Podcamp push

So Podcamp Ireland was fun, in lots of unexpected ways.

I met John McGuinness, Minister for State at DETE, and was very impressed with his outspoken support for blogging within the civil service. Just checked out his site there, and I seem to have missed the media storm from last week surrounding his comments on the civil service. Go get 'em John...

I also got a hug from Grannymar: the evidence is here, but a certain young Bohanna needs to share his photos properly! Keith - sort it out!!

Finally, I was immensely impressed with the first speaker I saw, Simon McGarr from Tuppenceworth, who spoke with passion and eloquence of his quest to improve the levels of media literacy and critical thinking of the nation's teens. I promised him I'd give his ideas a push, so check out his thoughts here.

Updated: Me and Grannymar!

Photo property of Keith Bohanna

Open source music?

Radiohead are asking fans to create remixes of their brilliant track 'Reckoner'; by releasing the various 'stems' or strands (mine is better) to the tune, e.g. vocals, drums, guitar, they want ppl to come up with their own version. This is apparently to help gain 'Reckoner' air time, which would be an easier task were disk jockeys to take their collective heads out of big media's asses, and try actually listening to the track.

Get the bits here.

Ughhh, apple....

Might as well face it

What an incredibly beautiful morning. I think I could possibly become addicted to light. Watching the sun rise over The Bay as the fog swirled around Poolbeg's stacks, listening to the waves breaking gently on the beach, as all the while Thom Yorke and crew crooned softly into my ear. Magic.

There was an old lady....on the DART across from me, reading her scriptures in Latin. What a waste of cognitive power. Hasn't she heard?

Open, social?

So the organisation I work for has upped and moved sticks to the North Bay Area. Shiny new building (albeit a little cold right now), and all open plan, from the CEO down, although he's not here yet afaik.

I like it here, even if network issues are blocking me from Twitter, and the proxy is blocking any Firefox traffic over SSL, which I can't even begin to understand the cause of :)

Teeth and tears

So we passed the 12-week milestone, and, ahead of schedule, Fionn is showing all the signs of teething. I'd like it added to the court record that none of us is best pleased about this. Most of the time he's grand, he's either showing off his new trick of blowing bubbles, or simply stuffing both fists into his mouth. However...

This evening was a particularly low point, made worse by my stubborn refusal to give Fionn some Calpol - I try and avoid taking painkillers myself, so why would I inflict them on my son? Bad logic by yours truly.

We were trying to put him down for a sleep at the time, and a mixture of pain and tiredness had him in tears for over an hour. Bad parenting by yours truly.

Within 10 minutes of S administering the Calpol he was asleep. Poor little tyke.

A trilogy in n parts

Eoin Colfer (he of Artemis Fowl fame) is going to write the 6th part of the H2G2 trilogy.

Please, please, please, please don't mess it up.

And, if it's great (and I have great confidence in you, Mr. Colfer), can you please write a new Dirk Gently when you're finished?

Disconnect

Eircom is killing my DSL: http://www.irishisptest.com/forum/utv/1582-contention-ratio-bandwidth-suckage.html

Supercollider

Well, the world didn't end.

Although they haven't actually started shooting the beams at each other yet.

On a lighter note, does anyone else think Dr. Brian "Things can only get better" Cox looks a lot like Irish actor Cillian Murphy?

Hmm, upgrades

So my new (ish) work laptop has DVD R but not W, and following on from my external HD fiasco I decided to purchase an external DVD burner. Yes, I have accounts with Picasa, PutPlace and Live Mesh, but once bitten, twice shy, and I'm not going to lose a single byte of data ever again. Guaranteed*.

I bought a Lite-On IT EZ-DUB burner through Elara.ie (still a great store, despite the outcome of this particular sorry tale). I assumed when I bought it that I would get a simple plug-and-play external drive, that would just mount in a manner similar to a USB pen drive. Turns out that the burner is USB, but you need to install proprietary software to write files to a disc. Annoying, but manageable.

The infuriating thing is that the EZ-DUB proprietary software depends on Nero 7, and only Nero 7, to do the writes - it won't even load with any subsequent versions of Nero. This is the height of rudeness and lazy coding - Lite-On are basically giving you two fingers, and damning you to an eternity of being lumped with a particular version of the software if you want to do anything crazy like, I dunno, use the hardware for the purpose it was intended. I wonder if Nero know their software is being used in this manner? I can't see them being too happy that Lite-On have effectively blocked a whole swathe of customers from Nero's intended upgrade path?

Disappointing. Hopefully someone somewhere has hacked this...

* Not actually a guarantee...

Late night chuckles

Fionn apparently learnt to laugh today. He just woke up a minute ago with the biggest smile and laughing with his full voice, for apparently no reason at all - we actually both thought he was crying at first :)

Long may it continue.

Shout out to Greg, get some sleep pop.

Chrome

It's a pretty silly name, but Google's new browser looks good(ish) on first glance.

They really have done a great job with the UI, they've given every last inch to the page display (although I'm not sure about the incredible disappearing/reappearing status bar...). And it's really disconcerting not to have the familiar old 'File' menu option in the top right-hand corner! It makes it feel like some malware app that's trying to full-screen me into submission.

Btw, Picasa 3 (beta) is also out - do Google release anything past Beta at all these days? :)