Category Archives: General

On my way to work this morning I managed to avoid most of the heavy traffic but eventually I got caught as I approached Victoria Cross. I usually come off College Rd on to Orchard Rd and then down to Victoria Cross. Unfortunately traffic is usually heavy at the junction of Orchard Rd and Victoria Cross. Today was no exception. As I waited at the junction, looking left and right I noticed a Flo Gas truck down the road with a large space in front of it and thought, “hmm, maybe if he goes forward I can get in behind him..”, but no, he wasn’t moving because a container truck on the inside lane was too large to overtake safely.

I continued to look left and right when suddenly out of the corner of my eye as I turned right I spotted a car plough straight into the Flo Gas truck! I can still see the back of the car raise itself up off the ground, see flying specks of paint and plastic, and hear the sound of the car crumpling under the impact.

Shocked, I watched for a few seconds before remembering my camera, grabbed it out of it’s bag and turned it on to find a full memory card, a quick change of the memory card later and I snapped a few photos of this unfortunate accident. Nobody was hurt, both drivers got out of their cars and a Garda was on the scene within moments.

A Long ago I stopped trying to make everything perfect. I think it happened when I realised that “good enough” really was good enough! Occasionally I will spend an extra ordinary amount of time trying to get some small facet of a program working just perfectly, but that’s common in every endevour. It’s so true that 20% of the work takes 80% of the time..

Batma^h^h^h^h^ Adam West returns to make a movie with Burt Ward about the 60’s tv show! Adam West is 74 now! Holy Retirement Batman!

I just finished Linus Torvald’s biography, “Just for fun” which was an enjoyable read and I saw a few parallels between his life and mine. He spent a summer in the early nineties coding and didn’t realise what the weather was like. I did the same coding a demo on the C64. At the end of the summer a shop assistant remarked that it had been a terrible summer. I still remember being dumb-founded when I realised I didn’t know. I mumbled an acknowledgement that, “yes, the weather’s been terrible” but I walked out of there in a slight daze. I’m a lot more aware of the weather now that I’m taking photographs, so at least that gets me out of the house!
Next in line in dead-tree format is “Mr. Nice” by Howard Marks. Good read, but I’m only 30 pages or so into it. He was an international drug smuggler and he’s led an interesting life!
Whenever I see “books on CD” going cheap I snap them up if I recognise the author or story. I picked up Roddy Doyle’s, “A Star Called Henry” for about 5 Euro a couple of weeks ago and I play it in the car in the evenings. It’s the story of Henry, a boy born into the squalor of Dublin tenements at the start of the 20th Century. His description of The Easter Rising in 1916 is brilliant and told well. I’m amazed at what the main character, Henry, got up to before his 15th birthday!
Finally, after downloading readM, the ebook reader for the Nokia 7650, I’m reading “In The Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson on my phone. I have to admit I’m getting bored of it now because he’s preaching about the Apple Mac but I’ll stick with it. I particularly liked the description of the car dealers!

What do we lose? Ancient history, ancient batteries that if they had been developed, “we’d be flying to the nearest stars by now” (read or heard that somewhere a few years ago).
I read a dog-eared copy of Eric Von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods” ages ago and enjoyed it but I knew of the controversy surrounding the book from reading another book.

Pronnsias may have a point..

mp3burn is a simple command line tool for making audio CDs from mp3s without filling up your disk with .wav files. It requires perl, mpg123, and cdrecord.
update! Why not use a self made script? (see comments)
Because I keep forgetting the parameters to pass to cdrecord, and it’s easier to have someone else maintain a package than me. Plus there’s a few graphical frontends for mp3burn that could be handy for the family.. Might finally get my brother interested in using Linux as a desktop!

Here’s why the techies on ILUG didn’t get excited about the Government’s plan to restrict the Freedom of Information act:

1. It came just a week after the data retention fiasco. There’s only so much ranting and raving one can do, even the ILUG! People are bored of politics.
2. The FOI Act deals with data that most people just don’t care about in their day to day life. The data retention policy directly applies to me because I go online at home. Do I have any issue with the Governement that I need “secret” information to persue? No, of course not, but if you are concerned about the running of the Government then the FOI Act is important. In a perfect democracy all citizens would be concerned citizens..

Who wants to be in the office today? I’d rather be flying a kite!
Wish I had the money for some of the kites on mobilekiteshop..

RTÉ News report on Grainne’s murder trial. There’s more on 96fm.

Sentencing Nascimento, Mr Justice Barry White said there was no need for Grainne to die.