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Review of Mr Cotton Coffee

Mr Cotton Coffee

Mr Cotton has been the key provider of coffee to OpenCoffee in Cork since it has been based in the Rubicon Centre. The owner, Declan, is taking part in the Genesis Enterprise Programme. So far we have only sampled his standard filter coffee which he provides as a mobile service to various industrial estates around Cork. The verdict has been universally positive and I genuinely look forward to a cup of joe from Mr Cotton at each OCC. Those weeks when he hasn't been retained are always disappointing! Keep an eye out for him around Cork. You'll get a rich, non-bitter rounded cup of coffee from him.

Rated 4/5 on Mar 04 2008

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Review Tags: beverage, mobile, coffee, local, enterprise

Review of Photobox Calendar

Photobox Calendar

This is now a perennial favourite in our extended family. Previously we gave a calendar to various family members and it consisted of 12 different staged photos of our children. Due to lack of time last year, we just selected 12 of the best pics of the overall extended family. This has gone down even better with everyone and extra copies had to be made for aunts and grandaunts. A simple super service that I would recommend to anyone looking for a gift idea with the personal touch.

Rated 4/5 on Mar 03 2008

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Review Tags: online, calendar, photo, printing, mailorder

Review of Liferea

This is the desktop RSS reader I am using on Ubuntu. It's not jam packed with features or anything but it has the one thing I need; the ability to access protected feeds like Trac timelines.

It integrates nicely into the Ubuntu taksbar and the notifications work well. Whilst I use Google Reader for my main reading, Liferea will do fine for everything else.

Review of "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here" TV series

"I'm a celebrity, get me out of here" TV series

"Can this get any worse?"

Can this get any worse?

The term celebrity is used here very loosely, I didn't recognise the majority of the participants on this show. Its the usual format of living in the jungle and food earned by accomplishing tasks.

The tasks being the usual eating grubs, insects, unusual animal parts, hanging from heights or being confined in small spaces with various exotic creatures.

The only real difference from year to year, is the interaction between the "celebrities" and even this has become predictable. A bit of romance, a lot of bickering and animosity.

This show, I feel has run its course. Its just boring now. Time to finish?

Rated 1/5 on Nov 20 2007

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Review Tags: reality, tv, tv series

Review of Pilot V5

Pilot V5

"This is one of my favourite pens. Fine tip roller-ball which lasts well and doesn't cost too much."

I have a small pen obsession and love buying new and funky models. But this is not at the high-end, you won't find any Mont Blancs in my drawer. I love the infinite variety of roller balls and gel pens that are out there.

The general price range is €1.50 to €5.00 but I have never found any relationship between price and quality at this level. Most recently I purchased a box of 12 Pilot V5's from Viking for the simple reason that they were the cheapest. Cheaper even than the own-brand stuff.

And I'm thrilled to find that they are perfect. Lovely smooth writing, nice ink, simple shape, a useful tool. And only 79c each! 

Rated 4/5 on Nov 17 2007

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Review Tags: pen, roller ball, writing

Review of Test item

Test item


This is a no summary review

This is a no summary review

Sweet huh?

 

Rated 2/5 on Oct 30 2007 by Conor O'Neill

Review Tags: test

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Review of Testy Tester

Testy Tester


Looks like I need a summary





Checking that summary is indeed actually optional and that the first couple of lines are used in the search results instead.

Rated 4/5 on Oct 18 2007 by Conor O'Neill

Review Tags: test1, test2

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Review of V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta

Far better than I expected it to be. Tres agréable. Mainstream coverage mis-represented it badly. Were they confused by John Hurt?

I hadn't heard many good things written about this movie when it came out but I finally decided to watch it on Sky Movies recently. I was very pleasantly surprised to find an interesting, exciting, well written movie which made up for the horror of the second two Matrix movies.

Basic plot is a dystopian near future where UK is a fascist state run by a dictator (John Hurt) and his secret police.

V is an anarchist/terrorist who blows up the Old Bailey, hacks into the emergency comms system and tells everyone to turn up at the houses of parliament in one years time to take power back for the people.

V spends the movie in a Guy Fawkes mask and it is testament to Hugo Weaver that his voice is rich enough to pull this off.

Natalie Portman gets sucked into his world but has a less extreme vision than him.

Lots of stuff about viruses, germ warfare, experiments on undesirables etc. Pretty standard fare for any dystopian movie.

The plot rollicks along with lots of depth. The colour schemes work extremely well.

Alls well that ends well and the nasty dictator is toppled but V dies in the process.

My main gripe with the movie is that dystopian futures in books/movies are always run by fascists whereas, apart from Hitler, all recent dystopian pasts have been run by communists. I read up on the graphic novel on which the movie was based to discover that it was written in the early 80's and the author thought Maggie Thatcher would lead the UK to a world like V's. What a numbskull.   

Rated 4/5 on Jul 05 2007 by Conor O'Neill

LouderVoice Review Tags: action, comic, comic book, drama, dystopian, futuristic, graphic novel, movie

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Review of Test Item with accent agréable

Test Item with accent agréable

Petit restaurant haut en couleurs, bonne cuisine, service agréable, vue splendide et ambiance “relax”

Petit restaurant haut en couleurs, bonne cuisine, service agréable, vue splendide et ambiance “relax”

 

Rated 3/5 on Jul 04 2007 by Conor O'Neill

LouderVoice Review Tags: test

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Review of Samsung Digimax Cyber 530 Digial Camera

Perfect for point and click photography. A little old at this stage so good value to be had

Review of product: Samsung Digimax Cyber 530 Digial Camera

Rated as 4/5 on Apr 20 2007 by Conor O'Neill

My mother dropped her ancient 35mm camera recently and it finally died. She popped into her local pharmacy/photo shop to get a replacement. They rightly guided her to a digital one. Due to her total technology phobia, the owner suggested this Samsung. It has a 5.1 MP sensor, 3x optical zoom and unless you want to experiment, everything is automatic. He also gave her a 1GB SD Card for it.

At the semi-regular extended family meet-up I played with it for a bit and was impressed overall. It takes standard AAs or rechargeable ones, is meaty in the hand but quite light and it is large enough not to have overly-fiddly buttons.

It was very fast to take pictures in comparison to our three year old Canon Ixus 400 and the picture quaity overall was excellent.

Navigation in "play mode" was simple and the menus were not too obscure.

I only have two real criticisms of the camera. First is that the USB cable has a proprietary connector on the camera. Why the hell couldn't they use standard mini-USB? And second, the navigation buttons are in the bottom right of the camera and my thumb kept pressing them by accident as I was holding the camera.

Being a local supplier, the cost of the phone was high for what my mother got - €160. She could easily get it for €100 online, but she doesn't shop online.

She now knows how to take snaps and knows to go to the pharmacy to get them to print the pictures she selects So they still have a thriving print business as long as people like her are around!

Summary features:-5.1 megapixels-15X zoom (3X optical, 5X digital)-Large 2.4” LCD-Quick print button-User-friendly “Effect”button-Macro & Auto Macro mode (as close as 5cm)-Cradle charging system (optional)-Available in black and silver

I believe there is no real difference between the S530 and the S500 so the URL on the Samsung site is for the S500.

LouderVoice Tags: camera, digital camera, lcd, macro, megapixel, mmc, point and click, sd, still, zoom

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New Beta of Blogger

Looks like Google are finally putting a few hours effort into upgrading Blogger to have some 21st century features. I tried switching over for the purposes of experiment but it looks like it is inviation only. They are adding categories/tags and integration with your other Google account info (like your gmail address). Still not good enough to make me use it for anything other than experiments.

Conor's Blog on the move

Finally, 5 years after registering conoroneill.com and just having it re-direct to geocities, eircom and blogspot (in that order), I am now properly hosted with PowWeb. The value for money they were offering made it an easy decision. The import of the Blogspot Blog went disasterously badly yesterday as I did it on the latest 1.5.2 version of Wordpress which the importer did not like. Tonight I reverted to 1.5.1.2, did the import and then did the upgrade and it all worked swimmingly.

So this blog at http://conoro.blogspot.com/ is now for historical purposes only. Get your ass over to http://conoroneill.com/ from now on. I'm still on a bog standard default Wordpress theme with links to nothing. I'll get a more reasonable L&F on it over the next week or so. For the 0.00000000025% of people who read this blog with an RSS Aggregator like Bloglines, please subscribe to the Feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ConorsBlog, rather than directly to the feeds on the site. Let me know if you spot any problems.

Importing from Blogger/Blogspot to Wordpress

I'm in the process of trying to move off a free Blogspot account over to Wordpress for my personal blog. I have yet to decide whether to use something free like Blogsome or get hosted with a wordpress.org recommended Host like PowWeb or an Irish host like Blacknight. If anyone has opinions on these alternatives, I'd be very interested in hearing them. If the Irish option is reasonable, I'd obviously prefer to go with that.

My concern about Blogsome is the lack of a business model to support their free hosting. PowWeb looks like a no-brainer but if the Blacknight alternative is competitive both technically and price-wise then I'd probably go with that.

But ignoring that for a minute, my biggest concern was that I'd be able to move all my old Blogspot posts and comments over to Wordpress. I have just done a trial run using instructions I found on Andy Skelton's site. It is as awkward as hell but it worked perfectly - I now have posts from 2001-2005 residing on my Fedora box at home after 30 minutes of fiddling.

The only other annoyance is that I have the conoroneill.com domain registered with Yahoo Domains. I then point it at wherever I happen to be doing my posts to. Ideally I'd like to move that over completely to the new host and not need re-directs. This looks messy so any tips there appreciated too.

TCB Baby - Taking Care of Business

I finally got to see Bubba Ho-Tep recently. What an odd but completely beguiling movie.

I sat down to watch it with a bunch of pre-conceptions and expectations. A low-budget ($500K) movie starring Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK fighting a mummy in an Old Folk's home in East Texas - how could you not have ideas as to what sort of movie it would be? I spent a summer in Stuttgart during college working in an old folk's home. Most of them thought they were Leni Riefenstahl or Field Marshall Goering.

From the first frame I knew I had it all wrong. The plot moved forward extremely slowly, action was minimal, the movie was very short, much of it was a voice-over and the horror was totally non-horrific. Enough normally to make me hate it (I think it's why I cannot watch 99% of the stuff made in Europe - I sit there thinking "do something for the love of god"). In this case however, the writing was some of the best I have heard in years - not one word or line went to waste. The acting was superb with both Campbell and Ossie Davis at the top of their game. But most of all it is side-splittingly funny. Snot out the nose funny. Giggling hours later funny. And it's been a hell of a long time since I heard the word Kemosabe in anything.

They obviously managed to get a good distribution deal as we were able to get it in the Xtravision in Bandon. Don't watch it if you are tired but it is a movie not to be missed.

A few sample quotes courtesy of IMDB:

JFK: Just what are you getting at, Elvis?
Elvis: I think you know what I'm getting' at Mr. President. We're gonna kill us a mummy.

Elvis: Don't make me use my stuff on ya, baby!

Elvis: It'd been two presidential elections since I'd had a boner like that.

Elvis: LBJ is dead
JFK: Well, that ain't gonna stop him

[killing a scarab beetle]
Elvis: Never, but never fuck with the king!

Elvis: No offense, Jack, but President Kennedy was a white man.
JFK: They dyed me this color! That's how clever they are!

JFK: He had me on the floor. I had his mouth over my asshole!
Elvis: A shiteater?
JFK: I don't think so. He was after my soul. Now you can get that out of any major orifice of a person's body. I read about it.
Elvis: Oh, yeah? Where, man? Hustler?

Elvis: Now the two key words for tonight - "caution" and "flammable".
JFK: Also "watch your ass".

Elvis: T.C.B., baby.