Damien Mulley

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In a discussion on Sunday night with some of the folks from Salesfoce and Coda and other companies, I mentioned the notion of eating chocolate with crisps. It seems the non-Irish (everyone there except me) were a little disconcerted at the idea of having a pack of crisps and eating a chocolate bar at the same time or just after. It appears to be a foreign concept in many parts of the (not so apparently) civilised world.

Questions were flying at me like the time between eating the crisps and then having the chocolate or was it at same time, the flavour of the crisps (when I said cheese and onion there was uproar!) and I was also asked would white chocolate be used. Vile. No.

Who else likes having their crisps and choccies at the same time?

These:

Photo owned by kissmygrandmother (cc)

plus these:

Photo owned by ChezDeniseetLaudalino (cc)

= yumm.

Donncha has a nice video of crazy Kathy Sinnott threatening legal action after Germans caught her signing in to “work” on a Friday morning with all her bags packed to fly away to Ireland and not “work” that day. Apparently she had worked all night instead. Of course!

Marie Boran from SiliconRepublic has restarted her blog - The Strange Quark.

Thomson Safaris - assholes.

Karen Schwartzman, a spokeswoman for the company, had this to say in response to their name being associated with the murder:
“Obviously it’s a tragedy. But the fact this company has had its name associated with this nightmare is another tragedy.”

Mick has a great post on the latest on the Robert McCartney murder.

I’ve signed up for a co-working space in Cork.

Via Kevin, where in Ireland do porn searches come from?

Ewan has a great post on presentations. Study it.

Spiritualized cover True Love Will Find You in the End.

After a massively damaged reputation, Real Networks are starting to claw back some goodwill, thanks in part to blogging.

What is Boing Boing up to with the deletions?

Gotta love Who Fans.

MSTRKRFT - Street Justice

Made the Irish Times too.

Accolades from YouTube:

#1 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Ireland
#1 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Comedy - Ireland
#1 - Top Rated (This Month) - Comedy - Ireland

#14 - Most Discussed (This Week) - Ireland
#2 - Most Discussed (This Week) - Comedy - Ireland
#80 - Most Discussed (This Month) - Ireland
#6 - Most Discussed (This Month) - Comedy - Ireland
#55 - Most Responded (Today) - Ireland
#3 - Most Responded (Today) - Comedy - Ireland
#38 - Most Responded (This Week) - Ireland
#2 - Most Responded (This Week) - Comedy - Ireland
#25 - Most Responded (This Month) - Comedy - Ireland
#86 - Most Responded (All Time) - Comedy - Ireland
#38 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Comedy - United Kingdom
#80 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Comedy
#83 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Comedy - France
#25 - Most Viewed (This Month) - Ireland
#4 - Most Viewed (This Month) - Comedy - Ireland
#6 - Top Favorites (This Week) - Ireland
#2 - Top Favorites (This Week) - Comedy - Ireland
#24 - Top Favorites (This Month) - Ireland
#3 - Top Favorites (This Month) - Comedy - Ireland
#18 - Top Rated (This Month) - Ireland

Had a lovely meal in the Dylan last night. We started with Gazpacho which was presented as a plate with the bread, a basil and cress thingy on the bread and tomato foam around it and then the waitress poured the gazpacho from a mini-jug around the bread:

For the main meal was Sea Bream with borlotti bean purée & Spanish ham(yay Spain):

Quenelle of Cheese Cake, with sablé crumble, raspberry coulis and filo crackers:

While rumour on Boards.ie is that the National Broadband Scheme is canceled, despite providers being brought this far, heres some interesting (for me) data about it. Just looking at more FOI’d documents from the Department of Communications and the list of companies and consortiums who applied for the National Broadband Scheme tender:

Wirefree
Eircom
BroadNet (Motorola & Azotel Consortium)
3 Ireland
BT, Wirefree & Avanti Consortium
Avanti Broadband
Crimson Tide
Clearwire, Motorola Consortium
IFA, Motorola Consortium
UPC, Enet, BT Consortium
Smart, Enet, Last Mile, Permanet Consortium

I’m at the SaleForce.com Tour De Force event today so blogging is going to be light. I met some of the folks last night and they’re some of the friendliest bunch of tech people I’ve encountered. Here’s some stuff to keep you slightly entertained while blogging is light.

Beer and food competition from Bubble Brothers.

M83 are back again.

Via 12 Stories. Are you a visual thinker?

Solar powered plant pot. I like.

For the Philip Pullman fans.

New blog - The Connolly Column. From Cob H.

Marketing’s Wheel of Misfortune.

Passion Pit. Yay.

Nodal Points. William Gibsontastic.

IrishTimes.com, the new site for the Irish Times and with another new design is now live. First reaction is I’m not too gone on it, too like the Guardian Berliner design. I liked the old white background. I don’t like the cream coloured background. It also looks like Shane’s fantastic blog, mothballed as it is, is not on the new site. Meaning that our cries and foot-stamping shouts of “You’ll be back, they always come back” were wrong. Jim’s is still there and Conor’s as is Mark Hennessy’s blog. No new blogs yet. Please please bring in new bloggers.

Via Fabulist:

“Safe as Houses” by aKING

Paywall removed, moving to IrishTimes.com, Ireland.com to become a portal.

Via Eoin and a really shitty press release comes news that the Irish Times are going online and are moving domain for the freeness to IrishTimes.com and keeping Ireland.com for premium stuff. The last bit is a little stupid really. All those links with “Irish Times” are now going to Ireland.com which is going to become a “portal” on all things Ireland. Great…

The Irish Times will publish on the web under its own title online from Monday morning with the launch of a new site, www.irishtimes.com. The site will be free to access by readers.

The move to irishtimes.com is designed to make the newspaper the dominant media website in Ireland in the 21st century. The change from a subscription model to a free newspaper on irishtimes.com is a further instalment in the biggest editorial development programme in the history of the newspaper embarked upon last February with the redesign and modernisation of The Irish Times and the launch of new supplements.

…

The new ireland.com will combine relevant content across a range of channels, local services and search functionality in a manner that has not been seen in Ireland before. The new site is aimed at Irish internet users or people elsewhere with an interest in Ireland and all things Irish.

Here’s what I predicted at the start of the year, so more to do:

The Irish Times will open up
While some won’t want to see the paymodel go away after defending it for years, the paywalls at the Irish Times will fall away and traffic will go up and up, making this quality paper rightly go up in rankings for all things Ireland. The Irish Times will internally consider buying Beaut.ie or asking Kieran Murphy from IceCreamIreland to do a weekly piece for their food and lifestyle blog. Nothing might happen though.

I’m hearing I’m going to be wrong on the blogs. They’re still greatly disliked in there.

Anyway, overall fantastic news, lets see how these stats look in two months.

No, not really. Found this on YouTube: