Balloons in Cork via In Photos dot org
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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A balloon seller on Daunt Square in September 2009, during one of our photowalks. A shopper takes her ease in the foreground.
Related PostsBarry’s BalloonsThe witch and the balloonsUnhappy Child... Community Variety Show on March 26th in Bandon via Conor's Bandon Blog
Oh hello via Damien Mulley
One for the late night crew! Kicking Back feat Taxman via StevieGBlog
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...
Fianna Fáil to fund criminal Pension Managers via Branedy
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...
Irish Banks to ripoff NAMA via Branedy
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...
Unhappy in Dublin via In Photos dot org
Grim faced people walking along O’Connell Street in Dublin a month ago.
Related PostsUnhappy ChildHop On, Hop off the SpireRailway Tunnel... Eddie Lenihan documentary on TG4 via Damien Mulley
Phishing in Irish via Holy Shmoly!
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... False dawn of the city via In Photos dot org
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... Learn about Twitter whilst having a nice glass of vino via Conor's Bandon Blog
It’s wheely grass via In Photos dot org
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!
Related PostsThomas in his buggyA storm brewing at Allihies BeachStaring at me... The €4 Million Govt website that you never heard of via Damien Mulley
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.... Reach For The Sky via In Photos dot org
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!
Related PostsGolden ArchesThe Big M... Irish QUANGOs enjoy their monopolies via Ambrand.com
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... Update on the Dublin Twitter Treasure Hunt tomorrow via Damien Mulley
Gates of the Dead via In Photos dot org
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!
Related PostsNo related posts... Privacy in this newest digital age via Damien Mulley
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 and the Boardwalk via In Photos dot org
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.... A Neighborhood solution to water supply via Branedy
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 watchable but not memorable via Conor's Bandon Blog
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... The Snow Dog via In Photos dot org
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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