I hope Adam finds this to be funny 🙂
Archive for September, 2009
Changed my mind, Vote No, Leader says so
Monday, September 28th, 2009Fluffy Links – Monday 28th of September 2009
Monday, September 28th, 2009Another competition on Food Fight, this for goody bags from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
Looks like Donncha’s Cork photowalk facilitated by Hotel Pat and the Montenotte Hotel went well. Well done to Donncha on looking after everyone.
Should Murphy’s Ice Cream do an ice cream to campaign for equality?
Via M, new book from Irish author Alan Glynn.
National College of Ireland running great lunchtime talks. Legends in your Lunchtime.
Kind of like Moo Cards. Memolio.
The history of Bruce making Born to Run.
Aim for awesome. What a great way to run a business.
Irish band Atomic Horsebox and their song Air Guantanamo. You can pay what you like for their album on their site.
A video on a Yes Vote for Lisbon
Sunday, September 27th, 2009Under this video in the comments, no doubt the idiots from the Yes and No camps will forget the content of the video and it being humour and instead use the same forced bullshit they use everywhere else to not inform the public but verbally jerk themselves off at being “passionate” about a point. Point of order… Be warned.
TV shows of note – As suggested by you
Sunday, September 27th, 2009Been asking on Twitter what TV shows you thought were worth watching. My own comments added.
Mad Men is now a given. Glee too. (I’m in love with Glee at the moment)
Others suggested were:
True Blood (watched Series 1, meh to be honest)
Generation Kill (Bloody amazing)
Breaking Bad (Saw two episodes and saw it as just Weeds)
Peep Show
Damages (Series 1 was ok, 2 bored me quickly)
Nurse Jackie (great first few episodes but grows boring)
Lipstick Jungle
Any others?
Imelda May – “Don’t Tell the Devil” Live in Bruxelles
Saturday, September 26th, 2009First time seeing this girl live and she’s lovely. Talent and a good rapport with the audience. Amazing band too.
Disclaimer: I was there via an invite from WHPR, a client of Diageo and I got free pints of Guinness at it. The double cheeseburger, hamburger, cheeseburger and twisty fries I got from McDonald’s halfway through were not on their bill. Probably a good thing.
Irish Museum of Contemporary Art and Drills
Thursday, September 24th, 2009Myself and Alexia called into the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art after both being at Science Foundation Ireland to chat to fellow blogger Frank Gannon. The ReFunct Symposium in IMOCA is all but gone but one of the art pieces is a drill suspended from the ceiling, leaning against a wall and this drill is connected to their website. When the website is loaded by someone, the drill goes off. Here’s a video of this in action and me trying to explain it as Alexia loads the site on her iPhone.
Hockey (the band) – Live at the Academy
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009Saw them last night. Great performers, these lads. The crowd didn’t seem too into it and felt like some were there for a chat. Not at all like the vibe when they supported Passion Pit. Right up front people were chatting away as the band kicked into their first song and chatted all through it. Then the idiots trying to mosh at the end. Remnants of the idiocy from Oxegen?
Fun moment when Orin? volunteered from the crowd to do keyboards for the band. “Do you know how to do a D?” “I do D all the time”
Will ComReg fold for the third time against eircom?
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009And this is a picture of balls. Two pairs. If you come from a Comreg IP address they spin, so you know what they look like:
Photo owned by jeffisageek (cc)
So we see that eircom are going to court against the telecoms poddle again. Once again this is about something called Local Loop Unbundlin which is all about who has full control of your phone line from the exchange to your house. In the UK unbundling is a massive success and we see dirt cheap, high speed broadband and lots of choice. The opposite to here. LLU has never worked here and companies that thought they could get it to work like Smart got walloped. BT Ireland probably wouldn’t have moved out of consumer if LLU worked well. This latest court trouble is deja vu.
In 2005, Comreg proposed a Line Share Price of 39 cent which was successfully challenged by Eircom
In July 2008 eircom appealed ComReg’s direction to set Line Share price at €2.94. ComReg subsequently withdrew their direction.
And now we have the latest court challenge to a regulator that never goes to Court but jacks it in on the steps.
The hope on the horizon is that we seem now to have a Department of Communications that despises eircom when once it wouldn’t really challenge them. And whatever the sentiment of the Department, we get the same from the “independent” regulator. Interesting times. I’d like to see a day in Court as some kind of precedent might finally be set.
Fluffy Links – Tuesday September 22nd 2009
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009Ian Healy’s take on filesharing. This is your consumers talking dear record company.
The IDA had a blogger’s briefing about their new campaign last week. The Business Post covers the €2M ad campaign they showed us. (Diclaimer, their ad agency and I worked on the briefing) Resulting from this though the IDA are starting to embrace online communities. First stop is a LinkedIn discussion group they’re facilitating called Innovation Ireland. Name is a clue to the content. Contributions welcome.
Modest Mouse are back to Ireland in December. Nothing on ticketbastard yet but soon…
Rosemary Maccabe‘s site is live and a-kicking.
Phantom of the Opera (the old movie), in a Church with an organist. In Bandon.
Ogra Fianna Fáil do a Ronseal on Lisbon.
Entreprenural Internships with NDRC.
Nice tips on how to maintain being inspired.
Love it. Enterprise 2.0 sounds so rough but Social Business explains it better.
Genius. Wispa uses their advertising spaces to allow customers to have fun with messages.
This is a Coke Can I want.
Readers of FoodFight.ie say this is their fav Julia Child clip. Julia and her chickens:
Hockey – Song Away (Looking forward to seeing them tonight)
Let’s dance
Monday, September 21st, 2009This blog post on design houses have entrepreneurs got me thinking about businesses and how they should always be in an adapting frame of mind. It made me think of dancing and specifically of dancing at weddings. We start off with the bride and groom and the traditional waltzy dance and move there to the “classics” and pop hits with the wedding band and then as the DJ comes along we wobble our extremities to all different songs, rhythms and so on. Some businesses are perfect at the traditional stuff, no stamping on feet at all while others are shit and do their best not to crash into others as they spin about. The ones good at the waltzes sometimes find themselves in foreign land at this “modern” stuff and leave the dance floor.
I often think that while being fantastic at one style of dancing is great, the ones that are rough around the edges and will stand in the middle of a dance floor and give it a bash have the better attitudes. Trying different things out, being game for something new is a survival skill. I’m reminded of this by three tech companies in particular: Odeo, Seesmic and Game Neverending.
Photo owned by edenpictures (cc)
Odeo created a tool called Twittr which became Twitter and Odeo the shell got sold on. Seesmic started as a video service and now their main product is an aggregator for Twitter and more and Game Neverending had a photosharing tool that turned into Flickr. Sometimes if you do join the dancefloor after watching the ebb and flow and studying the dance moves you’ll be grand, sometimes the music changes without notice and you’ll need to improvise and adapt.
It seems this year more companies than ever had to adapt and yet still haven’t. Taxi drivers are a great example. All complaining there are too many plates. That can’t be changed but they won’t adapt in other ways. Offer premium services. Create a driving standard way higher than the regulator enforces and push that as a selling point. New music, they sit in chairs and grumble. Any other examples of Irish industries that are not dancing to different tunes when they could be?
You dancing? I’m asking. And an all too serious video to end the post with: