darran.info

Every website and service online asks me to input a web address in my "profile" and I always found it difficult to pick one. Do my mad ramblings on here get higher precedence over the obscure that I post to Tumblr or on Twitter or perhaps I want you to add me on Facebook? A personal landing page is perfect if you're looking to unify all your online profiles. And I have a few profiles.

For the past few years I've used flavors.me which served me well, but I never liked the design and there was a few options you had to pay for to tweek the page exactly how I liked it. There are others such as about.me and dooid.me which preform a similar function too.

I needed a domain for my new landing page, and eventually realising that the furniture store, who has without fail for the past 15+ years re-registered their domain darran.com on time, it is time to move on. Also the fuckers at the Irish Domain Registry only allow first and last names, plus the cost for an .ie domain (and cost of registered a business in my first name) is ridiculous, I'm quite happy to not buy Irish.

Last year while renewing and changing domain registrars from GoDaddy to NameCheap I decided to splash out and purchase my one first name domain, perfect for my own personal landing page.

I was inspired by a business card I saw a few years ago which had something similar to the image below. I loved the simplicity of it all.

After a year I finally got around to putting something on it that I'm not ashamed of. The design is from John over at TentBlogger, where he has loads of reasons why you should have a page like this and a few designs you can use. I modified his version using the iPhone image, but since there is a new version, I had to make a few more images to update the site! After all I do love my iPhone 5!

So for all things Darran Crowley visit darran.info.

modernize

So here is what I've been up to this January

• New Years in Kandersteg
  
• Skied and sledded a bit
• Been working away at Musgrave
  
• Got my car repaired, twice
• Sent away all the details about my degrees to be assessed by the Teaching Council of Ireland
  
• Weekend in Tramore for Teoiny and Sandys Birthday
  
• Started a Wakoopa account
  
• Caught up with a lot of US telly
  
• Managed to see every The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for January
  
• Figured out why he says Repor (It's like there is a silent T like in Colbert)
  
• Started using Twitter a lot more
  
• Been to the cinema
  
• Watched a load of movies
  
• My contract has been renewed till April
  
• Didn't get to play as much Call of Duty as I wanted to
  
• Posted over 170 items on my Tumblr
  
• Been to a few Scout meetings

How has it been for you?

teacher training in ireland

So now I need some teacher training, to become a teacher and all!

There are a few courses around Ireland that will train you to become a teacher. The main 4 are through the National University of Ireland. Cork (UCC), Galway (NUIG), Maynooth (NUIM) and Dublin (UCD). DCU and Trinity (TCD) also run courses and Limerick (UL) does a nice Business Teacher course too.

So to apply for one the NUI courses, you have to go through a similar process to that of the CAO, through PAC (Postgratuate Applications Centre). You apply for an application form pack and receive it in the post. No online applications here, these guys want to keep it old school!

Be warned, the closing date for entry into the 2009/10 course is December 1st 2008! A whole 9 months before hand.

Photo owned by germanium (cc)

I’m at this point now, just about to get everything together to send it into PAC. Lets just recap on what I’ve had to do... so far:

• Request a application pack from PAC.
  
• Paid a € 80 application fee through the bank (not online).
  
• Got an official copy of my results from CIT where I did my undergraduate degree (luckily I still have the originals I obtained from last year for my masters application. It cost me € 20 or something).
• Copied my degree results and masters parchment.
• Got those photocopies certified as true copies.
• Got a stamp for the confirmation post card.
• Now just go to the post office to get the evidence of postage page stamped.

This is only the tip of the iceberg with what I'm sure will be a bureaucrats dream. Next time I will tell you about the teaching council of Ireland!!

becoming a teacher

Since I don’t have much to blog about these days, I’m going to bring you on the journey of becoming a teacher in Ireland.

First of all, why do I want to become a teacher? Lets look at the pros and cons of going down the road of teaching.

The Cons

• Dealing with kids all day
• Some kids don’t like to learn
• The pay
• Bureaucracy
• The nicknames
• Dealing with parents
• Lack of respect among other educated professionals
• Car getting keyed
• Early mornings
• Uncertainty in the current economic climate

The Pros

• Teaching people
• June
• Influencing them to do my bidding once they have grown up (may involve subliminal messaging in my teaching methods.. haven’t quite figured this one out yet.. I’ll keep you posted)
• July
• Job satisfaction
• August
• Job security once you have one

Photo owned by sridgway (cc)

So I’ve now talked myself into taking the first steps and consciously making the decision to become a teacher. What is next?

I need to be trained. More next time..

bold blogger

So I'm back to give you an update since I've been practically gone for the last month and a bit. Besides that last post which lowered the tone of the blog completely.

Yes I sold out, but I do have a canned response to those emails that I get enquireing about advertising on here and what do you know someone took me up on the offer! Thanks to Mike for writing it, my first guest blogger (kinda)

Anyway, since I was on here last I finally got myself an iPhone and I'm loving it. Besides a slight problem at the start with the side of it and I promptly received a replacement from Apple so they are still my friends for the time being, and o2 haven't been as terrible as they make out (besides ripping me off with my contract.. but i'll live with it)

I've also had a bit of a Holiday when Lena came over to visit, which is a nice break to work work work during the week. We spent the weekend in Dublin, taking advantage of a Getaway Break! You know, so I could experience what I'm working on first hand!

I climbed Carrauntoohil with my Rover Scouts. I've climbed it before, but it was good to get out and up it again. We had an Investiture at the top and all, the First Rover Scouts to be Invested in Douglas and the County!

What else? Oh! Obama won! Thank you America! Mulley puts it brilliantly when he says:

The world watched tonight because this was a world election, with just Americans voting in it. All those people that were frustrated with their lives, their countries, the world around them just wanted a new regime and their American brothers and sisters voted for it tonight. Thank you.

Besides that, work, Scouts and Friends are keeping me too busy to update here as much as I'd want to. I'm a bad blogger. I do however keep a Tumblr going that gets updated every off day with stuff I find. darran.tumblr.com

my cv

I'm in the job hunting game these days and no better way to get my CV out there than to put it on my blog! After all, whoever is about to hire me will probably just Google my name and find it anyway!

So if you or someone you know has a job opening and looking to fill it, please take a look at or forward on my CV! I'm interested in anything in the Cork area or beyond and involving IT and/or Business.

My Curriculum Vitae in different formats:

• Word Document - DOC
  
• Portable Document Format - PDF
  
• Google Document - HTML

a quick summary

This is just a quick summay of what is going on with me:

This week I bought a new camera. Its a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ4. Haven't had a chance to fully test it out. Keep an eye out for any chances to my Flickr Photostream.
I saw The Dark Knight. and even tho it wasn't in focus (those lazy lazy bastards in Mahon Point Omniplex) I really enjoyed the film. It's amazing!!
I'm off to Jamboree 2008 tomorrow. An Irish International Jamboree celebrating 100 years of Scouting in Ireland.*

So I'll be back in about 2 weeks, until then, check out my twitter feed for any on-site updates!

Byee!

EDIT: * It's going to be great!

sabbatical

A sabbatical (from Greek sabbatikos) is a prolonged hiatus, typically 2 months plus, in the career of an individual taken in order to fulfill some goal.

via Wikipedia

It's been about a half a month already since you last heard from me (no news with that last post either... yet!), and another 3 weeks till my exams are over. Fingers crossed, I'll have somehow achieved a Masters Degree!!

Till then, or whenever I get back here, you can see the odd funny video, image, link, song over on my Tumblr page: darran.tumblr.com

Slán!

D.

2007

Its that time of the year, the end of it. And like last year, here is the wrap up!

Its been a excellent year here, I've moved to a new domain, masking the fact I'm using Blogger, I've written a total of 95 posts which produced a total of 84 comments!

For those statisticians out there, here is a break down of whats been happening here on the site:

Total for 2007:

• 10,222 - Page Loads
• 7,522 - Unique Visitors
• 6,253 - First Time Visitors
  
• 1,269 - Returning Visitors
  

On average, each day:

• 28 - Page Loads
  
• 21 - Unique Visitors
  
• 17 - First Time Visitors
  
• 3 - Returning Visitors

Top 5 posts this year:

1. RTÉ Edits Wikipedia
2. Bebo Badge
3. Global Heating
4. Kandersteg Webcam
5. Emigrating to Canada

Traffic Sources:

• 56.63% - Search Engines
• 32.84% - Referring Sites
• 10.53% - Direct Traffic

Top Countries:

• 29.35% - Ireland
• 19.16% - United States
• 15.20% - United Kingdom
• 6.23% - Canada
• 4.71% - Sweden
• 25.35% - Other (96 including: Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Brazil, etc..)
  

Top Cities:

• Dublin
• Cork
• London
• Växjö
• Vancouver

Top Browsers:

• 54.85% - Internet Explorer
• 38.01% - Firefox
• 4.32% - Safari
• 2.82% - Other (Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, Camino, etc..)

Top Operating Systems:

• 89.79% - Windows
• 8.20% - Macintosh
• 2.01% - Other (Linux, Playstation 3, etc..)

Total Feed Subscribes: 41

Hope you all had a fantastic 2007 and looking forward to 2008! (100 years of Scouting in Ireland!!) That's it for me for this year, off to Clon, just like old times! Thanks to everyone again for reading, commenting, subscribing and supporting me :-)

Darran.

tumblr

I've been trying out a TumbleLog for the last week or so and I like it. What are they:

To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.

It is basically any video, image or link I find amusing and want to share with the world. I'm not going to writing a post here about every silly video or funny picture I see, because then this blog would loose its perception of high quality and top class I've tricked you all into thinking it has!

So if you want cheap laughs and to see what I've been finding interesting online, you can check out my full rss enabled tumble log! Simply titled Darran.

http://darran.tumblr.com/

all hail vhs

Its Science Week Ireland this week and they have a little blog post competition (tip of the hat to Damien)! Each day has a different question and todays one is:

What was the favourite invention from your childhood?

After thinking long and hard all day I came up with what I think is the best invention from my childhood. It has to be VHS, cassettes and the player! (That's Video Home System or just videos to some of you!)

Altho after doing a bit of research for this post, it turns out VHS was invented 6 years before I was born in 1976. But then again I don't think VHS players were readily available till the mid-80's as the Betamax/VHS war was only just about over when I was born in '82.

I can still remember two films that we were allowed rent, and we rented them many times. First was Santa Claus: The Movie and the other was Zig and Zag's: Nothing to do with Toast! We didn't mind one bit that we saw them before and could probably could recite the entire movie from heart, but back then there wasn't many children's films out.

We probably got to see these once in a blue moon because we didn't have a VHS player. We either had to rent one from the video store or borrow one but I didn't mind, I got to see Zig and Zag 3 times in a row!!

Later on, I think that VHS had a huge impact on the way we spent out time and our habits. A trip to the video store was nearly a weekly occurrence (with the amount of TV channels we had, you could count on one hand) and we got to bring the big screen into our home and watch films that we were not able to see in the cinema.

The best thing about VHS has to be the possibility to record TV. No longer were we slaves to the program schedulers! We were liberated and free to go about and live our own lives and watch TV as we pleased! Even to this day you can get a VHS player to record your favourite programs!!

Long Live VHS!



Zig and Zag!

let it begin

Now that Hallowe'en is finished for the year, it has given everyone the all clear to start to talk about the C word. I'm going to get ahead of the crowd and wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year now!

I also decorated my site... i tried so hard to get the snow flakes to fall, but in the end went for a ribbon just wishing my visitors a Happy Christmas!

Let the merriness and jolliness begin... I'm sure it will be over before we know it :-) Only 53 more days to go!

rte post

My RTÉ post got a lot of reaction. This was mainly thanks to links from Damien and Tom. I also noticed that a few of the papers then picked up on the story!

The Sunday Tribune:

The edits were first spotted by 24-year-old blogger Darran Crowley from Cork, who highlighted them on his blog.

Link

There was also stories apparently from Irish Times or Examiner and the Daily Mail who did not give me any credit!

On a side note, as you have noticed, this blog has taken a bit of a break, I started my Masters Degree in UCC (in Business Information Systems) which is taking up a good bit of time! I will try to continue to update more often. I also stopped contribution to Team Geared Up Blog :-(

jamboreeing

This week I'm off to Jiingijamborii, the Swedish national Jamboree and their dry run for the next World Jamboree in 2011! I'll be helping out on the Information Stands and giving tours! I'm their native English speaker! So not sure about connections and blog posts while I'm there. If there is any wireless Access to be found I will be updating Twitter! I had added the New Twitter Badge to my side bar for those of you who just visit the website and have no idea what a Twitter is!



I'm then flying from there to London on the 24th of July for the World Scout Jamboree. I'm a KISC Bitch there. Again if I do have access, I will Twitter some Updates! Oh! I may also have a UK Sim :-) so I could cheaply update Twitter via txt!

But I'm sure there will be posts on both these topics in future!

Take it easy and Enjoy the Summer or whatever this time of year is supposed to be called. Talk to ya in August!

sweden

I've been here in Sweden almost 3 weeks now. I'm having a great time!

My first impression of Sweden looking from the plane is that it is very green and full of forests! It puts Ireland to shame considering were billed as the emerald isle. Still tho there is a vast amount of open space and unpopulated areas. You can see when I put Ireland on a map next to Sweden. It is quite a big place!

The Swedish people like one thing as far as I can see and that is the Eurovision! They sing songs from previous years and are surprised when I am unfamiliar with what they are singing. Yet they couldn't recall last years Irish Entry, but i doubt many Irish people could. (It was Brian Kennedy - Every Song Is A Cry For Love for those of you about to fire off a Google Search) I even experienced a SwedishSingStar night!

Their licence plates on their cars are a load of TLA's. (All you business students will know what i mean!) So that keeps me amused also seeing POO on a car is quite amusing... I wonder if they paid extra for that?

In Sweden (the land of the mid-night sun) they celebrate Mid-Summers. You know, the longest day of the year. I headed up north to Rättvik where We celebrated the longest day by Decorating the May-Pole and then Dancing around it singing songs like some kinda cult. I was assured that it wasn't a cult afterwards, as it was traditional Swedish custom. They are a funny nation. Photos on Flickr!

I also went on a visit to Stockholm. Stayed at the Backpackers Inn (twitter review) and met up with Lovisa for a mini reunion! We saw the changing of the guards (12noon Saturdays and Wednesdays and 13:00 on Sundays!) as well seeing Old town which was really old. The Treasury and the City Hall. Again, Photos on Flickr!

One of the most interesting places was the Vasa Museum:

The Vasa is the world’s only surviving 17th-century ship and one of the foremost tourist sights in the world.

I didn't get to Skansen due to the weather. It was really shite, really Irish. There was a break in the weather for a few hours the first evening, and the city looked quite nice and amazing in the sun! So more of an excuse to go back and visit.

I also succeeded in my mission to visit and IKEA! Not to bad for my first visit IKEA (Yes, you have to type it as tho you were shouting it each time.... IKEA!!!!) being a Swedish IKEA!



So far the only down side to the trip is the weather. Global warming is really kicking me in the ass since it dealt me a lovely and snowy winter! There has been only a small few days I can say were Summer days; wake up and it is warm and sunny and stays that way till night. Instead it has been like the successful Scottish pop band of the 80's, 90's and noughties, Wet Wet Wet.

Overall it has been great! :-D

cormac harrington

A hello and welcome to the world to my new cousin Cormac David Harrington.

Cormac, you'll be looking at this when your all grown up after Googling your name. The time stamp is a day before your Birthday because I'm in Canada! I can see into the future!

UPDATE: First Photo!

personal dna

I am a Generous Leader, apparently!

Not your typical way of answering questions. Be warned, at 11 pages, it is a long survey/quiz!

Give it a try!

ssia

5 years down, and now it's d-day...

My SSIA Matures Today!!!

Yay me!

update

What I've been up to lately:

• A bit of house keeping, replacing Gurr with Grrr! It turns out I was expressing the wrong emotion! Sorry Vanessa, hope I make more sense now!

• I'm trying to sort out my flights to return to Canada Ireland, but my USIT login isn't working. They updated the system to the 2007 programme! So I'm waiting for a reply from USIT. That could be some time... BASTARDS!

• I'm also waiting for Scouting Ireland to get back to me re: My application for Jiingijamborii, which I sent them 3 weeks ago, and still no results! international@scouts.ie seem to just gobble up emails.

• I have also added a small AdSense banner at the bottom of all pages on my blog. I'm noticing a difference with a few people clicking! It is only small, it blends in and most people won't notice it as it's at the bottom of the page!

• Besides that, I'm a terrible team member on Geared Up Blog, but constantly looking for a new story. Any ideas? Drop me a mail! Thanks!

• I'm also quite busy at work:

P.S. Sorry for clogging everyones RSS readers up when I updated a few of the posts. Blame Blogger!

UPDATE: I'm returning to Ireland not Canada! Thanks Elisabeth :-)

bebo badge

I have just discovered bebo Badges!

They are a cool way to tell people outside bebo about your profile! Just copy/paste the html for one of the badges below into your other blogs or spaces around the web so more friends can see your page.

As anyone who has seen my bebo page knows, I delete any comments I get. Why? If you want to tell me something, send me an email, don't put it on show for everyone in the world to see. I donno, I just never liked the idea of everyone reading everyone personal messages.

[Update] I have removed the badge as it doesn't seem to load correctly in both Internet Explorer or Firefox! Stupid bebo! You can view my profile here.