Conor's Bandon Blog

Running, Food and Local stuff from a blow-in

An ex-church or nunnery in a small town near Cork from McCarthy's Bar??

An old old friend (bet ya like that description Jane) is living over in Frankfurt. Her hubby has just finished McCarthy’s Bar and is dying to visit the place mentioned in the book which he describes as an ex-church or nunnery in a small town near Cork, on the coast, known for it’s good cuisine. I have no idea where he is talking about and Googling only brings up the actual McCarthy’s Bar in Castletownbere.

Hey Dad, that's the same ugly fish as last week

I have a wee bee in my bonnet about how difficult it is to get good fresh fish in the “greater Bandon area”. When we moved down here, I thought I would have fish coming out of my ears (as opposed to sleeping with the fishes). But it was the complete opposite. The SuperValu in the town has a small fish counter but you can never rely on it to have anything you want.

Skyping with Bluetooth

Skype and Bluetooth are a match made in heaven. My home set-up is an Acer Laptop with a very nice teeny Neon Bluetooth USB Adapter which I got from Shop4Memory in Celbridge. I also got the latest GG Telecom GG03a Bluetooth headset from them. This is Bluetooth 1.2 compatible, but more importantly can be paired to up to three devices. So with a quick button press, I can switch it from working with the Nokia mobile to pairing with the laptop to pairing with the work desktop.

I despair - Its Youre Birthday

We just had Oisín’s 4th birthday party. He had a whale of a time in KidzKlub in Bandon and two of his buddies from his old playschool turned up so he was over the moon. He did well on the present front and has just spent the past hour opening them and enthusing in the way that only he can do. Catherine was putting the cards up on the mantlepiece when she noticed something odd about one of them.

First Flock Fiddling

Having a look at the Flock browser to see if it is much cop. So far not bowled away at all. This is a test post from its blogging feature. The whole integration thing just isn’t as slick as I was expecting. More importantly, I have setup the “Subscribe-to-Comments” plug-in. So now if you add a comment, you can get notified by e-mail if someone else replies. It saves you having to constantly re-check.

Weight Crash in Aisle Five

Not that anyone cares other than those who have to look at me, but I managed to drop a stone (14 fluid ounces in US measurements and 3 kilopascals in metric) in the past 4 weeks. Only 28 more pounds to go. Targeting another stone by Christmas but that is probably unrealistic. With the money I have saved from not drinking, I’m buying myself a new Ford Mustang. Another apt “Unfit” comic to celebrate.

My Army training tells me... that this is going to be a hot mission

Usually I’m on the ball when it comes to great new TV shows. I’m also incredibly modest and humble. I’ve been raving about “Curb” since I watched it on DVD before it was shown here. But I completely let “Arrested Development” slip past me. I used hear about the awards and how funny it was but never got round to checking it out. About two months ago I finally set it to record on the Sky+.

Philips USB Speaker Hell means Cisco becomes the Google of my living room?

The speakers on the Acer Laptop are a bit puny, particularly for playing DVDs. Unfortunately, the machine does not have a line out, so I decided to get a pair of USB speakers. I didn’t need anything particularly special and they had to be just a bog-standard stereo pair due to lack of space. A bit of browsing on Dabs brought up thePhilips DGX220 Speakers at a nice n cheap £23.

Le Singe est dans l'arbre et peut etre l'auto aussi

JWZ has a link to a fabulous piece of footage which will give any petrol-head goose-bumps: Early morning in Paris in 1978 at 140MPH in a Ferrari 275 GTB! The original story, with lots of updated detail is here. I’ll dream happy dreams tonight. [tags]jwz, paris, ferrari, vroom[/tags]

Numb-nut did his permalinks wrong

None of my recent posts were appearing on Planet of the Blogs and I assumed they were doing something wrong. So I finally mailed them today and they were able to suss that my RSS feeds were all buggered. Why? Because I cannot read simple bloody instructions. I wanted to change from the normal Wordpress link style for posts (e.g. http://conoroneill.com/?p=178) to a more meaningful permalink structure (http://conoroneill.com/2005/11/17/pork-from-china/). What did I do?