Category Archives: General

I’m off to Madrid tomorrow morning. Can’t wait as I know I’ll have a blast, but for various reasons I wish I wasn’t going. 🙁
Anyway, Simon linked to two articles on css layout that I have to read when I get back.
I may post some photos while I’m away but don’t hold your breath. See you back here in a week for definite!

*Sigh* OK, the title of this post didn’t turn out quite as I expected. It sounded better when I said it in my head..
Bob’s Yarr blog is the latest blog to take the world by storm. Everyone’s talking about it, the magazines are cooing about the delicate way he handles issues, and concise manner in which he discusses matters.. Muahahahaha!
Sorry Bob! I couldn’t keep a straight face any longer. Your blog has hit a great start and long may you continue!
Go visit his blog, makes for entertaining reading of a late evening.

Liam Keane walked free from a court in Dublin yesterday when the 6th witness in the trial “denied making statements identifying the accused as the killer”.The Irish Times has more as does RTE News.
Mr Keane is now wanted for failing to show up in court today over 2 public order offences commited last month.
Scary stuff.
Picture from the Irish Times

I’ve come across some of the things on this list and like many people been the victim of same. Even some of my friends in sales have explained some of these to me!

It’s happened before, and it’s happened again. Good luck with the job hunt Michael!
Hi boss, do you read my blog?

Simon discovered Work Rave recently. It’s a program similar to Xwrits which I have running on my X desktop. It forces you to take a break every so often and hopefully let your hands rest. I’ve used Xwrits for a long time now, and it’s one of those apps I wouldn’t be without.

I got an awful fright this morning when I heard this story on the radio. Martina and I took that same ferry many times when we stayed with my cousin on Staten Island.
I just heard on the radio that the pilot of the ferry may have fallen asleep. He’s in hospital after apprently trying to commit suicide!

Well done spammers, you finally discovered this site! I received 3 comment spams last night and others have been hit too. It was inevitable I suppose but now it’s time to take care of the problem.
There are so many methods of stopping this abuse of the site and they’ve been endlessly discussed in the blog world. I tried to pipe 2 of the spams to spamassassin but it doesn’t work too well unfortunately. Chances are, it won’t work when run as “nobody” either.
I’m opting for the method that keeps the CLUG and Webdev mailing lists free of spam: moderation. When someone posts a comment to your blog you will receive an email as normal with that comment, but it will also include a moderation link to validate or delete the spam. By default moderation will be turned on.
The next step would be a “registered user” mode so that regular visitors can register (with email validation) and post comments by-passing the moderation system.

But I’m a crap artist. Will someone please do better than this please? Those pictures took me ages, but they’re not very good!

So much to say but not today.

Some photography links and discussions:

• Apparently, the digital zoom on the Sony 717 is better than zooming and cropping in Photoshop!
• Don’t you hate shutter lag and autofocus time? They’re annoying, but at least the autofocus and exposure setup time for an action shot can be removed by pre-focusing. Unfortunately you’re still left with shutter lag. Here’s a long discussion about this issue.
• I read with interest an article by David Mc Williams in the SB Post last Sunday. In it he proposed that paying a mortgage is dead money, not paying rent. Yes, that’s sure to get up people’s noses!
• Keith Barry caught a bullet in his teeth on television in front of a crowd. Amazing illusion, however he did it. Never mind the dodgy looking site, navigate in. They’ve a recording of his appearance on the Late Late which is probably worth downloading just to see Pat Kenny have the sh*t frightened out of him!
• Film Degrain – a plugin for the Gimp. I tried this on one image and it worked quite well. It did make details a bit softer though so examine the photo carefully.
• I got 50 digital images printed by Spectra Photo in town. It only cost me €9.50 for 6×4 prints. Quality is very good and I’ll get more printed there as it’s a quick overnight service! (and a dial-up line can’t compete with the bandwidth of a CD dropped into a shop!)

Damn, typing html links on a keyboard with broken left shitft and ctrl keys is really awkward!
Later … I thought something was wrong. I counted the photographs I had printed and only 39 were there. The first 10 on the CD hadn’t been printed! (I had burned 49 images.. ls -l|wc -l counts an extra line at the top of the ‘ls’ output) I can’t wait to hear what excuse they give for this! *mutter*