Author Archives: Donncha

Choosing a memory foam mattress

Yawn. The mundane things in life are top of my agenda today. We’re looking for a new mattress and considering how much time is spent asleep in bed it’s criminal not to buy the best you can afford.

From research it appears that memory foam mattresses are the best to go for. I would certainly hope a new mattress would help my sore back! Tempura mattresses have been recommended to us but they’re hard to buy in Cork. Casey’s Furniture have them but they’ve always been over priced in their city center location. Another brand I have come across is Visco and it appears to do the same job. According to one salesperson they’re firmer than Tempura mattresses but I need to ring around a few more places before we make up our minds.

If you have one of these mattresses I’d love to hear about how comfortable they are. Try searching for any information on either brand and you’ll only find are online-stores trying to flog you one!

This page is better than most however. Here’s what they say about Visco-elastic mattress, which I presume applies to Tempura too.

  • Body heat reacts with the foam to soften it.
  • The mattress then moulds and re-moulds to your body’s contours.
  • Provides excellent support and enables natural movement during sleep.
  • Helps to maintain correct posture and align spine horizontally when lying on your side.
  • Hypo-allergenic with anti-microbial properties.

Off to town shortly and out with the credit card..

January 3rd 2007 – we went into town this afternoon and tried a few places before buying a bed in Swan Beds. It’s a memory foam mattress. A bit pricey but less than Casey’s were looking for. Hopefully it’ll be delivered next Wednesday!

Is the Sony Ericsson K750i a good upgrade?

I’ve had a Nokia 6320 or something like that for well over a year so I think it’s about time I treat myself to a mobile phone upgrade on my Meteor account. My brother bought a Sony Ericsson K750i, I had a brief play with it and I’m impressed. This review from last year paints a rosy picture also but it’s only one of a number of phones available from Meteor.

What do I need my mobile phone to do besides the basic calling functions?

  • A half-decent camera would be nice. I don’t want a 1.3MP sensor! The K750i has a 2MP sensor. That will do nicely.
  • I’d prefer a radio to an mp3 player but having both would be a bonus.
  • A messaging system that deletes all reports with one push of a button is very desirable. Some of the Nokias make you delete the delivery reports one by one!
  • I don’t like clam shell phones, but I could be swayed.
  • I don’t care about owning the newest and greatest phone on the market and I’m price conscious. As my bills are low each month I want to go for the cheapest call package which Meteor offer. That would be Meteor 60 I think.

Decisions, decisions. I probably won’t get a chance to go into a Meteor store today but maybe sometime over the next few weeks.

Update! I bought the Sony Ericsson W810i. Here’s my mini review and initial impressions. There’s not much between it and the K750i that I can see except:

  • It comes with speakers which could be useful for the radio/mp3 player but probably not.
  • It has a 512MB memory stick duo card.
  • Battery life is reduced.
  • The styling is a little different. The camera doesn’t have a slide-open cover.

Initial impressions are good except:

  • When texting, the predictive text engine, T9, pops up a small window with a choice of words or symbols by default. I turned that off. Choosing a new word requires the use of the small joystick instead of the * key. Something I’ll get used to, but so far it means I need to type 2-handed.
  • Delivery reports are switched off too, but that’s been the case with every phone I’ve owned. As Donal said in the comments, the report doesn’t go into my inbox! Woo!
  • The SPACE character shares the # key instead of the 0 key. It’s a minor niggle but I find the space in the middle of the keyboard is easier to tap with my large hands.
  • The SIM card is a pain to get out requiring 2 fingers to push and pull it out.

Those are mostly minor problems, and some are from familiarity with Nokia phones. My first phone was a Panasonic and it had the space character on the # key too so I know it’ll become second nature to me eventually. I like the camera. It’s a 2MP sensor, adjustable exposure value, white balance and even has an illuminating light. Movies are stored in 3gp format but I’m sure there are ways of converting them to an online-friendly format if I look. The Walkman app looks promising and I’ll play wih it a little more once I’ve added a few mp3s to the memory stick.

The W810i has a handy panorama feature where the phone will stitch together 3 photos to make one larger image. It displays a semi-transparent portion of the previous image on the left of the screen for overlap purposes to allow you to line up the next shot. It works quite well too. Here’s a shot from O’Brien’s Sandwich Bar in Blackpool shopping center this morning.

Is sex better than trainspotting?

For some hardy souls (or single young men) train spotting provides a much needed outlet for their adolescent energy. Check out this video by Delticmatt at Taplow train station and then view the tribute to the self-same person with added speech bubbles in case you don’t hear the “oooh aaaahhh” and “Oh Yeah!” These trains just keep on coming.

Just remember, say no to the guid! Why make their lives more difficult?

deltic.jpg

March 25, 2007 – DM has asked me to remove the video which was on this page which I am happy to do so as he’s made it private anyway. It’s a shame really as it was a great video!

Is my competitive ad filter broken?

I have noticed adverts from a particular domain listed in my Adsense competitive ads filter are still appearing. I understand it might take several hours for changes to the filter to become active, but 4 days?

creativeinterview.com has been on my list since the 22nd of December but I still saw it appear on the Love Messages post on my photoblog.

Google, is something broken?

adsense-for-content.jpg

Update! It appears I’m not the only one with this problem.

It works again!

Bah, it happened again on 2006-12-30. An advert for 1helpon.info/filmxfilm appeared on my site despite 1helpon.info being in my competitive ad filter for ages. Grrr.

Strawberries in December

2006-12-24__mg_7823-hs.jpg

It’s a sign of the times. We eat fresh strawberries in the middle of winter. They may have travelled thousands of miles and be overpriced but there’s a ready market here for fresh fruit all year round.

They are lovely in porridge first thing in the morning or even with Corn Flakes. They make the milk all creamy and delicious and in the mouth the taste and texture of the fruit just melts on your tongue!

We usually buy in M&S but there we were in Super Valu, and strawberrys are on display. It’s a cruel world when food that’s good for you is so nice too!

The point of this post and my interest in winter fruits is the origin of said produce. They come from Palestine. We hear so much bad news from that part of the world so something as mundane as strawberries is a reminder that life goes on no matter what.

Happy Christmas to you, may you have a nice day tomorrow, I hope with family or friends.

Nothing left to read

My aggregator is empty. Things are quiet on the Internet and I’ve finally clicked and scanned through every one of the 230+ blogs in my Bloglines account.

But no, that’s not true. I opened The Dilbert Blog in a new tab for further reading because Scott Adams always seems to have something that will catch my attention and imagination.

That’s the dilemma I face. Many blogs have only one or two posts before I get to read them. Usually I can scan through them quickly. On an (almost?) daily basis Scott writes long lengthy essays on everything from free will, to religion, to the war in Iraq and to hypnotism that I find irresistible so I always skip “The Dilbert Blog” because I know I’ll be sucked in and spend the next several minutes reading and wanting to blog about at least one of his articles. Scott’s posts are gone once I click on another blog, but the rest of them are crying out for attention too! What is one to do?
I put the Online Photographer in that category as well.

A good blog, like a good book, is something you can get lost in and forget yourself in. It tickles your brain cells and gets you thinking. What blogs do you put off reading until you have quality time to really enjoy them? What are the blogs you know you can’t read by skimming over them?

Turkmenbashi the great has died

Wow, I just saw on the news that Saparmurat Niyazov, or as he calls himself, Beyik Turkmenbashi died last night of a heart attack. His country, Turkmenistan was ruled by this eccentric man for 24 years and was featured in an article in the Sunday Times Magazine last weekend! I was planning on blogging the article but it is really weird that he died just as I was about to. One could become paranoid.

Turkmenbashi was a strange man, maybe even a little loopy and crazy. He banned make-up because he said Turkmen women were beautiful enough, dogs were banned in the capital city he was building in desert and he even built an ice rink in a desert where the temperture can reach 50C.

He reinvented the calendar and ordered his people to gnaw bones. He is gilding the desert in gold and marble, and the driving test is a questionnaire on his philosophy of life. Waldemar Januszczak infiltrates the world according to the leader of Turkmenistan

In 2002, he decided his country needed a new calendar. So he invented one. January was renamed after himself: Turkmenbashi. April was changed to his mother’s name, Gurbansoltan. And September became Ruhnama, the title of the large pink philosophy book he wrote, the one you have to answer questions on to pass your driving test.

The Ruhnama, or Book of the Spirit, explains the thinking behind all this. The president took 10 years to write the national book, and everyone taking any sort of exam, from schoolkids to prime ministers, is required to answer questions on it. You can’t miss the Ruhnama. It’s lollypop pink and lime green. To my eyes it looks as if it should contain a collection of Telletubby stories rather than the collected thoughts of the world’s most eccentric dictator.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me

Collin tagged me as did Toni to reveal five things you didn’t know about me. Frank left a comment here ages ago asking something similar so it’s about time to dish up the dirt on me!

  1. I’m slightly alergic to dairy products. So are most people. If your head is all stuffy and it feels like you have a cold, all year long, then you might be too. Especially after eating Black Forest Gateaux, or another rich creamy dessert the previous night! It started in my early twenties, and it wasn’t until I met my wife a few years ago that she recognised the symptoms.
  2. It’s true that you’ll notice cars you’ve owned before, and I take special care to look at the reg plate of any Green Toyota Yaris that passes. I spotted the one I owned around town a few times and when bored in traffic I’ll add up the numbers on the registration plate of the car in front of me. For example; 06 C 253. 2+3=5.
  3. My mother was a school teacher and I wanted to become a teacher but thankfully I was five points short (about one grade too low) to do that course in college.
  4. I worked 4 days in a pub, several August months in a school bookshop, and a summer as a porter in a hospital operating theatre. (and recognised people years later when I went back for an operation!) I like Scrubs.
  5. 2006 has been a wonderful year, but 2007 is going to be even more special. I’m going to leave no.5 for a little while longer.

Pass it on: Mark Matt, Donal, Ryan, Screaming Lady and Haydn.

The oldest lap dancing club

Grandad makes the case for Newgrange being the oldest lap dancing club in the world. At over 5,000 years old it’s an ancient structure and quite important today, it being the Winter Solstice, but I’m not quite convinced that it was a lap dancing club.

I mean, if the girls had to swing around a wooden pole wouldn’t they have got slivers of wood in their hands. Polished steel works much better, or so I’m told. I suppose after a while the ol’ pole would have been worn smooth and I’m sure things would have gone swimmingly well then.

I don’t know where he comes up with the idea of orgies there either. I mean, this is Ireland, like.

In light of the day that’s in it, I have a nice picture of An Fear Marbh off the Kerry coast at sunset on my photoblog. Feel free to wonder why a man is lying on his back in the Atlantic and how that relates to the above..

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