Archive for the ‘blogs’ Category

Fluffy Links – January 12th 2007

Friday, January 12th, 2007

Mininova reaches their billionth download. Yes, a billion torrent files download. Scary.

Tara Hunt on the Boutique Generation. Tara Hunt is all kinds of cool. I’d suggest subscribing to her blog. Well worth it.

Bebo launch Bebo Authors – An interface to Amazon. They seem to have beaten mySpace to the punch. Surprised there hasn’t been more social networking sites doing this with the demographics they have.

Via Adam Platti 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn by Guy Kawasaki.

I now have a Wii. It’s a lot of fun and certainly can make you fit. This seems like a cool game for it.

Casio just sold their billionth calculator.

Speaking of Casio, my username for Second Life is casio Tone. Say hello. (If I ever log back in.)

Via linkmap. Celebrities get tasered. More great american TV. Eric Estrada needs to get better plastic surgeons.

Arcade Fire Dublin – Sold out already?

Friday, January 12th, 2007

9 minutes past 9 and the Ticketmaster site is saying no tickets available. Ticketmaster phone is engaged. Arghhh.

Bebo Award – The more that enter, the bigger the prize

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

The Bebo Award, run off the Irish Awards Bebo profile is going well enough. 100 profiles have been entered. The more profiles, the better the prize. Right now the prize is an iPod Shuffle. It will turn into an iPod Nano if over 400 people are entered and it will become something a little better again if over 1000 profiles are entered. Hat tip to the marketing pilgrim.

Fluffy Links – January 11th 2007

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

More Gardai on the interweb. The pay isn’t great one Garda says. To start with maybe.

Brave Iranian politicians.

How to tell a friend his cat is dead.

Blurring images does no good.

I was speaking to God earlier today and sadly he made no mention f you.

Via BoingBoingearbud emoticons

Podcast from two Irish fellers about football.

Blackadder, Flashheart:

Blackadder again.

2007 Blog Award Nominations – Nominate your fav blog now

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

Details of how to nominate your blog or someone elses.

Please pass the word along.

Fluffy Links – January 10th 2007

Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

Bigulo – the Bebo hottie search engine. Blame this fella. 🙂

Insure.ie didn’t get my business the other day but the way they handled my blog post about them has impressed me.
Dublin bloggers better than Cork bloggers? Google thinks not.

Even the South Pole is better wired than Ireland.

Muppets – Fuck Tha Police. (On Bifsniff)

10 kick-ass opening sequencies for movies.

The French protest 2007. (BBC Story.) They want to stay in 2006.

Piaras is on the money for this one.

Get Smart Opening (first version):

The old 3-way gun trick:

Best phone ever? – Apple iPhone is for real

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Via engadget:

Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that’s frickin’ thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch wide touchscreen display with multi-touch support, 2 megapixel cam, 8 GB of storage, and 3G radio — and amazingly, it somehow runs OS X. A proximity sensor disables the touchscreen when it’s close to your face, while the iTunes support rocks CoverFlow

I so so so so so so so so sooooooooo want one.

Update: It does not have 3G as we know it. It has 3G radio, whatever the hell that is.

Blog Awards 2007 – All sponsorship slots gone

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Update: All category sponsorship slots are gone.

It all seems to be going well with the blog award sponsorships. Here’s a list of the sponsors and the categories they are sponsoring.

Best Group Blog and Best Sports and Recreation Blog are without sponsors though I expect them to go soon.

The sponsors so far for the 2007 Awards are:

Hosting365 | Beecher Networks | pixenate.com – The online photo editor | Poetry Ireland | Technofutures | Interactions | Edge Media | FirstPartners.net | Bitzbuzz | Equisoft | Sunday Tribune | iQ Content Ltd | Edelman | logic+intuition | Clubbing.ie | Microsoft | PutPlace | Boards.ie

Irish Insurance crowd Insure.ie – useless?

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Jan 2007. Since I wrote the below post I’ve used Insure.ie since and they gave me an insurance quote that was 30% cheaper than my own insurance provider and for fully comprehensive and not just 3rd party. Phone service this time was more than good, it was excellent. Recommended now!

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I’m shopping around for a new insurance policy for my car so I ring up Insure.ie who are part of Mike Murphy Insurance and choose the new customer option. I get through to some guy who’s name I don’t really care to know and I tell him my renewal for insurance is due but I want to shop around and get a good deal. He tells me I am on the wrong option and without asking switches me to “Existing customer, renewals”. Grrr. I explain to the next woman, who I mistakenly called Helen, though I don’t really care, that I am looking for insurance for my car and want some prices. “Oh that’ll be the new business line”. I get moved back to the first line. I give some details and I am told I am on the wrong line and she’ll switch me. This girl is painfully fucking stupid. She doesn’t press the transfer button and instead just types the extension number into the phone so I go “eh sorry” BEEP “I think you” BEEP BEEP “need to first” CLICK. Call ends.

Insure.ie will not be getting my business. Well done them.

Update: The people from Quinn Direct on the otherhand were really good and professional except they seemed to think I was a diabetic. I wasn’t that happy that they had a file on me especially with the wrong information.

Update again: Well the complaints department for Insure.ie is proactive at least. Some nice chap (I really am shit for names) rang me to sort this issue out and offer a quote. Too late though, plenty of choice in the insurance market. The girls name wasn’t Helen either so I’ve edited this post to reflect that.

*later update
I must say I am impressed with the attitude from Insure.ie. Not sure how they found out about my blog post but they took the time to ring me and figure out what went wrong and then offered to carry out what I was looking for. Generally when I get calls about my blog posts I am usually threatened with legal action. (Thus why I list my solicitor’s details on my blog.)

It’d be great if every person who had an issue with a company got treated like this. The only better treatment is to get good service first time every time. I’ve reworded the post title from “Insure.ie – fucking useless” to “Insure.ie – Useless?” I’ve been so impressed.

Fluffy Links – January 9th 2007

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Use your DS Lite like an iPod. Lovely touchscreen functionality.

Add more emoticons to GMail chat. Won’t work for me as my Firefox version is too old. I’m in fear of upgrading and having all my settings wiped. This version does me fine anyway.

Wouldn’t it be nice for SiliconValley to virtually extend itself to other places, such as Ireland. Shel Israel mentions that half of Silicon Valley startups were launched by immigrants but with connectivity getting better, do they need to move there now?

This issue is relevant to Global Neighborhoods because technology may make it less necessary for the world’s best and brightest visionary technologists to cluster here in Silicon Valley. In short, the flattening world may mean that the Andy Grove, Vinod Khosla and Sergey Brin, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Carnegie of the future may not have to come here, robbing America of its ability to attract so many of the world’s best and brightest.

As recommended by Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman recommends some comic books to read. Great list.

Wow, now that’s an impressive attitude from a McDonald’s employee in Ireland.

Cringely’s latest column. This bit sticks out for me:

I would predict the fall of CEO Howard Stringer again if there were clearly somebody at Sony who wants his job. The business is in such difficulty that Microsoft is discussing internally how to help Sony from going under, since that would create a raft of antitrust problems for Redmond. I am not making this up.

This Irish Times story about Bebo suggesting giving all school kids email addresses for age verification is interesting for a few things. It is a good enough way of identifying ages and schoolkids and could easily be a way of blocking non-schoolkids from accessing profiles of kids. As it states:

Advocates of this system would hope that the special e-mail addresses would mean that older adults would be unable to misrepresent themselves as being of schoolgoing age.

This bit kind of annoys me:

A Department of Education and Science spokesman said access to social networking sites, such as Bebo, is blocked under content filtering services in place in schools.

Didn’t they have the same blinkered attitude to sex education years back? If you don’t talk about it, it might go away. Didn’t help with teenage pregnancies did it? Bebo is here and needs to be recognised as being here. A lot of the parents of kids might not know anything about the Internet or Bebo and wouldn’t have an iota about advising their kids about it. I think schools should have special classes on dealing with interacting with others online and how best to deal with unwanted solicitations. I don’t think denying these issues exist is a credible way of addressing them.

Actually Labour’s Kathleen O’Meara talks a little sense when she says parents should get training too but I would disagree with what she says about kids:

It seems to me that youngsters are themselves quite well clued in as to how to behave safely and responsibly when using services such as Bebo

And now here’s another interesting take about knowing some details for kids online.

Zadi wrote to her friends, begging for help. One of her friends found the boy’s school on his profile and contacted the principal who, in turn, contacted the family and got an ambulance to the boy in time.

The dance scene from Napoleon Dynamite. Reminds me of someone I see around college:

Keith Ellison makes a beeline for Virgil Goode. Goode is the congressman that caused a huge fuss that Ellison was a muslim and wrote unflattering remarks about stopping more muslims from getting into congress. Ellison seems to genuinely want to reach out to the Virginia representative.