Conor's Bandon Blog

Running, Food and Local stuff from a blow-in

RTE Radio Show Downloads

I’m not a radio person so I tend to miss a wealth of interesting programmes, particularly in the evenings. I have only just found out about Winter Food on RTE1 presented by Cork’s own Clodagh McKenna. I was very happy to see that recordings of the show (and archives) were available. Unfortunately there are a few problems, but I have solutions to some of them: [1] The shows are in Real Player rm format rather than MP3.

Murphy's Awesome Ice-Cream now blogging

Kieran from Murphy’s Ice Cream in Dingle posted a comment to this blog last week and let me know that they now have a blog of their own. I’ll probably have to give Catherine a sedative when I tell her that they have a chocolate sauce recipe on it already. Murphy’s Coffee/Ice-Cream shop was the highlight of our walkabout in Killarney last Autumn. Fab coffee and stunning ice-cream. I just went with a simple double scoop of something fruity and Catherine went for one of their more complex creations.

The Hackney Hardman is back

It’s been a long wait but the man who put the AMS is Amstrad is back on our screens, hurrah! And what a bag of spanners he has collected for this series; How about the bipolar woman who cried during the first firing cos Sir Alan was mean to the girls? Quite possibly the most annoying woman on British TV after one short episode, so I assume he’ll keep her.

Dillon's of Timoleague - Good food, bad value

Dillon’s Food style/ethnicity: Modern Irish Map Chain: N/A Price: 30 - 40 (Euro) **Location**: <p>Main Street Timoleague Co Cork Ireland Food rating: 3 out of 5 Decor rating: 3 out of 5 Service rating: 4 out of 5 Kind Auntie Fiona took care of our angels on Friday night so Catherine and I could trot down to Timoleague for a bite to eat. Dillon’s gets a strange mini-review in the 2004 edition of Georgina Campbell.

Mr Krabbs goes to Bandon

Only two months later I get around to blogging our Spider Crab adventure from a few weeks before Christmas. We got a massive one for a few euro in Antcar in Union Hall. At this stage Oisín is totally cool with crustaceans, poor Sibéal was a bit shocked when I arrived back to the car with it. He stayed in the cooler whilst we did the Skibbereen Winter Wonderland. It wasn’t quite Disney but the kids had a howl.

For everything else

As I’ve never understood American football, I obviously don’t watch the Superbowl. But this means I only just found out about the Mastercard ad that was on during it. I’m sure Patty and Selma would have swooned through the whole thing. Richard Dean Anderson is still the man! [tags]Mastercard, MacGyver, Superbowl, Diggnation, Richard Dean Anderson[/tags]

Benny's Brilliant Web SMS Applet

Ben has just launched a very simple looking but really useful utility over at Freewebtexts. It is a front end to Vodafone Ireland’s web-text facility (other vendors coming) . If you have ever used Voda’s site, you’ll know that it was clearly designed by someone who hates people and wouldn’t know a standard if it came up and head-butted them (web mail that doesn’t work behind many corporate firewalls. What century is this?

Both Drinkin' and Bloggin' in it

Guinness has a blog. All the skinny at gapingvoid. Looks like a pretty decent attempt at a corporate blog. They have a posting about great Guinness ads. One thing I’ve always hated about their web-site is that if you want to see their genius US ads instead of their dire “meaningful” Irish ones, you have to pretend to be in the US when signing in on the home page. Boys, dump the swimming across the Atlantic crap and give us “Brilliant!

DS - not such a toy after all

I think I like Oscar’s Nintendo DS more than he does. He got Karts for christmas and I was blown away by how easy it was to set up with my wireless router so that I could play against other people on the web. Obviously I always come last. But one of the hinges on the DS broke recently. Looks like a design flaw to me (considering the new DS Lite has a much meatier hinge).

Sausage Semi-Success Satisfies

And so on to attempt number three. This time I followed the advice of Podchef Neal and others regarding keeping everything as cold as possible when trying to mince the pork. So I stood outside for half an hour. More usefully, I put the mincer attachment in the freezer for the day and used meat which had barely defrosted. Lo and behold, the meat flew through the mincer. I was using the coarsest holeage (I’m tired, I have no idea what the right term is for that) and so had to run the meat through again.