My Page on Amazon

MY PAGE ON AMAZON


I am delighted to see all my books gathered together at last!https://www.amazon.com/author/www.duffyberlin.com

THE TRADE UNION PINT


Everything is lined up now for the launch of my new book in mid July so this is a first glimpse with LOTS more to follow in the coming months.

Storymap, me and the Theatre Royal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70eoxkk9lyk&feature=youtu.be

 I made this link to a piece I made for the great website storymap.ie.

The Road to Mercury

THE ROAD TO MERCURY is my book about the making of my first feature film. It includes the shooting script.

a new wave of Kindle books

I have some new big publishing news coming up in July and I have decided, before that, to put up a set of novels for children/youths.
This link is to kindle at the .co.uk site, but the books are available in all regions. This link is to the novel WELCOME TO EARTH, but click on my name to see other work.

Checking in at the Central Hotel

Here's my latest RTE Radio documentary. A look at the life behind your stay at a hotel...

My new radio feature on German national radio

Back in October 2009, while out for an evening walk, I was attacked and stabbed. This is the radio documentary I have made about the attack and its consequences.

JUSTICE FOR MY SON by Vera Duffy

This is a link to a separate Blog I have set up for the book I helped my sister-in-law Vera write about the death of her son Alan. The book is now available throughout Ireland and through all major online outlets.

Martin Duffy: A Dubliner's Berlin

Martin Duffy: A Dubliner's Berlin

A Dubliner's Berlin

Here it finally is. The book I wrote in the first couple of years when I moved to Berlin. Then updated and published on Kindle. The link above is to amazon.co.uk, but you can look for the kindle book in your local area (.com, .de etc). You can download the first couple of chapters free! And the 76,000-word book sells for only $2.99.

my MOTHERSHIP novels - the full trilogy

I will be launching a few things on Kindle.
This, to start the ball rolling, is the full 84,000-word trilogy of my Mothership science fiction saga.

Great story and great value!

radio piece about New Year's Eve in Berlin 2010

I recorded and edited this piece.

the radio play I wrote and directed for RTE

sorry about the logline describing the play. No idea who wrote it!!!

my first RTE radio documentary

I made this in 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

My RTE Radio Documentary on One 'Pieces of the Wall'.

my second radio documentary

Here's the link to my RTE Documentary on One radio documentary about Tony Sheridan!

I'm back

It's been almost exactly a year since I wrote for my blog.

The death of my wife's dog, Pepe, became the first of a series of events that led me further and further away from any wish to be providing little slices of life. Misery may love company, but I had no urge to share mine with anyone.

Now, however, my latest film SUMMER OF THE FLYING SAUCER is going on cinema release in Ireland and I want to do what I can to promote it. I will also start providing more regular blog entries - though probably not as frequently as I had tried to do first time around as it seems like very few people actually were reading my blog!

Anyway. Give a thought for Pepe, and watch this space.

Sleepless in Hamburg

It was my own fault really for going along with it. I went up to Hamburg last weekend to see my son Bernard who is now living there. He couldn't put us up, so Claudia decided we'd do something crazy and book into 'Die Kogge Rock n Roll Hotel'. It's a fine funky place, and very reasonably priced, but I knew it was not going to be a quiet place for getting a night's sleep and boy was I right. What can you expect of a hotel where you can check in any time up to 6AM?
Our room was pleasant: each room has its own theme and we had the romantic room with floral decorations and lots of pink kitch. The odd thing, though, was that the double bed was built like two crates nailed together - there was a wooden beam dividing the two sides.
Having arrived late on Friday night, we met up with Bernard for something to eat and then Claudia decided to go back to the hotel as she was tired. Bernard and I then headed off down along the 'Reeperbahn' - a true den of iniquity: drunks and prostitutes line the street with its rows of sex shops. On the side streets, crowds spill out from loud pubs along the way. Bernard, determined to in some way darken my lily white soul, even took me down a barricaded street that women are not allowed to walk down; it was a street full of prostitutes in shop windows. As we were walking down, one woman had opened her window and, in an argument with some guy on the street who had offended her, threw the contents of a glass she was holding at him. 'What happened?' Bernard asked me. 'She threw her glass of white wine at him,' I said. Bernard urged us to walk quicker. 'I hear they keep their pee in glasses to throw at people who annoy them,' he said. Charming.
I got back from the pub crawl with Bern at 3.30am and reckoned I was tired enough to sleep regardless of noise. Die Kogge was absolutely heaving and the volume of the music was such that I couldn't figure how it could even be legal with neighbours presumably coping with this week in and week out. I barely slept a couple of hours. The music blared until 5am, and then people came up laughing and joking in the corridor as they went to bed.
Hamburg is a wonderful and thriving place, and there is plenty to see and enjoy. Claudia and I went for a long walk along the harbour, and also through the elegant Elbetunnel. But somehow Hamburg feels like a place where you pace yourself for nightfall.
Saturday night, a group of us met for a meal and this eventually became just Bernard and I having a few quiet drinks in an Irish pub. I was back at the hotel at 1.30am and again the place was in full swing. I was awake reading a book at 3.30 because I was woken by the music which had been pumped up louder. Never again. Bernard bravely phoned at 8.30 Sunday morning for us to meet at the famous Hamburg fish market, a place thronging with people down by the harbour. It starts at 6am in the morning and ends by 9.30. Many people drink through the night and then have their breakfast there, and I certainly saw lots of people drinking. In fact, I saw more public drinking and drunkenness there than I have ever seen anywhere. And I'm not talking about some old guys staggering around - we had breakfast at a wharf café and two elderly couples sat at the next table. They ordered three beers. It was 11am.
I look forward to going back to Hamburg again. I'll be there to direct a radio play of mine being produced by a friend - but that's another story, and another blog. And I won't be staying at Die Kogge.

BIG PRINTER IS WATCHING YOU

This is a rant against my printer and the forces of evil that are at work in the very ink that flows through its black-hearted electronic tentacles.

There's a lot to be said for the Lexmark X5470. It can be used as a fax. It can scan. It prints extremely efficiently. Its colour printing is excellent. There are many adjustments you can make - in terms of print quality - that are also good cost savers.

But what I've only just learned is that all along, my printer has been watching me.

Alright, I could kind of accept the fact that it would start showing alarms that the ink had almost run out when in fact it still had a quarter of its life yet to go. It would pop up an option on my screen to order from Lexmark before going ahead with the printing, and annoy me even more by giving me the option of not going ahead with the printing before ordering a new ink cartridge. But the black ink cartridges are expensive - €25.50 - so after a few times shelling out that much money I went to a local shop that refills cartridges; cost €10. The guy warned me, however, that the computer chip in the Lexmark cartridge might prevent the refill from being useable. I've found out what he meant.

As soon as I put in the refilled cartridge a warning sign came up saying this was not genuine Lexmark ink. The icon supposedly displaying how much ink remains in the cartridges shows the black ink cartridge as empty. There is an 'alignment' action that the printer should carry out when it has a new cartridge installed and it did so under major protest, scrolling the warnings; 'out of original Lexmark ink, warranty does not cover blah blah blah...'.

It gets worse!!!

Now every time I want to print a document, I switch on the printer and it warns 'black ink low'.

Then when I click on a document to print, up comes a sign on my screen saying there is no Lexmark ink in the printer and I should order some. I of course click to shut that option. Then up comes a sign saying I should not go ahead with printing the document because I don't have black ink. I click to ignore that. Then it prints while showing me the sulky sign that there is no ink in the black cartridge. EVERY TIME I USE THE PRINTER I MUST GO THROUGH THIS!!!

Are all modern printers like this?

I am going back to an old HP printer here for all my black ink document printing. It works fine and isn't monitoring me. I'll only use the Lexmark for documents that need extra bells and whistles.

But it bothers me. To what extent are the inanimate things around us bullying us into making more profit for their manufacturers? It's too late to bring the printer back to where we bought it. And for all I know every modern printer is battling to have its manufacturer reap maximum profits. But I have enough difficulty dealing with people who try telling me what to do, let alone a smartass lump of plastic and wires.

Boldly go where almost no one has gone before

As a sci-fi writer - and as someone who believed as a kid that I was from another planet - I am of course fascinated by the sky at night. Probably the only downside I can think of to living in Berlin is the fact that the ambient city light means you can never get a good rich view of the night sky.

A small compensation for this is a number of websites I've found.

Recently, Google have just set up STELLARIUM which I downloaded as soon as I read about it. It's a wonderful site.

This site has views of the Earth and the Moon.

While this one is a NASA site dedicated to Mars exploration. And then there's the ESA Mars site to explore.

A fantastic site is this one for the HUBBLE space telescope. I have often download screen images from their 'wallpaper' section.

For news on astronomy, this magazine is very extensive.

But of course if you want to know what life IS REALLY LIKE OUT THERE, then this is the site to go to.