IrelandOffline wants to update their logo and “brand.” More details here. Apply within etc. Forward this to any friends that you think may be interested as well. Monetary reward is low but helping out IrelandOffline will make you feel good!
Archive for December, 2005
New logo/brand wanted for IrelandOffline
Monday, December 26th, 2005Meaty Christmas
Sunday, December 25th, 2005Today was the first time since the end of August/start of September that I had meat. I decided to challenge myself as I do when I get bored, so the challenge back then was to be a veggie for an extended period. No meat or fish. As I progressed with this new diet I decided that December 25th would be the day I end the madness, I had hoped to do it for a year. And madness it was as I found my health deteriorating, I lost a good bit of muscle mass and I gained a lot more body fat. See, I’m not a good cook or a cook of any type and I think to have a proper veggie diet one needs to know how to make more than pasta. Too much carbs and not enough good proteins has damaged me.
So I started off breakfast this morning with an amazing piece of very rare steak. Mmm, dripping with blood which mixed nicely with my scrambled eggs. I’ll have to hit the gym soon now and help recover all that lost chest, arm and shoulder muscle. I think I’ll see an end to the lingering heartburn which I was experiencing too. Happy Meatmass!
Just Meebo, myself and I – Meebo wishlist
Saturday, December 24th, 2005Bow down and worship Meebo. It’s a great AJAXian application. Nice secure access to your various Instant Messaging applications, all via a browser. Very very handy if you have firewalls in work or school or college. All your IM clients open in one browser window.
But I want more from Meebo now. It isn’t enough anymore. I’d like to see the ability to browse some sites inside Meebo. Like that mini-browser extension for firefox (I couldn’t find the link to it, can someone send it to me?) which allows you to have a mini-browser inside a webpage, I think it would be sweet to click a link in an IM window in Meebo and have the option for it to be loaded in another IM window. If I recall all communications between my browser and Meebo are encrypted? The idea is Meebo serves me the webpages that it downloads for me, so if I have a nannystate firewall I circumvent it with Meebo.
This however could mean that the nannywalls would then block the Meebo site but perhaps there might be ways to come to an agreement with some companies. If the content does not pass through the company servers unencrypted then they might be more relaxed.
Essentially I’d like for meebo to be a VPN via the browser, imagine as well as IM, meebo connected to my home pc and allowed me to access my harddrive. “Feck” says he “I left that word doc at home.” “Why not Meebo it” says his work colleague. “Ah yeah”.
If we can have Linux in a screensaver, why not have VNC and VPN using Meebo?
Tis the season for domain renewals – GoDaddy just made a packet from me
Saturday, December 24th, 2005Just renewed a good few domains and realised I have some domains I should really use or just kill off.
buyanorgan.net – Evolved from an old college project where we had to build a jerk simple e-commerce site using javascript and other mundane web 0.9 technology. The lecturer seemed a right humourless git who I felt might take offense easily so I created an e-commerce site for selling human organs. It was witty enough. Later on I moved the content on to this domain. The site is dead now and will remain like that until I decide what to do with it.
civilpartnership.org – Registered around the time of David Norris brought out his failed Civil Partnership “Bill”. Perhaps with the latest McDowell belches about Civil Partnerships, a discussion forum could be put together to talk about this.
digihive.com – Registered when I believed the hype and thought I could make money fulltime from building websites. Mainly used now just to accept mail from domain registrars. Will probably kill it off soon.
incork.com – Registered for Fixer when he wanted to build a Cork listings style directory. Expires some time in 2006. Still a few possibilities for this domain.
nicecock.net – A piss-take domain again. After seeing the Nice-Tits.org site which was apparently owned by the Royal Tit-Watching (Ornithological) Society of Britain, I regged Nicecock.net and stuck a picture of a rooster on the front page. I guess if I had any design abilities I could have sold some t-shirts off it. Maybe the BitSniff people could help out and we can split profits? 🙂
peoplesrepublicofcock.com – More a dig at the PeoplesRepublicOfCork forum. Again I wanted T-Shirts that were to the casual observer the same as the PROC T-shirts, apart from one letter in one word. Dunno what to do with this.
homosexual-agenda.org – Well I finally did something with this.
smart-survey.com – As a result of working on surveys for IrelandOffline I thought there was a definite need for something out there targeted to the Irish market. Mainly there were tonnes of surveys I wanted to do without having to pay a fortune for them. Since I’m quite thick when it comes to the technology aspect of these things I’m just waiting on someone to come along and do this for me. I’ll happily share the revenue for anything made off this!
The Homosexual Agenda
Friday, December 23rd, 2005Rob helped me get Homosexual Agenda up and running and doing something. I regged the domain ages ago as I loved the way the right wing Christian nuts, mostly in the States, were always on about the homosexual agenda or the gay agenda. So I thought I’d put up a piss-take website. Version 0.2 was a group blog. That didn’t last as we all had our own blogs anyway, so this is version 0.3 and is just a simple aggregator. It’s not about segregating the homosexualists from the straights in the bloggersphere, but merely a way to see what a subsection of the larger community are discussing.
Send a copy of 1984 to all our TDs?
Friday, December 23rd, 2005Via BoingBoing – Newspaper sending all elected reps a copy of 1984. A nice publicity stunt to get attention to the US Govt spying on their people. It’s a cheap enough method of getting the press and the public tuned into issues of Governments abusing the civil and human rights of their constituents.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea to do the same here. Have people send in their secondhand copies of 1984 to the likes of Digital Rights Ireland who will then send a book to each of the 166 TDs and 60 Senators in Ireland as a reminder about the Irish and EU Data Retention laws. As well as highlighting the scary data retention law it would encourage people to read a classic piece of literature. No, I don’t think we should send the TDs the cliff notes version of the book itself. Unless we wanted to be exceedingly cheeky.
My bloggers, my friends, thank you.
Friday, December 23rd, 2005I have to say that 2005 was definitely the year of the blog in Ireland. A community quickly came together thanks in no small part to the IrishBlogs and the PlanetOfTheBlogs aggregators. I’ve made a good few friends and hardly any enemies from this blogging lark. I’ve also found a new play toy called United Irelander. But more of that in the new year 😉
The quality of content coming from the small but growing boggersphere community is fantastic and we need to encourage more people to join this community and be their guides and mentors. We have the like of the lefties interviewing us, so we can learn more about ourselves, even silly memes that fly around the boggersphere faster than UI gets taken to task by the feminazis are good things for becoming more comfortable with each other. We have reporters, academics, artists, politicians, business people and social satirists in the mix and it’s enriching our daily reading. This is such a good thing. We even have a lovely Russian lady giving her views on things. I’m still looking for the elusive Polish bloggers though.
We also seem to be reaching out further to cyberspace and making our presence felt. We had Robert Scoble over here to visit Cork and Dublin and he helped advertise other Irish bloggers. Sites like PodLeaders and Newsroom.ie are interviewing international tech leaders as well as local tech and business influencers. Us Irish bloggers are doing well!
We had a good few events like TechCamp and IT@Cork where the bloggers got together. Most recently being the Dublin blogger meetup where the real TwentyMajor may or may not have appeared.
It was through the Irish blogs community that the Digital Rights Ireland group formed and they’ve already shown their worth with massive media coverage. 2006 is looking like an amazing year for them, but I’m biased being a director. 🙂
Now that I don’t have work for a while, college is over til Jan 3rd and both the lobby groups I have fun with are slowing down for the holidays, I really really really guarantee I’ll do something about the Irish Blog Awards.
So, to get to my point at long last, I’d like to thank everyone who blogs because you contribute a great deal of knowledge to my daily life now and educate me non-stop. Keep blogging, keep your current high standards, keep encouraging your fellow bloggers and try and get more and more people to blog.
Linux as a Windows screensaver
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005Found this via Slashdot. Having Linux run as a screensaver in Windows. Pretty nifty and other words of praise.
Want some cheesecake? – Dossing Times now taking orders
Wednesday, December 21st, 2005Place your orders now for a chocolate orange and rum cheesecake with chocolate chip base. Nice one. I’ll have two please. Do you deliver?
Screw it. I’m off to see Sigur Ros again.
Wednesday, December 21st, 2005March 27th. Manchester Apollo. Anyone else interested in going?