Conor’s Bandon Blog

A big Merry Christmas to all my readers, most of whom are currently co-located with me in the sitting room in Kilkenny. We’re having a grand old time in Kilk. All of us are down now except for Emer’s gang who will arrive tomorrow morning. We’ve just assembled the various christmas presents and all of the kids are happily asleep having dreams of Mario Kart DS, Barbie Scooters, Leapad Walkers and Power Rangers. We’re nothing if not an international purchasing family.

For friends who are wondering about the meet-up on the 29th, drop me a line at cwjoneill   at    gmail   dot   com for details. Looks like it will be a decent turn-out and we’re already looking forward to the Quigley’s stories of alligator wrestling and dingo fiddling from down under.

Tomorrow should be a blast. The boys will probably turn their noses up at all of the lovely food that Rose cooks for them. Sibéal will probably try to eat the entire turkey single-handed. As long as I get to see Willy Wonka, I’ll be happy.

Shockingly, it looks like I won’t be taking the pledge since I am now drinking a lovely glass of Merlot as I write. But moderation shall be the order of the day (a bottle at dinner followed by a bottle for the movies).

Everyone writes their highlights of the year. We have plenty but none comes anywhere close to the arrival of Fionn, the bestest and fattest baby in the whole wide world. He is a star.

Ok,one thing might come close – Oisín took part in the gaelscoil’s playschool christmas show last week. All of the little 4-year old angels were singing “Realty realty suas sa spéir”, Oisín on the other hand was shouting “hey pooh pooh head, I’m gonna hit myself”, punched himself in the head and threw himself onto the stage. I can’t believe I missed this, Catherine had to be embarrased and stifle laughs simultaneously all on her own. One of the neighbours has it on camcorder, I have to get my hands on it. I do believe we have the next Larry Olivier on our hands.

Hopefully I’ll catch up on all of the intended blogging over the next few days.

[tags] christmas, kilkenny, bandon, conoroneill, kids[/tags]

I installed the Performancing extension for Firefox yesterday. It is a blogging add-on and I’m writing this post in it. Looks pretty good except I don’t see any handling of WordPress categories. If this feature does not exist or is not coming soon, I won’t continue to use it. From a basic UI perspective it seems fine tho. And it’ll handle multiple blogs. More as I investigate. Aha, found the categories tab, excellent.

As I was sick from Sunday to pretty much yesterday, blogging has been close to zero. Upcoming topics which may interest you include:

[1] Conor’s review of Ummera Smoked Eel (really good, try it)
[2] Mr Krabbs goes to Bandon (the story of a spider crab not a venereal disease)
[3] Skibbereen Winter Wonderland (who cares if a 37 year old wasn’t that impressed, the kids loved it)
[4] Foodie Podcasts (the good, the bad, the deeply clueless)
[5] Logitech Quickcam Fusion Review (not just for for internet pRoN)
[6] I’m a lumberjack and I’m ok (bye bye goddammed poplars)
[7] My horrendous drinking problem (Oh god, I don’t think I like booze any more)
[8] 2005 in review (or how many follicles died this year)

Can we get Vijay over to Cork? We have a bunch of things we need to talk to him about in Argolon Solutions.

Brad Feld’s Blog

[tags]VC, Dilbert, humour, Brad Feld, Argolon Solutions, Cork, Ireland[/tags]

Unless the name Matthew Smith means something to you and you get a wee tingle when the words “Manic Miner” are uttered, then you are probably not interested in the rest of this post.

But, YSNRY 1985 is finally with us just in time for christmas. This is the latest in a very very special (to Speccy fanatics like myself) series of animated “movies” about the hey-day years of ‘Your Sinclair/Your Spectrum’ magazine, an esteemed journal which published two games by yours truly back in 1985/1986!

It really is worth checking out all of the episodes if you ever had a Speccy or even a (spit) Commodore 64, Vic-20, Jupiter Ace, Oric-1, BBC Micro, Electron, ZX81, ZX80 or Enterprise/Elan/Flan. Do the author a favour tho and use bittorrent to download.

Some kind soul with an enormous amount of spare time has scanned in all the issues of Your Sinclair and Your Spectrum. Conor’s works of genius (being “The Grid” and “The Cherry Run”) in pure Z80 assembler can be viewed in all their JPEG glory below.

The Grid: Your Spectrum, Final Issue, December 1985

The Cherry Run: Your Sinclair, Issue 4, April 1986

If you are nostalgic for games that had graphics designed by a blind person, then you can actually play these games on your PC. Grab either ZXSpin or EmuZWin. Then download one of The Grid, Cent The Pete or Cherry Run and check out what a sad puberty I really had.

[tags] ZX, ZX Spectrum, ysrnry, Your Sinclair, Your Spectrum, ZXSpin, EmuZWin, emulation, 8-bit, nostalgia[/tags]

Sadly, attempt #2 at sausage making was not a big success. Not quite Null Points but definitely at the Norwegian end of the Eurovision chipolta contest.

I actually did it a few weeks ago for the parents coming over for brunch but I’m only getting around to blogging it now.

I defrosted the meat that I had not used the last time and spent a hell of a long time on preparation. In anticipation of the Kenwood making me cry like a small girl, I diced up all the meat ultra fine (along with the top of my thumb).

Pretty much the same mix as the last time with more pepper and more herbs. This time I decided to go for the smaller chipolata-style sheep casing. I ran the mix through the Kenwood mincer attachment twice on the roughest setting but the bastarding thing still jammed once. I am nearly ready to bin that P.O.S. It also didn’t fill the casing as well as the last time either.

To just make it perfect, I could not find my nice cotton string and ended up unravelling a piece of orange washing line and using that to string them up. I’m sure all the best deli’s will be switching over to day-glo polypropylene as soon as they read this.

As my lovely wife and kids were in the house, the shower was out of the question as a curing area. So I hung them in the shed, in the full expectation that some rat would run off with them during the night.

Luckily they were unmolested the following morning and I set them over a very gentle heat to cook up for a late brunch. Several of them burst but I wasn’t that bothered as I find that most of Martin Carey’s competition winning sossies do the same.

And they were fine but nothing to write a blog about I thought they were too dry, which my Da agreed with. I think I need to crank up the fat content in a big way and get proper pork shoulder instead of generic diced pork to go with the pork belly. Maybe less breadcrumbs too. But the spicing was better than the last time and I liked the white pepper kick off them.

I’m not giving up yet but I really need advice on what the problem with the Kenwood mincer attachment is. Do I have a bad un or am I missing something obvious.

I just received a fabulous book called “Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing“. If you have any interest in sausages, smoked foods, salamis, dried ham or any preserved meats, buy this book. It is a masterpiece. Hell, even if you never intend trying to make anything, it is just a great read. I’ll do a full review soon but what kills me about the book is that they made 90% of the things in it using a standard mincer attachment on a KitchenAid. Are they really that much better than a Kenwood?

I’ve just been checking the flickr pictures and it looks like I took none of the completed sausages. Grrrr.

[tags]sausages, charcuterie, kenwood, kitchenaid, eurovision, lulu[/tags]

“Dick Burning questions introducing feedflare”.

I ask myself, could Memeorandum have fitted more double entendres into one headline?

[tags] tech.memeorandum, double entendre, maturity of a 12-year old[/tags]

I finally did it – down to Union Hall with all four of the darlings and we bought a lobster. Poor Ois nearly had a heart attack when the guy in the shop leaped towards him with the lobster in his hand! Oscar just wanted to know how I was going to kill it. That kid worries me sometimes.

So here he is, just home, Spongebob.

Overnighted in the fridge covered in wet newspaper. Into the freezer for 2 hours and then straight into boiling, heavily salted water as per Sophie Grigson.

Also made my first ever mayonnaise. It split and I put too much oil in it. But other than that it was perfect

The lobster wasn’t great to be honest. Very disappointing – tiny amount of meat which was a bit stringy and didn’t have much flavour. Not worth €19. Back to crab.

And now for the bridge I mentioned recently. No it is not a pedestrian bridge and yes that is a van coming towards me:

[tags] union hall, lobster, glandore, mayonnaise[/tags]

I know absolutely nothing about marketing as I discovered in my first startup enterprise when it took me a year to notice that there was no “U” in our “USP”.

But over the past year I have been watching what Hugh McLeod has been doing with the idea of The Global Microbrand. Hugh is most famous for using blogging to create worldwide interest and demand for the products of a Saville Row tailor. Hugh is a disciple of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” which is a fantastic rant about where markets are going and how they are changing. The Number 1 thesis of the manifesto is that Markets are conversations. The amazing thing about it is that it was written in 1999. Hugh has a Hughtrain page which has some great thoughts on this area too.

More recently, and of more interest to me, are his efforts to to something similar with Stormhoek, a small South African wine company. In this case, one of the approaches is to send out free bottles of wine to bloggers and hope they blog about it. It appears to be working extremely well. There have probably been more words written about Stormhoek in the UK and Ireland in the past few months than about all of the Chilean producers combined.

The reason I mention all of this is due to a simple thing which happened last week. I blogged about Ummera Smoked Rashers; Anthony Creswell, who owns Ummera, spotted the blog and posted a reply. A few messages passed back and forth and I mentioned that I had never spotted their smoked eel in any of the shops. What does Anthony do? He drops a pack into Urru (a local gourmet food shop which stocks his smoked chicken and salmon)! I was gobsmacked.

Now, you may think this is just a bit of good customer service with a firm providing product to a local consumer (Ummera is only 10km or so from our house). But I think something far more important started here which is right at the heart of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Quite simply, this would never have happened like this without the “Read/Write Web” as it is known. Sure, I could have mailed Ummera and asked who stocks their eel and they could have dropped some into Urru for me. The gain for them? One extra customer.

But funnily enough, some people other than my family and Marky Mark actually read this blog and maybe some think to themselves “I’d like a bit of that” and they check out the Ummera web page and they realise Ummera ship world-wide, and they order some and it blows them away with flavour and they blog it and someone else reads their blog and and and and. All from one simple posting on a blog on a machine in California written by paddy in Bandon.

Ummera, Dunn’s, Clonakilty Black Pudding and a raft of other high quality food producers in Ireland are already global micro-brands so they are not trying to create brand awareness from scratch. But imagine if Ummera or Gubbeen or Dunn’s or Cashel Blue or Ballymaloe had their own blog? Imagine if that blog talked about the things they were trying to develop and their problems and their successes and recipes and ideas and questions and announcements and 1-to-1 customer feedback?

Foodies would go nuts for this kind of “inside track” and tell their friends who would love it and the foodie blogs would be abuzz and others would seek out the product and all of a sudden you have almost free global viral marketing. A simple seed would be for any foodie to post on eGullet that “such and such a producer has a new food blog and I think it is really interesting”. When I did a posting on eGullet to flag my review of “A Pig in Day with Hugh and Ray”, my blog readership sky-rocketed. Imagine if it finally came full circle and got picked up by the MSM (mainstream media) and they did an article in the Washington Post about this small Irish company with gloabl reach due to blogging……

There are many others who can explain this idea better than I. A recent interview by Tom Raftery of Steve Rubel who is a professional PR guy and blogger covers the power of blogging for advertising purposes extremely well.

Hell, I am surprised that some of the bigger global players are not trying this already at a national level to make themselves appear more “local”. They already do it with brands (like Campbells Soup owning Erin), why not with “The Cup of Soup Blog, live from Thurles”? There is a danger that this could be done badly like many of the big US corporate blogs where the blog is little more than another outlet for press releases. But done well, you start a conversation with your customers and find out far more than a million Lansdowne Surveys will ever tell you about what they like and don’t like.

Clearly the number of eyeballs is not very high yet but it is growing at a phenomenal rate. And the profile of blog readers is probably exactly the sort of ABC1′s that all marketeers want interested in their product.

But as I said, I know zero about marketing so feel free to ignore everything I just wrote and check out the picture of the lobster in my next post.

[tags]The Cluetrain Manifesto, Global Microbrands, The HughTrain, Stormhoek, Ummera, Dunn’s, Campbells Soup, viral marketing, Irish Food, Steve Rubel, Tom Raftery[/tags]

I don’t want this blog to turn into a list of great people who have died, but I’ve just read that Richard Pryor has passed away.

There is an excellent obituary on the Washington Post site.

Lovely quotes on Yahoo.

And if you’ve never heard him at his foul-mouthed best, you can listen to some clips on Amazon- hell go buy the box set whilst you are at it.

He was one of those guys who just made you laugh by standing on stage. It was amazing watching anger transformed into humour. Even his bad movies were worth a look.

He dies and yet Bernard Manning just keeps on going. It’s not fair is it?

[tags]Richard Pryor[/tags]

I’ve just cooked up the smoked rashers that Catherine got in Urru during the week. They were gorgeous. I was surprised when I opened the pack to see that it did not contain a few thick rashers but lots of very thinly cut ones. This is exactly the way I like them – I’ve never been a fan of those thick cut things which often end up a chewy as old boots. They usually have the word “traditional” on them. If I see this word on Irish food products, my brain automatically replaces it with the word “shite”.

But back to the Ummera rashers. Tons and tons of fat which, as Anthony points out in the earlier post, is where the taste is. They cooked up and crisped up beautifully. I popped the first one in my gob. The main things I noticed were that they were not very salty (again a plus) and the smoke flavour was nice and subtle. Sometimes on smoked food you get the sense that they welly on the smoke to make up for low quality meat. Actually, I get the feeling that some products have smoke “flavour” out of a bottle rather than real smoke. Not the case here. Wonderfully tasty rashers. I rustled up a BLT in double quick time and ate the nicest one I’ve had in years.

OK, so they are pricey – over €4. But what would you prefer to spend your money on – a weekly mouthful of mass produced crap which costs you feck all but tastes of nothing or a less regular treat which costs a bit more but which you remember for days?

Tomorrow – Ummera Smoked Eel. Off to Clon now to see if I can find horseradish root and then on to Union Hall again to get my first ever lobster – unless I chicken out on the way.

The next posting will attempt to bring together Smoked Food products and The Cluetrain Manifesto. But I don’t know if my brain is up to it.

[tags]Ummera, Urru, Smoked bacon, rashers, Union Hall, Smoked Eel, Cluetrain Manifesto[/tags]