Hiccoughs

Fionn chatting, being frightened, and getting over-excited at Brion & Roisin's, all the while wearing the world's deadliest t-shirt - nice one Steve!

It's oh so...

...tiresome. Picasa 3: it's uber-pants. Turns out it won't import video. Fair enough, I presume it's a beta release (tomorrow's news: Google in non-beta release shocker!!), and it's focussing on what it does extremely well, which is handle photos. Fine. But why the hell does it block access to the camera from any other device? Ubuntu has some automatic camera recognition, which I remember Picasa asking to annex when I installed it...but, guess what? Picasa doesn't provide an option to release that control back to Ubuntu...So I've uninstalled. Kerpow, Google!

And uninstalling it was hardly a breeze either, running dpkg from the terminal? Hardly user-friendly...

I'm still going to re-install it of course...

Can't touch this

Speaking of the young fella, here he is appearing in his latest presentation, "Tummy Time"...

Full album is here...

I've been busy...

what with college, work and baby, so haven't had much time to post. Right now however, I am waiting for the stinking piece of software that is Picasa 3 Beta (ffs) to transfer files from my camera to my Ubuntu desktop. Why does Picasa suck so badly at something that is part of its core functionality - and on an OS that generally out-performs the hell out of Windoze?

Speaking of - I love Ubuntu to bits. I especially love Amarok, the superb music player/organiser...it's actually worthy of a post of it's own, so I'll hold off.

Another amazingly fun feature of Ubuntu was the ease with which I could set up a file share between the desktop and Sinead's notebook (also running Hardy). In fact, I'll go a step further: I was able to attach an NTFS external drive to my desktop, and stream music to the notebook over the wireless network using Samba, and it took all of 3 minutes late on a Friday night to install and configure. Sweet, sweet, sweet...

Get it. There are no more excuses...

Fly like a?

So Yves Rossy took the easy route, and flew across La Manche instead of swimming it.

I caught a quick interview with him on The World: Technology Podcast - he summed up his future ambition with the phrase "smaller wing, bigger engines"... legend :)

The ivory tower

Wasn't that where the empress lived in The Neverending Story?

Anyhoo, first day back on campus today. I returned with a mixture of trepidation (loooooooong days: up since 6am, work until 5.30pm, classes from 6pm - 9pm), and excitement. This year we'll be developing a business plan for the Innovation module (Patricia O'Sullivan is the lecturer), and writing a dissertation...

I calculate that college work will take up all the free time I'm currently using to update the blog, so this is me signing off.

Yeah, sure....

And now for something completely different

While slurping down a bowl of unfeasibly tasty porridge (with honey, mmm) in the canteen this morning, I was delighted to see the following article in the IT:

POPE BENEDICT will this Sunday lead off a non-stop, six-day, seven-night televised reading of the entire Old and New Testaments in a Bible marathon that will bring the pontiff together with stars from the worlds of football, cinema and opera as well as more than 1,000 Italians from all walks of life.

Wow. What a marvellous idea. A bunch of celebrity Catholics talking at one another in a week long festival of self-congratulatory back-slapping: lots of talking, not one millisecond of listening.

BTW, I wonder which lucky celeb will get to read this particular pearl of wisdom?

If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.

Deuteronomy 25:11-12

Man of Science

My brother, Paudie, is doing something fun with lasers in Cork, and he now also preaches good science to the masses from his ambassador's residence.

Way to go lil bro!

A new departure

So I'm the proud owner of a shiny new-ish machine running Ubuntu 8.04, connected wirelessly to the web via my definitely-new Linksys USB adapter. Sweet.

Things are going to be different from now on...

Upgrades, redux

So Picasa 3 caused me no small amount of agony and frustration yesterday. Picasa is very good at finger-snapping easy photo editing for those who can't be arsed learning to use the Gimp, but I have come to loathe pretty much every other aspect it, in particular the rubbish way it handles file/folder management, and most of all the lack of control it offers users trying to change their web preferences.

It is impossible to change the way Picasa connects to the web - from trial and error I discovered that it just inherits whatever Internet Explorer is set to. For a product from a "web" company, that is approaching criminal neglect. Most notebook users will float through a variety of different networks, some requiring proxy access, etc, - the only way to make Picasa realise that you've changed your connectivity settings is to...switch it off and switch it back on again. Rubbish. It is the most un-Google Google product I've used.

Also, since I'm ranting - Firefox updates: good. Firefox updates every second day, which randomly disable my beloved add-ons, so I've nary an idea which is working at any given time: bad.

Dave, very much in conservative, change-is-bad mode.