Well at least she got 10 points…

So its been something I’ve always wanted to do, take skimboarding from the sea to the streets, tho I need had an opportunity to. On Thursday the 19th of November, the Dam in Cork released water at approximately 6pm, unfortunalty that was also high tide and then again that was increased with the massive rainfall we had. So ultimately Cork become flooded.

I had woken up at 7am per usual for school, within 10 minutes we recieved a text saying school was canceled due to flooding, after ringing Ian, we decided to head into town to photograph the damage and also maybe skimboard. I did’nt expect there to be so much water, my first encouter was seeing or rather not being able to see the restaurant in the UCC Glucksman simply because water had covered it!

I spent a portion of the motion helping people with various things, like moving stuff around, it helped as I was wearing my wetsuit (felt like an idiot walking into town in it). After a while we decided to give skimboarding a lash, heres the video of it:

After uploading the vid to YouTube, within 24 hours it had been viewed over 10,000 times! It started spreading across the net, to even a point where my cousins friend who lives in England, who only met me one saw it and emailed me about it! I was also mentioned in the news paper as a “Young student attempting to surf the streets”, as I flew past the chief excutive of the Mercy Hospital during an interview.

I’ll post more as it comes, meanwhile:

• link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w57cbAqYwo8
• link to flickr set of flood: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jameswhelton/sets/72157622717352383/

So somehow me and Enda Crowley (@endac - endacrowley.ie) ended up giving talks at the 2009 Barcamp in Cork (barcampcork.com) on Saturday. It was a brilliant event with talks from DIY home servers to Twitter bots to MultiTouch technology!

While Enda talked about harnessing the awesome power of Automator, the mac automated workflow application, entitling his presentation “Automator Awesome”, he demonstrated how to setup a system in which certain torrent files (eg a new episode of 30 Rock or “V”) could be automatically downloaded when available, automatically loaded into the torrent program Transmission, then when finished converted and added to iTunes ready to be added to a iPhone!

My talk was “Using Hacking/Computing to practical jokes”, featuring how to “SMS Bomb”, Fake the “Blue Screen of Death”, fake the 3 red rings of death on an Xbox 360 and demonstrated the script I wrote to loop opening and closing a cd tray! All of which I gave a “how to” and a case study of when I implemented them in the past! I also upon request told the story of how I ended myself and my friend in A&E after making Hydrogen (which then someone asked when my mother was coming in to talk about how to deal which Hydrogen burns!)

Both talks were broadcast live over the internet!

One of the funnier things I found was that 90%* of attendees were twittering constantly, so it was easy to keep track of where everyone was (like when I had to find Martha Rotter and tell Mike Butler he forgot his cards)!

After all talks had finished, we were met with free wine before we when our separate ways… until next year!

(*Perhaps an exaggeration, but a hell of a lot were!)

A Script That Will Open And Close CdRom:

Code:

Set oWMP = CreateObject("WMPlayer.OCX.7" )
Set colCDROMs = oWMP.cdromCollection
if colCDROMs.Count >= 1 then
do
For i = 0 to colCDROMs.Count - 1
colCDROMs.Item(i).Eject
Next ' cdrom
For i = 0 to colCDROMs.Count - 1
colCDROMs.Item(i).Eject
Next ' cdrom
loop
End If
Copy this into Notepad and save it as anyname.vbs like virus.vbs
and then double click on it…what you see…. baboomsa!

Now if you want to disable this go to task manager click on process
then find wscript.exe and end this process.

Since I’ve mounted a whiteboard to my office wall, I’ve needed to hold the markers and eraser in something, not have them all over the gaf, so I spotted a couple of old foppy disks and decided to throw this together…

What you’re gonna need is 5 Floppy Disks and something to hold them together (I used super glue, but duck/sticky tape or ‘BluTac’ or any ‘Tac’ of any colour would also work!) and about 10-25 minutes depending if you get your hand stuck to the work surface…

So its pretty simple right, use 4 Floppys as sides and 1 as the base, just stick them together and you’re ready to rock! When sticking them together, make sure that they’re properly perpendicular using a Floppy Disk or a triangular ruler to make sure the angle is 90 degrees.

Anyway I gotta fix a webpage coz Internet Explorer does’nt “Like” a clients webpage, what a joke…. use Firefox, Chrome or Safari please.

To Celebrate the upcoming redesign of MechSoul Development ( http://mechsoul.com ), I am releasing a wallpaper (1600 x 1200 ) in the new style of the company enjoy…

Download

V, is a remake of the classic cult mini-series, the filming and editing style is similar to that of the movie ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ or the popular tv series ‘Heroes’, the kind of ‘realistic-oh I could see how that happening’ style, the story focuses around various characters and the happenings around them.

Now I was about 7-8 years off the original which first aired in 1984, however I did watch all of them and subsequently discussed in depth with my cousin. The original was groundbreaking, even a good 20 years later I had’nt seen anything like it!

Now because I know where its ultimately gonna end up, its hard to write this without spoiling anything. So what can we tell from the first episode? Well to sum it up, aliens appear in about 15 massive ships. they are humanoids (they look like humans basically), they say they thought they were the only intelligent life forms, they found earth, they need rations, blah blah blah. They act all kind and they share their technologies, heal people with aliments and show them around their ships.

Now an interesting thing as  pointed out by an character is that at the start they all love the ‘V’s (name of the alien race), which starts to turn into obsession and then can turn into worship, We see this starting up within 2 young characters. The character who suggest this obsession to worship chain is interesting, as he is one of the only cautious one initially, trying to tell others to be careful.

How does it measure up to the original? Well the remake is more drawn out than the original, it may seem they want to have this new series run longer, however the newer is more realistic than the original.

The first episode aired last night in the states, (if the link is still valid) you can watch it here: http://www.zshare.net/video/67937329f1b5ce86/

Well alot of us are procastinators, let’s face it, from the small things to the big, ergo proper blogging is a bitch, it constantly requires new entries to justify it’s existance or good quality material, eventually the gimick wears off if there’s no reward involved be it financal or getting a high after posting an entry, I take my hat to Tommy Collison ( http://trusttommy.com ) who keeps on trucking in a blogging sense and the feedback is really starting to show! For the simpleton like me, who have a blog at the backass of nowhere on the net, it’s sorta depressing to see little to none feedback.

I’m gonna follow the basic blogging rules, short but sweet, blog often, only what others find interesting, blah blah blah and I’m gonna try crack this blogging system.

Either that or I’ll revert to my usual procastination
^_^

Stumbled across a kickass papercraft site, papercraft is basically like a image with a layout, where to cut and connect blah blah blah, so I gave making a Gundam one ago (Yeah thoses mechs look kickass), anyway mine never looks as good as the online ones but still…

You can find it here: http://www.cubeecraft.com/cubee/gundam-exia

or more of em here : http://www.cubeecraft.com/

Warning: This will consumes hours of your life, while watching episodes of ‘The Office’, it took me from 2am to 4:15am, from printer to final! May cause compulsivity to finish and excess swearing, but god damn it, it looks cool

Later buddio!