Archive for February, 2007
Twazr or Gritter?
Posted on February 27, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Gadgets, Technology.
James rises to the challenge:
7 Comments
I still think it is stoopid but
Posted on February 26, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Gadgets, Technology.
I’ve gone and got a Twitter account anyway.
What is Twitter you may ask? Well it is a web-site where you say what you are doing right now. You can do it via web, SMS or IM. Cos we all have such interesting lives and all our friends need to know exactly what we are doing at every moment in time. “finger up right nostril” “finger up left nostril” “bogey rolling” “bogey flicking”. Still it’s probably more interesting than the next Marian Keyes pot-boiler.
The reason I signed up was not cos of the original purpose of it but more for the interesting things that geeks are doing with it. Tom Morris scrapes Tube delay notices and twitters them so you can subscribe and get those updates via the same methods you use to send twitters. Kinda like the the District Line saying “right now, I’m bunched” “right now, some leaves are annoying me”. Neat.
It’s also far easier to twitter from your phone than it is to blog. So I will try to do a bit the next time I’m travelling: “I’m driving down the M8″ “I’m swerving into oncoming traffic” “I’m flying through the air”.
Looks like I’m one of the cool kids now. Check out what I’m doing in the sidebar of the blog. Next thing you know I’ll be getting a Second Life account. Nah.
5 Comments
Now that I’ve calmed down
Posted on February 18, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Ireland.
What a great line-up for the final! Well done to everyone who got through, there is some real quality in there. A ton of my fave Irish blogs are listed. Looking forward to the night of the awards already. Will the concierge mind the baby tho?
4 Comments
Struck dumb
Posted on February 18, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Ireland.
Damien just posted the short-list for the Irish Blog Awards. I got through in all four categories in which I was long-listed. I think I need to lie down.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now – I have the smartest, sexiest, wittiest, funniest, bestest readers on the planet. Thank you all for responding so well to my daily emails begging you to vote for me. They’ll stop now.
9 Comments
4 minutes left – Do it DO IT
Posted on February 16, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Blogging.
You’ll hate yourself in the morning if you don’t.
Just to whet your appetite, you can expect more of this sort of thing in 2007 from The Bandonites/Bandonians/OldChaplers.
(Via A Hamburger Today)
2 Comments
Not the way to lose your baby teeth
Posted on February 16, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Family, Health, Kids.
Poor Oisín is terribly unlucky with his front teeth. When he was 2-ish he fell off a changing table and impacted one of his front teeth up into the bone and split the lip and gum. Nothing could be done except let it heal. That tooth was much shorter than the other one until yesterday. Then yesterday evening, he fell off a stool and did a repeat performance, this time knocking out his other tooth and making a mush of his upper lip again.
Once again, the advice from the doc was to do nothing and let it heal. He rang the dental hospital and they concurred particularly considering they are his baby teeth.
But we are worried about the full teeth and what the likelihood is that they’ll come down ok. Anyone else have kids where this happened? I’d hate for the poor mite to have to get implants at an early age. I know too many people with those already.
I hope he gets something nice in town with Catherine today. The tooth fairy gave him a tenner cos she felt so sorry for him.
14 Comments
I’m not making this up
Posted on February 15, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Ireland.
Ivan Pope has voted for me in the Irish Blog Awards. Ivan runs a great tech company in the UK called, wait for it……Snipperoo. I knew there was a reason I put his widget in the sidebar of this blog rather than my business one!
In any case, 21 hours to go in the voting. Check out my nominations to the right there, check out all the others over at Jason Roe’s blog, and if you think I’m worth it, gis a vote.
And check out Snipperoo, if you like adding extra functionality to the sidebar of your blog, it really is sweet. I’ll be adding it to Argolon and LouderVoice as soon as my currently very dicky tummy settles down.
2 Comments
Cafe Paradiso Take Two
Posted on February 14, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Restaurants, Reviews.
Catherine, ReviewBlogger extraordinaire, has posted her review of our meal in Cafe Paradiso last Saturday. It was bloody lovely.
2 Comments
I wonder how long I’ll last?
Posted on February 14, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Ireland, Technology.
So far so good, I’m able to guess most of them.
11 Comments
Gourmet Burger gone already! Bugger.
Posted on February 13, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Food, Ireland, Restaurants.
Ah crap. JD posted a comment here earlier letting me know that he went to Gourmet Burger in Portlaoise the other day and they have already closed down to concentrate on their Dublin business. I’m so pissed off about this. I don’t think it is lack of market in this case, but lack of marketing. How many thousand cars go up and down the N7 and N8 every day? I never once saw an ad for them. I did see some attempt at putting a truck trailer on the side of the road at Christmas with ads for the overall Food Court but that’s it. People do need to know you exist before they’ll try your business.
Anthony from Ummera mentioned to them that I had blogged about them. Not once did they contact me or post a comment on this blog telling us what they were trying to do and how they’d love it if people would tell their friends. For gods sake, it would’ve been free advertising. Arrggggggh. Clueless Train Manifesto.
Surely someone with a bit more marketing nous and budget can make a go of such a great idea in an ideal location?
UPDATE 1: David from Gourmet Burger has posted an excellent comment here explaining exactly why they shut down Port Laoise. It makes total sense.
Now I’m between a rock and a hardplace aka Iarnród Eireann Sambos or O’Brien’s Sambos. Where’s me tupperware?
34 Comments
My kinda deli
Posted on February 13, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon.
A treasure trove of proper Italian food at great prices
The Boot’s Specialities
I heard about this deli over three years ago and have been meaning to go since. The story was that they had great Italian food but at non-ripoff prices since they are also a wholesalers.
Brendan mentioned it recently as a comment on this blog and we agreed to meet up last Saturday morning. He arrived with his Sardinian wife Laetitia and their two daughters. I arrived with numbers 2, 3 and 4.
However, we got there first and I decided it had shut down since there was no sign of a deli. The others arrived shortly after and drove over to this utterly non-descript industrial unit and there it was “The Boot’s Specialities”. I had seen the sign but assumed they were shoe distributors.
Unfortunately they also looked shut. Brendan rang Pasquale the onwer and it turned out he was inside prepping. He let us in with a big welcome a few minutes later.
Inside was a bunch of shelves with all sorts of pasta, sweets, drinks, sauces, wines, flour and ingredients. He had laid out some lovely cheese, olives, salami and mortadella to taste. My monsters started acting up so he broke out some bikkies too.
Laetitia and Brendan showed me all of the things they liked and I grabbed bits of everything. Some parma, salted capers, soup pasta, the Italian version of Monster Munch, olives, olive oil, coffee, those breakfast biscuits, the works.
I think we were the only people speaking English there and he was very busy. Not too busy tho to shock me by handing me an espresso he made himself using one of those stove top little pots. I think I love this man.
The reason I absolutely adored this deli was because it was the real stuff that real Italians eat. He didn’t have 16 different single estate extra virgin olive oils, he had one. He also didn’t have vintage red wine vinegar, just good normal stuff. Even more impressive was that many of the prices were far lower than you’d pay in Tesco!
I had a conversation with Haydn recently about the modern midle-class food fetishization that goes on. It seems sometimes like all those frou-frou shops are there to massage our gourmand egos rather than provide great food at good prices. I see Pasquale as the antidote to that.
He didn’t even mind when Oisín told him he talked funny 
And those Monster Munch (Cipster) went down a storm with the kids.
I’ll be back very very soon without the fighting children to check out the fridge section. I’ll still need my advisors tho.
12 Comments
Small AllFreeCalls problem
Posted on February 12, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Ireland, Technology.
I decided to try out AllFreeCalls.ie this afternoon. I had to ring Casio Customer Support in the UK about my poxy unfixable watch and my guess was that it would a longish call. I rang the access number and a voice told me that I would be charged at local rates and to enter the number I wanted. I entered the UK number and got through to the queuing system in Casio immediately. I did notice a reasonable amount of noise on the line which I assume is a VOIP artifact. I was asked to press “2″ on my phone which I did, repeatedly, to no avail.
I hung up and re-rang the number using Gizmo (I have Call Out credit) and this time my keypress worked fine. So it looks like the DTMF tones are getting sufficiently distorted that they don’t work on AllFreeCalls.
Not a huge deal and it will affect very few people. And still a sweet service.
A question popped up today when my wife had to ring her sister in the US. The sister was on an Irish mobile. Just wondering if [a] AllFreeCalls can handle that scenario and [b] how much the call would cost both parties? A perfect candidate for Roam4Free but she has a company mobile.
And no, the Casio people still couldn’t sort out my dodgy watch. Grrrr.
3 Comments
My beautiful readers
Posted on February 10, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Ireland.
You lovely lovely people have got me into the voting round in four categories in The Irish Blog Awards! I’m blushing just thinking about it. Thank you. Now the number of votes really counts in this round so head on over to The Voting Page and give me your first preference vote in the following categories:
- Best Blog Post
- Best Personal Blog
- Best Technology Blog/Blogger (I think this is my Argolon Blog mixed with LouderVoice)
- Best Business Blog (my Argolon blog)
Thanks again you gorgeous, thoughtful, deeply intelligent blog angels.
NOTE: Jason Roe has links to all the blogs and blog posts on his blog.
Technorati Tags: Irish+Blog+Awards+2007, iba2007
2 Comments
Casio UK Service dreadful
Posted on February 9, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Gadgets, Purchasing, Technology.
I bought a nice Casio Waveceptor watch about 18 months ago from a great discount online store in Wales called The Time Zone. It’s a combined analogue/digital job and syncs the time using those big transmitters scattered around Europe.
The watch worked fine for a few months and then the analogue bit started losing hours and hours. I returned it to Casio UK who replaced the battery and sent it back. In no time at all the problem returned. I sent it back again and they replaced much of the innards. All was well for another few months and then it started losing time again!
I sent it back last week with a statement that I wanted a replacement watch since it was either flawed by design or by manufacture. It was returned this morning with a note saying they could find nothing wrong. Here we are 2 hours later and it has already lost an hour!!
Maybe as part of their “extensive testing” they should put it on someone’s wrist for half an hour.
What the hell do I have to do to get this bloody watch fixed? And yes, it is still under warranty.
It’s probably cost me as much again in postage every time I return it. For the moment, all I can say is avoid Casio Waveceptor watches like the plague. Catherine got a cheap digital Casio at the same time as me and apart from a battery change has worked perfectly since.
Technorati Tags: watch, casio, waveceptor, casio+uk, customer+service, design+flaw, customer+rights, warranty
8 Comments
AllFreeCalls.ie – Free international calls from Ireland
Posted on February 9, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Ireland, Purchasing, Technology.
Some of you may have heard about AllFreeCalls which allows people in the US to call internationally for the price of a call to Iowa (often free). This is a service run by a great guy called Pat Phelan in Cork.
Well they’ve just gone and extended it to Ireland. If you have one of those free national calls packages that most of the telcos like Eircom and BT here provide, then you can call international numbers for zero cost using AllFreeCalls. Yup, big fat zero. Even if you don’t have such a package, you’ll just pay the price of a local or national call to ring many countries around the world. Very simple instructions on how to do it over at AllFreeCalls.ie
For once it’s great to report on Non-Ripoff-Ireland.
Technorati Tags: AllFreeCalls, AllFreeCalls.net, AllFreeCalls.ie, Roam4Free, Pat+Phelan
No Comments
Geeky thought about an Irish-English/English-Irish dictionary
Posted on February 7, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Commentary, Technology.
Our start-up LouderVoice got a nice mention in the Irish-language daily newspaper Lá. We were at an un-conference called BarCamp Ireland South-East in Waterford and Conn Ó Muíneacháin did a nice write up about it. Due to my desperately rusty Irish, I had to make use of this online dictionary to translate some of the words. Whilst it is a great resource, it seems to be lacking a huge number of words and also only seems to handle the roots of of words (or whatever it is called i.e it’ll find léirmheastóir but not léirmheastóireachta).
So the thought struck me this morning that a dictionary is the ideal target for a community effort, like Wikipedia is for encyclopedias. In fact, some sort of custom wiki might be ideal as a base for generating such a dictionary.
It could start very simply with one page per letter of the alphabet and as it grows, new pages are generated to sub-divide it. A wiki is very simply a web-site with pages that anyone can edit. The idea being that if you went to the wiki-dictionary to find the translation of a word and you spotted other ones that were missing, in a few simple clicks you could add them.
Of course it would need an agreed style of entry so it looked consistent but I’m sure there are plenty of language experts who could come up with a few simple rules for that. It would also need moderators to keep it clean and delete spam etc. And the search function would have to be very good.
For the laugh, I’ve just created a sample of what that might look like over at pbWiki. It took all of ten minutes to do and is called focloir.pbwiki.com. When Google makes JotSpot free, that might be the ideal location for such a resource since Jotspot is much easier to use than most wikis.
So what do people think? A bit too techie? A bit too idealistic? No need?
Technorati Tags: foclóir, dictionary, wiki, Irish, Gaeilge, community, UGC, jotspot
32 Comments
Sometimes you forget
Posted on February 6, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Entertainment.
That Prince is a Music God. And then you see this:
Superbowl XLI half-time show.
Technorati Tags: Superbowl, Superbowl+XLI, Prince
4 Comments
What next? Burberry buys the Corsa division of Opel?
Posted on February 2, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Motor Cars.
I don’t know whether this is good or bad news, and either way it has no impact on my life, but Lous Vuitton is buying Aston Martin. Sure they are both luxury brands but mixing handbags and camshafts – I’m just not sure. It smacks of one of those “synergy” horrors which used to be so common. Maybe Daniel Craig will sport a man-purse in the next Bond movie.
Hopefully they’ll do something about the rear-end of all recent Astons which to my eye are identical to a mid-1990’s Mazda.
Technorati Tags: Aston+Martin, Ford, Louis+Vuitton
3 Comments
We’ve got the decorators in
Posted on February 1, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging.
Ignore all the messing you see on this blog. Doing a bit of a revamp and tidy up and trying out the sooper-de-dooper Snipperoo Widget system for the sidebar. Normal service will return shortly.
No Comments
De Cecco doesn’t have to worry
Posted on February 1, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cooking, Food, Kids.
My sister Orla bought me a pasta machine for Christmas and I finally got around to trying it out on Saturday.
Myself and Sibéal decided to make a mix of tagliatelle and spaghetti. Neither of us had made it before and her excuse is that she is only 3.
I had the usual recipe problem of not knowing which one to use. Jamie Oliver’s Italy book said 6 eggs and 600g of flour and that’s it. Another no-name one also added oil and water and salt. I went with Jamie but the dough was far too dry, so I added a bit of oil and that seemed to do the trick.
I clamped the machine to the worktop and ran into the first big problem, I don’t have three hands. Oh for that extra 1970’s ad washing-up hand to appear. You have to feed the dough in, feed it out on the other side and crank the handle. The first run through was not impressive:
This was mainly because i was attempting to fix a 2 inch think lump of dough through a millimetre wide gap.
Two more attempts went a lot better and we ended up with something which looked vaguely like a long sheet of lasagne. I then ran it through the wider cutters and got my tagliatelle.
Sibéal took over for the narrower cutters and ended up with far better looking spaghetti.
Fatal flaw was then discovered – we hadn’t floured the dough so all the strands stuck together again. I valiantly tugged them apart for twenty minutes, dumped the lot in boiling water and ended up with something that looked and vaguely tasted like pasta. None of the kids would touch it and they were right as the tagliatelle was undercooked and the spaghetti overcooked. Bin.
I’m unfazed and will go at spaghetti again. Or maybe lasagne if I lose my nerve. Any top tips for the next time? Except maybe looking at PodChef Neal’s pasta videos before we start? Should we rest the dough even when using a machine? Was the cheap book right when it said you only need minimal kneading if you are using the machine since it does it for you?
Technorati Tags: pasta, pasta+maker, Jamie+Oliver
16 Comments
