week around ireland

I had a friend come visit for a week and a bit around Ireland. All the tourist areas like:

Bus to Newgrange!

Newgrange, one of the passage tombs of the Brú na Bóinne complex in County Meath

Ringing the Bells of Shandon, 3 blind mice!

View of Cork City from the top!

Blarney Castle, Stone Kissed!

Torc Waterfall, Kilarney!

Top of Torc Mountain!

Charles Fort Kinsale!

Nice Sign on the Cliffs of Moher!

The View over the Edge on the Cliffs!

Bunratty Castle, County Clare!

Kilmainham Jail/Goal

Fun week, really good, not its just time for Canada preparation!

300

I made it! 300 Posts! Just thought I'd tell you.

Lack of posts the last week and a bit because i have been busy entertaining! More news soon...

This time next week, I will be in Canadia!

webcam gadget

I was on the Whistler Blackcomb website looking at their webcam and notice a "+ Add to Google" button. I clicked and sure enough, it put the whistler cam on my Google Homepage! I then and an idea and now I have created a Google Gadget for the Kandersteg International Scout Centre Webcam! Now you can have the view from the Webcam on your Google homepage!

Olé!

loud howard

Like a bus, you wait for a post from me, and then two come along at once!
This is the Dilbert Comic for today:
I love Loud Howard. I felt it was my duty to inform Scott about my feeling about him. The email went like this:

From: Darran
To: scottadams
Date: Oct 11, 2006 1:12 PM
Subject: dilbert

I love LOAD HOWARD!

Darran.

Then 6 hours later i get a reply:

From: ScottAdams
To: darranc
Date: Oct 11, 2006 7:06 PM
Subject: Re: dilbert

Darran,

Glad to hear you're enjoying Dilbert. I appreciate you letting me know.

Scott Adams

YAY! The famous cartoonist emailed me! It up there with an email i got from DJ Dusty Rhodes years ago!
Am i easily pleased...? Yes.
Is this a lame excuse for a post...? Yes.
Do i care...? No!

isic

I'm off to Canada in 3 weeks. I got my International Student Identity Card in the post last week from USIT. I paid for it back in April when i had to fork out for the visa and flights. I only got it last week because when i went looking for it, they told me i never sent up any photo for it, so i sent one up! 6 months later i receive it and notice that it is valid from 01/09/2005 until 31/12/2006.

Now I'm off in 3 weeks on my Student Visa with my Student flights expecting to be basically being a student! I couldn't be more wrong. According to USIT they only needed me to be a student to book the flights and couldn't care less what my status is after that. In fact they couldn't care less if i physically had the card.

The ISIC Card (i know the last C of ISIC means Card) will get me many discounts on bus and rail as well as in shops etc while I'm over on Canada on my Student Visa, except after 2 months of use i won't be able to use the card anymore!

They have the system sewn up and don't care what people think. They are nothing more than a big bully and with their monopoly they are sitting pretty. Funny the Government doesn't step in, considering they are all against monopoly's in the travel industry and all!

rules of shotgun

The term "Shotgun" refers to the front passenger seat of an automobile. "Calling Shotgun" is the act of claiming the position of Shotgun for one's self. As this position is the most coveted of all positions when riding in a car. -ShotgunRules.com

These are the rules that i use for any car I drive:

• The driver makes the rules i.e. me!
• You must say "shotgun"
• You must be able to see the car and driver at the same time but the driver doesn't need to be able to see the car
• It must be called as you are heading towards the car to get into it
• If you sit down in shotgun before anyone calls it, you retain shotgun
• Shotgun has to do missions involving someone leaving the car i.e. to call into and collect someone, bringing rubbish to the bin etc...
• Once shotgun is called, it remains the callers until either:
  
  1. the caller leaves the car for the rest of the journey
     
  2. everyone leaves the car for a mission that involves some sitting down or an extended time away
     
• Once shotgun is called, everyone else can call seats they don't want to sit in i.e. "calls not in the middle" or "calls not sitting behind Darran"
• The drivers significant other as well as the cars owner automatically get shotgun
• Any problems or discrepancies can be resolved by the driver who may call for a game of rock, paper, scissors.
• The driver also has the ability to remove shotgun from anyone for whatever reason they like!
  

They are my rules and subject to change without notice!

new imagery

Google have updated their satellite imagery!

On October 3rd, we updated Google Maps and Google Earth with the following new imagery:

- the whole state of Minnesota, South Carolina, North Dakota, Missouri (updated to 2005), Idaho, Maryland, and now full coverage for the entire state of Texas
- Updates to Florida (most of the state covered now)
- 15 high-resolution cities in Germany
- update for London, 2006 data at 10cm from Bluesky
- South Georgia Island (courtesy of the British Antarctic Survey)
- Albany, OR; Lubbock, TX; Port Townsend, WA; Portage County, OH; Trumball County, OH
- 32 Digital Globe Citisphere cities (updates and new coverage)

In addition there was a significant update to the regular Digital Globe imagery all over the world.

Enjoy! - link

So what i hear you say, they update imagery ever few months! This time it is different! You can now see my house! Yup!

YAY!! =)

phone pics

Some of you who keep up to date with a feed reader will notice that there have been a few new posts tonight! I finally got around to getting all the images off my phone and putting on here!

Those of you who looking at this thru the good old website, you will have to go searching for the new photos!!

Enjoy!

driving with one eye

Ok, I know i don't have much to be doing with myself, and i could be coming up with far better things than this, but my brain is working overtime on stupid things.

Next time your driving, try and close one eye. It becomes really hard to do! I can only assume it is because you loose your depth perception. Open the eye again and it becomes a lot easier!

Funny that....

ha!

Taidy arrived home today and was so tired he fell asleep in Conors. Teoiny then decided that it was a perfect time for a Kodak moment! Classy as ever!!

toblerone

If you have ever had a Toblerone bar, you will notice the picture of the Matterhorn on it. Linking into its Swiss history eh?! What else do you notice on it?

Well it was only last week that my eyes were opened to something that has been in front of me for several years and I never noticed it before!! There is a hidden image on the mountain linking into their Bern History. Its so well hidden that no Swiss person I have asked knows about!

This, I believe, is an unbelievable discovery!!
Tell the world!

extras

The new series of Extras by Ricky Gervais is up and running for the last few weeks, but its the theme song at the end of the show that got me searching the internet. Mind you it didn't take too long to find the answer, it took a bit to find the actual song!

Cat Stevens - Tea for the Tillerman

Bring tea for the Tillerman
Steak for the son
Wine for the women who made the rain come
Seagulls sing your hearts away
'Cause while the sinners sin, the children play

Oh Lord how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day

deirdre o'kane

Saw her last night in the Cork Opera House. I'm no reviewer or expert on writing the perfect article on her, but i can search the Internet and bring you an overview of the show:

Funny and feisty, warm and down to earth, she chatters on engagingly for an hour of babies and how they affect your flirting; the terrible service you get in Ireland; an increasingly mad tale of having her car clamped; insomnia and nursery rhymes.

Added to this there is O'Kane's rich fantasy life, in which she shops at Argos with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones, chats baby names with Victoria Beckham and frets about the wellbeing of Katie Holmes. O'Kane is wonderfully comfortable on the stage and with her audience.

via Edinburgh Festivals

Now i thought she she did go on for a bit about babies, pregnancy and more babies. Fair enough she just had her own child (and another on the way?) so she had a lot to say on that subject. That went down a treat with all the women in the room, but after the first 30 minutes i thought it was time to move on!

It was my first comedy show as such and i did get a good laugh out of her. Andrew Stanley was on before her and he was really good. Lots of audience interaction and some great jokes! Maybe he was more along the lines of my taste.

pric€ facts

Barry Collins' Price Facts!

Every few weeks there are these bright yellow leaflets in Collins' Supervalu in Carrigaline listing a number of items bought in Dunnes Stores and again in Barry Collins, and the price paid in each store and the saving made!

This week there is 39 items with a total of €93.44 in Dunnes and €92.85 in Supervalu! That's a saving of 59c!! Now don't run off just yet. Looking down through the long list of small type and prices i took out a ruler and compared each items price. There are 2 things that are cheaper in Barry Collins.

1. Jacobs Jaffa Cakes 300g saving 8cent
2. Amigo Orange Drink 6pk saving 51cent

If these two items are not on your regular shopping list, there is absolutly no difference in shoping between the two stores (apparently)

The small print at the end of the leaflet shows that they checked the prices in Dunnes in Ballincollig on the 18/9 and in Supervalu in Carrigaline at 11.45am on the same day! Even giving a time!

Maybe they came back from Dunnes and realised they needed to lower some of their prices and lowered those two items so the leaflet would look good and everyone would make a 59cent saving!!

Oh and have you seen their website! Talk about a mess and totally unfriendly and unusable! You think with all that money they could of asked someone who knew something about web design! http://www.collinssupervalu.com/

so far so good

I've been busy trying to get my blog back to its old self again with counters and feeds as well as trying out the new features like labels. I've already arranged my labels as a cloud instead of a list à la del.icio.us, with a nice hack I've found. I'm sure that more hacks and tips with beta will surface in the coming weeks and months, but for now I'm happy enough and will continue labeling posts! (about 50 down... another 200'ish to go)

Tomorrow morning I'm off again to Switzerland for a bit of a holiday!! So as i write this I'm not even sure I'm going to even try and get my laptop through Gatwick. They are meant to be easing their rules for flying out of the UK this week, but knowing my luck the news will break tomorrow morning as I'm in the air to London!

Have a great week!

blogger beta

So i finally made the change over to Blogger beta. New features include:
Customisable Archive: I organised my posts by month, and they go back to 2003. So the list of months was quite long previously, not they are broken down by year then month and then by post! Way nice to look at!
Labels: Like with Gmail, you can now label your posts so you can view similar posts with the same label
Future Posting: I can write now and publish later!
Nice Looking Dashboard: For the better blogging experience ;-)

All these are nice and dandy, but its a lot of work getting the template back up and similar to what it was before you make the switch. Counters have to be re-installed and the new template need a bit of time in getting used to.
You also have to add labels to all your posts. It's going to take a fair bit of time I'd say with all 270 posts made in 'classic blogger'. But i do like a challenge!

Oh! Just noticed they added a Gmail type spell checker as well! Hurrah!

feed button

Those of you not reading this via some kind of reader (which by the stats on feedburner... is everyone) I put a feed button on the page. It replaces the static rss image, so now people can subscribe to my blog via whichever is their favourite reader!

For those of you... and you know who you are ;-) who might not know what I'm talking about, a feed reader is a program or web service that allows you to read feeds or posts that are published from which ever sites you subscribe and updated each time there is a new post, thus not having to come back and check the website for any updates!

My reader of choice: Google Reader

For those of you who are reading this thru a rss reader can you please look at my previous post :o)

Update: This doesn't seem to be working in Blogger Beta....

explanation

For those non-native English speakers reading this blog, and those who have a good command of English but don't understand what I talk about most of the time, I first of all apologise.

With reference to the post 1 days saved, I forgot to mention what Google Web Accelerator was.

Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google's global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.

Hope that explains how I managed to speed up my web surfing so I started saving days while surfing the internet!! :-P

911 cover up

An interesting mini-movie about September 11th and ideas around it and making you ask questions about if it really was a cover up. If you have 80 minutes to spare today or this week, have a watch of this.

Its really good.

1.0 days saved

Google Web Accelerator update:

I've had it installed since November 22nd. I had the first half day saved in 4 months and it took me another 5 and a half months to get the rest of the day!

My new minutes per day saved has dropped from 6 to just under 5! Altho I didn't use my laptop for about 6 weeks this summer.

I wonder what I will do with my free day?