Away For A Few Days
30/06/08 23:11 Filed in: Work
Off to
Tuscany tomorrow.
And before anyone goes “Lucky sod!”, it’s work, OK?
Back Saturday night.
And before anyone goes “Lucky sod!”, it’s work, OK?
Back Saturday night.
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Macro Mode
28/06/08 23:25 Filed in: Photos
The camera
that I bought a while back, a Ricoh Caplio
R7, has a great lens.
As well as a really good wide-angle option, it can
capture some fantastic detail up close in Macro
mode.
I have been playing around with it over the last while, mostly with the produce of my wife’s flower beds, pots and hanging baskets.
A few shots after the jump, and a gallery here.
Wait! There's More…
I have been playing around with it over the last while, mostly with the produce of my wife’s flower beds, pots and hanging baskets.
A few shots after the jump, and a gallery here.
Wait! There's More…
Ryanair Talking Bollocks (Again)
28/06/08 21:40 Filed in: General
Nonsense
Ryanair
CEO Michael O’Leary was on The Last Word on Thursday
evening, arguing against the provision of the Dublin
North Metro project. This is a pet topic of Ryanair,
and one that I noted their opinions on
before.
(Download an MP3 of the interview here.)
But this time O’Leary excelled himself as the arrogant, pompous, “Look at me, I’m on the side of the consumer” little gobshite that he is. His schtick is that because the majority of passengers come to airports in cars, therefore they are not interested in any other form of transport to get them to and from Dublin Airport. During the debate, his views were challenged by Sean Murphy, Director of Policy at Chambers Ireland. Whenever Murphy spoke, O’Leary could be heard making derisory snoring noises.
What he failed to say is that Ryanair have a commercial interest in maintaining the status quo. They have a deal with Hertz at the airport, and earn commission on referrals to Hertz from the Ryanair website. In addition, car parking is a valuable revenue stream to the DAA, and any reduction in that would doubtless lead to higher landing charges for airlines like Ryanair.
Still, expecting them to come clean would be futile. This is after all the airline that tried to pull a fast one on Munster fans earlier this year. Predicting as far back as January that their team would reach the final in Cardiff in May, fans booked the 6.50am flight on Ryanair to Bristol for fares in in the region of €50 or so. Once Munster won the semi-final, Ryanair ‘rescheduled’ the flight to 3pm (which would have been too tight to make the 5pm kick-off time), and offered fans a full refund if the new time didn’t suit. But a few days later, the 6.50am flight miraculously reappeared, this time priced at €229.
But this time O’Leary excelled himself as the arrogant, pompous, “Look at me, I’m on the side of the consumer” little gobshite that he is. His schtick is that because the majority of passengers come to airports in cars, therefore they are not interested in any other form of transport to get them to and from Dublin Airport. During the debate, his views were challenged by Sean Murphy, Director of Policy at Chambers Ireland. Whenever Murphy spoke, O’Leary could be heard making derisory snoring noises.
What he failed to say is that Ryanair have a commercial interest in maintaining the status quo. They have a deal with Hertz at the airport, and earn commission on referrals to Hertz from the Ryanair website. In addition, car parking is a valuable revenue stream to the DAA, and any reduction in that would doubtless lead to higher landing charges for airlines like Ryanair.
Still, expecting them to come clean would be futile. This is after all the airline that tried to pull a fast one on Munster fans earlier this year. Predicting as far back as January that their team would reach the final in Cardiff in May, fans booked the 6.50am flight on Ryanair to Bristol for fares in in the region of €50 or so. Once Munster won the semi-final, Ryanair ‘rescheduled’ the flight to 3pm (which would have been too tight to make the 5pm kick-off time), and offered fans a full refund if the new time didn’t suit. But a few days later, the 6.50am flight miraculously reappeared, this time priced at €229.
The Times They Are No Longer A-Chargin'
28/06/08 21:30 Filed in: General
Nonsense
Excellent
news comes today from
the Irish Times, who will open up their online
service free to read from Monday. The paper has its
faults (pomposity, Dublin-centric, oh-so-fluffy
Weekend Magazine), but compared to the competition,
it’s streets ahead.
The new service will also have a new url: irishtimes.com, and the existing one, ireland.com will continue life as a portal for everything Irish. (A portal site? How very Web 1.0!)
The new service will also have a new url: irishtimes.com, and the existing one, ireland.com will continue life as a portal for everything Irish. (A portal site? How very Web 1.0!)
Passwords
27/06/08 22:27 Filed in: Tech
I have an
app here on my Mac called Yojimbo, which is a
repsoitory for various bits ‘n’ bobs. I use it a lot
for things
like
licence keys of purchased software, PDFs of online
receipts, etc. But it also stores all the username and
password combinations I use. If ever I find myself
looking blankly at a login page, I just consult Yojimbo
and find the relevant username and password, having
first unlocked it with a password I keep in my brain.
Mac OS X has a utility that addresses this need and more, called Keychain.
Whenever you visit a
site and enter a username and password, you get the
option to save for future use. This is handy if you
only ever have one user, but if you have two or more
users, it doesn’t work so well. My wife and I both have
Gmail accounts (I have at least four), so relying on
Keychain doesn’t work so well in this case. Keychain
also keeps a record of usernames and passwords for
system functions like wireless networks, etc.
I have another utility installed called 1Password, which gets over this. This installs a
button on your
browsers, which when you click it, lists all the user
accounts available for the relevant service. If you
think that sounds a bit too risky, it can be locked off
so that it can’t be accessed by unauthorised users.
Setting effective and memorable passwords can be tricky. We are always told to use letters and numbers and mix lower case and upper case. For some reason that I cannot explain, I have an unnatural memory for car registrations. I can remember the reg numbers of my parents’ cars back to the early 1970s, so combinations of two or more can make a good strong password. Also, and again for reasons unexplained, I have ingrained on my memory postcodes of addresses I lived at in London. Add in the house number and capitalise the first lot of letters, and there’s another one.
One of the big temptations is to use the same username and password combination across everything. This is a serious no-no, because if your cover gets blown, you could be in serious trouble.
Mac OS X has a utility that addresses this need and more, called Keychain.
I have another utility installed called 1Password, which gets over this. This installs a
Setting effective and memorable passwords can be tricky. We are always told to use letters and numbers and mix lower case and upper case. For some reason that I cannot explain, I have an unnatural memory for car registrations. I can remember the reg numbers of my parents’ cars back to the early 1970s, so combinations of two or more can make a good strong password. Also, and again for reasons unexplained, I have ingrained on my memory postcodes of addresses I lived at in London. Add in the house number and capitalise the first lot of letters, and there’s another one.
One of the big temptations is to use the same username and password combination across everything. This is a serious no-no, because if your cover gets blown, you could be in serious trouble.
Time Machine
When Mac
OS X Leopard was released a few months ago, one of the
major features being promoted was Time Machine. This was Apple’s
revolutionary approach to backing up, which creates
incremental versions of files and documents that can
be accessed by going “back in time.” So if you
create a file on a Monday and amend it on Wednesday,
and then on Thursday decide you actually wanted
Monday’s version to work on, you can restore your
current version of the file to the state it was in
on Monday. When I upgraded, I set Time Machine up to
back up to an external hard drive, even though I was
already using SuperDuper! as a backup
solution (and Mozy too. And
Flickr for my photos. As
you can see, I’m paranoid about data loss.)
I never had occasion
to actually restore anything from any of my back-up
sets till last week. I was writing a piece on this site
about the death of
Esbjörn Svensson, and was trying to
embed an MP3 of one of his tunes into the post.
Whatever happened, the page file got corrupted and
threw up an error message when I tried to publish. I
deleted the post, rewrote it without the MP3 and
tried again. Same story. It was late and I was
heading for France the following day, so I decided
to leave it till I came back to sort out.
The whole site is contained as a single Rapidweaver
file (called a sandwich), which is stored on the hard
drive of my iMac, and backed up to my three back-up
systems daily. So by the time I came back home, the
corrupt file was now the backed up one. Normally, this
would cause a problem, but because I have Time Machine,
I was able to fix it quite easily. I just went back
through Time Machine to the day before I started
writing the post that caused all the problems, and
brought that copy forward to the present, replacing the
corrupt one. I then rewrote the post and voilà, it
worked.
Using Music In Ads
23/06/08 22:45 Filed in: General
Nonsense |
Music
The
new Bulmers TV ad for summer 2008
is out,
and as usual, they have chosen a great song to
accompany it. This time it’s ‘Lazy Day’ by The Byrds
(or maybe The Flying Burrito Brothers). It’s a good
example of how to do music in an ad like this. Take
a classic song that most people will just about
know, and don’t mess with it. They have done this
several times in the past, including this one from a
few years ago, featuring ‘Sunny Afternoon’ by The
Kinks.
A good example of how not to do it comes via the Corona beer radio ad. It takes the 1979 hit “My Sharona” by The Knack and alters the lyrics to “My Corona.” Another line becomes “Ooh, you taste so good, like you should, like I knew you would” or something like that. My ears bleed every time I hear it. Whoever came up with it deserves to be cast into the wilderness wearing sackcloth and ashes, to feed off locusts. Here’s the original:
A good example of how not to do it comes via the Corona beer radio ad. It takes the 1979 hit “My Sharona” by The Knack and alters the lyrics to “My Corona.” Another line becomes “Ooh, you taste so good, like you should, like I knew you would” or something like that. My ears bleed every time I hear it. Whoever came up with it deserves to be cast into the wilderness wearing sackcloth and ashes, to feed off locusts. Here’s the original:
Losing The Run Of One's Self
Over at
Irish Election, in a comment from some dude
called ‘Future Taoiseach’:
Indeed. Why, only this evening, I saw a marauding gang of veterans of the Maastricht and Nice campaigns burn a family of “No” voters out of their home in Bracklone Street here in Portarlington.
A once democraric union of cooperating nation states has crossed the line into coercion and dictatorship. As in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, your vote is not respected unless you vote ‘the right way’.
Indeed. Why, only this evening, I saw a marauding gang of veterans of the Maastricht and Nice campaigns burn a family of “No” voters out of their home in Bracklone Street here in Portarlington.
Esbjörn Svensson
18/06/08 23:20 Filed in: Music
I was very sorry to hear
of the death last weekend of the Swedish jazz pianist
Esbjörn Svensson. He was 44, and died as a result of a
scuba diving accident.
I discovered him about four years ago, and saw him in concert in Vicar Street in May 2005. This was my first "real” jazz concert, and it was an incredible experience. Even though the piano was the lead intrument in the trio, the bass and drums were also to the fore. Although the main focus of his work was on his own compositions, he was also a fine interpreter of standards, as this version of Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” shows.
I discovered him about four years ago, and saw him in concert in Vicar Street in May 2005. This was my first "real” jazz concert, and it was an incredible experience. Even though the piano was the lead intrument in the trio, the bass and drums were also to the fore. Although the main focus of his work was on his own compositions, he was also a fine interpreter of standards, as this version of Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” shows.