General: October 2005 Archives

Geoff has a nice post about wine over on his blog:

A Wine Peasant will proudly proclaim the virtues of their €6.99 bottle of South African Chardonnay. “…really easy to drink, and 14% alcohol…” as if drinking alcohol is a challenge and not something to enjoy and that extra few percent alcohol is just what we need to further remove us from our mundane reality. In fact the alcohol percentage is a legal requirement and only indicates the maximum, the actual content can be lower.

In some ways that would seem to sum up a lot of Irish people's attitude to alcoholic beverages. It doesn't seem to matter if the drink is good or bad as long as it has enough alcohol to get you drunk! I like wine. I think I always have done. I wouldn't spend large amounts of money on wine, but that's usually a matter of economic priorities more than anything else. When I lived in Italy I could afford to drink quite nice wine on a regular basis, whereas here wine is considered to be a luxury and is taxed to the hilt. The end result of the tax is that wines of very different values will end up costing almost the same price. Geoff does bring up some rather valid points about people's relationship with vinoculture. How many people actually know the difference between one cepage and another? At least the days of Blue Nun, Black Tower and those other excuses for wine are more or less gone. My local corner shop may not have the best selection of wine in the world, but there is enough to choose from regardless of your budget.

Age of Empires III is due for release the first week of November. I've never been much of a gamer, but I've always enjoyed wasting hours (sometimes days!) with the Age of Empires games and other conquest type games.

Pierre gave me links to a couple of the films he'd subtitled earlier, as they're in French here's the place to do your own :)

The old adage "you pay for what you get" is one often cited in the business world and in particular in that of IT and hosting.

Adsense and other contextual advertising systems offer small webmasters a chance to get a "slice" of the advertising revenue pie. You don't need to have a gigantic web portal or millions of page impressions a month to get enough cash to cover some of your basic costs, such as domain registration or hosting. Those of us who run larger websites are able to make more money - obviously. We are also interested in seeing how we can maximise our revenue without falling foul of the Adsense TOS. However not all webmasters are ethical and have resorted to using techniques that could be described as extreme, borderline or creative depending on your own stance. Darren has an interesting summary of some of the techniques being employed and you can see why some of them would attract attention. You can also see how they may help increase revenue. The question remains though - is it worth it? How far will you go?

I'm really happy with the speed of delivery from CDWOW.ie. As each season of Scrubs is released on DVD I intend to get a copy. Season 1 was fantastic, even though I had seen a number of the episodes on TV. Being able to have a Scrubs session was great :) Season 2 arrived today, so I know what I'll be doing for the next couple of evenings

According to a report on this morning's Morning Ireland, mobile phones have been in Ireland for 20 years today. Of course 20 years ago the word "mobile" was not as correct as it is now. I got my first mobile in 1996 when I was living in Spain. It actually belonged to one of my girlfriend's friends.. but that's not really important. So when did you get your first mobile?

My copy of the latest AfroCelt CD arrived this morning I have been listening to it on and off all morning and am really happy with it. They definitely haven't lost their touch to thrill and haunt you.

Yet another Flash game involving animals. This time kittens. Enjoy playing

Media, be it online or offline, should be accessible if readership and advertisers are to be maintained. Unfortunately some online media ventures are badly thought out and alienate portions of their readership by insisting on platform specific software and plugins. If a Mac user wants to read your publication why would you tell them to use Windows? The WHIR is one of the better respected webhosting industry information sites. Apart from their online features they also offer a print magazine which is sent to thousands of subscribers worldwide. The content of the magazine may not be of interest to some readers of this blog, but what should be of interest is the new online version of the magazine Some online magazines rely on PDFs with a few screenshots which although usable to a point isn't the most interactive. Other publications, including some of the Irish Sunday papers, insist on providing the user with a "full" experience - just as long as the user is running Internet Explorer on Windows with a combination of specific plugins etc., etc. The WHIR, on the other hand, have used technology to bring their magazine online without interrupting the end user's experience. I haven't tested it on linux yet, but it works seamlessly in Firefox on Windows.