Archive for April, 2007
My Proposed Questions to the HSE under Freedom of Information
Posted on April 30, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Health.
The scandal that is the non-vaccination using BCG of children in Cork could have far-reaching implications for the health of many people under the age of 30. Both employees of the then Southern Health Board and the political appointees to the board may have had a say in implementing this negligent policy and continuing to allow it to occur since the 1970’s. It is clear that the health of Cork children is considered less important than that of children from elsewhere in the country.
I’ve just been informed that budget was put aside to deal with this in 2004 and was then re-allocated. In the interests of accuracy I have decided to contact the HSE under the Freedom of information act to find out who, why and when decisions were made in this area since the 1970’s.
Below are my questions. Please add to them or improve on them in the comments section and I’ll put together a combined list and send it to the HSE. It’ll be interesting to see if there is any attempt made to delay the answers until after May 17th.
- On what dates was the decision made and then implemented to stop providing BCG routinely to newborn babies in the Cork region years ago?
- Provide the names of all the senior individuals (medical, administrative, consultant, board members) involved in the making of that decision
- Provide the names of all past or present TDs, Senators or Councillors who were on the Southern Health Board when that decision was made
- Did the board authorise that decision? If so, provide the names of all members of that board
- Provide the names of all past or present TDs, Senators or Councillors who were on the Southern Health Board since the decision
- Confirm whether the provision of BCG as a matter of routine was agreed to be re-introduced at any point since then, on what dates and by whom
- Confirm whether that NEW decision was overturned, for what reason, by whom and when
- Confirm that BCG shots are available in some locations nationally on demand and list the places where there is no waiting list
- Confirm that residents of Cork can avail of these BCG shots and provide contact information for arranging these shots
21 Comments
Greatest Wordpress Theme Ever!
Posted on April 29, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology, Tweets.
If you are not a geek, stop reading now. Factory Joe (aka Chris Messina) did a Tweet earlier pointing to a theme for Wordpress. I just checked it out. I am so in awe of this person.
It is a Commodore 64 Command Line Interface to a blog.
Try typing last, next, current, help or cat
Someone somewhere please please do a ZX Spectrum version of this.
UPDATE 1: Ach, just realised Chris must have seen it on Boing Boing.
1 Comment
Review of Anthony Bourdain Decoding Ferran Adria
Posted on April 26, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon.
Best programme about food I’ve seen in over a year. What makes the guy from El Bulli tick?
Rated as /5 on Apr 26 2007 by Conor O’Neill
I’ve been a big fan of Anthony Bourdain since I read Kitchen Confidential and my opinion of him just grew and grew with the TV shows and his Les Halles cookbook.
I was flicking around Sky the other night and spotted “Anthony Bourdain decod….” in the channel guide on UK TV Food. I pressed the info button and was thrilled to see that he was going to meet with Ferran Adria of El Bulli, rated best restaurant in the world for the past two years.
Adria is famous for a type of cooking which some coin “molecular gastronomy” and for which Heston Blumenthal in The Fat Duck is also famed. The basic idea is that you analyse what you are doing from a rigorous scientific viewpoint which enables you to come up woth new processes, tastes and textures that more traditional chefs could never do.
At the low-end you have things like “foams” which are already hackneyed and being done by people of far less talent in many restaurants around the world. These are whipped up foams of things like carrot so you get taste but no “body”.
The programme started well with Bourdain saying he didn’t think much of this view of cooking. It lacked heart or passion and seemed to be more concerned with shock than taste.
But he headed to Barcelona and was told first to check out a “ham” shop caled Jamonissimo. I was in heaven watching them thinly slice various types of Jamon Iberico like Salamanca. The fat was almost melting at room temperature. Pure food porn. The point of the exercise was to give Bourdain some idea of where Adria is coming from in terms of pure taste and pure texture.
Aside: We get small blocks of Serrano and Jamon Curado from my parents when they come back from Spain. Sibéal, aged 3, loves it and calls it Special Ham.
Bourdain then headed to the workshop to meet the team. And it was a proper team where everyone had equal say. Adria just sees himself as the front-man for the team. This was an incredible place where they spend hours every day trying ideas out, rigorously documenting them and then deciding if they could go on a menu.
A few things they showed included cooking sardines in such a way that they looked raw but were fully cooked, searing a peach so it had the texture of fois gras and trying a chemical that you can either taste as bitter or not taste at all depending on your genetic make-up!
Then it was time for the meal which was just mind-blowing. You get up to 32 courses over 5 hours in a restaurant which has 55 chefs and 55 seats. Each course is barely a mouthful or two but each one is amazing in execution. I’m only going to list a few but I was drooling at every one.
Apple Caviar: Somehow they can make tiny balls which have the shape and texture of caviar but burst to reveal a taste of pure apple.
Pasta-less Ravioli: Large globules of pure pea puree held together only by willpower.
Jamon-Tuna: Fat belly of tuna cured like jamon and sliced wafer thin. You get a tweezers to pick it up.
The amazing thing about the whole meal was that it was very relaxed, the restaurant looks pretty standard Spanish style and is not overly formal at all. I have no idea how much a meal costs and I know the waiting list is a year but some day, SOME DAY, I’m eating in El Bulli.
Oh and Bourdain was utterly convinced by the end.
19 Comments
Vote for your county in All-Ireland Monopoly
Posted on April 25, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Entertainment, Humour, Ireland.
Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. Get your county into the top spot in Monopoly! It looks like the entire population of Leitrim and Roscommon has voted with 296 and 258 votes respectively. Cork floundering with 31 and Kilkenny with 26.
Note to Hasbro - maybe get a custom PollDaddy widget created that we could all put on our blogs? It’s viral baby!
28 Comments
Wondering how to reading lots of web-sites quickly and what RSS is?
Posted on April 24, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology.
If you are one of my many non-technical readers you may have heard me and others mention things like RSS and words like “subscribe” and you may have wondered what it is all about. Well the lovely people over at The Common Craft Show have put together a great 3.5 minute video called “RSS in Plain English” which explains it all. If you check more than one or two sites/blogs per day to see if they have any updates then you need to watch this video and save yourself hassle.
NOTE: If the video/audio stutters a lot just pause it, wait a minute and then start again.
4 Comments
Review of Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16K
Posted on April 23, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon.
A brilliant machine that is much better than Commodore 64 or Vic 20 rubbish
Rated as /5 on Apr 23 2007 by Conor O’Neill
This review originally conceived November 1982:
My Dad contacted a workmate of his in the UK to see if they could get me one of the new ZX Spectrum home computers. I’ve wanted one of these since I saw the announcement but they are very expensive (over £100) so we went with the 16K model instead of the 48K.
It was finally purchased in WH Smiths and we met the guy up in Portlaoise on his way home.
I’ve never owned anything so complicated and was very excited opening the box and taking out the computer, the power supply, the manuals and the tapes. I hooked it up to our TV and to the power and then started twisting the tuning knob for that station.
But no matter what I did, I couldn’t get a picture on the screen. I didn’t know if it was the TV or the Spectrum. Cunningly I found the “beep” command in the manual but that didn’t seem to do anything either.
Our neighbour is a TV repair man and he came around a few days later. It turns out that our Ferguson’s tuner couldn’t tune that low. So he replaced it and I couldn’t believe it when he tuned in the Spectrum and I saw “Copyright 1982 Sinclair Research”.
The Horizons tape that came with it got boring pretty quickly but the couple of Psion games are good. I have just started learning BASIC from the manual and it is really easy.
I have also just begun buying magazines that are all about Sinclairs and I’m learning about all the games that are available and how the computer works inside.
Some of my friends have Speccys too and one of them realised that we could buy a cable to connect our two tape recorders together and copy games onto blank tapes. Sometimes we have to spend a long time adjusting the tape heads to make it work well. But the games are incredible even if they take ages to load.
I love the games from Quicksilva and Ultimate Play the Game but recently I discovered that most games are now written for the 48K Spectrum. A bunch of people in the magazines advertise memory upgrade chips and I ordered one of them using a sterling bank draft.
It was scary opening up the Spectrum but cool to see the processor and ULA. The socket for the memory chip was obvious and I pushed it in. It worked perfectly!
I hope to learn how to write games and maybe some day I’ll be as famous as Matthew Smith who wrote the incredible Manic Miner. I read that he is creating something even better. But what is “Monty Python”?
The Spectrum is miles better than anything by Commodore or Atari and has many more games than the BBC. It’s the best present I ever got.
12 Comments
ZX Spectrum launched 25 years ago today!
Posted on April 23, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Personal, Technology.
This mightn’t be a big deal to most people but it’s a huge deal to me. If my parents hadn’t got me a ZX Spectrum in 1982, I wouldn’t have had the life I’ve had. No exaggeration. Every single college and career choice I’ve made stems from the skills I learned on that machine, which I still have (the machine, not the skills 
).
Sure 50% of the time I was playing Jet Set Willy and Sabre Wulf but on the Speccy I learned BASIC, Forth and Z80 assembler. I also learned the basic architecture of computers and basic electronics circuits.
I still crank up emulators on my PCs, phone and Palm and still get annoyed over the bugs in the games I wrote!
Thanks to my parents for realising how important computer skills might be to me and to Sir Clive Sinclair for having the clarity of vision to create the ZX series of computers. I’m actually surprised he didn’t come up with the OLPC as it is right in line with his thinking.
Happy Anniversary Speccy!
p.s and just in time, the 1988 Edition of the Your Sinclair Rock n Roll Years has just been released!
UPDATE 1: Colin Woodcock has also just released a Special 25th Anniversary Edition of the wonderful ZXF online magazine.
5 Comments
How not to get my vote
Posted on April 22, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Cork, Ireland, Politics.
I cannot understand why Christy O’Sullivan thinks he’ll get a vote from me. Here is a guy shoe-horned in by FF at a national level who sends me flyers with absolutely no information on them about who he is, what he believes in, where he lives, what he has accomplished as a politician or why I should vote for him.
And of course his website doesn’t load!
Inserting this nobody over a well known local politician like Alan Coleman is a huge mistake by FF. I don’t know how well Coleman would have done in this climate but at least he has a known reputation.
I will not vote for anonymous candidates from any party.
35 Comments
Sign the RTE Digital Free-to-Air Petition
Posted on April 22, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Entertainment, Ireland, Technology.
As a lot of you know, you can get a Digital version of RTÉ (including Widescreen) on Sky Digital and NTL. However you must have a Sky/NTL subscription to see it. Many people, including myself, believe this is fundamentally wrong as we already support RTÉ through the mandatory TV licence.
Please sign the petition from Brian Greene demanding that RTE make digital broadcasts of their programming available for “free”. If you are a blogger, consider adding the badge in support.
Whilst I’m at it, maybe someone can tell me why I was talking to RTE about Digital Terrestrial TV in 1998 and we still don’t have it? RTÉ is another taxpayer funded organisation in dire need of a good kicking.
24 Comments
Motorcycle Drag Racing in Old Chapel tomorrow
Posted on April 21, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon.
The annual drag racing competition on the main Clon road in Old Chapel is on tomorrow. Always loud, always fast and always really well organised. We’ll be popping down for a few minutes until the younger ones start bawling.
No Comments
220 Children to get Chest X-Rays
Posted on April 20, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Health, Ireland.
due to the TB outbreak in Cork.
Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease caused by bacteria called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The bacteria usually attack the lungs. But, TB bacteria can attack any part of the body such as the kidney, spine, and brain. If not treated properly, TB disease can be fatal. TB disease was once the leading cause of death in the United States.
TB is spread through the air from one person to another. The bacteria are put into the air when a person with active TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs or sneezes. People nearby may breathe in these bacteria and become infected.
Current waiting list for BCG in Cork - 5 to 6 months!
HSE, get up off your asses, get all the BCG shots in Ireland down here NOW, advertise it everywhere and get the children of every copped-on parent vaccinated asap!
Or do we have to wait until the first child dies from complications when they go from latent to active?
UPDATE 1; Good thread here on MagicMum. Like almost everyone else we didn’t get our youngest 3 done in Cork as it was not offered and we cluelessly did what we were told. Seriously regretting that now and signed up in a six month queue. Maybe a trip to Limerick is in order?
29 Comments
Nostalgia Week at conoroneill.com
Posted on April 19, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Friends, Personal.
Given that this blog is six years old this week and we’ve started reminiscing about the good old days of Engineering in Merrion Street and Earlsfort Terrace, I’ve decided that it’s officially Nostalgia Week here at O’Neill Towers.
Knarf reminded me of Jimmy Jamjars at the gates to Merrion Street. Catherine reminded me of The Jimmy Jamjar Awards. I think Teresa won one in 1991 for the largest number of PFOs of any Engineering student.
I nominate our pop-rivetted aluminium boxes which ended up holding bog-roll in Merrion Street as a candidate for best re-use ever.
No Comments
I’m playing GAA like Rooney
Posted on April 18, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Family, Kids.
So he is only five years old and this was his first ever GAA session.
He reported back that he played hurling and soccer. His Nana from Meath better have a word with him about Gaelic Football.
Next week we are sending him in Kilkenny gear to shake things up a bit 
Bloody hell, now I have two hurlers in the house. Who would ever have thought?
No Comments
The ArseEnd Moves to Cork!
Posted on April 17, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging.
The Swearing Gentleman has just been offered a job in Cork so it looks like South Galway’s loss is the PROC’s gain with the imminent arrival of The Swearing Lady, TSG and Mini Me. The ladies of Montenotte will be scandalised.
Time to break out the Babycham and Marietta.
No Comments
Six Years a-Bloggin today!
Posted on April 17, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Personal.
17th April 2001, I got an account on this thing I probably heard about on Slashdot called Blogger. I just saw it as an easier way of keeping my personal homepage (which I think I started in 1996 on Indigo) up-to-date.
How wrong I was. The second blog post was 7th August 2001.
For the first 4 years, the blog mainly consisted of baby announcements of my friends and my job situation. In 2005 I finally started doing it very regularly, moved to a Wordpress blog and now look at me. In the next 4 weeks I’ll be launching a business built on blogging.
I can’t claim to have foreseen the profound impact that blogging would have in many areas. As with most things I get involved in, it just “seemed like a good idea at the time”. I’ve been very lucky over the years that many of those ideas turned out to be genuinely good.
I’ve gone from one reader (Catherine) to several hundred per day. Thanks to all of you for stopping by and leaving comments. I hope I’ve written the odd useful thing and made you smile once or twice.
I encourage anyone who has ever felt like expressing an opinion to more than their mates down the pub to give blogging a try. It takes less than a minute to get a blog over at wordpress.com and writing blog-posts is easier than sending an email. If it turns out you have no long-term interest, well you’ve probably wasted less time than your daily commute.
Here’s to another six years of conoroneill.com
Cheers!
4 Comments
Kilkenny to Cape Town
Posted on April 11, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Friends.
Paul Brennan let me know the other day about a very worthwhile effort by his friend Hugh Bergin. Hugh is doing a motorbike trip from Kilkenny to Capetown. It is a personal trip but he’s trying to raise some money for the charity Self Help. Self Help is an Irish development agency engaged in promoting and implementing integrated sustainable development programmes in rural Africa.
He started his journey late in 2006 and he is currently in the Congo region, still going strong and keeping a diary of his adventure.
You can sponsor him here.
Best of luck to him. My guess is that the Kilkenny to Inistioge leg was the most challenging
No Comments
Universities belong inside cities
Posted on April 11, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Personal.
I was a bit sad today to read this from the UCD Alumni office:
UCD will soon be saying goodbye to Earlsfort Terrace and completing the move to Belfield. Generations of students spent their university years at the Terrace and hold fond memories of that time.
This year, the last medical and engineering students will make the journey to Belfield and the Terrace will transfer to the National Concert Hall for major redevelopment as a multipurpose concert venue. To commemorate 124 years of UCD at Earlsfort Terrace….
From 1st Year to 3rd Year Engineering (1986-1989), we alternated between the Terrace, Merrion Street and Belfield. Then in 4th Year, they moved us out to the new Engineering building. I still think it is the worst thing UCD have ever done. I know they needed the space but there is simply no comparison between going to college in a City with all the facilities and social aspects that provides and going out to some horrible 60’s-style campus in the middle of nowhere.
I loved Merrion Street, I loved Earlsfort Terrace, I loved being part of the City. I hated so much of Belfield, apart from the huge increase in the number of women I actually have fond memories of individual rooms in the old buildings. And who can forget the Merrion Street canteen with the white loo tiles on the walls or the pink pork chops in Earlsfort Terrace? I can’t say the same about anywhere in Belfield.
I was in UCC a few weeks back and that warm feeling of “this is why I liked college” flowed through me. Compare that to CIT on the edge of the city where everyone has a car and there is no sense of place. It is just somewhere to go to be lectured.
I’m not explaining myself well and I know I’m an old fart, but still.
11 Comments
Try voting for informed people
Posted on April 10, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Family, Health, Kids.
Justin has done a great post on Patricia McKenna of the Green Party trying to justify non-vaccination of children on The Last Word radio show. The transcript shows what Cooper is capable of when he puts his mind to it. He slays the idiot and her nonsense.
If your child dies from the side-effects of measles, it’ll be due to you listening to uniformed clueless dimwits like her. Remember that when you are casting your vote. Oh and don’t drink the water, it’s CIA mind control.
UPDATE 1: On a related topic, the HSE have announced that all babies born in Cork from this October onwards will be routinely offered the BCG vaccine against TB. Welcome to the 20th century. Oh wait a sec, that’s over already. Wonder if there will be any civil suits taken against the individual bozos responsible for the current situation between now and then?
21 Comments
Quicker than I thought
Posted on April 10, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology, Tweets.
I’ve set-up a new blog which consists entirely of daily digests of my tweets. So rather than seeing every tweet as a separate feed item, this groups them together into more manageable chunks. You can get to it either via www.conoroneill.com/twitter or www.conoroneill.name
No Comments
Daily Tweets turned off
Posted on April 10, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Technology, Tweets.
It was an interesting bit of fun but I don’t think the daily Tweet digest was a great addition to this blog. However, if you are still interested in the Tweets themselves, you can subscribe via RSS to the feed here. I may set up a separate simple blog which does the daily digest. If I do, I’ll pop a link here.
