February 2004 – Something Odd!

What's he saying?

Does anyone understand the language used in this blog entry about b2++?

Panoramic Images with the GIMP

I read about Pandora, a GIMP plugin to aid in the creation of panoramic photos. I’ll hopefully get to use it tonight on some photos I took last night. The author suggests chapter 7.5 of Grokking the GIMP for more info on panoramic photos.

Around Cork..

Bush may not get a Cead Mile Failte when he visits Ireland! The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has asked that people not protest but that’s just pouring more fuel on the fire of discontent.
Don’t we live in a democracy?
(As an aside, note the maker of the rubbish bin this poster is stuck to? Quite a coincidence that a socialist poster should appear directly below his name!)
Later, it looks like Dublin City Council is refusing permission for groups to put up those posters. Anti-war bodies are calling it censorship. The Council says it’s a litter problem.

As I posted before, the girl holding this sign was reading a book. I like this “found” picture – she’s engrossed in her book and oblivious to the crowds passing by!
That closing down sale is lasting quite a while..

Yahoo or Google?

Dave, I must read your blog more often!
Your post about Yahoo gave me pause for thought. I tried a search for xeer c64 on Yahoo and Google and I knew they should return links to my old homepage on Geocities. Both did, but I couldn’t discern any bias on Yahoo from this simple search. If there is one, I’m going to update my old site with new links straight away!
That Tab Browser Extension is nice. Well worth installing!

Radio VCR

While in Chicago I used to record The Last Word to my PC using Mplayer, and listen to Radio 1 in “realtime” over the Internet. Well, I did this until I got bored of hearing the same news on each channel, except on a Friday when the 6-7pm slot on TodayFM went all sporty, and I’d listen to Radio 1.
Justin found a guy who’s recording radio using a voice-codec that encodes at 16Kbps. That would have been handy in the US!
What I should have recorded of course is:

The Full Irish on 2FM in the morning.
Marian Finucan on Radio 1 from 9am to 10am.
Ray D’Arcy on TodayFM
The 1pm news on Radio 1
TodayFM from 2pm onwards
Joe Duffy’s show on Radio 1 at 2pm would be more interesting as I could fast-forward through it!

Maybe next time I’m over I’ll do that!

CSS Capitals

Dave updated the style sheet on his blog so that the first letter of his blog entries are super big. Nice! Now, if the letter was vertically up a bit more it’d look a lot better. In Moz FF there’s an annoying space above the letter..

Can you hear me now? Good…

Russell explains one of the adverts I was puzzled about over in Chicago. A guy walked around the country with a mobile phone asking, “Can you hear me now? Good…”
The ad always annoyed me but now it makes sense.. the mobile networks in the US are in such a bad way that networks boast if they have good coverage! Remember when Eircell, and then Esat did the same so many years ago?

Good crowd photos..

Mark’s posted some excellent photos of a council tax protest in the UK. Love the “GO” one!

What are the neighbours up to?

I gave my neighbour a lift into town this morning and found out that his son is an aeronautical engineer in Germany working for Airbus! I knew he was in Germany but not what he was doing but it seems that he’s working on the Airbus A380!
Looks like that particular plane won’t be flying into Ireland any time soon however, it’s a monster of a machine!

Pic of the Day

Isn’t this photo one of the cutest kitten pictures ever? Either that, or he’s preparing to jump and snatch at the hand of the photographer.. Yes, I know cats, they’re evil sometimes! *grin*