Conor’s Bandon Blog

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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”
.
.
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“Agus Cheannaigh mé uachtar reoite!!!!!”

These guys should be as famous as Atom Films. Keep it up.

[tags]langerland, cartoon, atomfilm[/tags]

I’m not making this up.

Courtesy of my big sis Fiona:

Everything you ever needed to know about canine eyewear.