Peter Schiff and why we'll remain screwed
Many of you have seen this video on YouTube where investment expert Peter Schiff is shown many times on US TV in 2006-2007 explaining why the US was in a property bubble and why it was all going to collapse. If you haven’t seen it, it’s hilarious and depressing at the same time.
I don’t claim to know much about investing but when we were moving from Dublin to Cork in 2003 and saw that our house had increased in value more than 400% in 9 years, we took the money and ran.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Friday, April 3, 2009
How not to waste an hour
We’ve just had the third annual waste of time known as Earth Hour where millions of people worldwide pretend to do something useful about global warming and turn off lights for an hour. For 99.999999% of those people, that’ll be it for another 365 days. End result for the Earth, big fat zero. Perhaps if we take all the energy expended by the media covering this story, we may even have a net negative?
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Sunday, March 29, 2009
Whatchoo Readin' For?
(In the immortal words of Bill Hicks).
Just got an email to tell me that the [West Cork Literary Festival](http://www.westcorkliteraryfestival.ie/) will run from July 5th to 11th.  Now I’m not the most literary person in the world. My last three books were “Presenting to Win”, “Bad Science” and something by Harlan Coben. Next up is “On the Origin of Species”. But even I’ve heard of some of the heavy-hitters who’ll be attending the festival.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Friday, March 27, 2009
Brian Cowen now available as a t-shirt
I’ve ordered mine, have you?
Our Glorious Leader
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Dear Brian, welcome to the Internet
Fianna Fail may be able to censor RTE and turn it into a toothless Soviet-era Pravda but luckily we have the internet to enable democracy and freedom of speech and expression.
Here is the original RTE piece on the Cowen nudes that they removed from their site and then apologised for mentioning. Thanks to Mr Mulley.
“Against us are… all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty… We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Wednesday, March 25, 2009
West Cork Tweetup
If you had never heard of Twitter before, the relentless coverage of it on RTE and elsewhere recently must surely have changed that. It’s a simple system for messaging people who follow you but in a completely public way. You can pick whose messages you see by default too. Here’s a quick snapshot of those I follow: twitter_snap One of the nice aspects of Twitter is that it leads to real-world interactions too.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Tuesday, March 24, 2009
In honour of today's historic episode of The Simpsons
Cheers Homer!
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Tuesday, March 17, 2009
It's funny cos it's true
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Back to the Food Future
This isn’t good food, it’s fantastic food. The Irish have forgotten the power of preserving and this is a big wake-up call. Lip-smackingly gorgeous duck confit that is an absolute bargain and a doddle to prepare.
Disclosure: I received several of these products for free and did not pay delivery.
Quite a while back Laurent of Confit de France contacted me and a bunch of other foodie bloggers about his new ecommerce store which was selling a variety of preserved French foods including confit, pate, rillettes and foie gras.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Sunday, March 8, 2009
How safe are your pictures and documents?
I’m sure you bought a USB stick or portable harddisk with the best intentions in the world but how often do you actually backup irreplaceable files? How would you feel if those wedding pictures disappeared in a puff of smoke?
That’s why I consider online backup a must-have. I only recommend two services and the one at the top of my list is PutPlace. This low-cost solution by an Irish company is simple to set-up and then you just forget about it.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Thursday, February 26, 2009