Tag Archives: Ireland

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!

Experiences with 3

One person’s experienes with Ireland’s newest mobile phone operator, 3, are less than promising. Missed calls, no dialtone, bad coverage, ridiculous limits on the size of bills for new users. Doesn’t sound good.

3 are offering 5 cent text, picture and video messaging right now but if their service is bad, what use are they, even if cheap? (via)

UCC students blogging

Damien Mulley has the scoop about the latest development at University College Cork. All students will be given blogs!

While that’s great news for blogging in Ireland, I’m disappointed that they didn’t choose WordPress Mu. I had a quick look around a few blogs and noticed a few things:

  • They do have permanent links, but links to articles are only in the sidebar “Recent Posts” block. The title of each post is not linked, and neither is the timestamp.
  • Permanent links aren’t very descriptive being of the form “/blogs/Username/item_x.htm” where x is a number.
  • It looks like trackbacks and pings aren’t supported so it will be just a little harder for blog owners to participate in blog conversations with others.
  • What will happen when a student finishes college? Will they be able to export their work? On another level, who owns the work? Student or College?

I have to disagree with Bernie’s comment about what value for money colleges get from hosting blogs. Bebo and MySpace are only two of the many companies offering their own proprietary website platforms. A college weblog has an unbreakable link to that institution. Colleges are places for learning which is quite different from the profit motive of any and every commercial company out there. The more exposure students get to blogging the better they will be at dealing with this phenomenon in the future. Not to mention the older students who are not in the demographic targeted by commercial interests.

Clashes in Dublin over loyalist march

Clashes in Dublin over loyalist march – burning cars, missiles thrown, vandalism and looting.
Yesterday a group of Unionists/Loyalists marched through Dublin in memory of all the victims of Republican violence. The Government hoped it would happen peacefully but I don’t think anyone really believed that.
I’m glad the Unionists didn’t march through Cork, it probably would have been worse.
If you recognise anyone in the footage or pictures, call Garda HQ on 01 6660000 or Crime Stoppers on 1800 250025. Thanks ElBlogador for those numbers.

This is covered in much more detail with pictures:

A sad, sad day for Ireland.
The Sunday Times has coverage of the background and riots:

Here’s a video of rioters overturning a car and smashing it. Citizen reporting is alive and well. (via)

(links via Irish Blogs)

Meteor Stealing From Customers

It would appear that Meteor have adding a surcharge for downloading ringtones off their website. Even downloading a special “free” ringtone priced at €0.00 attracted a delivery charge of €3.39.
Who downloads ringtones? Kids and teenagers mostly, but of course the parents pick up the tab.
Don’t get smug if you’re an O2 customer, they charge for delivery of their ringtones too but couldn’t offer a means of calculating the cost.
Want a ringtone? Use Audacity to edit your favourite mp3 to your liking and copy it to your phone. Copying to the phone is left as an exercise for the reader but could be as easy as purchasing a USB card reader. (via Dave)

Irish Blog Awards – Who's your favourite?

Ryan alerted me to the fact that Damien Mulley has opened the flood gates for nominations for the Irish Blog Awards!

This blog hasn’t been updated as much as it used to since wordpress.com took off, but take a look at the categories and email Damien if you think I should be nominated!

Guess I have my hands stuck in several of the categories with this blog and my photoblog, In Photos, so please don’t let me stop you nominating me in whatever category you like! 🙂

painful self-promotion ends!

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