Opinion

Opera Mini - Easy to use web browser. It should be the first thing you install.

Fring - Universal instant messenger and VOIP application. It works with MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo, Skype, Twitter etc.... Its very easy to use, and allows you to stay connected all the time. This alone is a killer app.

Gmail - If you use Gmail, get the mobile application. Its fast and neat. You cant send attachments however.

Google Maps - Get satellite photos and maps on your phone. Can pinpoint your approximate location (to the nearest cell tower).

Train timetables - Stripped down interface to the Irish Rail website, without all the bloat.

Heres a bit of useless but interesting info for you. This complex, which looks very nondescript from the ground, is where Ireland prints and distributes money. From Google maps you can see the unusual roads around it and pillboxes (presumably for machine guns). Every now and again you'll see heavily armed convoys of ordinary articulated trucks heading into it.


View Larger Map

The housing market appears to be going down the tubes, but its difficult to see that that is the case. So I decided to visualise all of the houses currently for sale in Athy, Co.Kildare on a timeline, based on when they were first put up for sale on daft.ie.

I picked Athy because its advertised as 1 hour from Dublin (well the border of Co.Dublin), and since its so far out its very at risk in an unstable housing market. And as you can see, theres loads and loads of houses for sale for an extended period of time.

Timeline of houses for sale in Athy


I've only tested it in Firefox, so if your using IE, tough luck.

Theres daily news reports about how the property market is on its last legs, but yet theres few hard facts. Most "facts" are innuendo, or from business forecasts. Estate agents wont release hard facts because they probably think it will make things worse. So I decided to check things out for myself on Daft.ie, the largest property website in Ireland.

First off Daftwatch has shown a steady increase in the number of properties for sale in Ireland, which either means theres more people selling houses every month, or houses are on the market for longer and the backlog is getting bigger. So keep reading to see the stats.

Percentage increase in the number of properties on the market since beginning of year:
85% - Nationwide (26,000 to 48,000)
87% - Dublin

Interesting ad in the Phoenix.

Some people have thousands of friends on social networking sites. Just look at this list of Bebo users, sorted by number of friends. Mouse over the stars and you see that some people have 8,000 friends. Whats more unbeliveable is that 15,000 people have befriended a commercial product!

Over 2 million searches have now been performed by the Bigulo search engine. It took 6 months to get the first million, and only 2 months to get the second million.

Bigulo has been up to some other stuff too. A bebo irish celeb page was launched a few weeks ago, letting you find people like the cast of Glenroe and Podge & Rodge.

A page for the general election in ireland which lets you find the bebo pages of Irish election candidates was also launched. This got loads of media coverage with interviews by over a dozen radio stations including RTE1, 2FM, TodayFM, Spin1038, FM104 etc...

I came across another Church publication from the 60's called "Ten Faults of Husbands" which is supposed to guilt trip men into treating their wives better. Much of the traits are still problems, such as drinking, gambling, workaholic etc.. but back in the 60's there was no such thing as divorce. Once you got married, that was that.

The Chapter Titles say it all:

• The "You-do-your-job-and-I'll-do-mine" husband.


• The "money pinching" husband


• The "I need outside recreation and you don't" husband


• The husband who is married first to his business, and only second (or last) to his wife


• The mommy's boy husband


• The husband who is unreasonable and un-Christian in regard to sex


• The drinking husband


• The gambling husband


• The jealous husband


• The husband who never manifests his affection for his wife

The full text is below:

I recently came across some publications by priests and nuns from the 1960's where they give helpful advise on a whole range of subjects. "How to choose a wife" is full of great tips and quotes, such as:

"if a young man is not in the financial position to consider marriage he should keep his friendships with girls on a light-hearted basis."

"The teenage boy who is just beginning dancing and dating will feel much more secure if he chooses a less showy girl with whom he can feel more masterful, than if he goes for the glamorous and experienced girl who may well make him aware of his own inadequacy."

"There is a lack of generosity and outgoing love in the girl who ... speaks determinately of having only one or two children."

"They (the husband) sometimes realize that it's nice to have the little wife around to keep the kids under control, save the TV set from being smashed, cook the meals and have the place tidy and comfortable."

"She needs the logical reasoning of a man to balance her quick intuitive judgements"

The full text is below.

Bigulo has gotten visitors from 144 different countries in the past week, even from Greenland! So just where in the world is "Vanuatu", "Niue" or "Northern Mariana"?

A quick look for statistics on the market share of search engines, puts google at about 45%, Yahoo on 29% and MSN on 13%, but this doesnt appear to be the case from my own perspective. My own observations put Google firmly miles ahead of all of their competitors. So I've taken a look at two wildly different websites, one website hosts dozens of sites, and the figures are overall cumulative values (and its been operational for years), the other just an ordinary website which has been going 5 months and has 5 million pages of content.

I just bought the Sony Ericsson w810i. Its an excellent phone, with 2mpixel camera, radio, mp3 player and it can make phone calls. The screen is nice and clear, and its a very light phone. The only problem I have with it is that the buttons are a bit small and close together, for example, there are 11 small buttons just below the screen, within a 1cm X 4cm space, which makes for lots of accidental key presses.

Recently bebo created email lists as a way to stop those very annoying forwards. All replys to the persons mass mail are contained within one thread. But a new form of spam has appeared. If someone sends you a mass mail, all you do is reply to it with your spam, and everyone one the other persons list (usually everyone they know) gets the message. That way you can very easily and quickly spam loads of people you dont know, something which was impossible to do previously.

Got a weird mobile phone spam message yesterday, which came up as a browser message (also called a WAP push message). The only other browser messages I'd ever recieved were from my phone company. From looking around it seems if you click on the link in the message you get signed up to a service which costs a few euro per message! So turn off browser messages to avoid this sort of spam, because its probably gonna become more prevalent. On the Motorola V3 razr go to: Messages->Browser Msgs->Browser Msg Setup->Service and set it to off.

Dear xxxxxxx. Get 1,000 Text Messages at NO COST!
From: http://t.imob.tv/?m=xxxxxxxx

Ryanair have this great system where you can checkin online and print out your own boarding cards, saving you the hassle of having to queue up in the airport at the checkin desk. Up to now they gave you a PDF, which you just printed out, but they decided to "upgrade" their system. Now you get a webpage that you have to print out. Problem is, it only displays properly on Internet Explorer. So they took something that worked perfectly on nearly every OS and browser, and broke it majorly, so that only people running Internet Explorer on Windows can use it. Well done lads.

Found an interesting comment which got rejected by my anti-spam plugin on my blog:

I would like to know if you are getting married in europe
can you bring you wedding cake on the plane
regard's
Phyllis

How the hell should I know the answer to this question? But good luck with the wedding anyway.