Zoe Conway’s website has been relaunched to complement her new album, the Horses Tail, which has been getting great reviews since it was released a few months back (including a nine out of ten from Hotpress). The album is for sale online, with some more samples on Zoë’s website. Note to all Americans: this would make a great gift for Mother’s Day.
Conan visits Intel in Santa Clara. With the whole “copy exactly” philosophy, it’s almost identical to the Leixlip site – same chairs, same cubicles, same senior marketing manager in the client services group. The pain…
“First of all Don, I love what you guys have done with the colour here. I think the grey works very nicely with the grey. Which works well with the greyish-blue.”
Update: It has been deleted from Youtube but is available here.
I installed the new plugin from WordPress.com – a very nice addon. Slightly worried about what I’m seeing though, as the first hit to come through was a search referral for “Night Elves having Sex” and it got worse from there.
I went off to Africa to work in an orphanage and when I was leaving, this man came up to me and said “please take my son because if he stays here he will surely die, but if he goes home with you I know he’ll have a good life. And I didn’t take him… and emmm.. but I have in other ways”.
One of the best ways to hinder a cause is to promote it badly. I’ve just cringed through a bunch of videos on Blogorrah here and here urging young people to Rock the Vote. The idea is fair enough, and an initiative like Rock the Vote is an essential weapon in the war against apathy. However, these “celebrity” videos are so far off the mark that it hurts. I was planning on voting in this election, but after seeing none other than LOUIS WALSH encouraging me to do so, I have changed my mind.
The reaction around the place has been negative, to put it mildly.
Twenty Major
“Shove the vote up your hole”
Jim Carroll:
“Are young voters so dumb that they need sideburned singer-songwriters, lead singers of flop Dublin bands and devilish pop managers to remind them to vote?”
Adam:
The PR people that came up with this shite should be shot (along with most of the rest of them)”
Paul Campbell:
It’s a bit cringe-y
Maman Poulet:
Ryan Tubridy Rocking the Vote? I rest my case!
In fact, the only positive response I came across was Christine Bohan’s scintillating praise, declaring that the campaign is “kinda funny, gets the message across and it’s not nearly as cringey as you’d imagine.”
Unless I have got the wrong idea entirely about Irish people, the only young people that this will impress are under 13, and thankfully not eligible to vote. There was a lot of money put into this campaign, and I find it worrying, bordering on insulting, that they believe we can be seduced by the likes of Ronan Keating making the rock hand-sign. On the bright side, at least Marty Whelan/Linda Martin/Derek Mooney didn’t make an appearance.
Most people laugh cynically when I say that I am not a geek. I have never seen Battlestar Galactica, I’m no good at electronics, and I don’t even know where that “smoke me a kipper” quote comes from. They just retort with the cruel wisdom: “any true geek is in denial”. It stings because despite my best efforts, I know who CmdrTaco is.
Adam has thrown down the gauntlet for those of us who know dopefish from blowfish: a geek table quiz. The proposal is just at interest-check stage, so if you think that you have what it takes to be the alpha geek, then leave a comment on Adam’s notablog. I’ll be there if its in Cork.
Graham Linehan, on his Hompendium of Dorithies, has taken a quick look at the new His Dark Materials film. They have reuinted the Casino Royale leads Daniel Craig and Eva Green, and opted to cast Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter. Choosing the child actor is always a gamble, so they played it safe with another Dakota. Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel – good stuff.
I have to agree with Graham though, they’ve got Lyra all wrong… and those daemons/polar bears look a bit dodgy too. There’s no better way to cheapen a film than with second rate CGI. A game, made by SEGA, is also announced for this December – that has great potential, but video games which accompany movie releases are always disappointing. Have a look at the website – there’s a lot of stuff on it, including a ‘Meet Your Daemon’ utility, which must be broken because it said my daemon is a crow.
RTE notes that new Census of Population figures published today have ordained six new large towns. Any Cork people who were confused last year by the city’s official decrease in population will not be surprised by the fact that three of the “new major towns” are within 25mins drive from Cork City.
By now, most people acknowledge that the population figure associated with the city of Cork is very misleading, since the official boundry of the city is too tight. With no room for expansion in the city centre, the inner suburbs have been packed in recent years, and now the CSO acknowledges the same trend slightly further afield. What perks will this glorious new title bring to Cobh, Mallow, and Midleton? I don’t know, but word on the street is that the locals are expecting a shipment of white runners and Nissan Micra body kits.
I’m learning new stuff every day on my MacBook Pro. Today, OS X Hacker points out how you can zoom in on any part of the screen, simply by holding control and dragging two fingers along the trackpad. I can’t see this being useful, but that is beside the point. Little features like this are what makes OS X really cool… I will find it difficult to go back to Linux on my desktop.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007 RTE mentions that Bertie is embarrassed by the fact that we, “the laughing stock of europe”, don’t yet use electronic voting, while France get their election results in two hours, electronically. Two hours is very impressive, and that’s also how long the French voters were left queuing. This is before we even consider the usability and security concerns of the French system:
“protesters sued to ban the machines outright a week before the election, noting that some models don’t comply with a dual-key requirement for safety from fraud, and others, such as the iVotronic machines, have new software, but haven’t been re-verified since 2005.”
While our own e-Voting machines gather dust in a very expensive warehouse, the Taoiseach chooses to blame the opposition, accusing them of “playing politics”. Am I to assume that Bertie knows more than the Commission on Electronic Voting, who explicitly stated that our system is not ready?
- The security of the hardened PC that is proposed for use in preparing elections and in aggregating and counting the votes afterwards is inadequate and needs to be improved.
- Improvements are also required to the security of the methods by which sensitive election data, including votes, are stored, transported and accessed on ballot modules and CDs.
Bertie is happy to pile on regardless and deploy an insecure voting system, simply because his buddies abroad are doing it. Perhaps if he were less concerned in keeping up appearences, and more interested in the integrity of our elections, then he would acknowledge that the millions wasted on our unused voting system can only be blamed on the government who forked out on a product that does not work.
