I’ll try to make it into the the Open Coffee meetup tomorrow in Luigi Malone’s. I confess to knowing little about the business side of startups but as I’ve only ever worked for startups I guess some of it has probably rubbed off on me!
Monthly Archives: August 2007
The strange tale of the Brita water filter
It was a dark and stormy night. Thunder rolled over the land and lightning shot from the sky incinerating trees, cars and unlucky people caught out in the worst storms since records began. Out of the dark came a hulking shape. It was transparent, and water sloshed from side to side as it moved down the road, but no! Disaster struck, a little pebble made a small crack in the jug and it’s life force, the magical water seeped into the ground and the transparent walls of the Brita jug finally fell silent.
The thunder rolled on …
Well, I had to make a post about water filters exciting in some way eh? Now, here’s what I really wanted to tell you.
We’re on our second water filter at home. The first one was a Brita jug, which worked perfectly fine until a small crack appeared in the bottom. Filters lasted slightly less than a month before it became obvious the water wasn’t as pure.
My litmus test is my bedside glass of water. If it’s still drinkable in the morning then the water filter works! Without a filter, water in Blarney where I live tastes fine out of the tap, but left overnight it has a distinctly metallic taste.
As I said, the Brita jug was fine, but water leaked out of that slowly but surely and it was time to replace the jug. Little did I know how much the Brita was costing us ..
A few days later we were shopping in Tesco and I remembered the water filter. We made our way to the hardware section of the store, and discovered quite an array of shapes and sizes, not only from Brita, but also Tesco’s own brand. I compared prices and the Tesco filters were half the price of the Brita ones, so buying a Tesco branded water filter jug was a no brainer.
Back home, the Tesco jug works great. The filter seems to last longer and my glass of water can still quench my thirst in the morning a month after installing it. If you’re going to buy a water filter, go do yourself a favour and buy the Tesco one. It’s cheaper and works just as well as the Brita one.
If on the other hand you still have a Brita jug, the Tesco filter may fit it if your jug uses the long and round filters. That’ll save you about €3 a month and as they say, “every little helps” 🙂
No, I’m not paid by Tesco for this. I think it’s too good a bargain to pass up if you use a water filter at home! Normal WordPress, tech and “popular culture” blogging will resume shortly!
PS. ‘course the Brita filter might have been doing more work because the water was leaking out of it, and thus clogging up the filter more quickly!
Must be the rain in Cork
Rain spattered onto the windscreen in drops and a light drizzle sprinkled the car as we drove through town on our way home. It was warm today and I was looking forward to getting home, putting the baby to bed and relaxing for the evening. The windows were half down to let the air circulate in the car and traffic was going nowhere fast.
As we waited I heard the slowly increasing beat and volume of loud music from behind. A car drew alongside us and the cheering and laughing faces of the guys in it were clearly visible and their music blared into the evening. Their exuberance was catching and we were soon smiling and laughing with them! I think God must have heard their music, because suddenly the heavens opened and the car almost shook with a torrential shower of rain. We all looked at each other and laughed again. Why? Click play and you’ll find out!
Open a new window here in Ubuntu Linux
One of the things I missed a long time ago in Windows completely was the handy “start” command I could type from a command prompt to open a new Windows Explorer window in whatever directory I was in. Can you still do that? Does anyone use Windows from the command prompt any more?
I have since discovered you can do the same thing in Ubuntu Linux (and any other Linux for that matter of course!). I’m a big fan of Gnome, which uses the Nautilus file manager. If you’re fond of navigating your computer using a terminal, it’s really easy to open a Nautilus window in the current directory. Simply run ‘nautilus .‘ and a new window will open in that directory.
Don’t tell me you’re a keyboard junkie, I am too. I use Vim! Nautilus is still very useful though. Besides it’s obvious use as a file manager It’s dead handy for copying files to a remote server using any number of transmission protocols from ssh and SMB through to plain old ftp. But more on that some other time eh?
Matt Damon: on fatherhood and acting
Two quotes from a Sunday Times interview with Matt Damon, star of the Bourne series of movies. He and his wife, Luciana Barroso, have a 14 month old baby daughter and despite all the money and lavish lifestyle, they have some of the same experiences all new parents have ..
“Sometimes I wish I could go back to sleeping on the couch,” he says. “I think back to those days when I was sleeping on friends’ couches. For years I had two duffel bags and I went from set to set and everything I had in the world was in those two bags. I didn’t have a house. I had nothing. And I loved that and there was incredible freedom in it; I could be in and out of a place in a minute – I could have everything on my body and moving. And now I have 20 bags and cribs and strollers and Pack ’n Plays.”
Last night my daughter was up all night,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “My wife tries to help me when I’m working – she tries to do everything at night so I can rest, but the reality is that when you’re in a room with a baby who’s crying it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re the one who’s changing the diaper, you’re still going to be awake.
“Halfway through the movie Paul Greengrass [the director] looked at me and said, ‘You look terrible.’ I told him, ‘I’m sorry. I’m awake all night with the baby’, to which he said, ‘No, it’s really good. She came along just at the right time – she’s really helping your performance.’ In the previous two Bourne films I’d have to achieve that same ragged look by staying out all night in Paris.”
Not all of us have to jet across the world or party all night in Paris to look grubby in the morning but you get the idea. When a baby comes along your life is turned upside down!
Finally, first I’ve heard of him, but apparently Jimmy Kimmel has a long running gag surrounding Matt Damon. Unfortunately Matt “freaks out” when he finally gets on the show.
WordPress MU 1.2.4
The new WordPress MU 1.2.4 went live this afternoon and can now be downloaded. This is based on WordPress 2.2.2, a security release, so it’s important to update your WordPress MU install too. If you haven’t changed any files, all your need to do is copy over the new release and things should work fine.
- Kses has been reverted so you can use class and id attributes in your HTML tags again. Conor is already happy because his microformats will work again!
- The installer has been smartened up and is now friendlier and may catch a few more problems before they arise.
- Lots and lots of bugs have been squashed. It’s been messy but they had to be exterminated.
If you’re comfortable with Subversion and merging file changes, then the list of changed files should come in useful. You can also download a diff file there if that suits. Check the forum announcement for feedback.
It's Toddtime at Sacred Heart
Some said “Even The Todd wouldn’t wear those” but I think he would. In a recent episode of Scrubs, Todd had a tshirt with the url, thetoddtime.com emblazoned on it. Fearful for what I’d find there, I visited thetoddtime.com and discovered something so unreal, so shocking that I had to share it with you.
If the Quicktime movie doesn’t load for you, someone kindly uploaded it to YouTube as well. Click the “Read more” link to view it as I want to spare the sensibilities of the casual visitor here. It’s so YEEEEA!!!
Continue reading “It's Toddtime at Sacred Heart”Someone in London loves my luggage
On my way out to San Francisco my luggage was delayed in London and in similar fashion, when I got into Cork Airport it was again delayed in London. For all I knew my luggage was lost! I wouldn’t mind except:
- Once per trip is enough, please British Airways, keep track. It’s simply not fair.
- My flight from San Francisco arrived at 1pm, flight to Cork was scheduled for 2:15pm. It’s cutting it a bit tight but I’ve been in this situation before and my luggage came through. How close before? Let’s just say we had to sprint from one terminal to another in Heathrow to catch the next flight!
- My flight to Cork was delayed for over an hour. First the flight captain fell ill in Cork and had to be replaced, thus bumping the boarding time to 3:15pm, then we actually started boarding at 3:25pm, before waiting on the tarmac for at least 40 minutes because repairs and tests had to be made to the plane. I finally arrived in Cork at 5:20pm.
Don’t you think British Airways could have moved my luggage from one plane to another in 2 hours? Not a chance. Thankfully it was delivered this afternoon, almost 20 hours later by Aer Lingus staff.
I guess someone in British Airways has a fetish for luggage with pink and blue ribbons. Yes, I bet it was the ribbons.