Archive for December, 2007
Review of Science Museum London
Posted on December 16, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon.
On our yokel trip to London recently we spent an afternoon in the Science Museum. One Elec Engineer and one Mech Engineer had an incredible day bouncing from exhibit to exhibit.
There are too many things to describe but a few of the highlights for me were.
The entire Space exploration area:
The Spitfire exhibition:
The Babbage Difference Engine:
The V2 Rocket:
The VTOL aircraft:
Sinclair Calculator:
Disappointments? They had nothing on computing since the 1970’s. I’d love to see a display going from the Altair through the TRS-80, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Apple II, IBM PC up to a modern ultralight laptop. Ditto one on mobiles from the original analogue bricks right up to the Nokia N95 and Apple iPhone.
It was of course filled with school kids who had clearly been brought by non-science teachers “count how many stars are in the flag there, children” as opposed to “think about landing on the moon in this, children”.
There is a big gadget shop at the entrance which we found hard to leave at the end. A lot of the stuff was gimmicky but there was plenty of genuinely interesting “sciencey” things.
You owe it to yourself and your kids to go here and have a blast but enjoy yourself too. We are where we are today because of the things on display there.
UPDATE; I think this explains the lack of computers.
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How to render me speechless
Posted on December 13, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Entertainment.
Hand me this receipt in a bar in Paris after I order four bottles of beer:
Next time I’ll order wine.
Full review of the worst service I’ve encountered in 39 years coming soon.
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Car Sharing coming to Cork
Posted on December 13, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Motor Cars.
Michael Newham just left a comment on my post about car-sharing. It looks like this is going to happen next year. It’s a great idea.
Our company ‘Mendes – GoCar’ will be providing the car-sharing service in Cork City Centre. We hope to have it operational by May the 1st 2008.
Please see the Wikipedia article for a good overview of what Car-Sharing is about.
All our ‘GoCars’ will have dedicated parking spaces ‘GoBases’ near high residential and business nodes of population.
Research has shown that in a successful car-sharing business each car added to a car sharing fleet replaces 8 to 12 private vehicles; thus reducing Co2 emmissions and congestion.
Another benefit to joining a car-sharing service is the increased use of public transport as well as walking and cycling.
We hope to have our website www.gocar.ie live by mid January. It will just be a brochure based site to begin with where ye can leave contact details to find out about membership and so forth.
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90-L-1944 attempted to murder my family today
Posted on December 9, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Cork.
The savage at the wheel of 90-L-1944 came within a hair’s breadth of killing me, all my children, my mother in law, all of those in an oncoming vehicle and everyone in his own vehicle 10 minutes ago.
This cretin who clearly rates his own life as worthless carried out a suicidal overtaking manouvre of my car just before Bandon with a stream of cars bearing down on us. If I hadn’t seen him in my side mirror and swerved into the road margin at the last second, there would have been a fatal three car collision.
This imbecile then immediately got stuck in 20 MPH town traffic.
If you spot this old grey Honda Prelude in West Cork, give it a wide berth, he may try to kill you too.
You may ask why I didn’t call the police. Do you think they would have done anything?
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Love food blogs? You’ll adore Gastronom.ie
Posted on December 9, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Food.
I have to apologise to Damien for not blogging this until now. He has put together one of those simple, beautifully executed ideas called Gastronom.ie. It collects all of the food writing from a set of Irish bloggers into one place. So if you are sick of bouncing around from blog to blog to blog and you really aren’t into this whole geeky RSS idea, then you’ll become addicted to this site.
It looks lovely and the development was done by the brilliant John Blackbourn who I would recommend to anyone who needs web development or design done. He has LouderVoice as very happy customers too.
Some of us are having a wee non-serious argument about wordplay on ie domains. Some think that only geeks get them and that a mainstream audience will always pronounce the dot. How would you say the following?
I’ll be honest, I never spotted the first wordplay but I did see it in the second two. You?
In any case, get yourself over to Gastronom.ie and check out some top class food writing.
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Tapenade Bistro on N7/N8
Posted on December 9, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Restaurants, Reviews.
This newish place is in the Midway FoodCourt, Portlaoise and is nearly successful in its attempt to do something a bit different.
I had to drive up to Dublin recently (having become over-used to the train) and stopped at Midway on the N7/N8 interchange to grab something to eat. I had spotted a newish place in there the last time I’d stopped for coffee and I thought I’d give it a try. They call it a “healthy bistro” which may actually put a lot of people off since there is plenty of “normal” stuff to eat.
The main things that they serve are three hot dishes, lots of salads and a variety of drinks including smoothies. Unfortunately the hot dishes did not look appetizing at all. They had meatballs in tomato sauce, sausages in gravy and burgers in gravy sitting in standard catering kitchen bain-marie trays. But they also had rice and mashed potatoes in the same setup. All looked untouched for hours. Having said that, the meatballs sounded nice so I went with that. No pasta, so I picked rice.
With that you get two salads and I went for a carrot one and a potato one. I also ordered a raspberry and mint smoothie and a latte. €18.50 all in.
The meatball and sauce was very nice (not as good as my own obviously 
) but as expected the rice was a dried up horror. The salads were extremely good and the smoothie was genuinely the best I have ever had. The background taste of mint was just perfect. Decent machine-based latte.
They could easily fix the carb problem by doing what I do at home. Cook up the rice (or pasta), drain and then run under an ice cold tap for several minutes until all heat is removed. Then when person orders (or kids arrive in), you pour boiling water over a portion in a sieve. No more claggy, shrivelled up, dried up carbs. I know there is a danger if you don’t do it properly with rice but it’s never been a problem for us.
This place really is a good idea. I still query the “healthy” marketing given the target audience and they have to fix the way they do carbs. I hope it succeeds because I’d happily make it my default stop on the Cork-Dublin route.
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