Ireland – Page 15 – Something Odd!

Moriarty Tribunal in Text

The Moriarty Tribunal cost the Irish tax payer more than 100 million Euro and all we got was a 2,400 page protected PDF.

If you view the report’s PDF files you won’t be able to quote from it by selecting and copying text. You’ll have to manually type out anything you want to extract because the files are protected.

Value for money eh? Anyway, I ran the pdf files through the tool “pdftotext” and came up with m1.txt and m2.txt.
Use the original PDF files to read the report but for your convenience these text files will be much easier to quote from.

Please don’t link directly to them, mirror them on your own site if you write about them!

Here’s a Wordle tag cloud of the findings created by Jamie Lawrence.

Celtic Tiger RIP

Brian Cowen and company say sorry. (via)

Ketchup

There’s a new restaurant in the location Bullys used to be on Paul Street. It’s Ketchup and we’ve just had delicious burgers there. Yum!

Military Show at Cork City Gaol

Some photos from the military show at Cork City Gaol today. It’s also on tomorrow and well worth a visit!

I got to try out the red dot sight on an M416, see a Scar-L up close, and even checked out an M60 too. All replica air guns, without ammo unfortunately. There was a target range but there was a long queue for it. Maybe next time because my 3 yro son was disappointed the guns didn’t work!

I have a few more photos on my phone which I’ll upload tomorrow.

Lego The Dot Conf

I think I have to agree with Damien. This is the best trailer for a conference ever!

It’s for The Dot Conf in Dublin on July 22nd. I won’t be going but there’s a great line up of speakers!

Blairs Inn Smile

Duncan of Blairs Inn was giving out free samples of their delicious beef stew along with samples from other local restaurants at the festival in Blarney today.

Delicious stuff, and Blairs Inn is a great place to go for a meal too. Only been there once but we had a great meal there. Recommended.

Killer Queen in the Opera House Cork

If you know me well, you may know I love the music of Queen. I never had the pleasure of seeing them live unfortunately but I’ve been to a number of Queen inspired events, Flash Harry played in Cobh a few years ago and there was Queen at the Ballet too. (Thanks Ken, Aisling, Proinnsias, Sinead!)

So I jumped at the chance to see Queen tribute band, Killer Queen when they played in the Opera House recently. They were good, some parts were great, and Brighton Rock was absolutely amazing even if I got the feeling some people in the audience didn’t know that song.

Killer Queen are a blast. The crowd loved them. Of the three performances I thought Flash Harry was the best but you’ll have a great time at Killer Queen too.

Continue reading “Killer Queen in the Opera House Cork”

The death of blogging, again

One of the videos from The Irish Blog Awards celebrated the repeated demise of Irish blogging.

Darragh Doyle and everyone else did a great job with this video. Check out Award winners, lots of great blogs there!

Patrick's Day in Blarney

We were originally going to be walking in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Blarney but our son fell asleep a few minutes ago, and it wouldn’t be fair on him to drag him out unfortunately. We did visit the “farmers market” this morning however and I took a few photos. They’re really only snapshots but I hope you enjoy them, especially if you have visited Blarney.

This is probably the few times in the year that you’ll see this many locals near Blarney Castle! 😉
Continue reading “Patrick's Day in Blarney”

Matt Mullenweg and Craig Newmark

I was in Dublin yesterday to see Matt and Craig become Honorary Patrons of The University Philosophical Society in Trinity College. It was a low key informal event with many students and a few staff in attendance.

Eamon Leonard, of Echo Libre, kindly used my Flip Mino to record the Q&A session that followed. I want to express my gratitude to him for doing a fine job, especially as I saw him switch the camera from arm to arm during the hour long event. It wasn’t easy holding the camera aloft for so long. I’m currently transcoding the video and trying to make it smaller before uploading it.
I’ll add it to this post later, you won’t want to miss it!

Update! Matt was interviewed by Silicon Republic earlier today. Catch up on what’s happening at the Web Summit in Dublin by following #dws2 on Twitter.