WordPress developer in near miss auto accident!

Press the button on the traffic light, wait for the green man, walk. It’s simple. Cars generally stop and obey a red light or risk two penalty points if seen by a member of an Garda Siochana. Unfortunately they can’t be at every street junction every hour of the day.

Jacinta and I were walking across the road at the North Gate, a busy intersection, with relatively complicated lights. Pedestrians be warned, wait for the lights! Cars come from all directions! The green man was flashing so it was safe enough, we thought. An ambulance was trying to get through the red light in front of us so we stopped, still, the green man was doing his thing, shaking his stuff, and generally flashing on and off. All’s ok, until there’s the loud blare of a car horn, a louder engine powers a green VW Passat across the junction from North Bridge and swerves just behind us, missing us by perhaps a few inches!

We were shocked, but I looked after them and recognised the same green Volkswagen Passat I had seen two days previously. Dark windows, a big VW badge dangling off the center mirror and the name of some exhaust maker on the back window. That time I had been driving, they were in front of me, and had raced off when lights turned green, lane hopping like there was no tomorrow, in a 50km/h zone. Ironically, they were stuck at the lights going to Mayfield and I passed them a moment later..

It’s a mad world out there, I’ll post a picture of the car next time I see it.

The Elysian

If you have driven past the construction site on Eglinton Street you may have noticed all the expensive looking posters promising something, “better than you expected” and calling it “Ireland’s Biggest Secret”. Right, maybe the marketing department went overboard, but this evening I spotted a URL on the posters: http://www.theelysian.ie/

The brief was simple, create a landmark building for Cork which shows the positive energy of its inhabitants, make it a show piece for the way City Centre development should go and most importantly create stupendous homes where all manner of buyers will be proud to live.

I think it’s going to be a high-rise building with offices, appartments and a shopping centre. Should be a hell of a view from the top of it as it’ll have a 17 storey tower! That’s taller than anything else in Cork.

BarCamp Ireland – September 30th in Cork

I found out from Damien that BarCamp Ireland now has it’s own blog. Their press release gives a quick overview, but if you want to know who’s going and talking you should take a look at the BarCamp wiki where you can signup to attend. There are twelve speakers so far with topics ranging from running a start-up, Web 2.0, OPML, Ruby and more.

Should be fun and interesting, and it’ll be great to meet up with some of the folk I met at the Web 2.0 Conference again. See you there!

Paper Blogs

-ChanServ- [#wordpress] Welcome to the WordPress IRC Channel
wpbot donncha is someone who blogs on the Internet
ketsugi o rly!
ketsugi as opposed to blogging on paper?
donncha yup
Kamigoroshi i tried blogging on paper once..
Kamigoroshi but no one commented..
donncha Kamigoroshi: lol. the good ol’ days?
ketsugi teehee
* ketsugi leaves a trackback on Kamigoroshi’s paper log
donncha actually, so did I, and I expect that blog will survive for a lot longer than my virtual one

Who will take care of your weblog after you’re gone?

I've had more fun in a road digger

Jeremy Clarkson reviews the latest Volvo digger, sorry, the BMW Z4 M coupé, although you’ll have to scroll down to the end to see what he thinks of this “hard-top, hardcore version of the Z4 M convertible”.

If you want this sort of car, the Porsche Gayman is an obvious rival. It goes harder but is deeply embarrassing to be seen in. So what I’d do is buy the soft-top Z4 M instead. Or if you want something really fun for the weekend, buy a digger.

Is this really Jeremy Clarkson’s myspace blog? Somehow I doubt it as one astute reader noticed he spells colour without the u.

Malcolm in the Middle

One of the perennial arguments couples will have and compromise over is what to watch on TV. For us it used to be Will & Grace (argh!), then Two and a Half Men (getting better!) but thankfully we got into watching Malcolm in the Middle and have been glued to it ever since. The show is now over, finishing with Malcolm.. well, I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it, but it finishes in typical Wilkerson style.

If you’re like to know more, and even find out things you didn’t know you wanted to know, then take a look at the Wikipedia Malcolm in the Middle page. It’s chock full of useful and useless gossip and facts about the characters and places and episodes and secrets and makes for an entertaining read.

Frankie Muniz who played Malcolm in the series has had a very interesting life. He’s a professional race car driver now, and is engaged to marry.

Who is you favourite character?

Twink lets it all out!

I’m not sure how this voicemail became public, but Adele King, aka Twink, let rip when she left a message for her ex-husband. Unfortunately, the message did leak and is now featured on several websites..

It’s awful, but she probably has very good reason for being so bitter. Go listen to the voicemail on Damien’s post, WordPress is doing scary things to the object loading code here!

Do I really need a phone line with Sky Digital?

Way back in 2004 i posed the question, Do I need a phoneline for Sky Digital? and I can confirm that yes, you do need to keep your Sky box connected for the term of the contract, usually the first year.

Last January I purchased a Sky+ subscription with the multi-room option. I didn’t connect the second box to the phone, mainly because it’s upstairs and I never got around to stringing a phone line to that room. Then, sometime during the last year the phone line to the living room died so both boxes were offline. Oops.

Sky contacted me several times, I bought 2 phoneline extension cables but there was always something more interesting to do than fix a phone line. Fancy that eh?

Last week Sky sent me this letter saying, “sadly, your entitlement to Multiroom pricing has been lost” unless I reconnect the boxes to the phone and ring them.

I’ve been on hold to Sky for the last 32 minutes, only another 30 minutes to go..

letter from sky

I want a free house

Cork student Shane Murphy is running iwantafreehouse.com and selling advertising on his homepage in €100 blocks. Unfortunately, it looks like the site is struggling under the load of a free plug on Today FM but I’m sure they’ll sort that out later. He’s also running a simple blog on there so be sure to check back there for updates!

Heh. If I had thought of it I would have tried it when I was a student, but it probably wouldn’t have been such a success 10 years ago..