Tomorrow marks the launch of “School Yard Food Yard“, a new market that’s happening every Sunday in Ranelagh, Dublin 6.

An exciting new Sunday food market called “the School Yard Food Yard” is being set up by a group of enterprising market traders and local producers who have come together to breath new life into an old and neglected market at the rear of Ranelagh multi-denominational school. The market will be open on Sundays from 10am to 3.30pm.

It sounds like they have a really good crop of organic and homemade treats, delicacies, and other food stuffs.

The launch will have music, face painting, and a variety of other entertainment. Check their website for the exact location.

School Yard Food Yard launch poster

Date Added: October 17th, 2009 | 5 Comments

via There, I Fixed It: Epic Kludges + Jury Rigs.

Ok, maybe it’s not the best use of Duct Tape ever, but it’s a pretty good one. I’d say there’s a lot of impressive uses of Duct Tape out there.

Date Added: July 12th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

I’ve been undergoing some minor cash flow issues the last while. We may be owed a rake of money, but I don’t have enough money to buy bread. Nice.

Anyway, that’s not the point (though it should be), the point is that I hate banks. When things are going bad for you financially they love nothing more than to kick you in the knackers.

The bank rang me sometime last year and said, you’ve been having trouble paying some of your direct debits – would you like an overdraft facility as this might make life a little easier? Why sure, at this stage anything will help, I said. Now, I haven’t really used the overdraft facility much until I got staggeringly broke this month, and when you’re staggeringly broke, what better than to charge that person even more.

So I hit the bottom of my overdraft facility and then a loan repayment standing order attempted to leave my account. That’s a big no no. You don’t have enough to cover that, so we’re going to charge you €12.70 for not paying the standing order, and then, we’re going to charge an extra €25 because you attempted to go over the limit of your overdraft.

Nice, thanks bank.

Date Added: June 15th, 2009 | 4 Comments

I recently wrote about what some people were dubbing the “Irish Internet Tax”, a name which felt a little alarmist to me from the outset. The basic tenant of this new tax that was causing people ire was that any computer with an internet connection could be judged to be able to receive broadcasts from RTÉ, and would hence require the owner to pay a television license.

I decided, for once in my life, to actually contact the powers that be to request clarification of what this and wrote an email to Eamonn Ryan TD, the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. I’m happy to say that I did actually get a proper response from him, or at least his aide, the content of which I reproduce below for your delectation.

Dear Mr/Ms Leonard,

I refer to your recent correspondence regarding TV licences for mobile phones/laptops/pc’s etc.

The Broadcasting Bill 2008 currently before the Houses of the Oireachtas (see Annex A below) will not require computer users accessing the Internet (through a broadband connection or otherwise) to have a television licence.

As the case with existing legislation (see Annex B below) a computer will require a television licence only if it is capable of exhibiting standard television broadcasting services (see definition in Annex A.  Key phrases are bolded) e.g. the computer is used in conjunction with a television tuner card or similar device and, as at present, if such is the case, a single licence will cover all the “television sets” in a household. A computer which is not capable of exhibiting standard television broadcasting services but can access programmes through the Internet site of the broadcaster concerned, for example, downloading programmes or clips from the RTE, TV3, TG4 or BBC websites or the RTE Player, or from sites like YouTube does not, nor will not under the new legislation, require a television licence.

I hope that this addresses your concerns.

Yours sincerely,

Colm O’Conaill
Private Secretary to Minister Ryan
Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources

From the looks of things this addresses and nullifies any fears that people had about this being a thinly veiled new way of taxing Irish people and supporting the hulking beast that is RTÉ. The key phrase, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that a TV license will only be required if a computer is capable of exhibiting standard television broadcasting services, meaning that it will only come into question if your computer has a TV tuner card.

I’m happy to report I don’t have a TV tuner card and feel reassured that I’m in no danger of being required to have a TV license.

As I say, correct me if I’m wrong.

Date Added: May 17th, 2009 | 2 Comments

Over the last while I’ve felt my computer system has been creaking a little under the load of everything I’ve been getting it to do. A recent application upgrade resulted in massive frustration with the speed the application refreshed when accessing different elements, opening new files and so on.

As a result I started to consider an computer upgrade, which has been in the back of my mind for a little while. Currently I’m running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, which clocks in at 2.0Ghz per core and I have 2 x 2Gb of DDR2 RAM, although due to 32bit OS limitations I’m only actually addressing just over 3Gb of that RAM.

So my intention with the next system upgrade will include moving to a 64bit OS and opening up the possibility of running 8-16Gb of RAM. This will make it possible for me to run a much larger number of sample libraries in Cubase (such as the large but excellent Vienna Symphonic Library). This will necessitate finally dropping WindowsXP and moving on. I’d like to be able to wait for Windows7 to come out – from the sounds of things it’s already running much better than Vista, and I was quite ticked off with Vista any times I’ve tried it (which resulted in a post over on my web design company website about the performance difference between Vista and XP).

However with these recent speed issues, I was seriously considering making the upgrade sooner rather than later, and this would of course necessitate Vista fun and games, not to mention some expense which I really can’t afford right now.

Enter The Obvious

At this point I have to say many thanks to Warren Daly of Invisible Agent for pointing the following out. I’d been chatting to Warren about different upgrade options, the differences between the new core i7 chips and AMD’s latest Phenom II range (which has finally gotten them clawing back a bit of CPU respect), and then Warren made the suggestion that I should just overclock my current chip to get a bit more running time from it.

I went off doing a bit of research and found a good overclocking introduction guide on Tom’s Hardware Guide and got to work.

Increasing my reference clock speed to 220Mhz seems about as far as I can go and has resulted in my cores going from 2.0Ghz to 2.2Ghz. It’s a small increase, and I’m sure if I tweaked things more I could get a bit more clock speed out of the system (although unfortunately I’m already at my maximum CPU Multiplier), but I’d probably need to look at tweaking RAM timings and voltage settings, which is a little above my realm of experience.

Still, things are definitely feeling a little snappier on this system, and hopefully it will be enough to tide me over for the next 6 months.

So shouts out to Warren!

I should point out that this is actually his computer as well. Warren’s been away for a while now and left a bunch of stuff in our house. One day I was looking at his computer box wondering what was in it when I realised that it was way better than my old computer and was just sitting there doing nothing. So I recommissioned it. Thanks again Warren..

Date Added: April 11th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

Whoa, what’s going on here. Yep, it’s annual CSS Naked Day and I’ve decided to join in the fun by stripping off and running around naked as the day I was born.

Ok, not really, I’ve just taken my style sheets off, so I’m only naked in a purely geeky sense of the word.

What’s it all about?

It’s all a bit of fun really, but the idea behind it is to promote the importance of web standards and demonstrate the proper use of semantic markup (the content of the site, being what you are viewing now), and how important it is to keep this separate from the presentation of your site.

This day of nakedness actually lasts for 48 hours, being that it is April 9th somewhere in the world for that long.

So join in the fun and get naked.

Date Added: April 8th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

You would think that buying things would be easy. I have money, with which I wish to part, you have a product, which you wish to sell. A match made in heaven right?

Apparently not. Last week, having scrimped and saved for a long time, we initiated an order for Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 Design Premium. As CS4 is so hugely expensive (€1999 ex vat), it exceeded the limit on our business credit card so I rang to place the order having found out that they do accept wire transfer. Much confusion ensued with the sales person assuming that I wanted to place a volume license order, and me having to explain that we only needed a single license, followed by her saying “Oh, if you can just give me your credit card details” and me then having to once again explain why we couldn’t order with credit card. This went on for a while until eventually it all became clear.

Finally, after a bit more confusion about what country we were resident in, the order was placed and we received a wire transfer payment request for €1923 inclusive of vat. I was somewhat baffled. This seems to have been some magical number that doesn’t equate to their advertised price for CS4 design premium, no matter what way I look at it. It’s not the US$ price (which equates to roughly €1300 – a disparity that causes me much irritation), and it’s not the ‘design standard’ price (as we initially feared). It’s just somewhere in between.

Still, I’m not going to complain if I actually get it cheaper than it’s meant to be.

Anyway, the fun really started when 4 days had passed since we made the wire transfer payment and absolutely no word was forthcoming from Adobe. We rang our bank to make sure the payment had definitely left. We rang their bank to make sure the payment had definitely been received (which it had), and then proceeded with phone calls to Adobe to find out the status of the order. This is where things started going wrong. Every person we spoke to had a conflicting version of what was going on. Most said either “that order number isn’t on our system”, or “that’s not even the correct format for an order number”, which didn’t exactly fill us with confidence. There then followed a multitude of phone calls trying to find out what the hell was going on with various customer service people stating we clearly didn’t make an order or telling us it was impossible because our email address is registered in the US. This, coupled with an annoying frequency of dropped calls whilst on hold, got me quite close to becoming seriously annoyed – with me needing to point out to the customer service agent that we’ve paid for something as instructed by Adobe with an Adobe order ID andno one can actually tell me what the hell is going on?!

Finally I managed to get back through to the original sales rep that I placed the order with, who, thankfully actually had the order details (why no one else could bring this information up I don’t know) and once I had explained the situation to her managed to handle everything quickly and calmly and we had our receipt of payment within 6 hours.

There’s still a few things I’m confused about, but at least the order seems to have gone through and we should receive a download link soon and then all will be well with the world (actually, I am assuming the worst and clearly we’re going to have all sorts of hassle with this in the future – I daren’t even imagine what confusion could occur with an upgrade process).

Date Added: April 6th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

Bad Address Bar

I’ve recently noticed a worrying trend (if two things is a trend) in web browser user interface design. The latest versions of Internet Explorer and Google’s recently launched Chrome browser have both decided grey out everything in the address bar except the top level domain name (TLD). For example, when browsing this page Google Chrome would grey out everything except “alex.leonard.ie”, and IE would grey out everything except “leonard.ie”.

Is this progress or change for the sake of it? I find it extremely frustrating to not be able to clearly make out the URL of my current location. I really hope other browsers don’t go down this road, of if they do, they ensure that the greying out of the “less important” parts of the URL is much less drastic.

It could of course just be bad colour and contrast settings on my screens, but in theory I’m fully colour corrected with the Datacolor Spyder3.

Chromeless

Of course I’m not against new developments and things moving forward. However, for my own purposes this UI change doesn’t work. I can see that for the general user, they probably don’t care what the full URL is, but as a web designer I find that it is important for me to be able to quickly garner information from the URL with one glance at the address bar.

There was recently an interesting discussion between Alex Faaborg and Aza Raskin over on Vimeo regarding the question of designing of chromeless browsing. It’s fairly nerdy now, but I will admit I found it to be good listening. Lots of good things mentioned such as the difference between ‘Usability’ and ‘Discoverability’, which shows how easy it is to not even think about what goes into good user interface design.

Aza Raskin is Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs and Alex Faaborg is a User Experience Specialist at the Mozilla Corporation.

Date Added: April 5th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

Bono R.I.P.

Shocking news is breaking that world-famous lead singer from U2, Paul Hewson a.k.a. Bono, was found dead this morning in a penthouse suite of a hotel in Amsterdam.

At 10:00 this morning  staff of the Intercontinental Amstel hotel in Amsterdam made the decision to enter Bono’s penthouse suite despite the “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on the door. The decision was taken after Bono’s missed an appointment to meet his new Dutch accountant to discuss important taxation affairs.

Upon entering the room staff were shocked to discover Bono submerged in a bath of caviar. Urgent attempts were made to revive Mr. Hewson but the emergency CPR attempts were hindered by the large quantities of Almas Beluga caviar which were blocking his windpipe.

Dangerous Do Not Disturb

Authorities arrived on the scene and do not currently suspect foul play, however enquiries are being made as to the whereabouts of the supplier of such a large quantity of Almas Beluga caviar, which famously retails for £25,000 per kilo, and samples of the caviar have been sent to the Nederlands Forensisch Instituut in the Hague for testing to rule out any possibility of poisoning.

Bono’s body has been removed to the city morgue and it is expected that cause of death will be either asphyxiation or the rarely seen ‘indulgence toxicity’,  however it has been advised that no statement on this will be given until a full toxicity test has been undertaken.

Costly Death Blanket

Hendrickje Brinkerhoff, a hair stylist in an exclusive salon a near to the International Amstel, said this afternoon that she had been delighted to serve Mr. Hewson on a couple of occasions recently. “I think it’s really sad,” Ms. Brinkerhoff said. “He seemed like a very happy man and had said that the people in Holland were so much better dressed than the Irish that he knew. He made me laugh when he said that but I wasn’t sure how he would take me giving him advice on his own fashion sense.” She later added “It’s funny, he wouldn’t take his sunglasses off even when I was washing his hair.”

Outside the Intercontinental Amstel hotel a sizeable crowd had gathered and many people expressed shock at Mr. Hewson’s death. Rykaard Groesbeck, a local artist, said, “That’s terrible. It seems such a cruel way to go, and what a waste of such expensive caviar!”

Geertje Schermerhorn, a student who was passing by, said, “That’s awful, and I was only listening to ‘Shiny Happy People’ this morning. The world must be much less happy now.”

As news of Mr. Hewson’s death spreads across the Internet, the Chief of Police (Hoofdcommissaris) has issued a fairly terse summary of the death: “On Wednesday the 1st of July 2009 at approximately 1000 hours, in the centrum precinct, police responded to the InterContinental Amstel at Professor Tuppelin 1 and found a M/W/48 unconscious. The victim was pronounced DOA upon removal from a bath filled with Almas Beluga caviar. Investigation continues.”

U2′s manager and other band members have so far been unavailable for comment.

Date Added: April 1st, 2009 | 1 Comment

Came across some incredible art work via Conor Horgan’s Tumblr – the photography of Shinichi Maruyama.

The photo reproduced below is part of a series of photographs titled “Kusho”. This was the first and possibly most impacting photo I saw and it definitely took my breath away seeing this and am strongly considering picking up the “Kusho” book (if and when I have some spare funds).

Part of the Kusho Series

Conor originally put up a photo of Shinichi at work which, as soon as I saw it, made me think of some recent ideas I’ve been playing around with for my next release artwork.

Whilst I’m not expecting to come up with anything quite as breathtaking, I’m hoping it’s going to be the strongest album artwork I’ve done yet, and something that demonstrates the amount of thought behind it.

Shinichi Maruyama at work

Again, if you like these, definitely head over to Shinichi’s website.

Date Added: April 1st, 2009 | Leave a comment!