
A balloon seller on Daunt Square in September 2009, during one of our photowalks. A shopper takes her ease in the foreground.
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Every year the great people who run the Rosmini centre for adults with an intellectual disability organise a fun and interesting event to promote community integration and inclusion for everyone. This year they are organising a community variety show.
It’s on Friday the 26th of March in the GAA Hall in Bandon. Doors opening at 7.15, show starts at 8 sharp. It is not a fund raising event so tickets will be at the very affordable cost of €5 each.
The show will include:
A DJ
Singing & Music
Magic and Tricks (both kids and adults)
Bingo
Dance & Comedy
Raffle
Street Dancers
There will be spot prizes between performances.
Sounds like a great fun night for all the family. You should start seeing signs for it around the town soon....

I’m about, just more than a tad busy with upcoming events and that dayjob I signed myself up to. The useless drivel will return soon....
UK soul classic you might have had to be in the back bar to understand the sound I dedicate this to Gina, Shane and everyone else also the posse from the Donkey's Ears who are having a reunion in the Pav Friday week details...
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Fianna Fáil is now preparing to force every working man into funding Pension Funds that have been losing money every day. In other words they are funneling 8% of everyones paycheck into a black hole where there are no controls on pension fund managers. These incompetent Pension fund managers are allowed to lose money without regard to their customers. And there is NO need, you can earn interest on a pension WITHOUT risk. In fact this should be the number one requirement. Instead this is a gift to the criminal behavior of Pension manager. Should a regulation be put in place to guarantee that funds placed into pensions will never be less than the value of the investment. These crooks would scatter back under the rocks where they came out from. And Fianna Fáil would lose some more of their...
That headline isn’t really news, at least to the people of Ireland. And only the, very disconnected, Irish Government believe that their spinning of any other message has changed that public attitude.
But here is another one, Rent, the very nature of the overinflated rents, which are driving companies out of business. This has only one value, and that is to the Banks which are utilizing the higher rents to increase the apparent value of their holding before passing them on to NAMA. In any other country, this is called Fraud
Accounting fraud
In order to hide serious financial problems, some businesses have been known to use fraudulent bookkeeping to overstate sales and income, inflate the worth of the company’s assets or state a profit when the company is operating at a...
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Grim faced people walking along O’Connell Street in Dublin a month ago.
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Eddie should be declared a national treasure. Jealous of Allan and his pics....

Well, this is a surprise. One of my .ie email addresses got a very targeted phishing email. It was so specific that it was actually written in Irish! It wasn’t directed at me, but at a list owner address at linux.ie.
I wonder if the spammers know how many Irish people could actually read their email easily? It’d certainly be easier for most people to read in English.
Aire
Tá mé an tUasal Patrick KW Chan an Stiúrthóir Feidhmiúcháin agus Príomh-Oifigeach airgeadais Hang Seng Bank Ltd, Hong Cong.
Tá mé togra gnó brabúsaí leasa choitinn a roinnt le leat;
Baineann sé leis an aistriú suim mhór airgid.
Fuair mé do tagairt i mo cuardach a dhéanamh ar dhuine a oireann mo chaidreamh gnó molta.
Má tá suim agat i obair liom teagmháil a dhéanamh liom mo trí r-phost...

As you may have already guessed, that’s not the dawn. It’s the lights of Cork City (and Blarney) shining and into the sky in a long exposure shot I made last August.
I had meant to mention this sooner but 2 weeks ago I was shocked to hear about the death of Debbie Metrustry (@debbiemet), a wonderful person I had the pleasure of conversing with by tweet and by email over the course of the last year or so. She even won a print on this blog last year, but between this and that I never got around to sending it to her. I hope I can get in touch with her family at some stage and offer it to them instead.
Debbie’s blog on WordPress.com is still there and will be as long as the service is there (which is forever, right?), I’ve seen to that.
If you knew Debbie you might...
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I know the whole Twitter thing is still completely alien to a lot of people. How many wondered what the hell the papers were on about when discussing Dan Boyle’s “tweet“?
Here’s a suggestion for dipping your toe in and getting a handle on it all. Karwig Wines in Carrigaline is running the third “Twebt” which is a Twitter wine-tasting competition (Bubble Brothers and Curious Wines ran the first two).
The idea is very simple. You get a bottle of wine from Joe and his gang in Karwig’s and it is wrapped up so you can’t see the label. At an agreed time, 9pm Sunday March 7th, people open the wine and start tasting it and putting their tasting notes up on Twitter.Then they start guessing the country, grape etc and maybe even the exact wine....

One of the wheels of a boat trailer in Baltimore, County Cork.
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Petrol pumps sit idle at the same derelict station I shot this flo gas photo.
One of my photos will be auctioned off today as part of Bid For Haiti in the Metropole Hotel in Cork. Paul O’Mahony is organising it but my brother Donal is helping to get prints together.
Check out #bidforhaiti on Twitter!
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In a single sentence: 4M quid spent, no stats on usage.
The Irish Times today has a story on Mobhaile, which was a website created so county councils and community groups could have an online presence. My first interaction with the site was via blogs that it hosted for a time. I was reminded of it a few years ago by a fellow blogger and then saw mention of it last year too, so in December 2009 I did an FOI about it after reading Dáil transcripts pointing out at least 2M was spent on it. In turned out to be 4 Million.
The expenses for this system are below. Was it a success? Well they spent 4 million quid and then shut it down and how did they measure success? Well they didn’t know the number of visitors or logged in users as they never enabled logging of this information....

Bare trees reach for the sky by the Atlantic Pond and Marina in Blackrock, Cork.
Shot in April 2008.
woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof….
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Bishop Lucey Park in Cork City was the location of a wonderful display of angel statues. They were decorated in all sorts of ways and even had one dedicated to Jedward!
Adam had a great time running around them, and had loads of fun playing with another boy named Nathaniel. They went crazy chasing around and screaming as loud as they could at the pigeons who had an unexpected bout of exercise!
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I was in Dublin yesterday to see Matt and Craig become Honorary Patrons of The University Philosophical Society in Trinity College. It was a low key informal event with many students and a few staff in attendance.
Eamon Leonard, of Echo Libre, kindly used my Flip Mino to record the Q&A session that followed. I want to express my gratitude to him for doing a fine job, especially as I saw him switch the camera from arm to arm during the hour long event. It wasn’t easy holding the camera aloft for so long. I’m currently transcoding the video and trying to make it smaller before uploading it.
I’ll add it to this post later, you won’t want to miss it!
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The bridge spanning the river outside Abbeystrowry Cemetery near Skibereen in County Cork.
My wife was driving, I was able to enjoy the scenery!
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In the early years of the two thousands I needed to sit a Driving Test. At the time the Dept of Transport had a monopoly on driving tests. The waiting list was about 6 months long. The Dept hada monopoly, and they knew it. It was illegal to drive without a licence, and of course insurance (which followed), so they could have the list as long as they wanted and no one could do anything.
They weren’t quite the only show in town, there were stories on the grapevine of people travelling to the UK (Northern Ireland) to sit driving tests there. They could then convert their UK licences to Irish ones in a simple quick process - although there were other stories that people actually kept their UK licences as that was a way of avoiding Irish penalty points. I love peoples ingenuity!
Well...
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Have a look at the twitter account DublinTweasure.
It starts at 2pm in Dublin City Centre.
What you need is a phone with web access, a team and knowledge or access to knowledge.
Cash prize for the winners too. Full details of what will be asked of you will be on the Twitter account....

The roofed gates of Abbeystrowry Cemetery near Skibereen in County Cork.
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Abbeystrowry Cemetery is located near Skibereen in County Cork. It is the site of some of the mass graves used in the area during the famine around 1845.
I didn’t know, or had forgotten there was a famine in 1740/1741 when 400,000 people died. That many people died on this little island of ours in such a short time? The mind boggles.
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A small boat in Baltimore, County Cork.
The Galleries on Mallow Camera Club are back in operation! The site used to use a modified fGallery to allow members to upload photos but there’s an exploit for the last version of that plugin, it doesn’t work in WP 2.9.x and the author has abandoned the project unfortunately.
WordPress now supports galleries anyway so I converted the fGallery galleries into pages and upload files in the posts table. Works nicely now!
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The Press Ombudsman and Press Council had an event in Cork last Friday and I was asked to talk for 15 minutes on privacy and blogging though I instead talked about what is happening online and thoughts on privacy.
I talked about Twitter and Facebook pumping out tens of millions bits of data every day and after the recent privacy changes on Twitter, these bits are public. Twitter mostly throws out 25 million 140 character chunks of text each day as well as links to websites and 100s of 1000s of not millions of cameraphone photos. Facebook 10s of millions more. So perhaps 100 Million chunks of data be they links, text or photos are now shared with the web. Once shared, they’ll be found. Google and Facebook already tie directly into Twitter now. Facebook and Bing are tied together and...

The Clarion Hotel and the Boardwalk and offices sit on the banks of the River Lee in Cork City Centre.
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The Blackrock end of Pairc Ui Chaoimh in Cork. Michael Jackson, U2 and err, not sure who else have played in this stadium as well as the obvious GAA matches!
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Vodafone speedtest
Originally uploaded by Branedy
The first time I tried this I was getting better than 1.2Mbs but I forgot how to do a print screen, this is what I got the second time, too bad that it show so much inconsistency. But typical from what I’ve heard from other Vodafone users. It’s interesting that the upload speed is faster that my Eircom DSL line by almost 2X while the Eircom downlink was rated a 2.7Mbs....
If you live close enough to your neighbor (most semi-detached homes would fit this description) you can attach your external faucet, from your non functioning household water, to that of your neighbors FUNCTIONING water supply with a common garden hose and By opening the valves on the waterless house, and then the working house. The house with the functioning water supply will supply the non functioning house.
You might call this an Irish solution to an Irish problem. And since we are not currently paying for the water, we aren’t stealing water, just loaning......

Neven Maguire: Home Chef
I’ve always been a huge fan of Neven. Anyone who can run a successful restaurant in the middle of nowhere in rural Cavan gets my vote. His energy is always fantastic too. This new show is ok but nothing amazing.
I’m surprised to see cookery programmes still being made that refer to “dinner parties”. Does anyone still have those?
His three dishes in the opening episode were asparagus and smoked salmon tartlet, confit duck and a tiramsu variant.
Whilst I loved the look of the first dish, it seems a bit ridiculous to have an asparagus recipe in January. Or a salad with Nasturtium flowers whilst we’re on the subject. Have the producers of the programme missed every single Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall espisode ever made? Where did...
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Oscar our Shih Tzu is as comfortable in snow as he is in any other extreme weather. He’d rather be indoors in the warmth!
It snowed heavily and steadily today in Blarney. We took Adam out in it after wrapping him up warm and he played with the kids down the road, throwing snow around, messing with a bucket, and generally having fun.
Hi Mairead! Glad you follow my blog, you should comment some time!
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