Damien Mulley

Redmum introduces Moofobs.

Via Seth: Your Name on Toast – the next Million Dollar Homepage? This one is for charity though. My main question is how do they burn the name onto the toast?

Vote via TiVo or your PC? We can’t even get e-Voting right, should Ireland just move to looking at online voting?

Biomapping. Map your feelings in a real world environment. Find areas of greatest stress and calm in your neighbourhood. Interesting idea.

Flutes? Huh?

Phil is busy blogging.

Cool app for your website. Snap Preview. Allows you to see a small preview of the website being linked to without having to visit it.

Mike Murphy pranking Gay Byrne:

The Pogues and the Dubliners on the Late Late Show(Slugger O’Toole, drunk as a rule):

The Pogues – Rainy Night in Soho:

I think sometime around the end of June 2005 I started the statcounter for this blog. (See the end of the page to view the live stats.)

Sometime over this weekend the counter went over the 300k mark. I’d like to thank everyone that reads this blog and links to it and leaves comments on the blog. Thank you for years of feedback and for coming back again and again.

Below is a graph of visits to this site. Right now visits range from 200-1000 per day but the trend seems to suggest the upper point is going down slowly over time. Thanks also go to Blacknight.ie who have hosted this site for the past few years and dealt with all those lonely nerds who came to the site in their 1000s to find a girlfriend and put pressure on their servers.

Simon’s latest culinary post has motivated me to mention my weekend of food. Went to the Ivory Tower on Friday night and apart from the great company, the food was superb. This was my third time there and the first time impressed me a lot but I wasn’t so happy the second time. Third time was the charm.

Carrpachio pigeon was the surprise starter. Think serrano ham but done with a pigeon. Yeah, raw, rolled and spiced. The next course for me was Korean style bacon and cabbage. Gorgeous and really spicy. D got the duck and hedgehog starter. Yes, hedgehog. For the next course I got the miso oyster soup and then had baby Octopus for the main meal. Got a lovely fresh tropical fruit salad with a lovely lychee sorbet for desert. Whole meal was washed down with Brightwater Sauvignon blanc which the Ivory Tower gets from Bubble Brothers I would guess. They were out of sancerre. I was disappointed.

Treasa and myself went to Gusto on saturday for lunch (brekky for me). I got their Jamaican Jerk on pita. The coffee in there is better than most places in Cork. The tea is good too. Go visit if you are visiting Cork.

On Saturday I went to Rossini’s for a really good Italian meal. Service as usual in Rossini’s is dead slow. The pinot grigot in there was great and I had *cough* just a few glasses before my starter arrived. (They had messed up the damned order and I had to order it again about 30 mins after giving the order to the waiter.) I then moved on to a lovely red – Montepulciano d’Abruzzo (though the one Bubble Brothers stock is a diff vineyardI think) and had a few glasses of that with the Tris Ala Rossini dish, which is three types of pasta. The portion looked small but I was barely able to finish it. I managed the tiramisu after though. Today, all I want is more of that red wine and pasta. Possibly watching too much of the Soprano’s on dvd is making me like this.

Where do they get all their energy from? They must be on the same type of speed as the kids over on Blogorrah.

Meanwhile, Mary Gilmartin has put together a fantastic and extensive list of Irish Women Bloggers. I’ll pester Rob to create an aggregator for this list. 🙂

A few weeks back I blogged about the Irish Brain Trust idea. An advosry board for new Irish companies or existing ones who wanted some advice.

As a result of that John Timmons has set up BusinessAdvisory.ie and over the next few weeks/months we’ll start putting together a structure for this thing and see what we can do. Stay tuned.

A Dave McClure idea, halfbaked could easily be run as an event at BarCamp. Here are the guidelines from Dave:

• Act 1: start by having people yell out ~50 random words.
• Act 2: split into 5 teams, each chooses 2 words + “.com”
• Act 3: each team has ~10 min to prep their BlankBlank.com biz plan

(biz plan = product idea, revenue model, marketing plan, logo, tagline)

• Act 4: each team does a 5 minute pitch on their product to a VC
• Act 5: vote on who did the best job, then celebrate the insanity

Details of the latest Halfbaked.

This looks like a quite fun thing to do and along with Pecha Kucha would make the event a little more relaxed and interactive.

Around America in 80 days. In a mini, visiting each of the states that are joined to each other and visiting the smallest town in each one. Sounds fun.

Pets in costume. Freaks.

Want to buy some GMail email addresses? Check out EBay.ie. Because getting GMail invites is so bloody difficult.

You can now watch the whole of “The Power of Nightmares” online.

Microsoft Zune are sponsoring blogs to get the word out on their iPod competitor. Trouble is they demand you cannot say unkind things about Microsoft or Zune. Tut tut. Scoble has a nice soundbite on that: “You define yourself and your business by the customers you fire”

Carpark North – Human. I only have a few videos on my iPod. This is one.

Via Boards.ie

Dirk Benedict aka Starbuck from the original Battlestar in the series “Paine Management”:

Over on the blog awards website I mention that planning has started and I also go over the kind of sponsorship I need to make it better than last year. Also, 4 new categories are announced and 4 more surprise ones will be announced closer to the day. Suggestions for other categories are also welcomed over there.

(It’s a Simpsons quote.)

Another pay to play Web awards got coverage in the Examiner yesterday. The Webbys. Fee details. The Irish site is here. Take a deep breath before clicking. I love the bit at the bottom that is barely legible because of the colours on the page:

This website skillfully created by Brightspark and wonderfully hosted by Webhost.ie

Eoghan, Richard, Alan, thoughts?

Update: They’re delighted with their coverage. 🙂

Don’t forget the Politics in Ireland competition! (I’m saying this too much I guess.)

Education in Ireland. A view from the coalface/Western front. We need more teachers blogging and explaining what it is like from day to day.

How to tie a double windsor.

Irish energy regulator once again acts as Bord Gais apologist. Maybe now that the Consumers Assocation get less money from the Government, they might start making bigger noises. Though they’re still getting paid by numerous quangos to be on their “advisory” panels e.g. they are paid €1500 to attend consumer meetings with ComReg. In return at a meeting with the EU the Assocation sang the praises of ComReg and their consumer initiatives and rattling off false ComReg figures.

Mmm cupcakes.

Who wouldn’t want a rampaging Willie t-shirt? No filthy, not that. Wash your mind out with soap!

Via Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: Jumbo landing on an airstrip that’s really really short and really really narrow. Final flight of this jumbo. Magnificient piloting of this sky giant:

Ist Bruno! He’s just a gay version of Borat. Baron-Cohen got 40m for a Bruno movie? I’m curious are they just making something like a Borat sequel with this character.