8 years after I first registered conoroneill.com, this blog is finally hosted in Ireland where it belongs. Based on all the great feedback I heard about Blacknight and the fact that they are great supporters of the Irish tech startup community, I went with them.
We’re on the SOHO package with is just €35 per year ex-VAT and it does everything I need. The move was extremely easy to do. I just copied all the WordPress files off the old host, copied the WordPress Database, loaded both up on Blacknight and told GoDaddy that the blog is now there.
All in all, maybe an hours work including email account setup? The one glitch I had was solved by their support people in less than 10 minutes. The blog feels a lot faster, I hope it’s the same for you.
Full review coming soon once I’ve poked around a bit but so far it’s 5/5. If you are thinking of setting up a blog, go for their blogger package and you’ll be up and running with close to zero effort or knowledge.
p.s. if you didn’t see a bunch of posts from the past two weeks, that’s my fault. Should be working ok now.
On June 9th, my uncle Bobby Walls, passed away suddenly. He had been suffering from cardiomyopathy for several years and left us too young at the age of 56.
I probably hadn’t seen Bobby since the last funeral I attended in Ratoath. The line about Irish families only meeting at baptisms, weddings and funerals is so true. However, as with all my uncles and aunts, I was incredibly fond of him, having spent many summers in my Granny’s house as a kid.
Bobby led a simple life. He loved his family, horses, having his few pints, local sport, Man United and laughing. For many years he worked in Woodpark Stud. I remember my mum telling me that he worked in an office until my Grandad died because Grandad wanted him to have more opportunities than he had. But horses and the outdoors were his love and the draw was obviously too strong.
Bobby lived in the house at the junction of Glascairn lane and Fairyhouse Road with his two brothers Frank and Martin. Since my Granny died, he ran the house and made sure that my uncle Martin, who has been crippled by mental illness for many years, was ok.
He died just as he was about to head off and watch one of the syndicate horses run in Roscommon. As the priest put it, in a line Bobby would have loved, “I believe it is still running”.
The funeral for this man who never married, never had kids and lived in the same house most of his life was packed. So many people wanted to carry his coffin, we had to do it in relays down to the graveyard. The overwhelming upset of my younger cousins reminded me of how much Bobby was loved.
I’ve been meaning to write about him since the day he passed. What finally got me to do it was the death of Randy Pausch the other day. For those of you unfamiliar with Randy, he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer last year and given 6 months to live. He gave a “final lecture” to his students at CMU which has become famous and resulted in a great book too. If you or your family is dealing with mortality, this life-affirming talk may prove to be great comfort to you. Randy’s talk is about living not dying.
I cannot think of two less similar people than Bobby and Randy but so much of what Randy said applied to my uncle. Most importantly of all:
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand”.
In a change from our usual programming here at Bandon HQ, I kicked off a light-hearted conversation on Twitter earlier about great looking women who just get better and better with age (we also covered men). The results of the Twitter jury in chronological (not age) order were as follows:
Neve Campbell
My wife
Marisa Tomei
Maria Bello
Catherine Keener
Monica Bellucci
Helen Mirren
Isabella Rossellini
Candice Bergen
Mary McDonnell
Natalie Portman
Laura Linney
Joan Allen
Mary Louise Parker
Lauren Graham
Michelle Pfeiffer
Felicity Kendal
Glynis Barber
Sigourney Weaver
Susan Sarandon
Helena Bonham-Carter
Helen Baxendale
Jennifer Beals
And for the men we had:
George Clooney
Paul Newman
Richard Gere
Sean Connery
Pierce Brosnan
Harrison Ford
Liam Neeson
Steve McQueen (I snuck that one in there)
Hugh Laurie
Alan Rickman
John Hannah
Adrian Brody
Those are far more satisfying that the pneumatic nobodies that grace most (wo)mens magazines. Any we’ve missed?
I’ve been talking quite a bit recently to Phoebe Bright who is based down in Drinagh. She wears many hats but is incredibly passionate and knowledgeable about energy.
She writes some absolutely brilliant stuff in this area on her blog and I highly recommend you subscribe to it. She is no happy clappy, let’s wear hemp shirts and cycle 40 miles to work every day person. The blog talks about fundamental issues around energy supply and managing energy demand. It’s about how it directly affects you.
We were talking about this general topic on the way back from OpenCoffee BBQ recently and I expressed the opinion that the Green Party are letting themselves down very badly. They should be providing a grand vision backed by simple steps and milestones to help us get our energy usage under control. This requires thought leadership, practical assistance, changes in building regulations, direction to energy providers and a simple message that you will spend less, not more, if you apply some smarts to how you consume energy over the course of a day/week/year. Idiotic prattle about election posters really doesn’t cut it.
So get yourself on over to her blog and start having those conversations and asking those questions.
I’ve done a post over on our business blog about the supports offered to local business by West Cork Enterprise Board. If you are based in the region, it’s well worth reading. The highlights are:
6 hour IT Consultancy for €150 via Tech-Check
Feasibility Study Grants up to €5100
International Trade Show Attendance Grants up to €2000
Ecommerce Web-site development Grants up to €1500
That last one is absolutely brilliant. If you are making any sort of product (I’m thinking crafts and food in West Cork) that could also be sold by mail order, you’d be nuts not to avail of it. Note that the grants are all done on the basis of “matching funds”.
Now that’s a phrase you didn’t expect to hear in the current economic climate.
One of the reasons we settled on Bandon when we moved to Cork was the classic location, location, location. It really is ideally situated in Munster for access to almost everything – Cork City, Airport, beaches, businesses, school, sports facilities etc etc.
However, this prime location is missing something critical – somewhere people can meet in a modern business context. Whether it’s for seminars, conferences, training or bigger community events, we have nothing. There are many organisations (state, semi-state and private enterprise), who would kill for a venue where people from all corners of Munster, Ireland and Europe could meet and get to easily.
The beneficial knock-on effects to other local businesses of having a regular stream of visitors are obvious. At the moment, all that business traffic goes to the city, Clon, Skibb, Kinsale and elsewhere.
So there you have it. If you are someone who has spent a fortune on property in the area over the last ten years and/or if you are sitting on assets you won’t be able to shift until 2010 at the earliest, here’s a way to generate immediate regular cash and provide a major boost to the town.
The Munster Conference Centre, Bandon: Which of you is up for it?
The offer of a free box of these sauces was irresistable and we have spent the past few months trying them in a variety of different ways. Whilst our weak-willed Irish palates found the hotter ones just too hot, the depth of flavour is just fantastic. If only they had an Irish distributor!
Back in January I got a comment on a very old post from 2006 that I did about buffalo wings. I had used the famous Frank’s Hot Sauce and mentioned that I was a little disappointed by it. Mark Stirling from Branding Iron Foods offered to ship me a box of their sauces all the way from Washington State to try out. I was stunned and of course I accepted.
In no time at all, a box arrived with nine big bottles in it. Three each of EZ Earl’s Blazin Hot Stuff, Smokin Hot Stuff and Spicy Sauces. Mark told me that they have been refining the recipe in these sauces for generations. I couldn’t wait to try them out and immediately tried the hottest (Blazin) on a tray of chicken pieces in the oven. It blew my face off. Seriously, this makes vindaloo curry taste like a korma!
Over the next while we tried out all three levels of heat both at home and on some of my extended family. It turns out we are all a bunch of big girl’s blouses and the lowest heat (Spicy) is our favourite. All three work brilliantly well on buffalo wings but the hottest is just too hot for us in things like pitta kebabs.
But heat shouldn’t be the main focus of this review, it should be taste. These sauces deliver that in bucketloads. There is a phenomenal depth of flavour that far exceeds anything I have tried before. In particular, the Spicy one gives you the opportunity to really get the notes of all the ingredients.
All of the sauces have smoke in them which I guess is traditional in the US? This is perfect for all those BBQ sutuations but I’d love one more member of the product family to be created without the smoke so it can be used in an even wider variety of situations where you need to add a strong spicy undertone to a dish.
Whilst using the sauce instead of Tabasco in a Prawn Cocktail might seem a bit odd, trust me, it works so so well. I actually find myself looking for unusual ways of using the sauce, it really is that good.
My gut tells me that the hottest level would not sell in Ireland and that the best seller would actually be the Spicy. But I do think it would be a best seller. If any Deli or Gourmet shop here is looking for unique products to import, you really should look at these. I’d be happy to put you in touch with Mark.
Now all we need is some decent weather so I can get some BBQ done!
UPDATE 1: The first ever OpenCoffeeClub BBQ was held in Terryglass, Co Tipperary on the shores of Lough Derg recently. I decided to test out the Blazin and Smokin sauces on the attendees. I got a few kilos of wings, some bone-in chicken breasts and some massive pork chops from the excellent Dan Moloney’s butchers in Bandon. I put each of them in ziplock bags and emptied bottles of the hottest sauce on the chicken and the less hot on the chops. They went in the fridge overnight and then were transported in a cooler box to the BBQ.
Due to the bad state of the grill near the venue, the food was actually cooked in some ovens. But boy were they popular! People descended on them like ravenous wolves. The feedback was all positive and contradicted what I said earlier about heat, no-one found them too hot, they thought they were perfect! Marinating them and then dry roasting them seemed to have mellowed the heat compared to wet cooking. The depth of smokey flavour came right through. Very memorable wings.
Denise Cox has let me know that a new Film Society is being organised in Bandon. I don’t have any of the details yet but if you are interested, fire an SMS over to Declan Waugh at 086-3853363. I’ll post an update when I hear more.
