Conor’s Bandon Blog

We’re just playing around with a few ideas on a site called Jaiku this morning (they were bought by Google a few months back). The idea is that you can have discussion channels on particular topics like technology, politics, Bandon GAA, whatever. What makes it (and other great sites like Twitter) so powerful is that you can interact with it entirely through SMS on your phone.

So this morning I created two non-techie ones that I thought might appeal to my more foodie readers. The first is #recipes and the second is #gardening. In both cases the idea was that they could be used for requesting advice (in addition to general chitchat).

The #recipes one was suggested by Michael Kiely and he thought it would be great if you were out shopping and spotted an ingredient and wanted suggestions for mini-recipes so you’d know what else to buy whilst you were there. A quick SMS, a bit more shopping and you might get some suggestions back by SMS.

I thought of the #gardening one and it could also be used in a similar way to #recipes when in a Garden Centre and wondering e.g. is X worth buying, it Y over-priced etc.

Of course you can use both channels on the web too (and obviously type a lot more than 140 characters!).

There are two flies in the ointment. The first is that it’ll need more people on these channels to make them work and the second is that joining Jaiku is officially closed at the minute. Both can be solved in one fell swoop by heading over to Jaiku Invites, setup by Ciarán Rooney and requesting an invite to join.

Give it a go. It’s just a bit of fun and I’ve already had two suggestions on how to cook the fennel bulbs I bought on a whim in Lidl during the week. Any problems using it, just pop a comment here.

I just had  a comment on one of my posts from a girl in Coláiste Na Toirbhirte wondering about summer work vacancies in Bandon. If you have any, or know of businesses that take in summer students, maybe post a comment here or drop me a line at conor AT loudervoice DOT com and I’ll pass the info on.

Are there any sites that provide some sort of service in Ireland for this? Like a lightweight free irishjobs.com? I’d be happy to host one for nothing if there is opensource software available.

Just got this by e-mail from Slow Food Ireland:

Slow Food for Kids at Hosfords Garden Centre, April 6

Official Opening by Denis Cotter, of Café Paradiso.

• 12.00 noon: Market Opens
• 2.00pm: Official Opening by Denis Cotter
• 2.30pm: Cookery demonstration with Denis Cotter
• 3.30pm: Worm Composting Demonstration with Peter Fitzgerald
• 3.45pm: The Clown entertains
• 4.00pm: Denise Bushby will give a strawberry planting demonstration, strawberry ice lollies, demonstration grow-bag with cropping strawberry already growing. David & Denise Bushby grow strawberries and they supply their most delicious strawberries to the best shops & Restaurants in West Cork.
• 4.30pm: John Hosford will give a demonstration on growing vegetables for kids –pumpkins, courgettes + fun packed seeds.

A wide range of stallholders will be attending the market to entice you with their artisan products.

Location/Directions: Main Bandon-Clonakilty (N71) Road, 8.4km west of Bandon.

I know there are tons of small businesses out there struggling with IT, even basics like anti-virus and e-mail. Unfortunately, lack of knowledge can often mean you aren’t even aware that there are better and cheaper ways of doing what you are doing.

Last Autumn, the County Enterprise Boards launched Tech-Check to address this widespread problem. It’s a simple but highly effective initiative to help businesses sort out their most pressing technology problems.

For €150, you get up to two 3-hour sessions with an IT expert who will go through every aspect of your IT usage and needs. They then come back with a report highlighting your highs and lows and a small set of specific recommendations to improve things.

Disclaimer: I am one of the people used by the Cork CEBs to provide this service.

Unfortunately, the uptake on Tech-Check has not met expectations. I think there are a few reasons for this and I hope I can clarify things a bit.

• It’s not for IT companies, it’s for any small business (from 1-50 people) who needs guidance on any aspect of technology whether it’s mobile phone usage, internet access, security or even getting a small web-site up for less than €250
• You are getting far more than €150 worth of consultancy, it is very heavily subsidised and I think the value for money is amazing
• The CEBs are very sensitive to conflicts of interest and the consultants cannot offer their services to actually implement the suggestions they make
• The feedback I have received from clients so far has been phenomenal. I’ve advised everything from one man training businesses and solicitors to multi person sports centres and they have all ended up with better setups and in some cases, saving lots of money.
• You do not need to know the first thing about IT or technology to apply for a Tech-Check. The less you know, the more help we can provide.

Ignoring the fact that I help provide Tech-Checks, I genuinely think this is the smartest thing to come out of the public service in years. There are thousands of businesses who can benefit and your entire investment can be just €150. I think you’d be nuts not to sign up, even if you think you don’t need it!

Contact:

• West Cork Enterprise Board
• South Cork Enterprise Board
• Cork City Enterprise Board
• North Cork Enterprise Board

We finally made it down to our first St Patrick’s Day Parade in Bandon. The kids really enjoyed it (2 year old loved the tractors and fire engines). I was a bit surprised how short it was and the person beside me mentioned the lack of music. Face painting and balloon shapes went down very well. I wish I’d managed to see all the old cars as the pristine Escort (Mexico?) looked fantastic from a distance.

I noticed the Scouts were allowed wear jackets. In my day in Kilkenny we didn’t even have jumpers

Here’s a few photos and videos:

I meant to write this post a few months back and was finally reminded to yesterday when I was in Cork Airport yet again.

The old airport carparks had the most unreliable equipment on the planet, pure third world garbage. I spent more time stuck in queues trying to get out of there due to malfunctioning barriers than any other airport, including Dublin which I have used more.

So you’d think, when spending €180m on a new airport (and hoping we taxpayers will stump up the money for it), that they’d find a supplier of equipment that, ye know, actually works. Silly me, of course they decided to use the same rubbish as before. Does Cork Airport Authority understand that the phrase “competitive tender” does not mean “cheapest” or “close personal friend”, it means “competitive”?

In the past six months:

• I was locked into the carpark at 1am for 40 minutes. The barrier ate my ticket and the intercom system would not work. Of course if you embed an intercom into a barrier then the intercom will fail along with the barrier. What incompetent morons [a] designed this and [b] purchased it? A Thomas The Tank Engine Walkie Talkie duct-taped to the machine would be a more intelligent engineering approach to system reliability. I ended up running down to the terminal TWICE to ask to be let out and still failed to exit. Only the arrival of the hotel shuttle bus saved me.
• On another occasion, the ticket machine printed my ticket so badly that it could not be machine-read when I returned to pay. Of course the support desk was not manned and multiple calls had to be made before someone turned up and printed me a new one so I could leave.
• I have seen queues of people stuck coming out of the short term car-park due to equipment malfunction.
• One of the ticket machines has been broken for months. In fact, it’s been broken for so long that they have erected a permanent “temporarily out of service” sign! Has the airport not got an SLA in their service contract with the equipment provider? Or is that too complex for them?

A few simple steps:

• Dump the incompetent supplier
• Demote or fire the person who re-ordered this rubbish
• Replace the equipment with something that works. Maybe ring Frankfurt and ask them what they use
• Look up the acronym SLA

If Al-Qaeda wants an easy way into Ireland then Cork Airport is the route to take. There are obviously no CCTV cameras in operation or else these constant problems would be noticed far sooner by staff. If the Airport Authority is interested, I know a guy who could set them up with a reliable mesh of wireless enabled webcams for a few hundred Euro. Not everything has to cost €180m and reliability can be a default.

As someone who grew up in Kilkenny from the age of 6-18, I was very excited to see that Creative Camp is on this weekend. Not only that, but it’s on in the wonderful Kilkenny Castle where I spent many a day trying to find secret tunnels as a kid.

If you are wondering what it is all about, the idea is that the attendees are the presenters. It is in the BarCamp tradition of “unconferences” where the agenda for the day is very much made up on the day. You might think this is a recipe for disaster but the success of BarCamps in Cork, Waterford, Dublin, Belfast, Galway and PodCamp would suggest otherwise.

PodCamp was held a few months back in Kilkenny and was particularly interesting since it broke out of the “techie geeky” community and had many attendees and contributors from the world of media and the arts.

The aim of Creative Camp is to continue on in that vein and really get a broad cross-section of those in technology, arts, media and creativity to meet and exchange ideas and experiences.

If you are in the South East on Saturday, I highly recommend that you attend. It is completely free but it would be polite to register so they have some idea of numbers. The success of each *Camp is dependent on active participation by all who attend.

Some of the topics that have already been suggested for the day include:

• Outsourcing your development workload to free your creative time
• Branding an Arts organisation from the inside
• GPS For Developers
• Writing and promoting your book with social media
• How To Blog Like A Boy
• The Art Of Software Development
• Creating a vibrant, connected Arts Community in the South East
• How Friends Communicate
• GPS Drawing
• Building and working in a distributed startup
• Creative Ways To Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
• Personalisation and the Social Web
• Women & Technology – grabbing the blogosphere by the balls

Why not wander down and see what it is all about?

Mike Newham has updated us on Car Sharing in Cork:

We’re pushing out the introduction in Cork till July the 4th because of the massive VRT changes that occur on that date. We’ll start off with eight cars on the road – 3 Ford Focuses (Foci?), 4 Ford Fiestas and 1 Transit Connect for delivery’s and the like.

All will be low emission diesels with extra safety options and lots of helpful gizmos like bluetooth and sat-nav. They’ll all be positioned in and around Cork City Centre.

We’ve made a decision to postpone the new website till about mid-May when it will be fully operational to allow new members to join and book cars.

By the way CarSharing for us is not ride-sharing or car-pooling, its basically the service by which you book a car for a number of hours, use it for those hours and get charged for those hours.

I really hope the mainstream media really pick up on this.