenge. It is about 80m in diameter and is surounded by a kerb of 97 stones. Some of these are elaborately carved. Inside the mound is a passageway lined with roughly-hewn stone slabs, which leads to a cross-shaped chamber.

The entrance to the passage is a simple doorway formed by two upright slabs and a horizontal lintel. Above the doorway is a hole known as the roofbox. The passageway has an amazing feature: although built from roughly-hewn rock, it is aligned in such a way that the rising sun shines through the roofbox, down the passageway, and lights up the central chamber on the morning of the Winter Solstice (21 or 22 December). This amazing fact was only discovered during the 19th Century and verified scientifically around 1960. While initially dismissed as coincidence, it is now generally accepted that the mound was designed with this in mind. It shows that the people of 5000 years ago were far more sophisticated than we generally think.

I am thinking of getting a GPS system for my friend for his birthday. His broke a week ago and I know that he does not flying without it ad as it is his birthday very soon it will not be long until he can fly again. I know that he had an avcomm 200 and I am not sure whether he might like the same again or whether he might feel that he wants something different. I think that it will be best for me to ask him, perhaps do a bit of research, come up with a list and get him to choose which one he will like. I will need to tell him soon as well, as I know with the avcomm ac 200 he did loads of research and so he might like to do the same thing again in order to make sure that he is getting one with all of the features that he wants. I have been looking at the garmin 96 and think that might be the best so I will suggest that he looks into that one first and a few others and hopefully he will be able to get back to me well in time for his birthday so that I can get his present sorted out.