Plenty of activity in the past month, some good, some bad. Variety and texture remain problematic but overall, sticking to veggie and fairly vegan for the past few weeks.

Some product updates to share. First, the good ones:

• Sojade – A bifidus soya yoghurt-alternative. This is a shocker. Smells and pretty much tastes like natural yoghurt. Has that lactic tang which is so missing in most soy products. Used it in a curry instead of yoghurt and could not tell the difference. Pretty sure you could add pureed fruit to it to make normal yoghurts and not be able to tell it lacks dairy. Got it and several other recent products in Quay Co-Op in Ballincollig. It’s not as big as the Cork one but handier for me to get to.
• Silken Tofu – Found this shelf-stable stuff in Scally’s in Clon. Total disaster when I tried to fry it and use in curry. It just melted. However it makes a brilliant dairy alternative for many recipes where smoothness and creaminess required. I used it in a pea puree recipe instead of cream and it worked a treat in the food processor. I’ll post that recipe soon, it was a big success.
• Quorn Mince – Yesterday I made traditional spag bol for the kids but used Quorn instead of minced beef. All of the kids loved it and rated it delicious. I told none of them what they were actually eating. Proves, yet again, my point about a lot of foods being easily replaceable with plants, if you can get the texture right.
• Dal – After reading most of an Indian Vegetarian cookbook, I finally did one of the recipes yesterday (minus the relentless Usli Ghee on every page). This was a spicy dal with 6 chillis and red lentils. Utterly gorgeous. Had more of it today and will have more again tomorrow. Total win, full of protein.
• Darina Allen’s Cucumber Pickle Recipe – if you loved the jars and miss them, her recipe is identical and only takes a few mins with a mandolin to do. Apparently they cancelled the supermarket product as the stuff was fermenting and blowing the lids. You can still get it fresh in Midleton Farmer’s Market. I’ll post the recipe here soon with full attribution.

Now for the failures:

• Quorn Smoky Bacon Slices – Horrible. Imagine a plate of BBQ-flavoured Rancheros with the rest of your food. Nothing is right about this product from taste to smell to texture
• Quorn Chicken Pieces – I’ve gone completely off this. Texture is just so wrong.
• Some veggie sausages with leeks – You can’t just mush spuds and leeks together into a tube and call it a sausage. It’s a bloody croquette. Nothing wrong with the taste, it’s just false advertising.

Apart from that, still doing some Oatly but finding it too much in every cup of tea. Tea is really my downfall for the vegan bit. Still doing low-fat milk there and in the morning porridge. A bit of goat’s cheese in the two-weekly homemade pizza too. That’s about it for dairy.

More stuff on recipes in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, seek out that Sojade, you won’t believe how good it is!

I was thrilled to see that Kinsale has kicked one off too and they had 103 kids at their first one. Well done!

Annnd I’ve just spotted that they now have one on Sundays in Blackrock Observatory.

If you are anywhere even vaguely close to either club I would encourage you to go with your children. I am absolutely convinced that early exposure to “computers” in a creative setting (not as consumers reading web pages or playing games) gives children a swathe of new opportunities in life that they would otherwise miss out on. They may never be programmers but they may become designers, engineers, scientists or artists.

This is also absolutely not a thing only for middle class, technical parents. The clubs have plenty of spare computers and people there who can help/guide the kids. You just have to be there to mind them

The contact details for the City one are here. It is on every Saturday morning in the NSC in Mahon.

Kinsale details here.

The Kinsale one is on this evening at 7pm in The Trident Hotel. Please contact them if you are intending to go so they have an idea of numbers. They use an SMS system to gauge numbers each week where you just send Y/N in reply to a text message.

Blackrock details here.

Munster Programming Training

I should also mention the granddaddy of them all, the brilliant Munster Programming Training course which has been going for many years in UCC. Coder Dojo founder James Whelton attended it himself so it must be good! It is targeted at Transition Year students as preparation for participation in the “All Irish Schools Programming Competition”. Full details here.

One fantastic outcome from yesterday’s blogpost was John Handelaar and others pointing out that I’d given up too easily on trying to extract the river level data from the Bandon FEWS web-site. And it turns out they were right. A small amount of messing around and I was able to extract out the water level and the date/time.

I’ve been meaning to do more with Google Fusion Tables for ages and this seemed like a good opportunity. It’s like a Google Docs online spreadsheet but with knobs on. So  you can populate, query, visualise etc using an API. I decided to use that to make the FEWS data available to everyone. Of course then I ran into the horror that is OAuth2. But a fair bit of messing and stomach cramps later, and I got that working too.

So we now have the hourly Bandon river level data available to use for whatever purpose your fiendish minds can come up with. I’m thinking trends, analytics, charts, maps, mashups with weather data, other alerting methods (email, Twitter DMs, iPhone Alerts), a Facebook Fan Page, widgets for other Bandon-related sites. What other ideas do you all have?

If you want to embed that live graph on your own site or blog, just paste this code in:

<iframe width="500px" height="300px" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="http://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?gco_allowHtml=true&gco_displayAnnotations=true&gco_wmode=opaque&gco_chartArea=%7B%22top%22%3A%2230%22%7D&containerId=gviz_canvas&rmax=250&q=select+col1%2C+col0+from+2191951+&qrs=where+col1+%3E%3D+&qre=+and+col1+%3C%3D+&qe=+order+by+col1+asc&viz=GVIZ&t=TIMELINE&width=500&height=300"></iframe>

You can export the data to CSV and play with it offline in Excel etc or you can go fancy and query it live over the API.

e.g. this API call grabs all of the data in one go (you can test with your browser): https://fusiontables.googleusercontent.com/fusiontables/api/query?sql=SELECT+ROWID,+riverlevel,+datetime+FROM+2191951

But of course you will be able to do far more complex queries than that, once we have a decent body of data. See the Google Fusion Tables Guide here.

Note that I was forced to use that awkward date format to make the timeline feature in Fusion Tables work correctly.

I don’t know if anyone wants the data or will find a use for it but this first step was critical to enabling them to do so. Hopefully this will be a trigger for others to liberate locked-in non-private data on other public sector sites.

Or it could be an opportunity for County Councils to take this tough time we are all living in, where Capex projects are few and far between, and start a Data Liberation Project in every Council department in the country. Nothing I did over the past 24hrs cost a single solitary cent apart from people’s time. And based on recent conversations with old college friends, time is one thing a lot of Council Engineers have on their hands. If any Council people are interested in reading more they should have a look at the links in this post I did at the start of the year.

Comments? Thoughts? Improvements?

I have had a few thoughts on other things we could do with that live river-level data for the community. Web-apps, Twitter integration, Analytics, Trends etc etc.

However, despite several communications, I have been unable to get any response from Cork County Council about getting access to the live data. All the OpenData initiatives around the world (including Ireland) are obviously passing them by.

Even something as simple as a Twitter Account could be useful and interesting. So I created one called @BandonFEWS. Of course then I had to get at the data despite the CoCo’s silence. I dug around the Bandon Flood Warning site but it is built in such a way that the data is not machine visible or scrapable.

I discussed this problem with fellow tech-person Gordon Murray of Murrion Software just up the road in Carrigadrohid and of course he had a solution!

Gordon’s company has a very smart SMS service which can both send SMSes and receive them in order to act upon them. By signing up his service’s “phone” number to the FEWS SMS alerts, he can then do something with them. In this case, he takes the SMS, interprets it and then posts it automatically to the @BandonFEWS Twitter account.

Nice one Gordon! If you have any need of inbound or outbound SMS services, give him a shout.

Now if only Cork CoCo would give us access to all of the live data, we could do some really interesting things for the community for free. Anyone got any influence in there to make this happen?

Until yesterday I had only used the satellite bit which gives you BBC etc. It works very well except for the lack of a programme guide. I recorded Doctor Who onto a portable hard-disk using it yesterday! But I really wanted to try out the terrestrial bit. The other night we watched Masterchef Ireland using the RTE Player on a 37″ TV in a browser, full-screen. Not recommended if you value your eyesight or sanity. Sidenote: Dylan surprisingly non-infuriating but I had a big belly laugh when I heard a guy who serves steaks on paving slabs calling someone’s food “contrived”.

Our old roof aerial hasn’t been working right for years and I wasn’t sure where the problem was. So yesterday I cut the cable in the attic near the ingress hole and wired it straight into a old TV I hoisted into the attic. It confirmed that the aerial itself was banjaxed but there was no way I was doing a Rod Hull on it. I grabbed a pair of rabbit ears and then tried them to discover that I could get traditional analogue RTE1 and RTE2 reasonably ok with a bit of noise but not TG4 or TV3.

I wondered if that signal was enough to get the new Saorview Digital Terrestrial working on the Ariva box so I brought the box up into the attic and amazingly it worked instantly! Perfect digital picture on RTE1, RTE2, TV3, TG4 with full on-screen programme guide too. I had some interactions with people on Twitter last night who confirmed that even if your old analogue signal is poor, you may still be able to get Saorview.

Unfortunately the rabbit ears don’t have enough welly to feed a splitter box so today I’m popping into Dwyers Electrical to get this aerial and I’ll fit it in the attic. This type of aerial may be necessary for a lot of people in West Cork due to all the hills. But check using your old aerial first. Hopefully this will work with the splitter so we can have old analogue TV in most rooms and then Saorview in the room with the Ariva box. If they drop in price even more, we may buy another one.

So if you are tired of buzzy noisy old-school analogue TV in West Cork or if you are tired of paying the Rupert tax and can live without Sky Sports, you can save yourself a fortune by going down this route.

I have been very bitchy about Saorview since it was announced. It has taken Ireland 13 years to catch-up with the UK’s OnDigital/Freeview. I worked in a company that talked to RTE about building a Digital TV box in 1998! Celtic Tiger my arse, more like Celtic fat tabby sitting in front of the fire for a decade, scratching its hole. But now that it is here, I have to say it’s very well executed. And €99 for that box is a complete steal.

The internet is one place where we see a wonderful synthesis of creativity in design and engineering. I believe you can teach anyone the basics of web development to a level where they can contribute in some way to web applications and mobile applications. Some of the greatest web-apps were built by self-taught people, not Computer Science graduates.

The key, again, is the word “creativity”. We need to take back ownership of that word from those we would traditionally call “the creatives”; artists, sculptors, authors and actors. Just look at something like Facebook and think about all of the people involved in the creation of that. Creative coders, user interface designers, product managers and Ops people all working together to build an amazing system which impacts 700 million people in a positive way.

Yesterday I attended an event which may be one of the most important initiatives ever in changing the mind-set of Irish parents. Cork Coder Dojo was put together by James Whelton and Bill Liao. You probably know that Bill is a serial entrepreneur but you may not know James. He just finished his Leaving Cert.

The Coder Dojo is a weekly meetup where young people can learn the basics of web development and build sites/apps with the help of the volunteers there. Yesterday was the first one and it felt to me like I was taking part in the beginning of something huge. The room in the NSC was jammed with kids of all ages and their parents. James gave a basic intro to some simple HTML and then he and others went around to help.

I was there with our 12 y/o who has just finished primary school. He is a geek but not a coder. We have built Google AppInventor mobile apps but he has never seen HTML. Within 20 minutes, he “got it”. We had fun embedding images and videos and changing colours. We also did some basic styling with CSS. The next step is to look at JavaScript and JQuery to make a site that does something.

The reason I feel James and Bill are on to something is that I could see many of the parents were not remotely technical. This is not geek parents turning their kids into programmers (well, except for me maybe ), this is smart parents understanding that their kids can re-build this country with their creativity and the right skill-sets. I was pleased to see that Simon Coveney popped in too.

Whilst I know that many secondary schools teach some basic web skills to kids, I think it has to start earlier and be driven by people who build Apps themselves. I see no reason why my 9 y/o or even 7 y/o could not learn simple development. They may never use it, but they will always have an appreciation for it. Maybe in some ways not that different to sending your kids to piano lessons.

The intention is that The Coder Dojo will be on every Saturday. I strongly recommend that you bring your children to at least one. Don’t worry if you don’t have a laptop, the guys have spares (and I can bring a spare too). They will also be rolling it out in other parts of the country.

Head on over to the site to find out the details and register your child. You can also follow them on Twitter. I’ll hopefully see you at the next one.

We continue to struggle as a small Internet business with 6 Mbs ADSL (512kbs up). If we were slightly closer to the exchange we might get 12Mbs. Those responsible for allowing Fibre connectivity to bypass Bandon have ensured that there will never be a technology cluster in the town. It was a catastrophic oversight and will damage the town for years to come. No business requiring serious levels of bandwidth can set themselves up here.

But even with Fibre in Clon, there are no Hot-Desks in the Technology Park. If you go looking for small business offices in West Cork you either find something over  a shop or you can have an entire building.

So I was thrilled to see that Bantry now has Hot-Desking in Bantry Enterprise Centre, supported by WCEB. You can rent by the month and get:

• Individual desk area – fully serviced and partitioned
• Access to broadband
• Direct dial telephone number
• Access to canteen facilities and Meeting Room
• Generous car parking
• Linkages to support bodies for start-up assistance

I really welcome this but there are a few small issues:

• Pricing is “on application”. This should be public and on a web-site somewhere
• No mention of what type of Broadband. It needs to be a lot more than ADSL
• It’d be better if weekly options were available too (and even drop-in daily rates)

Enquiries/Expressions of Interest should be forwarded to:

Cork County Council,
Economic Development Section, Floor 14, County Hall, Cork.
Tel: 021 4285560; Fax: 021 4343164
Email: development.section@corkcoco.ie

I’m going to contact them now about pricing/broadband and will update when I hear back. Obviously it is too far for me to go regularly but if it’s a success, maybe WCEB could look at some of the empty buildings with Fibre in Clon? I’d be down like a shot if they did.

My type of running is known, by experts in the field, as walking Last year I did the Courtmacsherry 10k, the Dingle Half-Marathon and the Galway Bay Half-Marathon. All done incredibly slowly and all tough. My dodgy ankle did not help.

My aim for Bandon is to shave at least an hour off my time. It’s not going to be easy since the route is pretty challenging due to hills. But that is balanced by the fact that the views are great. TBH I really didn’t enjoy the Galway race. Urban running, in traffic, even with sea views, cannot compare to something like the Dingle Peninsula. The Bandon run is in some of the lovely back roads between the Clon road and the Dunmanway road near the river. See below:

If you have never run before, why not go for the 10k route? It’s a great way to spend a morning and the pints taste mighty fine afterwards.

I believe the Dingle weekend is their busiest business weekend of the year. Let’s hope the same ends up being the case for Bandon.

Hopefully see you on the route. I’ll be the mentalist wearing these:

Love it or hate it, if you want absolutely up-to-date information on the General Election over the next few days then you have to be on Twitter. Don’t worry, for most of it you don’t have to setup an account.

So the main feeds you’ll probably be interested in are:

• #GE11 – This will be a firehose and only for total politics junkies. A huge percentage of Tweets about the election by everyone on Twitter will have this tag
• #CSW – This is much quieter and is specifically for Cork South West Tweets
• @RTEcorkSTHWEST – This is for RTE’s coverage of the count in Cork South West
• @RTE_Elections – Despite my many criticisms of RTE, this has been a brilliant feed of general election coverage
• General Election Candidates – This is Suzy Byrne’s list of 265 General Election Candidates accounts.
• General Election 2011 – A small list I created of people/accounts talking about the election

And finally, my little geeky project over at CurationByMe. It allows you to pop in a List like Suzy’s and then filter it by a tag. So you can see just #ge11 related tweets by everyone in a specific list, not everything they are saying. Unlike all of the other above, you do need a Twitter account to use it.

Any other hashtags, accounts or lists that people can recommend for Cork South West coverage? Radio stations, newspapers etc?

But now I have an even better reason for Munster residents to sign-up. Cork Airport is now on Twitter and they are doing an absolutely amazing job. Fully up-to-the-minute information on delays, cancellations, closures and more. No more hoping the web-site has been updated or sitting on hold trying to find out if your flight is leaving on-time. If you travel much through the airport, join Twitter now and follow even that one account.

Please head over there and show your support.

The concert, which still has no name (ideas welcome) will be held on October 29th in the Brogan Inn in Bandon. At the moment we are practising a barbershop song. It is quite challenging, but we’re having a lot of fun with it.

If you know of any such group that are looking for workshops or entertainers then do get in contact with him on pat.naughton@yahoo.co.uk

Quote:

Full Circles African Drumming workshops are an exciting, fun, addition to any festival or gathering that you have planned. We cater for both childrens and adults workshops on the day. In the childrens workshops we encourage parents to participate as well, especially in the case of very young members.

We are fully mobile and can provide up to 40 drums on the day with a variety of shakers bells, and African xylophones. Children and adults learn how to create their own rhythm, sing songs and chants, dance and listen to tales from Africa. Within five minutes we have people playing the drum, grooving, dancing and clapping to an energetic beat.

We cater to your requirements and needs on the day and can arrange a timetable to suit. We have done such festivals as the Dun laoghaire ‘Festival of World Cultures’ 2006 Terriglas Festival Tipperary 2007, Green Gathering 2008, Roundstone Summer Festival 2009, Feile Lispoil Dingle 2009. Bere Island Summer Fest 2008, Belvedere house Mullingar 2010 and all the major Cork Community festivals.Included are a list of schools and centres Full Circle has worked in including references from school.

Enquires are very welcome. As the summer period is a very busy period for us please book early to avoid dissapointment. Full Circle is covered under public liability insurance. Should you also wish to book a performance based percussion group playing and dancing to traditional rhythms from West Africa then contact us on 087 2176460 or e mail. For a preview check out YouTube ‘Nankama Ireland‘ or alternatively ‘Nankama drummers with ark vg dancers cork city‘

A quick poke around confirmed that it is built on the same fantastic WordPress foundation as this fine blog.

A certain person named Donncha O’Caoimh is one of the main developers of WordPress and just lives a few miles away in Blarney. Bandon is clearly commited to buying local. OK WordPress is free but you get my point!

The site is now much easier for Trevor and the crew to update regularly and most importantly of all, the site now has comments. This might seem a small thing to you but the importance of giving people the ability to have their voice heard online about local issues should never be underestimated.

The site is  a superb local community resource, so head on over right away and check out the new site. And leave a comment there!

p.s. if you are a Twitter user and want to keep abreast of updates on the new Bandon site, just follow @bandon there and it’ll automatically post a link any time there is a update.

The allotment garden is located in Cloughmacsimon – a short distance off the bypass, right behind Coláiste Na Toirbhirte.

Plots are available in 2 sizes 5x7m for €80pa or 5x10m for €100pa. There are plenty of plots available so call 023 8852922 or 087 9567452 or email bandontransition@gmail.com for more information.

Bandon Community Allotments Open Day Sunday 16th May 1.30 pm

Plenty of family entertainment on the day with music, face painting, fun games and competitions like Wellie Throwing, Wheelbarrow Races, Tug O War, Make your own Scarecrow, prizes and more.

All the details over on www.bandoncommunityallotments.com.

They are also at Transition Bandon on Facebook.

Well done to everyone involved in this!

Lots more photos over on Pix.ie.

Also the dog owned by one of the kids who was going to perform has gone missing. Please keep an eye out for a sheepdog in the Crossbarry area. If the same happens to you, I encourage you to post it on LostandFound.ie.