Feckoff.net

Brian Cowen has announced that the infamous Fianna Fail tent at the Galway Races is no more.

Some of the posters over at The Property Pin had some amusing comments to make on it:

daltonr

Brian’s no fool.

Scraps the tent.
Avoids having to face the builders.
And comes accross as cleaner than Bertie, clean slate, no more FF tied to the builders.

Nice one BC.

kerrynorth

They’re downsizing to a telephone box - they are not expecting many solvent builders at Galway this year.

verbatim

He knows that being seen to be cosy with builders when the full scale of the mugging of young Irish people becomes apparent over the next couple of years won’t be a wise move.

conor_mc

I disagree, in the 70’s they were probably the farmers party with the IFA pulling the strings. In the 80’s, it was the industrialists like Goodman, Smurfit and co.

They’ll move on to the next profitable donor-industry now - this is as sure a sign as you’ll get that property has had it day. BC is cutting the apron-strings, the CIF are on their own now.

I have to say I agree with most of them. As anyone who knows me already knows, I’m no fan of Fianna Fail but its refreshing to see the new Taoiseach making some changes that appear to be for the greater good, even if there are possible ulterior motives that can explain them.

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I took a drive down to Mahon Falls in Waterford today. Its a natural beauty spot in the Comeragh Mountains, easily accessible by road from Dungarvan or Carrick on Suir. It was beautifully sunny on the way down but once I got up into the mountains the clouds became very low and dark very fast.

I’ve put a few photos on Flickr here (took ages to upload a mere 20 or so MB, I need faster upload speed). I had another go at HDR although this time from only a single exposure. I used Nikon’s RAW software to generate JPEGs with 7 different exposure levels from the one RAW file (.NEF in Nikon land) and then fed those into Photomatix and fiddled about with it to get the following.

Straight from camera:

HDR’d up the ass:

Click the photos for the flickr page with full size versions available.

In the past I would never do anything more than cropping or rotating a bit to fix lopsided shots but I think this photo really benefited from the tone mapping shenanigans of Photomatix. Which do you prefer?

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Extreme Pizza recently opened their first branch outside of the US here in Kilkenny. I’m just after having their “Ragin’ Rooster” pizza and it was absolutely bloody delicious! I’m not usually one for pimping businesses but credit where credit is due.
The ragin’ rooster consists of chicken marinated in barbecue sauce, red onions, coriander, cheddar and mozzarella and it rocks. Hopefully this chain expands across Ireland in the future.
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Took this this evening - its my first attempt at HDR photography.

That’s St. Canice’s Cathedral in Kilkenny, shot from Michael St. across the river.
Click it for the flickr page with bigger sizes.

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Got this in my email this morning: A lucrative new position being advertised on recruitireland

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Don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out.

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LOL.

There’s a load of righteous types crying over it here.

Eircom, the telco everyone loves to hate, has announced that they are upgrading their bitstream broadband products all round… unless you’re on a 1Mb deal, in which case it sucks to be you.

Press release

If you’re on a 2Mb product you’ll be going to 3Mb.
If you’re on 3Mb you’ll be going to 7.6Mb.
If you’re on 4Mb you’ll be going to 10Mb.
If you’re on 6Mb you’ll be going to 12Mb.

All of the above depends on the poxy Eircom copper between you and the exchange being up to the task. They haven’t mentioned if there will be any change in upstream speeds yet. Upgrades are being rolled out between now and June. Apparently this is all part of Eircom’s ADSL2+ rollout.

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… Car insurance has finally started to become more affordable.

FBD and Allianz are now quoting me less than a grand to comprehensively cover my Civic 1.8! They wouldn’t quote me last year, nor would Hibernian. Hibernian are looking for a little more, but since their website wouldn’t let my specify that my car is an i-VTEC (just “Honda”, 1.8) they might tell me to fuck off. I don’t want to give that shower of wankers my money anyways. Axa also lack an online quote system, ergo they suck.

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With today’s news that the government are finally going to crack down on the 400,000 provisional driving licence holders in Ireland there has been some hilarious angry ranting from those who believe it is their right to drive on public roads without sitting any test. Apparently over 300,000 of our provisional licence holders have not applied for a test. Check it out:

• One of those utterly worthless online petitions (with some rather humorous comments left)
• A call-to-arms on boards.ie to get people to sign the aforementioned petition
• A lengthy thread about the situation on boards.ie (152 posts and counting)
• Another lengthy thread about it on politics.ie (149 posts and counting)

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