Damien Mulley

Well done to the people in Irish gaming software company Havok, according to Techcrunch, they’ve been snapped up by Intel. This follows the March aquisition of Irish gaming middleware company DemonWare by Activision. Well done all. Nice to see Ireland doing so well in the gaming industry.

Markham has a nice post about running the Sydney Marathon. He seems to be in perpetual training mode for all these endurance feats. He’s hoping to raise a few quid this year for noble reasons:

On September 23 I’ll be running the Sydney marathon in aid of the Multiple Sclerosis Society and in memory of my mum, Mary, and her unusually intense struggle with Multiple Sclerosis.

Head on over to his blog if you want to read more and contribute to his run.

Bloglines has delivered me 8000+ unread posts in my Irish feed folder alone. Bit of a hiccup there lads since I went through all my feeds about an hour ago. I still find it faster and better to use than Google Reader by the way. Google Reader feels like scrolling through treacle.

Update 2: Mark Simpson links here and says just call it Mormo. He coined the words metrosexual and sporno, who am I to disagree!

Update: Andy, he of no blog address suggested this be called Mormno. We have porno, we have sporno, now we have Mormno.

There’s a bit of a brouhaha going on in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Since even Italian priests are doing calendars, it seems Mormon Missionaries are doing calendars now. These lads are getting their tops off too. Judging from the calendar it seems they’ve been hitting the gym a lot while doing their missionary work. Check out the cover:

And there’s a whole online store to go with the calendar where you can buy male and female t-shirts with interesting slogans:

Yes, already bulk buying for Christmas presents. Should ask the next Mormons to your door if they are in the calendar or would they like to be in one. Time their quick exit speed. Or just pop on the t-shirt as you seeing them coming to the door.

Update 3: Now with Youtube video. Warning awkward video production:

It took a lot longer to sell out this time round but hooray and stuff as I finally got Arcade Fire tickets. I got four tickets. I am but one person. If anyone has spare tickets for the now second night and wants to swap for the first night, give me a shout. Might as well get to see both shows.

In order to cut down on costs, the HSE are implementing the following in Cork University Hospital, according to a source in there:

• Contract cleaners are having their hours cut to save money. Cos we need less clean hospitals with MRSA rampant.
• Staff are going to be charged for parking now, when before it was free.
• The hiring freeze is til December or January, not September as has been stated.
• They are thinking of going back to a monthly pay system instead of a twoweekly system as they can let three people go then.

Seán is right. The eircom hotspot logo is almost the same as the RSS logo.

Conor Pope tells you how to tune in the free rugby matches on Le Sky box.

The Album Archive has moved to wordpress. Change your blog rolls. Anyone know about putting redirects on blogger for it?

Irish Uber design guru and Irish SEO expert call bullshit on another SEO “expert” coming along. Lions playing with their meal.

I agree with Russell here. I can’t read any blogs or websites with white writing on a black background. It hurts my eyes and brain quite quickly so the bookmarklet he links to is perfect.

Oh god I just adore these trainers.

23 and me. Have some of your DNA analysed and see your genetic traits. Sounds though like they’ll add it to a big DB.

Via Ben Hammersley: This is a tackle, please sing “Bomb Track” when watching this –

This is for all those (like me) who have terrible luck trying to get Arcade Fire tickets:

To the Google employee who is slagging me and my blog off in private emails and is continuing to harass me after I asked you NOT to contact me anymore, below is space for your right of reply but just a few notes for you and your colleagues:

Attention all Google employees who are apparently pissed off that I slagged off their company on the Marian Finnucane show last weekend. I will not indulge or entertain your demands for me to justify what I said in private when you and your company don’t have the balls to come on the radio and answer questions. You’ll happily go on to talk marketing bullshit but it seems when it comes to anything challenging, you need to seriously control the debate or you won’t go on.

If you can’t challenge me in public because of your company’s policy on being more secretive than the NSA then don’t skulk around in the shadows putting questions to me and calling my answer lame if I tell you to kindly piss off. You signed up for the company and their rules, live with it.

The same of course goes for Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and everyone else I have a dig off. (There are loads). Of course when I’ve taken shots at companies before I’ve actually had people contact me and explain their side and they’ve done it officially and without the confrontational attitude.

If Google of course would like to have a public debate about their ability to totally fuck over your life if they abuse their technology, then let me know. I think it would be good for the tinfoil hat wearers like myself, the quite balanced people in DRI and the Google lfanboys to get all of this out in the open.

In a conversation on Facebook yesterday someone was asking me why I blog so much and so often. I answered them in a stream of consciousness mini-rant which is below. I currently have 3-4 blogs with this one, the Blog Awards one, IWillNotHold.com and another one I mess on. I’ll be launching another two in the next two weeks and I think another shortly after. One of them will be designed to at least pay for itself. Now, your turn, if you are a blogger, why do you blog?

Mine:

Why the obsessive blogging and writing? I think too much, I don’t unwind, I go to bed exhausted after putting a long day routing around information, consuming it, playing with it and exporting it back to a blog or draft post. When I wake in the morning it’s to my brain playing some song over and over and I have about 10 ideas and thoughts and new events I want to organise. Once I’m awake and the song is playing I cannot get back to sleep again. My brain is a cruel mistress I think, the more I do, the more I think I should do.

I also find that blogging allows me to pour out these various thoughts in my head and structure them so they make more sense to me as I fix them to make sense for others and I also find that as I write things down, I make new discoveries about what I’m writing about. I find new connections to disparate pieces of information I’ve read about as I start writing stuff down. It kind of keeps the excitement going, as the more you write, the more you discover.

Of course the blog posts too are a numbers thing. I know if I don’t do two blog posts a day I’ll get less visits and my ego likes the attention. I do find it very good training and it keeps me regimented a bit too. The fluffy links make me think in a kind of popculture mentality where like a magpie I pick up shiny things.

As I surf the net I’m categorising everything and checking to see have others mentioned it. The afternoon posts I try to make about a specific topic, general tech and business. These have a little more thought to them and I have some of these pieces in draft for months. I recently cleaned my drafts section on my blog as I think I had about 60 of them made of all sorts of crap. I write maybe a little too much. So yeah, that’s me and blogging.