Tag Archives: Ireland

Classic Irish Rock from Horslips

St. Patrick’s Day has arrived and it’s beautiful outside. It’s perfect weather for landscape photography – plenty of light and an interesting sky with fluffy clouds floating on-high. I’ll be on the streets of Cork photographing the crowds and the parade so look out for me if you’re around!

Just because of the day that’s in it, and because I was dancing around the kitchen with Oscar this morning to this song, here’s Horslips playing “An Dearg Doom”.
Video of the aforementioned dancing will not be making it’s way onto the Internet any time soon…

Just back from town now. We met Linda and went to Luigi Malones for lunch, hoping to catch the last bit of the parade afterwards, but as we reached Patrick’s Street at 2pm the crowd started to disperse! The parade lasted barely an hour! Conor saw the whole thing and he said we didn’t miss much. I got some great shots of the crowd and as everyone was in good mood many people posed and acted a little crazy for the camera.

A few minutes later we met Conor and Sylvia, headed to the farmers market where Linda and I took long exposure shots of the carosel and we eventually ended up in a nearby cafe for further refreshment.

Looks like some photos of the parade are showing up on Flickr already. I saw an insane number of people with digital SLRs. Folks, why aren’t you all blogging?

I think Linda might have found a new passion in street photography too. Can’t wait to see her shots!

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More photos: Red Mum took some excellent shots of the parade in Dublin. Monasette did the same in Galway. Gallery to follow! Flickr has lots to offer today! Anyone else I can link to? Leave a comment!

Everyone’s very quiet! No more photos? I have a few photos on my photoblog, and I’ll be posting some more over the next week.

St. Patrick's Day 2007

Tomorrow is the feast day of the patron saint of Ireland, St. Patrick. Unfortunately it seems that St. Patrick was never canonised officially by a Pope, but that’s ok because according to Wikipedia, “for most of Christianity’s first thousand years, canonisations were done on the diocesan or regional level.” We’ll not give up our Saint without a fight! (via)

In honour of the day parades will be held in all the cities and many of the towns of Ireland. I’ll be in Cork tomorrow to capture a flavour of the day and photos will appear soon after on In Photos.

Some links to whet your appetite for tomorrow:

  • I can’t believe the last time I posted St Patrick’s Day photos was 2004! I did shoot the St. Patrick’s Festival which was on during and after the parade last year. That was great fun with street entertainers and food stalls. Yum!
  • Details about the Cork Parade can be found on the Cork Festival website. The parade starts at 1pm from the end of the South Mall and heads up towards Mc Curtain Street. The usual route of the parade if memory serves.
  • The Dublin festival lives at stpatricksfestival.ie and if the radio adverts I’ve heard are anything to go it’ll be a great day!
  • Does your town or city have a parade website? Leave a comment and I’ll link it here!

Blogorrah lists five reasons it’s great to be Irish which will either bring a smile to your face or confusion. Frawley’s? Never heard of it! I love reason two however!

You don’t have to resign from office for being corrupt – just pretend you’re really sorry for about half an hour. Or better still – ignore it and it’ll go away!

My home from space

If I were in the house buying market it just got a little easier to spy on the neighbours of your possible new home. My home.ie added a satellite mapping service to their site which allows one to zoom in closer than other online maps, although I don’t think you’ll be watching anyone skinny-dipping..

It’s not quite as smooth as Google or Yahoo’s offering. You have to click the direction arrows instead of dragging the map but it’s not bad for scouting around.

Finally, my map on Useamap links to a spot in Blarney a few hundred meters down the road from where I now sit. They offer driving directions and distances just by clicking on your destination on the map. It’s not perfect. It likes the main road to Cork a little too much, but I guess if you didn’t know an area it’s probably better to stay off the side roads eh?

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MyHome.ie

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Google Maps

Craic agus ceol ar an gCeadaoin

My brother Donal who I mentioned a few days ago is going to Lesotho in mid-April to help build a school and raise funds for the ISPCC here in Ireland.

As part of his fund raising effort there will be a charity trad gig on Wednesday night, that’s tomorrow night! Sounds like a great line up and I’m going to try get in for an hour or so. Watch out for the guy in the WordPress tshirt with the camera. That’ll be me!

Charity gig

Performers on the night include The Fuchsia Band, back from their travels and who always put on an energetic and entertaining show; Cork singer Ger Wolfe singing some of his distinctively Cork ballads; Dan O’Callaghan, a piper from Cork who has travelled around the world playing music; Tommie Cunniffe on accordion, who is currently recording his debut album; and, last but not least, John Mitchell on flute accompanying Donal O Caoimh on the uilleann pipes.

Update! The gig was great. A huge crowd gathered to watch and listen and we even had a few dancers! I hope to post some photos tomorrow if I find time to work on them tonight.

At the mercy of Eircom

Connectivity has been very flaky for the last few hours as my phoneline has degenerated into crackle hell. Making it worse is the fact that I dared move from the incumbant telco, Eircom, and became a customer of UTV Talk some time back.

UTV took my complaint after I waited for a customer representative for only a few moments. They checked my line and it flagged red so they passed on the complaint to Eircom to fix the line. That nagging feeling that I would be offline for a long time only got worse..

About an hour later someone did ring the house phone, and through the crackles and interference I think I was told an engineer would be out to check the line. Rejoice!

I’m still waiting, hours later. A call to 1901 proved fruitless – the automated voice said my line wasn’t an Eircom one so he couldn’t do anything else and shouting “agent” at the phone put me on hold waiting. I put my mobile on speaker and waited about 10 minutes before hanging up. Aren’t monopolies great?

I hope an engineer calls tomorrow.

The moon will be blood red tonight

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A lunar eclipse is expected tonight at 10:44pm here in Ireland, all over Europe, Africa and elsewhere. I’ll be outside with my Canon 20D and 75-300 zoom so hopefully I’ll get a shot or two I can post here later. NASA has a great page on the eclipse which is where I got these two images.

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I checked Astronomy Ireland too but unfortunately their site is basic and at a glance isn’t very informative. They definitely need a blog to update their events and provide more information. If one were cynical, you might think they want you to ring their premium rate numbers…

Never fear, the blogosphere came to the rescue. Daragh’s post on the subject has the times of the eclipse and how long it’ll last. I’m subbed to his blog, read that post this morning, and only thought seriously about the eclipse this evening, long after forgetting where I had come across it.. Thank you Darragh! Hope you enjoy the Blog Awards tonight!

Edit: I wrote a short post, how to photograph a lunar eclipse which might be useful to you if you’re out on this cold night. It’s getting foggy here in Blarney but I hope if clears up in the next hour!

9:46pm – a shadow can be seen at the bottom of the moon.2007-03-03_img_9802-m.jpg

Matt has some excellent shots of the eclipse:

(Matt – get off the phone! Jacinta just rang and the line is busy!)

More photos of the eclipse:

Counting down to the 2007 Blog Awards

It’s not long to go before the Blog Awards on Saturday. Damien says that there’s extensive media coverage of the event including interviews on radio and spots on RTE news. I’m looking forward to seeing who wins what on the day. I’ll be keeping an eye on Irish Blogs.ie for updates that evening, but I’ll be staying at home here in Cork while everyone is partying in Dublin!

Meanwhile, Blarney suffered yet another power cut. This one lasted for well over 2 hours. Have laptop, have dvd player, watched “United 93”. Frighteningly real and shocking film. I still remember being in my boss’s office watching on a little portable TV as the smoke poured out of the World Trade Center that day and later hearing from clients on that campus that they were ok.

Edit: While on the subject of Irish blogs, Haydn Shaughnessy asked if Irish blogging is about to peak just as blogging becomes mainstream elsewhere? I never got around to commenting on it, but if I had I would have asked, “Does it matter? People have been nattering and gossiping forever and a day and they’ll do it in whatever forum they can.” His article appeared in today’s Irish Times, so go buy the dead tree version, or read the comments on the post above.

Irish WordPress powered companies and a free iPod

Matt started the “company website run on WordPress” theme by posting that moo.com runs on WordPress, so here are two Irish companies that use WordPress to run their websites:

  1. Segala, a company involved in website accessability and trust. They have rather an interesting idea about content labeling. Paul Walsh, their CEO, “is Segala’s W3C advisory committee representative”. Keep an eye on them. You’ll be hearing more about them I’m sure! Oh, and if you leave a comment here, it may be entered into a link bait competition Paul’s running. He’s giving away an iPod on March 2nd. If he picks you, I’ll email you with Paul’s email address.
  2. The second website I will mention is one outside of the usual web 2.0 zone. It’s Harrington Estates, an estate agent in West Cork, Ireland. Houses are listed in posts, and interested buyers can leave a comment using the standard comment form. Thanks to the SEO friendly nature of WordPress, the site also appears on the front page of Google for related search terms! Thanks Frank for that info!

Are there any more Irish companies using WordPress that I can profile in a future post?

Update – the winner has been announced! Competition closed!

The Silent City

Remember Fifty Percent Grey? I briefly mentioned it a couple of years back, little knowing that it’s creator, Ruairi Robinson, would be nominated for an Oscar for his work on that short film.

Ruairi’s back, and thanks to Ruairi Roddy I found out about his new production. This time it’s a very cool short film called “The Silent City”. Ruairi (Roddy) likens it to Starship Troopers but I think it’s more evil than that, maybe not as blood thirsty, but I’d love to see what happens after the film ends. Who or what answers the call for help?

I wrote/directed/edited/storyboard this and did 95% of the visual effects myself. The film stars Don Wycherley (Batchelors Walk), Cillian Murphy (28Days/Later/Sunshine/Batman Begins/Breakfast on Pluto) and Garvan Mcgrath.

This is the film that finally got me an agent in Hollywood, where an Oscar nomination failed, and hopefully might help me secure one of those “career” things I keep hearing people talking about. I’ve had many many feature film scripts sent to me in the last couple of months from big fancy hollywood studios, which is utterly fantastic (but would be nice to be able to pay my goddamn rent in the meantime, before I get ahead of myself) so a big thanks to me in the past for finishing the film. I couldn’t have done it without past me. Future me, you better not fucking fail present me in my hour of need. Kudos to Nick Ryan too, for producing the thing for me. And the cast/rest of crew of course. I owe a lot of favours that I hope to *actually* repay some day.

Continue reading “The Silent City”

Gomaith: cartuin as Gaeilge

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Gomaith is an online cartoon in Irish that is yet in it’s infancy but promises to provide, “an irreverent look at the world from the high stool.”

Not all the cartoons are funny but there are a few nuggets of gold in there. Oh, and there’s an English translation too, so don’t be afraid to click the link! (via)

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