The Killinaskully Halloween Episode

patshorttrobinhood.jpg zombie-5-shot.jpg If you missed the Halloween episode of Killinaskully find someone who has recorded it! We just watched it and I haven’t laughed as much in a long time!
It’s all because Dieter offered the local populace some new cheese he had. Nightmares were the hilarious result. Robin Hood was ridiculously funny, and it’s obvious the zombie dance got it’s inspiration from a certain Thrilling song!

Marvelous stuff by Pat Shortt and company. Check out the site above for video clips to give you a taste of what Killinaskully is like as well as the usual promotional gig and video stuff.

Introducing Ms. Dewey

Ms. Dewey is the attractive front end of Microsoft Search. She’s entertaining and comments on search items and does her own thing if you leave her alone for a minute or two! Search for President Bush or even gmail for some great stuff! If the search for Yo Mama doesn’t make you smile and laugh I don’t know what will!

That was fun for about five minutes but she’s definitely the most attractive search mascot/helper I’ve seen online and good linkbait to get people to try their search technology! (via the Natural Search Blog)

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Linux Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy – no problem

I upgraded my Ubuntu 6.06 install to the new Edgy soon after it’s release using the simple command gksu "update-manager -c". Several hours later, and after clicking on a few dialog boxes to update files in /etc/, I’m not running Ubuntu Edgy on my desktop box.

Initially I wondered where Firefox 2.0 was hiding, but on my upgraded system it’s /usb/bin/firefox.ubuntu so it’ll live alongside version 1.5. I also noticed that when saving files in the GIMP the filename would disappear when I clicked on a new folder in the “bookmark” folder of the Gnome file dialog. Once I noticed, ctrl-c to record the filename and ctrl-v to paste it in again worked fine. I rename my files when saving so it’s not much of a hardship.

My machine seems slightly faster but I haven’t delved too deeply into what has been upgraded but Firefox, xchat, terminal, GIMP and Gthumb all work fine! Did your upgrade go as well?

Is your Macbook spying on you?

I’m typing away here, working on some bugs, fixing them, not creating them! I sit back thinking about one bug in particular and I look up and see that black square above the screen and I wonder, “Is anyone looking at me?”

If you are spying, here’s me! Hello World!

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Post your spy shots and tag them !

Brians Latest Comments Cached

After the success I had with Ultimate Tag Warrior I turned my eye to another popular WordPress plugin that I use: Brian’s Latest Comments.

This plugin lists the latest comments on your blog and I wanted to squeeze every bit of performance out of my server so I guessed that caching the output of the plugin would save several queries for every page generation. Comments are cached for an hour. The cache isn’t invalidated by a new comment so don’t worry if the comments list doesn’t update immediately after a comment is made.

Install

I used the same cache directory that WP Cache 2.0 uses, wp-content/cache/. You’ll have to create that directory and make sure the webserver can write to it. The simplest way of doing that is by running the command chmod 777 cache. Download the file below and copy it into your plugins directory. If you’ve never installed the original plugin you’ll need to download it and read the install.txt to find out how to use the plugin.

Download

brianslatestcomments.txt – rename to .php and copy into your plugins directory.

Testing Firefox 2.0

I’m trying out Firefox 2.0 and first impressions are good. Fonts looks a little different which is refreshing but I’m having trouble exporting my bookmarks from Flock. It looks like others are having the same problem too. There’s even a FAQ about it.

On the Mac, click-and-hold doesn’t bring up a context menu. I’ll have to figure out why. Must be a key combo. Ah! It’s CTRL-click!

If you’re wondering which is better, IE7 or Firefox 2.0, then check out this “unbiased” review:

In one corner we have Internet Explorer 7. After 18 months of development and a shiny new set of tabs, he’s in top shape and looking better than his predecessor ever did. That is, before he entered the ring with Firefox 2.0. Now he’s just a cripple with fancy RSS reading.

Brighten your day

I didn’t know it but Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert lost his voice 18 months ago. He suffers from a rare condition called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Even though there is no cure for it he has written a great article about his experiences and how he never gave up trying to get his voice back. If you’re having a bad day this will cheer you up. Amazing and inspirational story.

To state the obvious, much of life’s pleasure is diminished when you can’t speak. It has been tough.

But have I mentioned I’m an optimist?

Edit! The post has been removed from Scott Adam’s website because it appears in his new book but thanks to Google Reader I found it again:

As regular readers of my blog know, I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down in some people, usually after you strain your voice during a bout with allergies (in my case) or some other sort of normal laryngitis. It happens to people in my age bracket.

I asked my doctor – a specialist for this condition – how many people have ever gotten better. Answer: zero. While there’s no cure, painful Botox injections through the front of the neck and into the vocal cords can stop the spasms for a few months. That weakens the muscles that otherwise spasm, but your voice is breathy and weak.

The weirdest part of this phenomenon is that speech is processed in different parts of the brain depending on the context. So people with this problem can often sing but they can’t talk. In my case I could do my normal professional speaking to large crowds but I could barely whisper and grunt off stage. And most people with this condition report they have the most trouble talking on the telephone or when there is background noise. I can speak normally alone, but not around others. That makes it sound like a social anxiety problem, but it’s really just a different context, because I could easily sing to those same people.

I stopped getting the Botox shots because although they allowed me to talk for a few weeks, my voice was too weak for public speaking. So at least until the fall speaking season ended, I chose to maximize my onstage voice at the expense of being able to speak in person.

My family and friends have been great. They read my lips as best they can. They lean in to hear the whispers. They guess. They put up with my six tries to say one word. And my personality is completely altered. My normal wittiness becomes slow and deliberate. And often, when it takes effort to speak a word intelligibly, the wrong word comes out because too much of my focus is on the effort of talking instead of the thinking of what to say. So a lot of the things that came out of my mouth frankly made no sense.

To state the obvious, much of life’s pleasure is diminished when you can’t speak. It has been tough.

But have I mentioned I’m an optimist?

Just because no one has ever gotten better from Spasmodic Dysphonia before doesn’t mean I can’t be the first. So every day for months and months I tried new tricks to regain my voice. I visualized speaking correctly and repeatedly told myself I could (affirmations). I used self hypnosis. I used voice therapy exercises. I spoke in higher pitches, or changing pitches. I observed when my voice worked best and when it was worst and looked for patterns. I tried speaking in foreign accents. I tried “singing” some words that were especially hard.

My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I’m no brain surgeon.

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

My brain remapped.

My speech returned.

Not 100%, but close, like a car starting up on a cold winter night. And so I talked that night. A lot. And all the next day. A few times I felt my voice slipping away, so I repeated the nursery rhyme and tuned it back in. By the following night my voice was almost completely normal.

When I say my brain remapped, that’s the best description I have. During the worst of my voice problems, I would know in advance that I couldn’t get a word out. It was if I could feel the lack of connection between my brain and my vocal cords. But suddenly, yesterday, I felt the connection again. It wasn’t just being able to speak, it was KNOWING how. The knowing returned.

I still don’t know if this is permanent. But I do know that for one day I got to speak normally. And this is one of the happiest days of my life.

But enough about me. Leave me a comment telling me the happiest moment of YOUR life. Keep it brief. Only good news today. I don’t want to hear anything else.

I'm still shaking

This morning I almost went straight into the side of another car on a bend.

I drive Jacinta into work and on my way back via Sunday’s Well I got a strong smell of petrol on the quay. It was raining with water pooling at the side of the road and the tell-tale rainbow of the petrol on the road was everywhere. It hadn’t been there a few minutes earlier and traffic was backed up going out of the city. The wrong way considering it’s the morning and we had been stuck for 15 minutes going in ten minutes previously.

Driving up a hill that’s been plastered with petrol is no fun. Other cars were getting stuck, we were stopped and people were getting impatient. I heard the beeping of a horn from somewhere behind me. We weren’t going anywhere and my view was blocked by the van in front of me. Finally the car in trouble started off again so I let go of the hand brake and pressed the accelerator. Nothing, I barely moved. In desperation I slammed on the hand brake again and took a breath checking my rear view mirror to see how much space I had. I tried again, the speedometer said 20mph but the car was barely moving. I heard an awful whining sound and slowly the car inched forward. Finally the tires gripped the road and slowly I made my way up around the corner. The road was clear ahead of me and I had another obstacle.

There’s a steep hill up and over Sunday’s Well and too late I saw the rainbow hues on that bend but I was committed. Slowly I advanced forward, turning the wheel with the corner but to my horror the car kept going forward, right towards a car. I stopped quickly. Thankfully the brakes held, switched off the ignition and hit the flashers before jumping out in case something had happened to my steering. No, the wheels were turned left but had been skidding on the slick petrol film on the road. I got in and abandoned my attempt to go up the hill, instead taking the longer route down the North Mall and up Blarney Street. At the top of that street were the signs of petrol again but it’s level ground and the road is more porous and didn’t present a problem.

I’m only now calm and not shaking. It gave me an awful scare and I’ll be heading into town a different way this afternoon. The Gardai were called and they had received a few calls already. I passed a Garda van on the way home so hopefully they were on the way down to direct traffic and help people.

I’m glad I’m home.

The bodies keep piling up

I remember something a friend said to me about the UK. He came back for the weekend a month ago and we were catching up. Traffic and road deaths and crazy driving came up in conversation and he said that in the UK they’re nowhere near as obsessed about deaths on the roads as the Irish are. People die here, people die there. So what? It’s part of society. That was shocking to me, but then I remembered that they have an order of magnitude bigger population yet a much lower per-capita death rate on the roads. Why is that?

Damien Blake asks what can be done to stop the carnage on the roads? Up to this morning 55 sites or posts linked to Damien Mulley’s post about Thinkhouse PR. We bloggers can do the same for road deaths. Unfortunately it’s unlikely that the guys doing 200kph are the ones reading blogs. What Damien Blake can do is present our ideas to the people in power. It’s been brought to our attention that no single body has responsibility for the roads. The responsibility is shared so nobody is blamed when things go horribly wrong. Damien can bring our ideas to the attention of all of them. Go read his post, he has some great ideas to start with.

I’ve given up ranting about the bad driving I see. A quick search of my blog brought me back 2 years and I’m still saying the same thing. There will always be idiots, no that’s not right, careless and irresponsible people on the roads. I could go on and on. I could tell you about the idiot in the sports car who tore down Sunday Well past the traffic jam, risking a head on crash, or about all the times people speed past me on the Commons Road. Gardai – post a guy permanently there. He won’t be bored, he’ll have a great time and an empty ticket book when he gets back to the office!

Jeremy Clarkson is so eloquent you’d almost believe him. Almost. Go on, read his car review. Three quarters of it is taken up with his speel against anti-speed campaigners. I am glad he recognises truly bad driving as a danger to the rest of us, but his blase attitude to speeding is doubtless upsetting to anyone affected by speeding incidents.

This follows a weekend in which 7 people lost their lives. A fifth person involved in the Monahan crash died this evening. I heard on the news yesterday morning that the speedometer of one car had frozen at 150kph. Don’t try to say that was simply inappropriate speed. That’s never an appropriate speed on Irish roads! Why were they traveling that fast?

As we are oft to do, the Irish Government is following in the footsteps of the British Government and introducing a proper network of speed cameras to the country. At the moment there are 20 fixed speed cameras with only 3 operating at any one time to serve the whole country but that will be increased to 600 including mobile cameras in the next year. It’s expected that 11.1m checks will be made which means you and I will be checked on average 6 times a year. If you don’t speed you won’t have anything to worry about. The private operators running the system will be paid a flat fee so there’s no incentive for them to catch people. Hopefully it’ll have the same effect that the introduction of the penalty points system had when people were actually afraid of getting caught. I admit it’s scary to think that going 1kph over the speed limit will result in a fine and penalty points, but the manpower isn’t there and nothing else has worked. People don’t respond to the carrot, only the stick.

What should we do? The country can’t be paved with motorways, there will always be back roads and bad roads. I have one suggestion. Time. Offenders should serve time. Haul a speeding driver to the nearest Garda station and hold him there for 6 hours or overnight. He’ll soon forget what he was rushing to. Lock up a drunk driver for a week. Even though it is drastic, can you weigh any solution unfairly against the life of even one victim of our roads?

Choosing a pension

I know, I know, it’s late in the day, but I’m looking at my pension options. I’m self employed and if I start a pension before October 31st the tax I owe for 2005 will be reduced by 42% of the lump sum that I invest. As you can imagine, it’s well worth buying a pension but it’s important to get value for money so I need to choose carefully.

Some links I found:

Who offers the best pension? I imagine that’s like asking, “who is the best football team?” Everyone has their own answer.