Archive for November, 2005
I despair – “It’s You’re Birthday”
Posted on November 27, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Humour, Ireland, Personal.
We just had Oisín’s 4th birthday party. He had a whale of a time in KidzKlub in Bandon and two of his buddies from his old playschool turned up so he was over the moon. He did well on the present front and has just spent the past hour opening them and enthusing in the way that only he can do. Catherine was putting the cards up on the mantlepiece when she noticed something odd about one of them. Check it out:
I initially put it down to the card being made somewhere like China. Then I turned it over. It appears that English is not the first language for people in Roscommon either!
[tags] birthday card, spelling, grammer, english, pomposity[/tags]
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First Flock Fiddling
Posted on November 24, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Technology, Wordpress.
Having a look at the Flock browser to see if it is much cop. So far not bowled away at all. This is a test post from its blogging feature. The whole integration thing just isn’t as slick as I was expecting.
More importantly, I have setup the “Subscribe-to-Comments” plug-in. So now if you add a comment, you can get notified by e-mail if someone else replies. It saves you having to constantly re-check. This is the only one of three plug-ins I tested last night which actually worked. That Wordpress-Feedburner one in particular just did not want to play ball.
I’m also testing the “Connections Reloaded” theme which is a big revamp of the one I’m using here (Connections). Looks better, has more features and is a lot better under the hood so I may try switching over tonight.
All for now. Gonna be a looooong day.
UPDATE: I don’t like all the HTML crud it inserts all over my bog standard text. I don’t hink I’ll be using it to blog from now on.
technorati tags: flock, subscribe to comments, wordpress
3 Comments
Weight Crash in Aisle Five
Posted on November 22, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Drink, Personal.
Not that anyone cares other than those who have to look at me, but I managed to drop a stone (14 fluid ounces in US measurements and 3 kilopascals in metric) in the past 4 weeks. Only 28 more pounds to go. Targeting another stone by Christmas but that is probably unrealistic. With the money I have saved from not drinking, I’m buying myself a new Ford Mustang.
Another apt “Unfit” comic to celebrate.
[tags] weight loss, booze, GI, Unfit Comic, Ford Mustang[/tags]
3 Comments
My Army training tells me… that this is going to be a hot mission
Posted on November 20, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Humour, Reviews.
Usually I’m on the ball when it comes to great new TV shows. I’m also incredibly modest and humble. I’ve been raving about “Curb” since I watched it on DVD before it was shown here. But I completely let “Arrested Development” slip past me. I used hear about the awards and how funny it was but never got round to checking it out.
About two months ago I finally set it to record on the Sky+. Woo hoo – another classic. I love it. Offbeat, oddball, mainstream but not quite, fabulous writing and even better acting. Sure, all the characters are stereotypes and they try to make every line a puchline but it’s that rat-a-tat-tat of jokes that make it great. They come so fast but also so obtusely that you miss about half of them.
There is a great series of episodes where one of the characters tries to be one of the Blue Men from The Blue Man Group.
I can imagine this is causing the real group all sorts of problems. I saw an ad for them in the paper recently and laughed, assuming it was for the TV show. Nope, real ad. Unless I can bring rocks to throw, I don’t think I’ll be going any time soon.
UnfortunatelyArrested Development has a big problem. It is pitched as a mainstream show in the US but simply doesn’t get the viewing figures to support that. They were about to cancel it after the first series and then they won a bunch of Emmy’s so had to keep showing it. It looks like it is up for the chop again.
Lost Remote has a brilliant posting on how this might actually be a good thing for the show and how to make it even more popular by viral means.
More on The Long Tail
Unless Rupert suddenly starts “getting” the way media is heading (and to be fair he hasn’t missed much over the past few years) and takes Lost Remote’s advice to use all that Web2.0 has to offer in terms of marketing (work that meme baby), you’d better catch it while you can.
[tags] Arrested Development, Fox Network, TV Comedy, Sit-Com, Blue Man Group, Rupert Murdoch, Long Tail[/tags]
2 Comments
Philips USB Speaker Hell means Cisco becomes the Google of my living room?
Posted on November 18, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Business, Gadgets, Technology.
The speakers on the Acer Laptop are a bit puny, particularly for playing DVDs. Unfortunately, the machine does not have a line out, so I decided to get a pair of USB speakers. I didn’t need anything particularly special and they had to be just a bog-standard stereo pair due to lack of space. A bit of browsing on Dabs brought up the Philips DGX220 Speakers at a nice n cheap £23.
I received them a few weeks back and was happy to discover that they need no special drivers – XP just handles them out of the box.
Except it didn’t.
Weeks of fiddling ensued with no success. The USB composite device would be found and the drivers would load, causing the power light to come on but the install of the USB Audio Drivers always failed with “cannot find suitable drivers for device”. Nights of googling produced nothing. These are obviously not a popular product as there are almost no links to them anywhere.
I tried everything – install, uninstall, direct connect, hub connect, scour the philips site, scour all the USB sites. But to no avail.
This evening I had one final go. The various discussions of USB speakers in general all indicated that I had to have usbaudio.sys in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers. I didn’t but I did find a copy in C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386, so I copied that over. But that was not enough because I needed an INF file to allow Windows to install the driver and there did not appear to be any file called usbaudio.inf anywhere. A bit more googling brought up a discussion of a Siemens M34A Cordless Audio thingy. Totally unrelated to my speakers but one guy mentioned the use of a file called wdma_usb.inf in C:\WINDOWS\inf. Of course I did not have that either. But I did find wdma_usbinf.bak. Why the hell is that there? Who knows. I renamed it to wdma_usb.inf, unplugged and replugged the speaker and went through the install process, obviosuly picking the “manual route” and pointed the device install wizard to the INF file, annnnnnd, it worked!
For gods sake, PCs will never become ubiquitous with their own spot in the living room as long as rubbish like this happens. When I co-founded Advanticus back in 2002, it was on the basis that we were heading into the era of digital convergence where the consumer electronics guys like Sony and Matsushita would deliver on the vision rather than the PC manufacturers. We were just a bit early.
Cisco obviously believe it too as they have just dished out $5.3 Billion for Scientific Atlanta. If only Sony and Co would get their act together, they would leave Microsoft/Dell/Intel/HP and their buddies in the dust. However due to their obsession with DRM (and look what a fine mess that just got Sony into) and controlling the consumer, maybe the winner for living room space will come from left-field and we’ll all be converged on our Cisco Home Centers in 3 years time. I’ve just realised that the Linksys purchase was probably the first step in this.
Ye know, the tech news worlds blinkered focus on Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/Web2.0 may cause them to miss the huge elephant in the room. Maybe it is time to dip my toe back in the cruel world of the stock market and put more money where my mouth is.
A Few Links: GMSV, Light Reading.
[tags]philips, speakers, usb, cisco, scientific atlanta, convergence, web 2.0, sony, drm[/tags]
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Le Singe est dans l’arbre et peut etre l’auto aussi
Posted on November 17, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Gadgets, Personal.
JWZ has a link to a fabulous piece of footage which will give any petrol-head goose-bumps:
Early morning in Paris in 1978 at 140MPH in a Ferrari 275 GTB!
The original story, with lots of updated detail is here.
I’ll dream happy dreams tonight.
[tags]jwz, paris, ferrari, vroom[/tags]
2 Comments
Numb-nut did his permalinks wrong
Posted on November 17, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology.
None of my recent posts were appearing on Planet of the Blogs and I assumed they were doing something wrong. So I finally mailed them today and they were able to suss that my RSS feeds were all buggered. Why? Because I cannot read simple bloody instructions. I wanted to change from the normal Wordpress link style for posts (e.g. http://conoroneill.com/?p=178) to a more meaningful permalink structure (http://conoroneill.com/2005/11/17/pork-from-china/). What did I do? I copied the sample code and forgot to change it for my site. Nitwit. Thanks lads. But even after fixing, the Atom feed is still bunched. So there goes the next hour or two trying to figure out why.
UPDATE: I just got the Atom feed working too. After a ton of googling, it turns out I had to go into the MySQL DB with PHPMyAdmin and hand edit some of the guid entries in the wp_posts table to fix the screwed up old permalink structure. A bit unimpressed that a simple typo in a setting could bugger up the DB like that. But all is well again in Conor-land.
[tags]potb, rss, planetoftheblogs, wordpress[/tags]
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Pork from China?
Posted on November 17, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Food.
I set up Google Analytics and AdSense on this web-site for no real reason other than messin. Watching the ads that appear could become a full-time hobby.
Most of them are as expected – “Holidays in Donegal or Galway”. I’ve had a few “buy sausages and herbs from us”. But one made me do a click-thru on my own site: “Buy Pork”.
Hmm interesting. Then I read the detail of the site a little closer, “Buy Pork from China”!
Ye know, I’d almost be tempted by “Frozen Pork Sides Origined in Shandong province, China with high quality”. I don’t know if I could have a communist in the house tho.
[tags]adsense, china, pork[/tags]
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For those of you who have been living in the tora-bora mountains for the past two years
Posted on November 17, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Humour, Ireland.
And have never heard of Langerland, get yerself over to www.langerland.com and watch their latest cartoon.
A snot-ejecting moment when Sean Óg’s All-Ireland speech started with “Bhí mé ag dul go dtí an siopa chun rudaí a cheannach”
.
.
.
“Agus Cheannaigh mé uachtar reoite!!!!!”
These guys should be as famous as Atom Films. Keep it up.
[tags]langerland, cartoon, atomfilm[/tags]
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Doggles – Goggles for Doggies
Posted on November 15, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Family, Gadgets, Humour.
I’m not making this up.
Courtesy of my big sis Fiona:
Everything you ever needed to know about canine eyewear.
1 Comment
Heists for Jesus
Posted on November 15, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Humour.
I shouldn’t laugh, I really shouldn’t, but I’m pretty sure the only Baptist church in Bandon is the one just near our house.
Baptist pastor charged over bank robbery
If only we’d gone to his coffee morning, this could all have been avoided.
The fact that the BOI Bank Manager lives beside the Baptist Church too sends this story into the realms of the completely bizarre.
UPDATE 15/11/2005: They gave the poor sod a suspended sentence. Ye have to feel sorry for him. But, to be honest, it doesn’t stop it being funny. All I can picture in my head is Woody Allen arguing with the bank clerk about whether his note says “I have a gub” or “I have a gun”.
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Useful Nut warnings
Posted on November 12, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Food, Humour.
For those suffering from both nut allergies and an IQ of 50.
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Important news for Veggies, Vegans and pulse lovers everywhere
Posted on November 10, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Food, Humour.
Courtesy of the Dave Barry Blog
Great news considering the diet I’m on right now.
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Is that a sausage in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?
Posted on November 9, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Cooking, Food, Ireland.
Last Saturday, the world was my oyster. Wife n kids were in Cavan, house to myself, I could do anything I liked. Except I’m off booze so getting blotto was out of the question, I’m on a diet so a huge steak n chips was off the menu and I hate sport so a day of Premiership football would be torture. But I was still totally buzzed about making sausages after the Hugh Fearnley-Wearnley-Guernley Course in Ballymaloe. So that’s what I did.
I had ordered the natural casings from the UK and Cecil sent them over quickly. Boy did they stink! Catherine texted me to tell me that Darina’s article in the Examiner was about the course and gave recipes for sausages. Saving The Bacon. Damn, all of the belly pork might be bought up, so on my bike (literally) and I raced into town.
First into Martin Carey’s. They were under pressure and fobbed me off with pre-diced pork and a claim that they were indeed out of pork belly. Got some nice Italian sausages for comparison tho. So, across to Dan Moloney. Not only did they have belly pork but there was a big slab of it on the counter. So maybe I wasn’t so nuts thinking Darina’s article had caused a bit of interest. I got all my bits and wheezed back out to Old Chapel.
A bit of sage, oregano and thyme from the front garden was cut, white pepper located and then onto the prep. There isn’t much to sausages really. A pretty equal mix of lean and fatty pork, up to 20% rusk or breadcrumbs to help texture and reduce leakage, some herbs and spices and not much else.
The sausage casings just need to be soaked in water for a while. I went with hog casings as I was making a big breakfast banger rather than chipolata’s. Why is that word only used in the UK? It means nothing over here really.
Yet again, apologies for the rubbish photo quality – Catherine had the Ixus so I had to use the Nokia Crap-Cam again.
I had been looking forward to using the mincer attachment and sausage making attachment on the Kenwood Chef since we got it last year.
So I assembled the bits, mixed my sausage mixture and turned it on. I started pushing the mix into the mincer and a few moment later, the minced pork started coming out of the drilled holes. Hurrah, success. And then it stopped. I then spent nearly an hour trying to mince 1 kg of pork. A total disaster. The Kenwood jammed on every tiny piece of fat that it encountered.
I tried big holes, little holes, fast speed, slow speed and I re-chopped all the meat into smaller pieces. Eventually I got it all through but at that stage it had the consistency of meat paste.
I am totally pissed off at Kenwood. What is the point of a feature on a machine if it is not capable of handling the normal standard situation? Grrr.
But undaunted, I moved onto the sausage making phase. The kit for this was easily set up and I clearly remembered everything Ray had said on the course.
And ye know what? It bloody worked. Not perfect, not neat, not consistent but a sausage all the same.
And the next bit worked too – even better than the first. I was worried I was underfilling but as it turned out I was slightly overfilling.
The one bit I wasn’t going to try this time was the method for making all the linked sausages. I understood it on the day of the course but I didn’t have enough length to give it a proper go. So I just squeezed it at various points and twisted to make each sausage.
And for the first time in this blog, I get a chance to use Vinnie McCabe’s famous phrase. Vinnie was Dean of Engineering in UCD. He did “Introduction to Engineering” in first year. In one class he was describing the first bridge he ever designed. He summarised it as “functional but not aesthetically pleasing”. Till the day I die, I won’t forget that perfect phrase. And today it describes my sausages.
Sausages should ideally be left to hang for about 24 hours to let the flavours merge and to let some of the ooze settle. I hung them in the shower for about 8 hours but the stink of the casing was brutal so I wrapped them in grease-proof and put them in the fridge. On Sunday morning I fried them up.
Mmmmmmm.
Thirty minutes of gentle cooking later and they were ready. A tomato, some ketchup and some chilli sauce joined them on the plate.
I was a bit tentative with the first bite. But, to my amazement, they were pretty damned fine. Texture was too dense and smooth as expected after the mincing nightmare (more like pate really) but very tasty. I will definitely add more pepper and herbs the next time as I was overly cautious this time. But all in all a huge success. I’ll be doing it again, if I can figure out the Kenwood problems.
And today’s challenge is – how many double entendres can you find above? Your time starts now…..
[tags]Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Darina Allen, Ballymaloe, sausages, Kenwood, casings, cooking, Bandon[/tags]
4 Comments
Wexford: Farm Shops and Citroën SM’s
Posted on November 5, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Food, Ireland, Personal.
We spent the halloween weekend down in Rosslare. I know it is now a mini-Dublin but it’s a perfect spot for all of the extended family to meet up. There is one shop I want to mention simply because they deserve to be much better known. “Kate’s Farm Shop” is just off the Duncannon Roundabout towards Duncannon. I found it accidentally during the summer when I went for a “lets get the kids to sleep for a hour” drive.
It had been very quiet that time and I spent a good 45 minutes filling a basket full of things that I didn’t need. The shop is evenly split between a great selection of fruit n veg at the front and deli-style provisions at the back. They have tons of pastas, spices, breads, cheese, meats, grains and other speciality foods. They seem to do a lot of organic stuff and special-diet products like gluten-free ones.
Of course, it was a totally different experience on the halloween weekend. I actually had difficulty parking. When I got inside, it was jammed. And every single accent in there, apart from the girls behind the counter was south-side Dublin. It was kinda spooky. I immediately felt myself wanting to put on a strong fake Cork accent so I wouldn’t be labelled along with the rest of them. But when your basket contains olives, pumpernickle, organic pasta sauce, hummus and japanese pears, you aren’t going to avoid labelling ye langer.
Anyway, fab shop. Pay it a visit if you are in the area.
And because I am too lazy to make a separate post, can I just mention that I saw, for the second time in my life, a Citroën SM (not XM!) heading towards the ferry.
I had noticed in general the number of 05 cars in Wexford, many of which were WX reg. I even spotted a Porsche Cayenne. But they all paled by comparison to the SM. This was a low volume car developed by Citroën whilst they were in control of Maserati. It is drop dead gorgeous and many of the innovations in it were carried over to the CX. There is a great article on the history of the car here.
Yeah, yeah, I should grow up and just accept the Mondeo.
[tags]Rosslare,Wexford, FarmShop, Citroen, Citroen SM[/tags]
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Killarney, Land of the Celtic Tiger’s Aran Sweater
Posted on November 5, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Ireland.
After Caroline’s wedding, we hung on for another day in Killarney to get a break from our four darlings. I think maybe I had passed through once before but could remember nothing of the place so I had no expectations. OK, I did assume we would find a certain level of paddywhackery but jesus, it turned out to be Brigadoon transplanted.
I have never ever seen so many shops selling such tat in all my life. They make the shops in the streets around Notre Dame look like high quality purveryors of objets d’art. I could have dressed as a full leprechaun in any of about thirty shops.
I had thought that the older generation of Irish-American immigrants had started dying out or at least were getting too old to travel. So I assumed the demand for this sort of “darby o’gill and the little people” “top o da mornin to ya” shite had died off. I was obviously wrong. These shops wouldn’t be selling this rubbish unless someone was buying it.
There are signs of hope. The Murphy’s Coffee and Ice Cream shop is a branch of the one in Dingle (sorry I of course meant An Dingle Dangle Dongle Ui Cuis) and serves fab stuff. And there is, em, well, em, oh yeah, the factory outlet mall and the, oh ye know, the, eh, gimme a sec, the, of course, the Supermacs in the garage.
I did realise there that there is one opportunity being missed by all the pub chains operating on the continent. One of them needs to open an Irish Pub – in Ireland!
I have to sign off now and go polish my pot o gold at the end of the rainbow.
[tags]killarney, ireland, tourism, paddywhackery, leprechauns[/tags]
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The King of Black Puddin’ Passes Away
Posted on November 4, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Food, Ireland.
Edward Twomey was Mr Clonakilty Black Pudding. I was sad to read in my local Bandon Opinion last week that he had passed away. The story of Edward and his pudding is one that I think very few people know.
Since I started eating out, I have often run into Clonakilty Black Pudding on menus. I have also seen many articles raving about it. But until I moved to Bandon, I honestly thought that it was a general description for all pudding from the town. In my overly florid imagination, I pictured Black Pudding shops on every street corner: “Tom’s Traditional Pud”, “Mary’s Home Made Pud”, “Gunters Organic Free Range Pud”. Hell, I even imagined street hawkers cooking it on black pud stalls.
It turns out, surprise surprise, that the reality is nothing like that. The Clonakilty Black pudding of world renown is Eddie Twomey from start to finish. You can find his butchers shop about half way up the main street in Clon and apart from the famous pud, they do everything a high quality butcher should.
I hope The Bandon Opinion won’t mind if paraphrase some bits from Diane Curtin’s article to give a short summary of Edward and what he achieved.
The butchers shop was owned by the Harringtons when Edward bought it. He found the old pudding recipe there and asked Paddy Allman who had made it for 44 years to make him some. Unfortunately Paddy died a few months after Edward had bought the butchers and the details of the recipe pretty much died with him.
So Edward decided to try to make it himself and basically used all of the old customers as his guinea pigs until they were happy that he had got it right. He then got permission from the Harringtons to use their name on the label – hence “Original Harrington’s Recipe” on every black pudding he sold.
Most stories would end there and a local butcher would have happily sold local pud to local people. Instead this mans fantastic energy and ambition meant that it became one of the most famous food products made on this island. I am honestly in awe of the man. From one tiny shop in Clon, he made a product which is known and loved everywhere by foodies and non-foodies alike.
I really think that he should be up there in the roll-call of Irish Food Legends. His story should give hope and motivation to anyone who is making a quality product of any sort on a small scale and dreams of bigger things.
[tags] black pudding, clonakilty, edward twomey, harringtons[/tags]
1 Comment
Unfit, cough, moi? Wheeze. What was the question again?
Posted on November 4, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Drink, Food, Personal.
The war on weight continues and I am debating whether to start a weekly post on the Bloggers Belly Bulkometer. Half a stone in a week is not bad going. Those couple of bottles of wine and cans of Becks each week were obviously contributing slightly to the inexorable move towards Rick Waller territory.
Tonight will be a major trial. Curry with brown rice, no naans and no booze in the house on my own. And they dare complain in New Orleans about how tough it is over there.
Next week I might try a bit of exercise, but it is far more fun instead just to read the Unfit Comic Strip which just gets better and better.
Wednesday’s was one of the best yet:
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First camera phone test post to wordpress
Posted on November 3, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology.
Testing, testing.
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Test e-mail Blogging
Posted on November 3, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging.
Last attempt did not work
