PeeBlog

Some pictures from Fashings 2010

paul — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:09:39 +0000

During the week I received my new toy, the latest pride and joy, a fancy Canon lens (EF 70-300mm 1:4,0-5,6 IS USM). Not wanting to miss an opportunity to take some interesting pictures as Tuesday was Fashings (the German version of Carnival), I took my kit into the city to put it through its paces. Here are some of of my favourite snaps from the day.

In Germany (Munich & Cologne in particular) they tend to go a little mad in the streets with lots of crazy costumes and a bit of prosecco and beer thrown in.

Profits.ie – fail

paul — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:44:46 +0000

We all hate spam, it wastes time both the sender and the receiver, hurts businesses, mine in the respect that I have to again waste time, and yours, because I know I will never, ever, ever work with you. And you know what’s worse than the fact that I will never work with you ? It’s the fact that I will tell everyone I know what a usesless shower of crap your company is as they have to resort to stupid / illegal marketing tactics to get their word out.

So without further ado here is the email I and a few others received today from Profits.ie (sorry, no link love either).

Good Morning,

We have had phenomenal interest in the Sales & Marketing Course we have been running for the last few weeks. So much so, that we are AGAIN running it this Friday 19th (Between 9am and 1pm)

In the Wicklow Enterprise Park training room in Wicklow Town.

Before sending this email we have already 5 confirmed companies on the course. We have an engineering, retail and accountants already signed up

So I have 5 seats left. That’s all and they will go quick. Due to time constraints this may be the last time we run this. We normally only run this for our own clients.

Please let me know ASAP if you are interested in coming. It’s a hand’s on course in how to do cost effective (LOW COST) direct marketing that gets results.

A taste of what you will learn

· Why direct marketing is the cheapest advertising & gets far better results

·

· Proven Sales letter techniques and tips

· List formation and filtering

· Database creation techniques

· Direct mail techniques that work

· Applying a systematic approach to your marketing

These are just a few of the things you’ll learn. This is a course on LOW COST sales & marketing for small business.

If you want to know more give me a call.

The last 5 seats will be allocated on a first come first serve basis.

CALL NOW to confirm your place

Regards

Charlie Melia

Sales Director

Profits.ie

Unit 17c, Wicklow Enterprise Centre

The Murrough,

Wicklow Town

Phone:- +353 (0)404 66433

Mobile:- +353 (0)86 387 1767

Lo-Cost CRM and Sales Automation

The formatting is all theirs, including the red text. And as for Direct mail techniques that work, I think you’ve missed the boat, the pier and the whole damn harbour ! This is now how you do business Charlie !

Register 365 – fail

paul — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:12:54 +0000

Today I got a email from Register365, saying that for security reason they are disabling the online web folder manager. The sneakily make it sound like they are just disabling it until it’s fixed. But in reading this it also sounds strange that they don’t disable it straight away if it is such a threat. Here is the email I just got :

Dear paul savage,

Thank you for choosing Register365 as your hosting provider of choice.

IMPORTANT SERVICE NOTICE

At Register365 we take the security of our customers’ hosting services
very seriously and as such we would like to inform you that our
engineers have discovered a potential security flaw in the WebShell file
manager. In order to preempt any risk of a security breach that may
affect our customers’ websites the WebShell feature will be turned off
as of Midday on Tuesday 9th February 2010 .

Please note this is a precautionary measure and FTP will continue to
work as normal and your websites should not be affected in any way by
this action.

If you need any support on how to use FTP clients to upload files to
your site please refer to our knowledge base articles located at

http://www.register365.com/knowledge/view_folder.php5?section_id=312

At Register365 we strive to provide the best quality of service and
infrastructure to all our customers and as you may already know, we have
been working hard to deploy a new shared hosting cluster based on state
of the art technology and delivering the most stable and secure hosting
environment on the Irish market. If you would like to find out more
about the new hosting cluster available with Register365 and how you
could migrate to the new platform for FREE, please contact
support@register365.com.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact our
support teams through the usual channels.

Kind regards

Namesco Ireland Limited (trading as Register365)

To that I submitted a support case as the service email came from “noreply@register365.com” .

You are disabling it indefinitely ? or just until you can patch the service ?
This is unclear in the email I got from you.

and to that I got the updated report that they are not fixing it, with some extra padding about saying it’s too difficult.

Good afternoon Paul,

Thank you for your email.

It’s being disabled indefinitely I’m afraid as it would be too prohibitive to have a patch developed, tested and deployed at this late stage in our H-Sphere platform’s life cycle.

We haven’t taken this decision lightly but the issue that has been identified could potentially be quite serious so urgent pre-emptive action was needed. Disabling the webshell feature for the foreseeable future seemed the most expeditious and safest solution.

We apologise again for any inconvenience caused.
Kind Regards,

Nathan P.
Support Team
Namesco Ireland Limited

An unconvinced customer

Somehow I am not convinced here, if it’s a security issue why not disable straight away, and why no provide an alternative ? It really doesn’t sound like any level of customer support or attention to security. If it’s a security hole, disable straight away. You are now suddenly not providing a method for people to edit their files outside FTP’ing them, this for many people is not an option because of company firewalls. All in all it seems like Namesco Ireland Limited / Register365 couldn’t give a toss about their customers.

A way of searching for things

paul — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:35:13 +0000

Last month I was in the states and picked up the latest Google Phone, and have really found love. One of the coolest features is the Google-Goggles, and I think in the future it will really be a new way of searching. It allows you to take a picture of an object and it will tell you what exactly it is, be it a painting, a book, landmark or a logo.

Have a look at this quick video for a complete idea about what it can do.

What it means for search

If, in the future will be able to take a picture of a cake and Google Goggles will be able to deliver a recipe for that particular object, or not I don’t know, but it would be great if it could ! I don’t think it will replace how most people search, but it now suddenly enables your mobile phone to be that bit more useful.

Google Goggle example

Here is a picture I uploaded, to test it recently. You can see the picture is off centre, at an angle and not complete.

But still Google was able to analyse it and it came up that it was Georg I Schneider, which was of course right.

Some ideas

I would really love to see it having the ability to take picture of medicine, and telling the manufactures details about that particular medicine.

The world outside my window

paul — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:02:04 +0000

Just back from 2½ weeks in Ireland, and while the weather was quite bad at times, i.e. lots of ice / cold / snow, it was still great to be back. I’m not going to comment on how the County Councils could run of of salt and grit, or fail to have adequate material dispersed on the roads, because, well it doesn’t happen every year.

Generally I am a fan of the “bad weather“, snow really makes the city streets quieter (it absorbs the sound), like the brightness in the mornings, and the feeling of a few flakes landing on your tongue as you walk down the street. I’m a big fan of the mountains and skiing and I’m really looking forward the season ahead. I’ve missed a bit of the season already, so I’m eager to hit the slopes.

I didn’t mean to ramble on, what I wanted to do was share the view from the office today :

now it’s time to get that snowboard waxed …

Cork Flooding

paul — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:43:28 +0000

Here are some pictures of the recent Cork Flooding, taken on November 20th 2009. These pictures are taken from Jurys Hotel on the Western Road in Cork. You can see that river Lee has burst from both sides and joined in the middle.

The first view is a view down Western Road towards Washington St. You see that there are cars that have water almost up to the widows !

Here is the view of the bridge at Jurys Hotel, and looking out towards the County Hall. UCC was also closed for the day due to flooding in some of their buildings. Here are some pictures on flickr of the UCC Flooding.

The view across to Dyke Parade, which is also flooded.

It will be interesting to see what dirty will be left from the flooding, which will also be smelly mess in a few days.
P.S. I’m not too sure who took these photos as they were forwarded on to me, if they are yours please let me know in the comments.

Map of Cork

Here is a map of where the pictures were taken from (for your reference)

View Larger Map

Using a Moka Express

paul — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:13:30 +0000

Here is a quick guide as how you can make a great cup of coffee with an Italian Moka. Originally these wonders were first made in 1933 by Alfonso Bialetti, under the name “Moka Express“. Our one below isn’t from the famous manufacturer, but the design is similar. Sometimes Moka’s are incorrectly spelt as Mocha, but that more refers to a mixture of coffee with chocolate. Here is our Moka Express.

For good coffee, you need good beans. We are using Lavazza beans, namely their espresso blend. This is a mixture of 30% of Robusta beans and 70% Arabica beans. Lavazza is apparently Italy’s favourite coffee blend.

The best grinders are canonical grinders, as they don’t heat up the ground coffee unnecessarily. Sadly our grinder isn’t, but it gets the job done.

The Moka Express has 3 parts, consisting of a boiler, which is a holder for the water, a metal filter for holding the ground coffee and an upper part used for holding the coffee once it is brewed.

When you are grinding your beans, make sure it is almost ground to a powdery consistency. This will allow you to pack more coffee into the metal filter. This coffee below needs to be more finely ground.

Coffee that is ready for the Moka.

Here is the metal filter filled up with coffee. It is important to fill it up to the top, and to also compress the coffee down. Compressing the coffee into the filter will ensure that the steam from the boiler will pass through the coffee at a high pressure.

Place your Moka on the stove on a full heat. This will cause the water in your boiler to boil as quick as possible.

Generally you should keep the lid down to avoid the coffee flying into your face and boiling you. But here is what it looks like.

The coffee will continue to bubble up and fill the upper part.

And all that is left to do is to enjoy your espresso, or add a bit of water for a weaker, but still tasty cup of coffee.

Alternatives to a Moka Express

And for those of you who are too lazy to use a Moka, and want to use something a little easier to use, but still want a good cup of coffee, I would suggest a nespresso machine. Nespresso coffee comes in little small pods (see below) which contain ground coffee sealed for freshness. Pop these little capsules in the machine, and out comes a rather nice, aromatic coffee.

The variety of blends also you to give your guests a nice cup of coffee depending on their tastes and preferences. Nespresso also offer decaffeinated capsules, these are the red ones normally. Nespresso rates their capsules on a scale from 1-10 for strength, these are listed on the side of the boxes, with 10 being the strongest.

So what’s your favourite way of making coffee ?

How to get the old view on Facebook

paul — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:14:07 +0000

To restore Facebook to old look

About every 6 months facebook goes through a few changes . Generally these changes are something that annoy a lot of users, and people try to find out how to change things back. So here is a “fix” to make your default screen appear as it did before the latest change.

Look to the top left menu and click on MORE (in blue). Then drag STATUS UPDATES to the top. After dragging to the top, click on it. That becomes your default and it will become like before !

When not to email a doctor

paul — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:37:20 +0000

I get some random emails every week, like earlier this week I received a complete landscaping proposal for “my garden”, it had a detailed project plan and everything. Today’s email is from a doctor, actually it’s his out of office message, and it goes something like this

I am out of the office until October 13, 2009.

For refill requests and other clinical concerns, please call (617)XXX-XXX and listen for the prompts.

In case of emergency, please go to your local emergency room or dial 911. For urgent clinical matters call the hospital operator.

What I find strange is the fact that the doctor needs to tell people that they shouldn’t email him in an emergency. Which probably means people do so on a regular basis ! Crazy !

IEDR reload times / nameserver update schedule

paul — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:24:45 +0000

Seeing as it was a little hard to find on www.iedr.ie’s FAQ page, I thought I would do a quick post for myself and perhaps for other people search “when does the IEDR update their domainservers“. On the page listed, it’s hidden on point #19,

” How long does it take to register a .ie domain name?”

Technically it’s called “server reload” and it happens 4 times a day for the IEDR, at 10am/12pm/5pm/10pm. Previously it used to be twice a day, as far as I can remember.

So if you came her via google or any other search engine, looking for this information, I hope you were helped by this.
Edit : as far as I can see, this page, in their quote

Please note that nameserver changes submitted after 4pm on Friday will not be processed until the following Monday, therefore please submit your hosting changes early to avoid delays.

This is no longer the case, as they are updated every day.