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.

However, it it critically important that anyone who relies on their standard roof aerial to get RTE, TV3 etc knows what is happening on Dec 31st 2012. Whilst there have been Saorview flyers in the post and the Dept of Communications has put together this horror of a web-site, I have severe doubts that those whom it will affect most are even aware of the analogue TV shutdown. My biggest concern is that older people are the ones most likely to be still using non-digital TV and they simply won’t know that the switchover is happening.

I strongly recommend that if you know anyone who is not on Sky/UPC/etc and is still using a roof aerial to get their small set of channels, let them know they need to move to a digital receiver in the next 12 months. In fact they can move now, since the Saorview service is working really well.

Given the dire financial situation in the country, any extra cost on people is going to be a strain so I was thrilled when Barry from tvtrade.ie contacted me about the Xoro DTV-M5 Digital TV Receiver. He had read my review of the Ariva and wondered if I would review their inexpensive Xoro box for them. At €49 for a fully-functional Irish Terrestrial DTV box, of course I said yes. He shot me down a review unit for free a couple of days later and I’ve been beating it up for the past few weeks.

Short aside: I need to clarify the difference between “Saorview” and Irish DTT. You will see a lot of boxes on the market like the Xoro that are labelled Irish DTT or Irish Digital TV but which are not Saorview-certified. You shouldn’t worry about this in the slightest. Either the boxes obey the relevant standards that Saorview uses or they don’t. If they don’t, you simply return the box for a full refund. It’s a bit like saying your PC is certified to access the internet. That’s why we have Standards in the tech world. The key thing with Saorview is that the box can decode MPEG-4 video and can display the Programme Guide (EPG). The Xoro does both perfectly.

First the basics. The really nice thing about Saorview is that if you have an alright RTE aerial signal now, you literally unplug the aerial lead from the back of your TV, plug it into the Xoro box, plug a Scart or HDMI lead from the Xoro back to your TV and you should now be receiving RTE, TV3, TG4 and some other stations (not UK) in crystal clear digital. You also get a bunch of Irish radio stations in digital too. It really is that simple. In fact, even if you have a buzzy RTE signal, it’ll probably work perfectly and fuzz-free for Saorview.

Now on to the Xoro box itself. It’s tiny! I love getting neat units like this which can fit into the smallest nook or cranny. The front panel has just Power, Channnel+, Channel- and USB. I really wish all the box manufacturers would put the USB on the side or the back but most have it on the front. More on USB later.

This picture shows its size compared to an XBOX (excuse the messy cable setup, I moved it quickly between rooms last night so the kids could watch the Toy Show):

Usage is dead simple simple and the box goes from off to showing a TV programme in a couple of seconds. You can channel change up/down as you’d expect and Saorview has a 7-day Programme Guide, so you can see what’s coming-up on-screen. You can use Scart (for older TVs) or HDMI (for LCD/Plasma) to connect to the TV. It handles all the various picture resolutions up to 1080p but I’m pretty sure nothing on Saorview is at that high-res yet. There is teletext handling there too but as it’s not 1987, I didn’t bother check. The remote is fiddly compared to a Sky+ one but is fine and you get used to it in a few minutes.

Like all Irish DTT boxes, the TV channel list is as follows:

• RTE One
• RTE Two HD
• TV3
• TG4
• 3e
• RTE News Now
• RTE Jr
• RTE One +1
• RTE Aertel

Radio is as follows:

• RTE Radio 1
• RTE 2fm
• RTE Lyric fm
• RTE Radio na Gaeltachta
• RTE 2XM
• RTE Choice
• RTEjr
• RTE Gold
• RTE Pulse
• RTE Radio 1 Extra

The bit that really impresses me with the Xoro is the USB/PVR. Basically you plug a portable USB harddisk into it and you now have the ability to pause/play/record/timer-record anything that is being broadcast. The overall setup is similar to Sky+ but obviously isn’t going to be as slick. Unlike the hell that is the Ariva 120, it all works really well including getting the programme name right (helllllo Ferguson, can you sort that out?).

I did have issues with one harddisk but it turns out that this is a very common problem. Harddisks of around 500GB capacity that are USB-powered struggle to get enough juice from many USB ports. In fact my troublesome one doesn’t work on any of my PC’s USB hubs either, I have to use a split-cable for it. The same split-cable trick worked on the Xoro. In general (not Xoro specific) you should either use a smaller less power-hungry HDD, which are hard to get, or use one that has it’s own power supply. Also these set-top-boxes prefer to format the harddrive themselves. It only takes a second.

If you have a bunch of media files (movies, tv, music), you can copy them onto the harddisk and the media player on the Xoro should be able to handle them no matter what the format. I tried an SD AVI, a 720p x264 MKV and a 1080p AVI and they all worked perfectly.

There’s not much more to say. It’s a very impressive piece of kit at a shockingly low price and no-one should have any hassle figuring out how to use it. If anyone asks me to recommend an Irish DTT box from now on, I’ll point them to the Xoro.

And please, let older relatives and neighbours know that the switchover is coming and they need to get a DTT box. In the UK they are doing information days and a travelling roadshow across the country to let people know. What are they doing here?

13 minutes really just left me wanting more. Given that the Late Late cannot compete for “celebrity” guests with the UK chatshows, how about more time on fewer meatier guests like this from now on?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sc_i-5FivE

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?

The downside is that is doesn’t cover building rental but surely some joined-up thinker in the Council is already working on a deal with NAMA to get properties for rental at 10c on the Euro or less? What is the point of having unused empty crumbling buildings when they could be generating rental income and be maintained?

There is nothing even approaching hot-desking in Bandon. As I’ve written before, the lack of Fibre is a millstone around the neck of the town but at least 12 Mbs ADSL should be available to anyone near the exchange.

Based on my last post there is at least one NAMAfied office building in Bandon. Anyone interested in trying to do something with it? Maybe even some sort of Co-Working space?

Go on, you know you won’t be able to help yourself. I immediately zoomed into Bandon to see what was there. Surprisingly few properties actually.

Head on over to the site and click on any dot of interest to see what property it is. Some of the locations will be off as they rely on Google accurately converting text addresses to lat/long. Of course if we had a Post Code system in Ireland, we wouldn’t have that problem. What’s the current prediction for that? 2015?

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.

I’m really really getting sick and tired of this bullshit. It’s a miracle that you can still buy unpasteurised cheese in this country with these drones in charge. If I want to drink raw milk I damn well will and I won’t have some paper-shuffler using “safety” as a code-word for control, telling me otherwise.

The last time I had raw milk I was about 6 years old. It was straight from the cow in my Grand-aunt’s house. I didn’t really like it. But I’m bloody going out this week to see if I can buy some more.

Slow Food Ireland has a petition to try and stop these muppets having their way. I strongly recommend that you sign it before all of your rights to buy and eat what you like are taken away from you.

We really seem to be heading towards a world of zero responsibility and zero consequences with faceless bureaucrats deciding everything. The ongoing collapse of the European project shows exactly where that leads.

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?

Please don’t abuse it, they are watching out for that.

Current stats for CSW are very interesting. I’d be very surprised if they match the outcome assuming that the number of remote mountain farmers on boards.ie is pretty small!

In an ideal world i.e. not Ireland, you would see new parties forming that build on the anger of the populace and offer something radical, new, modern, urban and focused on National issues. Unfortunately in Ireland, if you want to skip the usual suspects,  you can choose between:

• a bunch of right-wing religious nut-jobs or
• a bunch of old-school pinkos in suits or
• a bunch of  murderers in suits

Even if you did form a new party, it would get almost no votes since it would need to spend years playing the bullshit local politics game that lies at the heart of all of our problems.

Here’s how you currently get elected to run the country:

1. Be a teacher, other public sector employee, accountant, solicitor, publican or auctioneer
2. Join the local branch of your favourite party
3. Get involved in “local issues”.
4. Build up a support base.
5. Be seen as a “family man/woman” and be heavily involved in sport
6. Run for the local council and get elected. In Bandon you only need 100 votes to do this.
7. Bide your time
8. Become an expert in street lights, water pressure, roadworks, church gate collections, removals and funerals
9. Run for the county council. Get elected.
10. Pick the man/woman who you are going to piggy back on e.g. Mini Martin or Batt in Cork. This is critical, pick the wrong one and there goes any chance of you making it to the big leagues when they are promoted/retire.
11. Bide your time
12. Finally when the opening appears through death/retirement/MEP-ship, “throw your hat in the ring”
13. Get picked by the party to run (you have been networking during all these years to make sure you are the one who is picked, haven’t you? )
14. Hurrah, you now have a seat in the Dáil. You can chill for a few years so you don’t rock the boat.
15. Make sure your local constituency office is very active in the community. If you forget this bit, you’ll be out in the next election.
16. Claim credit for everything the County Council, Public Sector or Government does in your constituency or county. Anything from a new light on the bypass to the actual bypass itself
17. Make sure the locals see you regularly in your constituency office and make sure they see that you are solely responsible for sorting out whatever it is that they were already entitled to if they had just contacted the relevant department themselves.
18. Run the next time and get elected

Or

1. Be a son/daughter/nephew/niece of a TD
2. Wait until Mammy/Daddy/Uncle/Auntie retires/dies and take their seat.

This is why our Dáil is full to the rafters of people you wouldn’t hire to work in your own business in a million years. But they are not to blame, you are. As long as you expect the people who are supposed to be running the country to sort out your mickey-mouse local problems, you are going to elect completely the wrong people to the Dáil. The idea that you contact your National Representative when you have a local problem is so utterly ridiculous it’s staggering.

How do we solve this? Well people are too lazy to change so they’ll probably have to be forced to (plastic bags anyone?). What if it was made illegal for a sitting TD to contact any government department or public sector body about a constituent’s problems? Based on the potential for corruption? Would that sort it out?

Until we fix this local nonsense out and start electing National politicians with the skills and aptitude to run a country, Ireland will remain a tin-pot banana republic with delusions of grandeur run by a cabal of small town operators.

But let’s pretend the Irish voters get a clue and start realising they are the problem and they start thinking about the future of their country rather than their townland. Imagine a party with no ties to the past starting with a blank sheet of paper. What would I like to see in their manifesto in order for me to be able to vote for them. Here’s a random unordered, incomplete list of the stuff that’s been bouncing around in my head.

1. As I said above, make it illegal for a sitting TD to contact any government department or public sector body about a constituent’s problems
2. Force all public sector employees to resign from their positions if they are elected TDs. Yes teachers I’m talking about you.
3. Complete and utter re-structuring of the HSE from the ground up. Removal of layer upon layer of health board legacy management.
4. Firing, demoting or “early retirement” for every senior civil servant in Dept of Finance (and elsewhere) involved in the destruction of the Irish economy. It shouldn’t just be the temporary government that gets the bullet, it’s time the permanent government took some responsibility for their actions.
5. The titles and responsibilities of all senior Civil Servants to be regularly distributed to the public and those Civil Servants interviewed regularly by the media about their roles, recommendations and decisions.
6. Cancelling of all state and semi-state contracts with the audit firms that were involved with Irish banks over the past 5 years. Those firms blocked from new contracts for another 5 years.
7. All public sector pay and promotions based on strict performance metrics.
8. A 4-week review of every quango in Ireland with the aim to shut down 60% of them in 6 months. Any quango whose only job is to formulate policy, replicate what another quango does or spend training grants to be the first to go.
9. A rapid-fire review of what FÁS does and whether it provides any lasting value to the people being trained or to the country
10. A 4-page summary of every contract to the big consulting firms to be delivered by the relevant departments. These would list the intent, projected deadline, projected cost, current actual timeline and current actual cost. Aim to shut down 60% of them in 6 months with no new contracts to the big firms.
11. Creation of position of Government CIO/CTO (possibly the only decent idea Brian Cowen ever had. Where is that person Brian?) Every public sector IT project over a certain value to be vetted and monitored by small team of full-time IT experts working for that person, not the big consulting firms.
12. Upskilling of people at every level in the public sector so that IT initiatives become driven by needs from the bottom-up
13. Mandating of online communications tools wherever possible to reduce public sector travel, both for cost and environmental reasons. This includes things like IM, Yammer, Wikis, desktop sharing, webcam-based video conferencing  etc etc
14. A guarantee to deliver, before the following election, a list system to bring real expertise into the Dáil.
15. Either shut down the Seanad or make it directly electable. We can no longer afford a dumping ground for has-beens or never-weres who like the sound of their own voices.
16. TDs, Ministers and Taoiseach’s salaries to be brought down to acceptable levels.
17. Banning of all Government appointments to state and semi-state boards.
18. Splitting of RTE into three independent businesses:
    1. Commercial business spun off as a private entity funded only by advertising.
    2. Semi-State Public Service Broadcaster funded by a much reduced licence fee. The IMF bailout coverage fiasco was a new low point for RTE public service broadcasting. This needs to be fixed.
    3. State body managing the network and providing it on commercial basis to all comers, including the previous two (see next point)
19. Creation of a National Infrastructure Management Agency (NIMA). I was a fan of the privatization of Eircom back in the day but as I sit here on rubbish ADSL in Bandon with no fibre to the town I have come to the conclusion that there are certain things a country should own and control itself. All that talk about sovereignty recently and yet we don’t own our telecommunications infrastructure. Who, other than the state,  could build a Fibre to the Home infrastructure in Ireland given the investment required and the long period over which it would make a return?  NIMA would own and manage:
    1. ESB Networks
    2. Eircom’s infrastructure (this would obviously have to be bought back. What sort of cost?)
    3. All of the MANs. Any future MAN based on need, not political influence.
    4. Any strategically important fibre
    5. RTE TV/Radio Network. An Ad-free, foreign-programme-free www.rte.ie probably fits here with the RTEPlayer
20. Twitter has made the leap to being a Public Service Utility and should become a mandatory reporting system for all County Councils around the country. It was invaluable for weather and road reporting over the past few weeks. See Irish Weather Online and my TERROR post here
21. Some other very technical things I want to see (via the Ireland CIO/CTO) from a post I did a year ago include:
    1. Mashups and data mining across departments/areas to be promoted
    2. No new public sector IT projects to be approved without an API even if that is just RSS
    3. APIs to be freely available for use by the public wherever possible. Only exception is where individual’s privacy may be impacted. Where this is an issue, anonymised aggregated data provided.
    4. A CIO Solutions Catalogue to be created with examples of successful projects from all areas of the public sector that can be re-used
    5. Strong ongoing data-mining of e-tenders system to find repetition and redundancy and to guide those putting up RFTs to re-use or customise existing solutions
    6. An agile approach to all projects. Quick prototypes mandatory
    7. An avoidance of boil-the-ocean projects and a move towards simple quick wins locally which bubble up nationally
    8. Metrics for success defined at early stage of all projects and reported on at regular intervals
    9. Off the shelf Open Source to be preferred for all projects
    10. Once per quarter IRLCamp where public sector and private sector get together and present interesting projects, ideas and technologies and learn from each other. These lightweight BarCamp style events will have people at every level, not formal Powerpoint from senior people.
22. OPW to be made self-funding with a profit-making mandate.
23. Is Failte Ireland self-funding? It should be.
24. Ditto Coillte.
25. Coillte, OPW, Tourism Ireland, Failte Ireland mandated to generate additional €100m p.a. in revenue from castles, buildings, forests, parks, beaches, camp-sites etc etc in conjunction with new tourist/leisure facilities in all of those. Fees only for the facilities.
26. Coillte, OPW, Tourism Ireland, Failte Ireland and other tourism quangos mandated to work with private sector to generate new tourism/leisure revenue streams of at least €100m p.a.
27. Temporary removal of all fees and travel taxes for those travelling to Ireland by air/sea.

As I said, an unordered collection. But most of it very achievable by a new competent skills-based government in 6 months.

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.

Yesterday I did my first ever Half Marathon in Dingle. Yes it nearly killed me and I had to walk lots of it but I finished and I had several hundred people behind me. Compared to some of my friends who regularly do Triathlons, my achievement is nothing special. But for someone who spent 20 years sedentary and started running in January, aged 41, with a gippy ankle and hugely overweight, I’m pretty proud of myself.

One application I have been using is CardioTrainer on my Android phone. It started as a pretty simple app but just gets better and better with each revision. It uses GPS to record distance, speed and elevation as you exercise. The most recent version finally has a “permanent account” feature so you can change phones and keep your exercise history. It saves everything on the phone and online. It also posts to Facebook which I love.

Last night whilst watching TV with my completely seized up left knee, I played a little more with it and suddenly discovered it has Google Health integration. This is a service that has always intrigued me but I had never used. Unlike many people, I would love to have a permanent online store of all my records that all my health providers would input to and read from. No more silos. My GP, various hospitals, physios etc could update and access what is appropriate to them.

So this afternoon I signed up for Google Health and connected CardioTrainer to it. I’ve been sitting here for the past hour looking at it with some “big ideas” bubbling around in my head. They are not quite formed but it goes something like this.

1. Android phones will become ubiquitous in the next two years
2. You can already get basic models for £100 un-subsidised in the UK
3. CardioTrainer is free in its basic form. They just released a calorie counter app and have an inexpensive weigh-loss app
4. Google Health is free
5. There is some opportunity around tracking your exercise, eating, weight, etc and uploading via CardioTrainer to Google Health
6. Your health professionals could track your progress and give advice, feedback and encouragement
7. The HSE could hand out those phones and create a preventative care group for billions less than it costs to deal with the health problems related to obesity, diabetes, alcohol, heart disease, smoking etc etc etc. Hell they could even outsource the whole thing to Malaysia.
8. Someone from FourSquare could help with gaming dynamics to build incentive systems into these apps to encourage people to get healthy
9. Think “Operation Transformation” for everyone
10. If Google wanted to do it themselves, they could finally find a practical use for Latitude.

Ok, so you can see where I am going with this. As I said, the idea isn’t fully formed but there is something valuable here centered around cheap mobile technology, the cloud and the health of our country.

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!