Something to brighten up your day, be offended! 🙂
Monthly Archives: September 2006
Happy Blog Birthday Donal!
My brother Donal celebrates his first blog birthday today! Go on over there and wish him a happy birthday!
Apparently the first post on my blog was on January 1st, 1998. I doubt it was on that exact date but the second post is dated the 1st of February that year. Maybe I was posting to my old xoom.com site on the first day of the year. *Gosh* I had a brand spanking new P133 then!
Dinner in Cork, October 17th
Pat Phelan is organising a dinner on the night of October 17th for anyone interested. Shel Israel and Rick Segal will be there so it should be an interesting and lively night. Venue is the Taste of Thairland, Bridge St. Cork at 8pm.
Shel Israel visited Cork last June to attend the Web 2.0 conference and it’s great to see him back so soon!
Banks, they get you young and grab hold of you by the goolies!
Why list 50 adwords when all a greedy website owner wants is the most expensive one? It’s school loan consolidation
, with an average cost per click of $69.16 apparently. I expect to see a lot more blogs springing up around about … now on this very topic.
Makes you wonder how much the banks make directly from the interest on a school loan and in the long term how important it is for them to get a young person as a customer. People don’t move bank accounts much so you’ve got a customer for life! I haven’t moved bank, and in fact use the same bank for my business account despite the fact that Ulster Bank offer free banking! It’s also much easier to move accounts these days but that would require effort wouldn’t it?
Here in Ireland students get a “welcome pack” with brochures and pens and a rotten apple or some such thing. It’s been a while. Maybe the banks throw in a free iPod these days? Of course, it doesn’t cost upwards of $50,000 to do a college course here thankfully. Well, except for the drink and waffles and beans that is.
See here for an explanation of goolies if you’re confused. (Thanks Damien for reminding about this page.)
Google Sitemap WP Plugin Tip
If you use the Google sitemap plugin for WordPress it’s probably a good idea to disable the auto rebuild option. This is especially true if you have a large blog and a small server!
Go to Options->Sitemap and uncheck “Rebuild sitemap if you change the content of your blog”.
You can regenerate the sitemap by calling a URL with a secret key. It’s listed on the configuration page. Copy it into your bookmarks or make a cron job to call that URL at a time when your server isn’t busy. Posting to this blog would timeout quite often if the server was loaded in any way. If it wasn’t loaded before, it almost always was after! It took some time for me to figure out that it was the Sitemap generator.
The sitemap generator plugin is a great program, it does what it says on the box, but disable to the auto-update feature if you’re having problems posting!
Don't mention the war!
Would you like to have a job where you’re paid to watch Fawly Towers? Mairead on Ray D’Arcy’s show has never seen a full episode of Fawlty Towers so she’s watching the episode with the Germans. Classic comedy!
Charlie Harper Sucks
The Charlie Harper Sucks website really does exist! I watched the episode of Two and a Half Men last night where Rose setup a Charlie Harper hate website so I had to see if it was really there. Unfortunately it redirects to a Warner Brothers site but at least they created a site with that devil picture of Charlie!
In real life, Charlie Sheen’s love life isn’t going too well. He and his wife Denise Richards are divorcing. Denise is 6 months pregnant with their second child.
Sheen thought that her hormones (due to the pregnancy) are raging, but the former gorgeous Bond girl felt very neglected. Maybe she felt that Charlie was slipping back to his old self…which she said she ”can’t even comprehend” (when asked about whether his past bothered her).
WordPress developer in near miss auto accident!
Press the button on the traffic light, wait for the green man, walk. It’s simple. Cars generally stop and obey a red light or risk two penalty points if seen by a member of an Garda Siochana. Unfortunately they can’t be at every street junction every hour of the day.
Jacinta and I were walking across the road at the North Gate, a busy intersection, with relatively complicated lights. Pedestrians be warned, wait for the lights! Cars come from all directions! The green man was flashing so it was safe enough, we thought. An ambulance was trying to get through the red light in front of us so we stopped, still, the green man was doing his thing, shaking his stuff, and generally flashing on and off. All’s ok, until there’s the loud blare of a car horn, a louder engine powers a green VW Passat across the junction from North Bridge and swerves just behind us, missing us by perhaps a few inches!
We were shocked, but I looked after them and recognised the same green Volkswagen Passat I had seen two days previously. Dark windows, a big VW badge dangling off the center mirror and the name of some exhaust maker on the back window. That time I had been driving, they were in front of me, and had raced off when lights turned green, lane hopping like there was no tomorrow, in a 50km/h zone. Ironically, they were stuck at the lights going to Mayfield and I passed them a moment later..
It’s a mad world out there, I’ll post a picture of the car next time I see it.
The Elysian
If you have driven past the construction site on Eglinton Street you may have noticed all the expensive looking posters promising something, “better than you expected” and calling it “Ireland’s Biggest Secret”. Right, maybe the marketing department went overboard, but this evening I spotted a URL on the posters: http://www.theelysian.ie/
The brief was simple, create a landmark building for Cork which shows the positive energy of its inhabitants, make it a show piece for the way City Centre development should go and most importantly create stupendous homes where all manner of buyers will be proud to live.
I think it’s going to be a high-rise building with offices, appartments and a shopping centre. Should be a hell of a view from the top of it as it’ll have a 17 storey tower! That’s taller than anything else in Cork.
BarCamp Ireland – September 30th in Cork
I found out from Damien that BarCamp Ireland now has it’s own blog. Their press release gives a quick overview, but if you want to know who’s going and talking you should take a look at the BarCamp wiki where you can signup to attend. There are twelve speakers so far with topics ranging from running a start-up, Web 2.0, OPML, Ruby and more.
Should be fun and interesting, and it’ll be great to meet up with some of the folk I met at the Web 2.0 Conference again. See you there!