Archive for December, 2005
Tis the season for Milk Tray and cadbury’s chocolate fingers
Posted on December 24, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Family, Food.
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]
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First posting from Performancing for Firefox
Posted on December 22, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Blogging, Family, Food, Reviews, Technology.
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)
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Saves me from infringing Scott Adam’s copyright…
Posted on December 16, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Business, Cork, Humour.
Can we get Vijay over to Cork? We have a bunch of things we need to talk to him about in Argolon Solutions.
[tags]VC, Dilbert, humour, Brad Feld, Argolon Solutions, Cork, Ireland[/tags]
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The “Your Sinclair” Rock n Roll Years 1985 now available
Posted on December 15, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Personal.
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]
4 Comments
Boom Bang a Bang Banger
Posted on December 15, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Cooking, Family, Food.
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]
4 Comments
And tonights double entendre is….
Posted on December 13, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Humour, Technology.
“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]
1 Comment
Spongebob The Lobster
Posted on December 12, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Cooking, Cork, Food, Ireland.
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]
2 Comments
Irish food producers and the Cluetrain Manifesto
Posted on December 12, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Blogging, Business, Cork, Food, Ireland.
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]
13 Comments
There’s nothing worse than being an aging young person
Posted on December 11, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Humour.
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]
2 Comments
Ummera Smoked Rashers: Taste-tastic!
Posted on December 10, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Cork, Food, Ireland.
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]
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One of the best ever words in a foreign language
Posted on December 7, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Personal, Technology.
My first employer was S3, who are 90% owned by Philips in The Netherlands. As a result,I spent quite a bit of time in Eindhoven, where the HQ is based. Big hello to the Eindhoven posse (Mark)!
The Inquirer has an short article on the death of the son of the founder of Philips at the age of 100. They mention what he was in charge of in his heyday. The same name was on a giant sign which you passed in the train on the way into the city from Amsterdam. I never needed anyone to translate it for me:
Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken
Just a perfect word.
[tags] philips, Gloeilampenfabrieken, S3[/tags]
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LJK Passes Away
Posted on December 7, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Motor Cars, Personal.
I was gutted to read in CAR that LJK Setright passed away recently. I started reading CAR when I was 14 years old and continue to do so despite his absence for the past few years.
As a kid, I checked out most of the motoring magazines and CAR was the only one I read where I felt I was learning something, rather than just reading pseudo-ads. For a short while in the late 80’s I tried Performance Car but to be honest that was only because of Clarkson. I can happily claim to have spotted his future greatness whilst still in my teens. The letters page every month were filled with missives from indignant middle-Englanders who were scandalised by his digs at everything they held dear.
But Clarkson was just naughty and after a while I returned to the more thoughtful bosom of CAR, and more importantly, to LJK’s monthly column. Each month I worked my way through it and understood about half of it. His breadth and depth of knowledge was extraordinary, with many literary references and tons of Latin (all of which went straight over my head due to giving up Latin for Classical Studies in 2nd Year in Kierans!). I learned more about cars from his one page each month than from the rest of the magazine.
LJK was arrogant, pompous and usually right. This is a man who argued engine cylinder design with Honda’s Nobuhiko Kawamoto, who argued that there were distinct advantages to smoking, and who, most of all, argued that speed does not, in fact, kill. And for that, I loved every word the man wrote.
Last year I bought the last book he wrote: “Drive On! A Social History of the Motor Car”. As I am averaging two book completions a year right now, I have only read a few chapters. But this is a masterpiece of erudition, history, opinion, insight and humour. To many people, a car is simply an appliance whose main contribution to the world is pollution. This book shows how so much of who we are and how we live our lives comes from the motor car. And the critical thing is that most of its effect are to our benefit. It’s a heavy read (as were all his CAR articles) but you’ll feel that you understand the world just a little bit better as you go through it.
I felt that the obituary in CAR was a sad reflection of what has happened to that magazine. In the past, they would have articles running to twenty pages or more. Phil Llewellin (who sadly also died recently) specialised in articles like that. As a young-fella, I did find many of them overly wordy but now I see what the alternative is – every article stripped to 2 pages for the ADD-addled Max Power generation. No depth, no analysis, barely time for the specs. They gave two pages to Setright, one of which was a picture (and what a unique style the man had!). He deserved half the entire issue.
Here are a few links to obituaries:
The Telegraph. The Independent. Pacific Motorsport.
I’ll finish with two quotes from the great man:
On the Citroën GS in 1971:
“According to Voltaire, ‘the secret of art is to improve on nature’. It is a peculiarly French attitude, one that is manifested as much in their engineering as in their graphic, plastic or musical artefacts. In their automotive engineering it is especially apparent…”
And most famously, Setright on speed limits:
“Apart from tax evasion, there should logically be one and only one motoring offence: dangerous driving… If what one does (even if one does 150mph) is not actually dangerous, then it does not matter what it is, nor what other people think. It is then no business of other people – not if this is, as we used to think, a free country.”
I’m going to miss that man.
[tags] LJK, LJK Setright, CAR, CAR magazine, obituary[/tags]
18 Comments
Blatent Blog Whoring
Posted on December 7, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Food.
Accidental Hedonist is doing the 2005 Food Blog Awards. You know what you have to do………
[tags] accidental hedonist, food blog, food, conoroneill[/tags]
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Ummera do Smoked Bacon
Posted on December 5, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Food.
To mix vernaculars; Holy god, Ummera Rox! Wifey spotted Ummera Smoked Bacon in Urru in Bandon today and bought a pack.
Check out the back fat on that baby. Hell, I even have trouble competing with that.
[tags]ummera, bacon, rashers, smoked meat, urru, bandon[/tags]
10 Comments
An ex-church or nunnery in a small town near Cork from McCarthy’s Bar??
Posted on December 5, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Friends, Ireland.
An old old friend (bet ya like that description Jane) is living over in Frankfurt. Her hubby has just finished McCarthy’s Bar and is dying to visit the place mentioned in the book which he describes as an ex-church or nunnery in a small town near Cork, on the coast, known for it’s good cuisine.
I have no idea where he is talking about and Googling only brings up the actual McCarthy’s Bar in Castletownbere. Can the combined wisdom of the blogosphere help a Greek abroad? Just post your responses as a comment. Thanks.
2 Comments
Hey Dad, that’s the same ugly fish as last week
Posted on December 4, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Cooking, Family, Food, Ireland, Personal.
I have a wee bee in my bonnet about how difficult it is to get good fresh fish in the “greater Bandon area”. When we moved down here, I thought I would have fish coming out of my ears (as opposed to sleeping with the fishes). But it was the complete opposite.
The SuperValu in the town has a small fish counter but you can never rely on it to have anything you want. And in the spirit of old Ireland, there are two fish stalls every friday up near the top of town. Whilst this is a lovely tradition and long may it continue, I do tend to want fish other than on the same day every week. The two vendors also only sell the usual staples like cod etc.
I got excited one day when I spotted a van with a sign saying “The Bandon Fish Shop”. And where do they turn out to be based? The English Market in Cork City! I think they live in Bandon, hence the name……
Of course the English Market is heaven for all sorts of food, particularly fish. If you visit the city and don’t check out O’Connell’s fish stall, you are missing something very special. These guys have everything. They have a counter which has a constant running stream of water on it and they gut and fillet at high speed on demand. Not quite the high jinks of those guys in the Market in Seattle who throw the huge fish at each other but still pretty bloody impressive.
There are only two problems with the English Market – it is a 40 minute drive and the only day I can go is Saturday when it is mayhem from about 10am onwards. Ideally I want to use the double buggy to cart around the two younger ones whilst I have Oisín in a head lock to stop him running away but the aisles are just too narrow and there are too many people to make it a pleasurable experience.
I spent a day last year touring villages near the sea trying to find one. Clon is on the bloody sea and they don’t have a fish shop – the fish counter in Dunnes is a joke. Nothing in Kilbrittain, nothing in Timoleague. But I did spot a sign for Ummera Smoked Salmon and headed in that direction, thinking I was being very cunning as they would surely know where to get fish in the area.
We drove up a rutted track to find a fabulous wooden building which unfortunately looked closed but a van arrived just after us and it was the owner, Anthony Creswell. I spent about twenty minutes having a really good chat. He is an interesting, friendly and funny guy. The Smokery is just so cool; It is totally environmentally friendly and uses a reed-bed system for filtering its waste. If you get a chance, try their salmon, it is fantastic. They are part of
Irish Smoked Wild Atlantic Salmon Presidium of The Slow Food movement, along with Marky Mark’s Da’s company, Dunn’s of Dublin (which is also fabulous and a lot easier to get than Ummera). But the unbelievable thing was that he had no idea either where we would get fresh fish other than heading down to the ports.
I gave up for a long time except for the odd foray to the English Market. Then a few months back there was rake of ads for Fish shops down in West Cork. Union Hall Fish Sales advertised that they now had a place in Skibbereen and then Antcar advertised that they had a shop in Union Hall which is a major fishing port.
Two weeks ago I headed to Skibb. On the way we passed through Leap (pronounced Lep or Leep?). Fab Lake/Estuary/Sea/Bit of water as you leave the village. I toured Skibb and failed miserably to find the Union Hall shop, but I did find “The Baltimore Fish Shop”. I had the three younger squirts in the car so I bundled two of em into the buggy and Oisín pushed. The shop was quite small and pokey with a very small selection of fish. But Ois was enthralled. “What’s that ugly one called Dad”, “Monkfish, Ois”. What about that long one “Cod, Ois”.
So I got some plaice, tuna and smoked haddock. I wondered about overall freshness as the place wasn’t exactly hopping but when I took the fish out later to cook, there was only the smell of the sea so it was top quality. All of it was lovely. Fishcakes for the kiddies, fried plaice for us and then tuna with spaghetti and tomato sauce for the squirts the following day.
So of course I had to go one better and the following weekend headed down to Union Hall to check out Antcar. This is one of the best drives you can do in the country. There is the lovely view of Rosscarbery Lagoon just before you turn towards Glandore. And then Glandore, dear god Glandore. My C in Honours English in the Leaving means I lack the descriptive skills to give you any sense of the views as you drive through and past Glandore. I can see why lots of “stars” have houses there. Jaw-droppingly fabulous sea vistas. Easily as impressive as the Grand Canyon.
After Glandore is one of the coolest bridges in the country. It is a small metal pokey thing and it is one car wide apart from a bulge in the middle to allow those playing chicken to pass each other. I would love to have been at the meeting where they decided the design of the bridge. “I call to order the monthly meeting of the Ballymagash Town Council. The first order of business is the planned bridge joining Union Hall to Glandore”. “We have £1000 available to build it, how much will it cost?”. “£2000″. “Bugger, anyone got any ideas?”. “How’s about half a bridge?”. “What, they swim the rest of it?”. “No, half a bridge, one donkey cart wide”. “Genius, motion passed, build it”. That is lateral thinking at its very finest.
And so onwards to Antcar. Absolutely brilliant. It is a small shop fronting their wholesale business and was hopping at 11.30 on a saturday morning. Shibs and Fionn were buggy-bound and not that interested. Ois had eyes bulging out of his head when he spotted the massive lobsters in the tank. And then, “Hey Dad, that’s the same ugly fish as last week”. You’re spot on Ois, it’s another monkfish. Poor lad nearly jumped out of his skin when the crab beside it made a move. The guy behind the counter was extremely friendly, helpful and did a great job on gutting and filletting.
On the way back I popped into The Lettercollum Kitchen Project in Clon which is half food shop (mainly organic) and half pre-prepared food for foodies who hate cooking. They do fantastic quiches, salads, tarts and a bunch of other things. The shop half has lots of things made from spelt (what the hell is spelt?) and good value in spices and other ingredients. I splurged. I also got a big bar of Green & Black Caramel chocolate and broke the diet badly for one lip-smacking day.
We had a weekend of gurnard, haddock, a fab Gigot de Lotte (Monkfish roasted with garlic and rosemary) and calamari.
And then onto the final chapter in my slightly obsessive adventure. Last weekend, I tried to find the Union Hall Fish Sales place again in Skibb and this time I succeeded. They are just on the road out to Bunalun. So I guess Bunalun Organic Products is not an invented name after all? The Co-Op is another smallish shop fronting a wholesale business. The selection was not great at all but the fish looked good. One thing I had noticed in Antcar was a complete lack of molluscs and it was the same here so I asked why. He just said it wasn’t part of their business. Maybe this part of Cork doesn’t land much in the way of mussels or scallops? I think it is the right time of year for them. I got some sole and frozen scallops and then asked him about the John Dory. I wanted to know if it was best to cook them whole or get him to fillet them. “Dunno mate, don’t eat the stuff”. Jesus! What is his weekday job? Vegetarian in a butchers? So I got him to fillet them cos they looked awkward to do.
On the way back this time I went to the Organic Shop on the same street as Lettercollum. Pick a random name from the 1916 boyos and they are both on that street. This is a branch of the one in the English Market. They seem to have re-focused since Lettercollum opened and now do a lot of fresh veg and food rather than the dried goods. It’s also an excellent shop but the prices are pretty steep. In any case, the sole was lovely but idiot-boy forgot he was going to Boston for the week so the rest of it was frozen until I get a chance to eat it.
So top tip for eating fish in Cork: Move to Union Hall.
Update 1: Finally went to Scally’s Supervalu in Clon. Fish not bad. but even better – they do bacon from Gubbeen in Schull. I’ll be back.
[tags] Baltimore Fish, Union Hall Fish Sales, Antcar, Skibbereen, Bandon, fish, Cork, English Market, fish on fridays[/tags]
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Skyping with Bluetooth
Posted on December 1, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Gadgets, Technology.
Skype and Bluetooth are a match made in heaven. My home set-up is an Acer Laptop with a very nice teeny Neon Bluetooth USB Adapter which I got from Shop4Memory in Celbridge. I also got the latest GG Telecom GG03a Bluetooth headset from them. This is Bluetooth 1.2 compatible, but more importantly can be paired to up to three devices. So with a quick button press, I can switch it from working with the Nokia mobile to pairing with the laptop to pairing with the work desktop.
It’s then a simple matter of telling Skype to use the Bluetooth as the Audio Input/Output device and you can now make Skype calls using the headset and wander (not too far!) around the house.
I purchased €10 work of Skype-Out credit and was initially using some of it for the conference calls I make to the US when I’m working from home. But I suddenly realised that I could use the US toll-free numbers to dial-in to the conference calls from Skype. So these calls are now free! The quality can be patchy at times but is no worse than that from many of the people who dial-in using their mobiles.
As an experiment, I am going to try the same with Gizmo to see if the quality is any better. It is a fully standards compliant VOIP tool but with many of the same bells and whistles as Skype. I prefer the idea of standards compliance rather than the proprietary lock-in of Skype. If I get a chance I’ll try it today and report back.
If you do get the Neon Adapter (and I do recommend it), then make sure to install the latest Blue Soleil Bluetooth stack from IVT, as the older ones which ship with the adapter don’t work well with the Nokia PC Suite.
SMALL UPDATE: I bought $10 credit on Gizmo so I could test the performance connecting to POTS. Unfortunately the planned conf call was cancelled. But I dialled into the US Conference Center number anyway. Initial impression was that the voice quality I was hearing was better than Skype. Also, I often get failures in Skype with keying the conference passwords – the DTMF must get overly-distorted. I had no issue with Gizmo. So looking good overall. Next test is to find out from others how I sound on it and to see if they do free calls to US toll-free POTS numbers like Skype.
UPDATE 2: I’m in the international departures lounge in Logan. Customer needed to talk to me ASAP and I didn’t want to use the mobile, so I chanced Gizmo. It worked like a charm. I didn’t have the headset set-up so I was talking at the tiny built-in mic on the laptop and used my normal walkman-style headphones to listen to him. I asked him how the quality was and he thought it was fine. Particularly impressive when you consider the level of background noise and the constant tannoy announcements (Some poor announcer sap actually said “Mr Goldfinger please contact the SwissAir check-in desk”! Check it out.
[tags]skype, bluetooth, nokia, gizmo, voip[/tags]
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