first post

Well I managed my first guest post on the Geared Up Blog!!
Posting will be a bit quiet here for a while till I get into a rhythm and find my feet. You know, build confidence and getting the hang of it all. It is kinda strange blogging for a blog I'm so used to reading!
Anyhow, this is how that post turned out:

Cartwheels In A Swimsuit At The South Pole


WHISTLER, BRITISH COLUMBIA (Geared Up Blog) - Boing Boing has this photo of one crazy girl who decided to strip off on a trip to the south pole.

Sandwichgirl is stationed at McMurdo, in Antarctica. She took a trip from there to the South Pole, and in this photo she is doing cartwheels in a bathing suit at that site: - 25.5° F (-31.9° C), -44.7° F (-42.6° C) windchill, 9.4 knots. This chick's got some major cojones.

Link: Sandwichgirls Blog!

team geared up

Today I was chatting with Robin from Team Geared Up this afternoon. He invited me to become a guest poster on the Blog! I'm really excited about this as I get to write on stuff like outdoor gear, and my favourite, gadgets! With me being in Whistler as well I should be inspired with some other ideas!

The only problem now is getting past the writers block for that first Blog post. I should have something before the end of the weekend, and then the posts will flow!

I'll update you when I post my first Guest Post!

kandersteg webcam

** Promote * Promote * Promote ;-) **

With the new webcam up and running showing us the International Scout Centre in Kandersteg (and their lack of snow), I was able to update the code for the gadget I created, so you can once again personalise your Google homepage with a handy gadget and your favourite content from the web i.e. my webcam gadget and the KISC Webcam!

Tell your family and friends ;-)

piston broke

My friends father recently returned from his challenge where he drove from Cork, Ireland to Banjul, The Gambia as part of the Plymouth - Dakar Banjul Challenge.
The two man team drove a Punto across the desert to reach their destination. It took them over 20 days to complete the journey. That is a pretty impressive achievement. They kept in touch with his satellite phone and the car made it to the end. It was one of the better ones as well because it was such a small simple car that didn't cause many problems!

The Plymouth-Banjul Challenge or the Ultimate Banger Challenge is a cheap alternative to the Dakar Rally. The entrants must use a car worth approximately £100 for the 4,000 mile or 6,000 km adventure where all proceeds go to charity!

Read about their adventure on their team website: Piston Broke

global heating

So it finally comes around to bit us in the ass. Global Warming is here!

Take a look at a few pictures from last January I took on my holiday to Kandersteg. I have matched them up similar photos taken a few days ago from Patrick who is back for his own holiday. The differences are scary.

As you can see from these photos of the village, there is a severe lack of snow.

These photos of the campsite path shows you exactly how little snow there is. Last year you could cross-country ski through the campsite. This year it doesn't look too good.

More worrying is this photo I found on Flickr.

Originally uploaded by u_sperling.

So I think I got the best deal this winter with a record snow fall here in Whistler!

24 tips

With 24 starting this week over here in North America, I found some nice tips for 24 Newbies I though I'd share my favourite one with you.

• Chloe is right. Don’t ever question that girl. Believe it or not, she can shoot a gun.

You can read the rest at feld.com

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.

24

Jack is back!
24 starts here in less than 30 minutes! 2 hours tonight and 2 hours tomorrow!!

all right

Great news coming to me in over the web! They have dropped Old Man Marty on 2FM! Sorry... RTÉ 2FM. Moved Rick around, and got the breakfast guys from FM 104 to do the Breakfast Show!

Dec sums it up well here. I'll be happy when I return, that is if it looks the same in a few months!

blogger hacks

As everyone is aware I use Blogger to blog. I use them because back in the day, I needed a service provider to host my blog and because of the great work Google did with search and other services like Gmail I decided to give them a shot.

With their major update they have successfully put my urges for moving at bay with all their new features. But I came across this article that shows a plug in you can get for WordPress. It picks up if you are viewing the website/blog from a PSP, DS or a Wii and reformats the page to fit! Pretty ingenious! Its a pitty Google won't open their Blogger software to allow developer plug ins, instead we have to rely on hacks! I have found a few sites with these hacks for blogger, so have a look at the current news from these hack sites for blogger:


I think I will be holding off on a WordPress install for a while tho. At least until I get home and get me a proper computer!

new year

So I put off this post for a while. There isn't much to say, so I guess there isn't much to write about! New years was totally uneventful, where the most exciting thing that happened was... hang on, nothing exciting happened! I stayed in and watched some Comedy DVD's I had. We ended up not having our Back to the Future night.

Besides that the past few weeks have been pretty much work and Skiing! I have a taste for new ski's after demo'ing some new ones one morning. I also wasted a week organising a 3 day road trip from Dallas Texas to Whistler that fell through. Long story.

Work has been pretty easy after the huge Christmas rush, it is a little bit too quiet! Conor also arrived home with presents and chocolate! Life is pretty boring, with nothing much happening. Snow is quite good tho... Am I rambling yet? Repeating myself? No? Then I'll stop.

2006

What a year! I did not have any killer post this year that push my page views up to over 1,400 in one month like last year, but I'm not still doing too bad!

Total for 2006:

• 3,821 - Page Loads
• 2,439 - Unique Visitors
• 1,948 - First Time Visitors
• 491 - Returning Visitors

On average, each day:

• 12 - Page Loads
• 8 - Unique Visitors
• 6 - First Time Visitors
• 1 - Returning Visitors

I hope everyone had a great 2006. For me it has worked out fantastic, but I'm really looking forward to 2007! Have a great night where ever and when ever you are in the world when you ring in the new year!

That's it for me for this year... Thanks to everyone for reading, commenting and supporting me :-)

signing off...

Darran.

happy everything

It has been a very busy week;

It was Christmas!! It came and went so fast! Not too bad for my first Christmas away from home. We went skiing for the morning, where I taught how to Ski. After about 2 or 3 hours, we decided i needed a bit of time to get off the green slope and get in some real runs! Myself and Taidy headed up to a very windy peak. It was a total white out as we took the peak-to-creek run down, turning off to head towards mid-station (have I mentioned enough runs that no one knows what I'm talking about yet...? Here is a map!) to meet Heather. It was impossible to see where you were or where you were going at the top. You had to rely on people being in front of you to see their outline, or else if you were lucky, there was a marker warning you of a cliff or something. Good times!

Following a trip home to open presents, and a Shower we headed out for Christmas Dinner. We had reservations booked at the Hilton in Whistler! It was a lovely buffet Christmas dinner, with as much as you want to eat. I had 2 starters, a main course, another starter and then some desert! It was class, we didn't have to wash up or anything after!

After that it was out for a bit of dancing, or that was the plan, which failed on 2 accounts, 1. We were way too early for dancing, and the club was empty and 2. We were all stuffed after dinner! So it was home and then to bed after a great day! I hope you all had a good day what ever you got up to.

The day after, Stephen's Day was so lovely! The sky was so blue and the sun was shining so bright! If I wasn't trying to get over this cold I have I would of loved to be up the mountain.

Besides that I have be working like a trooper, and going to enjoy a well deserved day off on the slopes tomorrow! I hope you all had a great Baby Jesus Birthday and everyone has a plan for New Years. Back to the Future I, II and III over in Nordic Drive if anyone interested in attending :oP

readers

I know that friends and people I know read this Blog from time to time, thanks to StatCounter! I see how they find my blog and what they are looking at. I don't usually take notice because it could be any one of my friends.

Yesterday I noticed that I got a visitor from Ireland, finding my Blog via a Search for Taidy and their address had a host name ending with .amazon.com. There could be only one person that fits a description like this! If i was putting money on it... I would have to guess...

AMY

Was it you reading my Blog? You know you can all leave comments after every Post!!

back online

Early Friday morning our broadband connection was lost at home. After nearly 5 days were back online here in Whistler. Bloody ridiculous!

It has been terrible for business, the week before Christmas, as if you used high-speed Internet access for your credit or debit cards you could not process any of these transactions. Thus a severe loss of business. I know where I was working, we didn't have a dial-up back up in place and it took till Sunday before we had to set it up ourselves.

This is not helped either with Whistler Cable/SHAW Cable and their terrible technical support. I was in contact with them 5 times in total, twice for work and the rest for home, the first time to find out was it us or is everyone out. They could only give me a straight (or correct) answer last time I rang. Every other time they didn't really know what the problem was at the moment or when it would be fixed. About as helpful as a kick in the face.

I really wouldn't mind if they told us what went wrong, which we now know:

Heavy snow had weighed down B.C. Hydro wires on a transmitter near Whistler, which touched the Telus line, knocking out ADSL access to Whistler and neighbouring Pemberton.

via CBC News

But we weren't. There was a severe lack of communication. It was word of mouth and rumour that kept us up to date. Things I've heard over the last five days were from Solar flares and Sun spots to the Internet would be out for at least 2 weeks. We found out yesterday it had something to do with a fiber-optic line broken, which really isn't true either. What kind of Joke Company is this... would they got away with this in Ireland? Maybe... but I'm sure there would be way more complaining ;-)

On the lighter side of things, I started to Snowboard yesterday. I would show you a video of my first few runs, but Taidy took it so who knows when I will have access to it...

wii fitness

I did it!

I got my Wii Sports, Wii Fitness age down to 20! The perfect Score! And here is the proof:

sushi village

I had Sushi for the first time ever last night. We have been putting it off for a while now, but considering there are a few sushi restaurants here in Whistler, we couldn't put off going out for some any longer.

We headed in to the Sushi Village, in the Village (funnily enough), where we tried to make out what is nicest and what we should try. Of course we didn't have a clue, so we just got come combinations.

For starters:

• Sweet Potato Tempura - サツマイモの天ぷら

This was basically sweet potato, that kinda looked like deep fried hash browns. It was alright, it gave up some practice with using our chopsticks to get ready for the main course. Which was a selection of:

• Tekka-Maki - 鉄火巻き - Fresh tuna wrapped in the center
• Kappa-Maki - かっぱ巻き - Sliced cucumber in the center
• Salmon-Maki - サーモン巻き - Fresh salmon in the center
• Spicy B.B.Q. Salmon Roll - スパイシー バーベキュー サーモン 巻き - B.B.Q Salmon, avocado
• Spicy Scallop Roll - スパイシー 帆立巻き - Scallop, Cucumber
• Spicy Tuna Roll - スパイシー 鉄火巻き - Tuna, cucumber, radish

They were all covered in rice and then what were guessing is sea-weed type thing to hold it all together, or else the sea-weed thing and rice on the outside! We were not too fond of the Tuna or Scallop, altho the Spicy Tuna Roll was quite nice.

There was about 12 little pieces of sushi each, and it was quite filling. That also might be the fact this was our first time trying it, so we got full on raw fish pretty fast! One pointer is the small bit of green stuff you get on the side of your dish, my suggestion is, try a tiny bit and then just don't touch it. It's Wasabi and its the worst substance known to man.

Overall, it was a great night. You'd need to be in the mood for sushi, but it very different, but defiantly worth a go!

P.S. Do ya like the way I put in some Japanese into this post! Hopefully it might be noticed! Hello all my Japanese readers :-)

a tedious job

This has to be one of the most tedious jobs I have ever done. There was 60 single boxes, that first of all had to be constructed. Then I had to put some poof or stuffing in to line the bottom. Then add a single chocolate truffle. Close and seal with a little sticker. Then cut a small length of ribbon and tie it in a bow. As you can see, at this stage I had 7 done and another 53 to go! Fun fun fun!
I got them finished before the night was out. Olé!

year in review

Here is something you can all try. I got this idea from a Blog I'm reading the simple life honey about someone who is also in Whistler! You take the first sentence from the first post for each month of the year. It gives you a summary of 2006! Maybe next year I might be more creative at the start of each month! Strange to look back at the year! Good times, good times!!

January: So its the start of a New Year and this is usually the time I make 1 very achievable goal for my self!

February: Conor... the optician... or whatever.... you work with glasses...

March: I'm looking forward to The West Wing tonight.

April: That is what the penalty points website looked like up until Sunday, the day before the new points came into affect, and the same they the government started advertising on TV and Radio.

May: This guy bet his girlfriend that any old website could get 2million hits.

June: I came across this website that generates a graph of any website by reading the html on the page, and then makes a a graph to represent what it finds!

July: Ciara Crowley & John O'Mahony

August: I have added 5 more!

September: I have visited 11 countries (4%)... i better get moving!

October: Taidy arrived home today and was so tired he fell asleep in Conors.

November: I have arrived in Canada!

December: I got my left wisdom teeth out yesterday.

trams for cork

The Green Party today unveiled plans to bring a light rail system to the city of Cork.

YAY!

Dan Boyle announced that it would be a rail line connecting Ballincollig to Mahon going through the city centre. Then a spur line linking Bishopstown to CIT and Cork University Hospital. After that they could extended the line to Passage West, (and maybe Carrigaline?) and develop a light rail network for the Northside of the city.

After that news, other candidates and councillors came up with more crazier plans such as a harbour water bus service, from the city centre to Ringaskiddy, Rochestown, Cobh and Mahon.

Altho the plan for re-opening the Cork to Midleton rail line isn't really a bad idea, it could work! But what about re-opening the Cork to Crosshaven line? Servicing Carrigaline, that would take a lot of cars off the road. Pitty most of that old rail line is a road now!

But whatever the government does, they have left cork out of this transport 21 plan. They have to do something!! Get the finger out >:-(

Green Party Proposal