2012 - Day 87 - Whos gonna win?

Look at this fight.. if your into fighting that is... in fact, if you are not into fighting your not gonna enjoy this at all. Not because the fight is really gruesome. It is not really bloody at all. I just came across it, the commentating is funny. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBbkodOhjOE&feature=colike

2012 - Day 86 - Tuesday

Myself and Linda went into town to get some business done. We did it, met Mart too and had a delicious meal in the Cellar bar. Well it used to be called the Cellar, is it still called the Cellar? Either way, the food was nice, if you are going by I would advise you to get the small Caesar Salad. It was delicious. And filling, although I do not know if the girl gave me extra food for free cause I was telling her how hungry I was. Then again, maybe she did give me extra food but also charged me for it, who really looks at the bill?

When we came out to Carraroe we painted a crappy wooden shelf thing we had that I had loads of junk on. Got some good quality bargain paint down at Tí Liam. When we were finished with it I was like "wow, that looks fantastic".

I finished off my day with an exhausting hour session at Cliffs Gym. Phew, I was tired afterward but I felt good.

2012 - Day 85 - Monday Sunny Monday

Yeah today was good weather wise. I was at karate too in the evening. I meant to do some work of course but I did nothing. What I did do was to relax and get over my hectic weekend. It was great!

2012 - Day 84 - Ran na Feiriste Drama Competition.

First off we were in the drama competition and of the 5 catagories that were going, well maybe there were more than 5 but I don't know, the drama won 4! 80% success rate is brilliant in anything. Here are some pictures of the event. 

John Keane hard at work.

The set... some assembly was required. 

Linda and her padawan Rick finalising the preparations for the set. 

"The butler did it!"

The fantastic cast taking a bow.

The fantastic cast striking a pose. 

John contemplates which timber to build his trophy cabnet from.  

Kinda scary looking trophies... here are 50% of them... yeah!

2012 - Day 83 - Up to Donegal we go.

Up to Donegal. It was a really cool journey actually except that most of it was in the dark. Some people told us to go up to Letterkenny and then all around to the top of Donegal. Obviously these people have shares in Shell Oil or something and wanted us to add an extra hundred euro petrol onto the journey. Instead, we went the fast efficent way. We stopped in Donegal town into what seemed like a respectable diner/take away. The food was ok there too, but more because we were really hungry than the fact that they had really fine cuisine. Finally we arrived at Caislean Ór in Anngry.   

2012 - Day 82 - Friday

Workin.... However when night fell i went down to Marts and we had a film night. We saw Thor and some ghost film. Paranormal Activity 3.  It was my second time seeing Thor and it was equally as brilliant the second time around. Maybe the best of the Avengers films?

2012 - Day 81 - Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome

There are some things in ones life that you look back on and you realise what age you are and your current financial situation, you might have kids... you might be sick... who knows. But you look at your life and you realise that "this thing happened in the past and I can never redo/do/undo it."

Battlestar Galactica is not like this at all! It is a brilliant series and I have never seen it. However, if I want to see it I can just download it, look at it on my 1 months free from Netflix or get a DVD off someone! Rock on!

Must... Watch.... BSG

Now that there is a new Battlestar Galactica coming out called Blood & Chrome I realise that I have wasted enough of my life... I am going to watch the first episode of BSG (not the 70's one obviously - I actually technically saw all those I believe) tonight with or without Linda and for once and for all catch up on BSG. As Captain Picard said in the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation... "I should have done this a long time ago."

2012 - Day 80 - KONY

Joseph Kony. Who is Joseph Kony? I had heard about him a bit but the thing that made me really go, ''ok who or what is Kony' is that I saw a float in the parade in Carraroe with Kony written on the side of it. I did see that right? It was on a float in Carraroe right? So then I looked into it. I googled "who is Kony" and I got the following video.

http://vimeo.com/37119711

Basically it is a 27 minute video exactly for people like me who did not know who or what Kony is. Thing is I had heard of this man before but I did not know his name. Basically, he is a man who kidnaps kids, rapes, tortures them. He turn the boys into soilders and the girls into sex slaves. He is a very bad man.

Kony, Joseph Kony. kony 

Look at the video. By me telling you to look at the video I am actually doing something good in the world believe it or not. By you looking at the video YOU are doing something good in the world. By you and me telling other people to look at this video WE are doing something good. And what is that good thing? We are letting other people know who Kony is.

He is getting away with what he is doing because people do not know about him. See his face. Know him. Tell people about him. That is how he will be stopped.

2012 - Day 79 - Propaganda

Yesterday I mentioned Chairman Mao. He is the ultimate in propaganda. Before he became the leader of China he worked in the propaganda ministry in the Chinese government. He boasted at one point that he killed 4200 intellictuals whereas a leader before him killed 420 and therefore he was 10 times better than the previous leader! To me that sound like crazy talk. However, go to China and you will find millions and millions of people who will say that under Mao the country grew in strength, living conditions improved and more people got education.

Propaganda I am sure has a lot of definations. My defination is that propaganda is the act of making people see what you want them to see. I was looking at the video below and I found myself questioning weather I was looking at propaganda or not.

Sometimes, maybe it is propaganda. And maybe the propaganda is correct.

2012 - Day 78 - The Non Bank Holiday Monday

Today was not a bank holiday in Ireland despite many many people thinking it was so. Therefore many people left out bins on Saturday!!!! Ahhh!

It was a nice relaxing day all the same. Did some physical work, that was good. I explained to Sophie who Chairman Mao is and how he was just another leader in the history of China who held controvertial political views.

The Fearless Leader of China from the 1940s - 1960s . He also killed around 45 million of his own people.

2012 - Day 77 - Mothers Day

A survey said, and logic of course - you know with all these surveys people make and probably spend a good deal of money on, if you just think for a moment you can get the answer anyway. Like this survey I just mentioned, getting back to the point, that the number one thing that mothers wanted for Mothers Day was a sleep in. Nice and simple. Not chocolates, not flowers. No, simply and specifically nothing. Leave me the hell alone kids. Just leave me. Go... get out... close the door... "hey come back!!!! I said close the door!". All that. Yep... well the no kids part for the first part of the morning anyway. I know this. So I tried to let the mother of my kids sleep in for a while. She did and the day was off to a great start. I believe she had a good Mothers Day.

2012 - Day 76 - St Patricks Day

Today was Saint Patricks Day. And like most Saints days his aims were totally misrepresented by consuming tons of alcohol. Of course thats fine with me. It was just an observation. But anyway, in Carraroe there was a parade. It was cool, we ended up walking the whole thing, as in walking up the total length of it and all the way back down again. Then after mingling around up at the hall, Halla Einne(? - spelling) we worked our way back down to a family feast. It was a great day actually. We chilled the beans in the evening, looked at telly and went asleep. I didn't paint the town red, I just relaxed with my perfect other half.

2012 - Day 75 - Friday

Wow the cool stuff i did today on my beautiful ubuntu. I manually installed mysql & php5 & apache2 using aptitude. All on the command line! it felt like i was really using the computer. I am taking notes on what commands i am using. This is the kind of stuff i would never do with windows. I just could not be bothered.

2012 - Day 74 - Lovely Ubuntu + Anonymous

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group) 

**********************************

I didn't tell you or did I? I few days ago I got a laptop that had Microsoft Windows on it and I overwrote the operating system with a Unix - well Linux rather - operating system. In my case the new Linux operating system is Ubuntu. The version of Ubuntu that I have is 11.10. The version is relevant because Ubuntu has come into its own with it own look and an interface called Unity that is kinda like the scroll bar that you find on the bottom of Mac OS screens where you can pick programs from really quickly. But there are a million reasons to go with Ubuntu over Windows. First off they way that computers are going, with phone and tablets the actually dependancy that people had on Microsoft Windows is not as strong. I am not saying that Microsoft is obsolete! I am not saying that. What I am saying is that once there were many operating systems, then for a while there was really just  Microsoft with Apple and Unix getting honorable mentions. Now if you want something to run your device you can go with:

Windows
Android
Lumia
Apple OS
Ubuntu (of various versions of Linux)
Blackberry
Sony

The reason I mention all of these is because there are reasons in the past where if all you wanted was to surf the internet, check mail, play some computer games, look at YouTube, Facebook etc the regular end user would have simply needed Windows or Apple. That has definately changed now. The future is definately bright because if the past has taught us one thing it is that where there is competition there is innovation. And with competition and innovation there is always one big winner. You - the end user.

So why am I on Ubuntu? Becasue I can. I downloaded it free and apart from games (there are some there but games are simply not Linux's strong point) it has everything. For games I use my beautiful xbox360. For everything else I can use my beautiful Ubuntu.

2012 - Day 73 - Senator Trevor's Birthday

Ah, another day another birthday! Trevor this time, happy birthday again Trevor. Not that he will be reading this. But still... 

Had a good karate class today actually. I wasn't feeling the best and I was considering for a moment not going, but it is always worth going. 

Always...

2012 - Day 72 - Mali's Birthday

I think I have finally come up with a naming convention for my blog titles. There will always be the 2012 in the beginning because that is the series that I am doing, then the number of days we are in the blog, in this case 72. The last part will be the subject of the cool thing I am going to talk about. Or if there is nothing cool I will just have the day of the week over head... this also enables me to keep track of what day we are in as well.

Now today was my sister Mali's birthday! Yippee! Her and a bunch of girls went up to the house and did some fun girl stuff. Linda was knitting. It is the first time I saw Linda knitting and to tell the truth I didn't even know she could knit!

2012 - Day 71 - Monday

I was looking at something on telly, whatever it was there was some Japanese in it, as in spoken on it, and I recognised one of the words, he said "Ready"... I know that because we say the word in Karate... so I am slowly... very very slowly learning Japanese too.

非常に印象的な氏ドナル

2012 - Day 70 - Sunday

Not much happened that would be of interest to the world in general. If some alien species read this they would say... "that was his day! not much of a day". Ah but that is where you are wrong ET. It is days like today that make my life as good as it is. I was down at the beech with the kids and Linda. We played in the sand and made canals, and mines, and I flooded them. Ah sand...

2012 - Day 69 - Saturday

Funny old Saturday. I was at Cliffs Gym... then at mom and dads power hosing the house and path. My evening was topped giving a Microsoft Access Databases to my little friend... A good day.

2012 - Day 68 - The Artist

Got back into playing a bit of xbox. Played some Dirt 2 which is great great great grandchild of the original game Colin McRae. If your unfamiliar to the games they are computer games based on rallying. Thing is the first Colin McRae games were brilliant. You could do loads of adjustments on the car and you really felt like YOU were a real racer. The new games are nothing like that now. You press the right button on your joypad. You speed past pretty graphics. You win or not. You don't really care.

This films is brilliant, beautiful and all things that are good with good cinema.

Every week we try to get into the cinema. It is an expensive thing to keep trying to do but it is our thing. It is our break from the kids. So we see a good few films in the cinema. I love the cinema experience. So when we went to see the Artist this Friday it was like we won the lottery. Honestly I could not say enough good things about this film. It looks at the history of cinema strokes it ego in the nicest cleanest most caring beautiful way. Beautiful is a word that comes to my mind alot when I am thinking of this film. The very dashingly handsome Jean Dujardin and drop dead georgous Bérénice Bejo quietly draw you back in time to when film was about the silver screen... famous actors and actresses... and innocent story lines. This film has definitely carved a place for itself in my top 5 films of all time. If you have seen it you know why. If you have not seen it then know that in your life you still have 2 of the best hours of you life waiting for you...

2012 - Day 67 - Thursday

I was not working today but i spent alot of the day preparing for a computer class.

2012 - Day 66 - 2 Irish Hackers Arrested

Darren "Pwnsauce" Martyn and Donncha "Palladium" O'Cearrbhail have been arrested and are in serious trouble. Basically they are part of the Hackivists group LulzSec. I for one am proud of these people and I admire what they do. I had my website cupantae.ie hacked a few times... no thanks to Blacknight.com for that one whom is my host, anyway, cupantae.ie was hacked, minor hacks and I was like cool. There is something that I find really admirable about the hacking community. Maybe is it just that I am a wannabe hacker (that for the record has never hacked anything in my life), maybe I like the way they are stickin it to the man. Maybe it is because I am an idiot.. hmmm?

Poor Mr. LulzSec :(

But seriously... I hope they don't get into too much trouble. I am proud of them and I hope they will be ok.

I have cut this piece out of the online mag TechCentral.ie - It gives the news better than I could.

"TechLife | 06 Mar 2012 :  Two Irish men were among five arrested as part of investigations into the LulzSec hacking team today. Police in Ireland, the US and UK have taken a total of five men into custody on the foot of information supplied by LulzSec's alleged ringleader Hector Xavier Monsegur (28), aka Sabu, who was arrested last June.
According to Fox News Darren "Pwnsauce" Martyn and Donncha "Palladium" O'Cearrbhail have been taken into custody. Also indicted so far are Jake "Topiary" Davis and Ryan "Kayla" Ackroyd of London; and Jeremy "Anarchaos" Hammond of Chicago, who has also been charged in connection with operations by hacktivist collective Anonymous. Davis, a 19-year-old diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, has been under house arrest since August.


The FBI's operation to dismantle LulzSec dates back to August 15 2011 when Monsegur, an unemployed father of two, was unmasked as Sabu. Since then he operated out of FBI offices tasked with taking down the other leaders of LulzSec and hacktivists from Anonymous.


During LulzSec's brief existance it attacked the websites of the CIA, Fox, Sony and global intelligence company Stratfor, posting confidential information to the website Pastebin and causing billions in damage and harming Sony's reputation to the extent that it has had to rebrand its online gaming service to distance itself from the fallout from the security breach.


A long-term welfare recipient, Monsegur's last full time job was with peer-to-peer music sharing service Limewire. The company went under in 2010, helped in no small part by a €100 million lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America.


LulzSec officially ceased operations in June 2011 citing boredom rather than intervention by law enforcement agencies as the reason for calling it quits.


As for the Irish arrests, Darren Martyn is the "founder and main researcher" of Insecurity Research and studied at NUI Galway. In January he gave a talk on wireless security at information security conference CampusCon, organised by the Waterford IT Hacking Society. Details of O'Cearrbhail's background are pending confirmation.


The Garda Press Office has confirmed it is holding one person for questionning.


TechCentral Reporters


Read more: http://www.techcentral.ie/18450/two-irish-arrested-in-lulzsec-case#ixzz1oPrP2dzc"

2012 - Day 65 - Alpha07

Not much of a big news to many people but today I made a major breakthrough in the Web-based game I am working on Alpha07. The breakthrough is that it works now to a certain degree. I can create a new user, I have a city or planet that I am looking down on and I can build upon that. Soon the financial aspect of things will come into play, you will have to buy things to put on your planet, you will have to trade your commodities and barter with other people so that you can both build each other up. There is loads of potential going in every direction with this.

Me = :)

2012 - Day 64 - Monday

Highlight of my day was Karate....

2012 - Day 63 - Wedding Fare Day

Came back to Galway today in time for Sunday dinner at home with Mom and Dad in what is a ritualistic event at this stage where it does not matter almost whom is there for the day, the same amount of dinner is prepared anyhow ensure that if only a few people turn up you will have the choice of a ridiculously massive dinner, or if all the family arrive in at the same time that there will meerly be still too much food for those present. It is a fantastic system.

On the way down we looked at a hotel in Mayo, Westport. It was nice. It is on our definately maybe list. Then we got to Carraroe of course and there was a wedding fare there! It was in Ostan An Cheathrú Rua. The place scrubbed up well and there was a nice positive feeling there from the hair and makeup, to dresses, the food etc etc. Everything you need for the day I guess. But to me our wedding seems SO FAR AWAY! Realistically, I know that, even though we have not set an actually date, the wedding is going to happen relatively soon.

But I will let future Donal worry about that....

2012 - Day 62 - Saturday

Went up to Sligo to meet Lindas brother and his little family. God twins! He has twins. So much work. I can see how it would get manageable when your used to it and I can see also how when those twins are older they will be company to each other. But to me when I am not used to it, it seems like alot of work and I am impressed with how they are managing the whole "thing".

When we got home we had a nice walk about Castlebar when our kids were asleep. Castlebar, like most small towns, is alot nicer when there is not much traffic, or many people walking around the place. To know a town or city you have to see it at night too. They have different energies.

2012 - Day 61 - Friday

Busy day...

Work => Meet Linda => Castlebar...

Basically, when I had finished work, and got to Castlebar with Linda and the kids we were all so tired we did nothing else.

Oh, except relax and chill the beans. Exactly what I needed.

2012 - Day 60 - Spring

It is spring. In celebration I have added Vivaldi's "Spring" to todays blog entery.

2012 - Day 59 - Wednesday 29th Feb!!

What madness is this! 29 days in Feb! Chicks proposing to dudes?

AAHHHHHHHH!

Well, after karate and some TV, and after way too many of the delicious fairy cakes buns that the girls made, I went to bed and actually got some thing working properly on my Alpha07 game! I am impressed and amazed with myself, although it really was stuff that Mark Ahern wrote that I didn't have a clue how it worked but that I have figured out now. So basically my little php browser based game is getting closer to completion. Rock.

2012 - Day 58 - The eyes have it....

Took Sophie to the opticians today... it is part of a state scheduled thing I assume. I don't know, all I know is I had to take her in. But her eyes are perfect the Doc said. You see I wear glasses, Linda wears glasses. There is a genetic loaded gun pointing at Sophie ready to fire a short sighted bullet at her. Hopefully she will not need glasses, not for any other reason than lets face it, they are a bit of a pain. It is something else you have to carry around with you all your life... unless you wear contacts, which is also a pain, or you have "freakin'" lazer eye surgery. Basically.. shes fine and all is good.

So we met up in town with Linda who got a beautiful new haircut....

Your lookin good baby... but no news there :)

2012 - Day 57 - Monday - Alpha07

I was not at work today, but I tried to do some work at home, but you know what, the day just flew.. I was at karate though which is always cool. But the big karate news was that there is a grading on April 7th! A mere what, 6 or 7 weeks away! But if I get it I will be up to a green belt. W00t.

You know, it is funny. I have been learning a programming language on and off called PHP. I have been learning or dabbling rather with programming languages on and off all the time since I was a (late) teen. But anyway, it is one thing to mess with a language and a whole other thing to do something with it. So in an effort to learn PHP I began making a game based on the browser based game idea of "Torn City" or "OGame". Remember Torn City? How big were we into that at the time!

Anyway my game is called Alpha07 and it is based on this idea where you have a planet, you can build space ships, fight other players, there will be an economy in it where if you need titanium to build your space ship but your enemy knows that you need lots of titanium then the enemy can buy up the titanium and increase the price of said titanium... therefore fighting you economically before flying his ship over to your planet and blasting it to pieces.

Screen Shot 1 - Login Screen

Screen Shot 2 - Complete with naff pics I drew myself....

Yeah... I have put a few screen shots together to show you that this is not actually a dream in my head.. I have actually been working on the game for a good while.

My point about all this is that I have actually begun working on the game again, hopefully I will get to launch it properly as a playable game! I will keep you posted.