Conor's Bandon Blog

Running, Food and Local stuff from a blow-in

And it burns burns burns, that ring of fire

I couldn’t resist this bottle of Hot Sauce in departures in the airport in Texas. I’m sure it is the equivalent of a Yank buying an aran sweater, Shillelagh and some inflatable shamrocks in Shannon, but I don’t care. [![IMG_2173_resizedb](/images/flickr/2024_download/90377297_798cbac561_c.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bandon1/90377297/ "Photo Sharing") [tags] Texas Hot Sauce, Johnny Cash[/tags]

Guest Blogger Review - La Maison Troisgros

My old friend and classmate from college Dee Burke read my review of The Four Seasons and sent me her review of La Maison Troisgros in France. I asked if she’d mind if I posted it here due to the drooling all over the keyboard that resulted when I read it. She said sure. So, for the first time in the five years this blog has been in existence - a posting from someone other than Mr Creosote:

Salt Lick BBQ Driftwood Texas - Can I have a franchise please?

We brought the rain with us from Cork and it lashed down as we were driven out to the Salt Lick BBQ which is, as they (and probably Ned Flanders) would put it “a heck of a long way out yonder”. It is also in a dry county where the sale (but not consumption) of alcohol is illegal. I think many of my Irish readers have probably had some sort of aneurysm reading that last sentence.

This week we'll be mostly driving the AssKicker 40000

Last time in Texas I was in a compact car. I was nearly crushed to death several times each day. This time, it was going to be fire with fire. You lookin' at me? I said are you lookin at me? UPDATE: Goddammit, Baz was right. It is a poxing mini-van not an SUV (the sliding door is what gives it away). The locals were gentle with me and said it was kinda a minivan-SUV hybrid until one of em goes, “yeah, for soccer moms”.

I picked the wrong day to start carrying a concealed 357 Magnum


Dammit they were out of Lincoln Navigators

Yer, I want dat wun: So we only got a massive SUV instead of a planet-sized one on our arrival in Texas. We’re here for the week and I hope I keep my wits about me and take plenty of Nokia Crap-cam pictures. The first one will be of our town runabout with three rows of seats and what sounds like a V6 under the bonnet. I spun the tyres when taking off gently from some traffic lights and squealed them every time I turned a corner.

The Seasons of my mind

We didn’t have a “formal” family holiday in 2005 - a week in Rosslare with the extended family was it for us. As year-end approached, weariness grew. So we threw caution to the wind, threw the children to their granny and headed down from Cavan to Capital City for some pampering and unashamed luxury. Stop reading now if you are offended by the profligate spending by people of their own money when there are still starving babbies in Biafra

Eircom Broadband 11 hour downtime. What exactly am I paying for?

Few useful words for Network Operations in Eircom: Active/Passive Clusters, RAID, RAC, Multi-Pathing, Redundancy, 247365 Network Monitoring, investment, SLA. €33 per month ex-VAT for this? Next time Eircom, maybe don’t double the download speed, just halve the price. This wasn’t just me, this was, in their words, “the Cork region”. Can anyone who has business broadband with Eircom in Cork confirm if they were down from midnight to 11.30am this morning?

Testing Postie Plugin from GMail

Dirk, who has written the most excellent Postie plugin for Wordpress is putting a ton of effort into tracking down why I can’t send an MMS picture message from Vodafone to the blog using his plug-in. We are now testing other mail clients to see if they work. This one has a picture attached as the suspicion is that pictures are causing the problem.

Smooth n Easy Upgrade to Wordpress 2.0 and Connections Reloaded

If anyone who worked for me ever attempted a double simultaneous software upgrade, I’d fire them. But as I’m the boss of me, I can do whatever I like on my blog. Last night I upgraded the blogging software to Wordpress 2.0 and moved the Blog Theme from Connections to Connections Reloaded. Huge kudos to Matt and Donncha and all the others at Wordpress for the trouble free upgrade and to Ajay for doing such a slick improvement to Connections.