Another airline goes bust
With fuel prices soaring, these last two months have been devastating for airlines. Today another airline, Euromanx, the airline of the Isle of Man declared bankruptcy. In April ATA, Aloha, Skybus, and EOS have been among the other victims of this crises. Smaller carriers are facing bigger financial challenges as the costs of operation keep increasing, while the revenue from passengers doesn't match this cost increase.
Money Blue Book Blog has some advice on how to protect yourself against companies who are at risk of going bankrupt. In essence the advice is to use your credit card for any payments where there’s a risk of the company going bankrupt, be it an airline, a tour operator, or any other similar business.
Giving Twitter another chance
I've decided to give Twitter another try. For those unfamiliar with the service, twitter is a website where you can post (or send) a small message to people who are interested in hearing it. For people to see your messages they have to subscribe to your posts by following you on twitter. These messages can be viewed either from the twitter website, or using special twitter clients, or even getting them on the phone by SMS.
Originally the service was intended to let your friends know what you're up to. It was something similar to setting you status in facebook, or your personal message in MSN Messenger. Now apart from it's original use, twitter is used to send all sort of messages, like for example links to interesting sites, or asking questions to people who are following you. It's a sort of cross between instant messaging, chatting and mini-blogging.
I tried twitter a couple of months ago, way before it got all the hype. I used it mainly for posting my status to friends, but since there weren't many of my friends using it yet it was pretty useless. Now I'm giving it another go, hoping to make some new friends. If you want to follow me on twitter to see what I'm up to this is my profile. I still have to figure out how to find interesting twitters though.
Now with twitter I have to decide what should get blogged and what should get twitted :) Well, for posts more than a sentence long I'll have to blog them, but I might start posting less general appealing links (like computing links) on twitter more than on the blog.
How to get the miss hooked on gadgets?
Get her one of these Roomba iRobots... Click image for video
Westport - County Mayo
This weekend it was the turn for an Irish trip. We decided to go to Westport, in the west (duh!) of Ireland in County Mayo. The trip from Dublin took around 4 hours, with a short stop-over for lunch in the lavishly decorated PV's pub, in Longford. The GPS on my IPAQ worked perfectly and took us exactly to the entrance of the Glenderan B&B where we were staying.
The B&B was an excellent choice. The room was newly furnished with old style furniture, and was tastefully decorated with hand-made candles and dried flowers. The attention to detail like the two wine glasses, digital TV, supply of tea and coffee, and room service, made this place one of the best B&B's I've ever been to. The breakfast consisted of a selection of cereal, a choice of full Irish breakfast or yoghurt cheese and fruit, and tea or coffee. It's also well priced at 38 Euro per person per night.
Westport is a nice local Irish town which even on a bank holiday weekend was not full of tourists. We got the impression that even though the place is well catered for tourists with a considerable number of B&B's, it's mostly Irish tourists that visit the place. We got further proof of this when we went into a pub on the main street on a Saturday night, and people were looking at us like we had 5 heads.
Westport is also a good starting point for visiting other attractions spots in Mayo. On Saturday and Sunday we visited Achill Island and Croagh Patrick. Achill Island is a postcard picture of the typical Ireland, with rolling green hills, 40 shades of green and an Irish traffic jam with sheep blocking the road. The place is scenic, relaxing and easily toured by car in a day. It reminded me a bit of the Isle of Skye in Scotland.
Croagh Patrick is the mountain (hill for people who live in places with real mountains) where St. Patrick reputably spent 40 days fasting. The mountain which is about 8km away from Westport is a popular pilgrimage site, and some people walk up the mountain barefoot as an act of penance. This must be a really awful experience considering how many rocks of literally all shapes and sizes litter the path. With our hiking boots tightly fastened, we walked up the mountain on Sunday morning in a rare day of glorious weather. The slope gets quite steep at the end, but it's something most people can do. It took us about 2 hours to go up and about the same time to go down. You can rent a stick before starting the ascent, something that's highly recommended if you don't have your own walking stick. On top of the hill there's a small white chapel which is open on the last Sunday in July.
Pictures to follow
... off to Westport for the weekend
I know the blog is turning a bit into ...off to [here] and back from [there], but who cares. Well this long weekend I'll be off to the west of Ireland in Westport. Hopefully I'll be able to bring back some good pictures to show off.
In the mean time keep well.
What's the best thing since Family Guy?
It's always sunny in Philadelphia! This series is good, and by good I mean really really really good. It's about a group of 4 friends in their late 20s who run an unsuccessful Irish bar in Philadelphia (duh!). This series has a wicked sense of humour and it takes the piss out of topics like racism, abortion, guns, disable people, etc. You get the idea. Very unclean fun ... just my type of humour! I restrained myself to watch the first series over two days but it was very difficult.
MadTv - Parodies
I clicked on a link for Juno II and found a treasure trove of other great stuff.
Other Good Ones
Lost
Desperate Housewives
Sluts and the City
Back from Warsaw
Just got back from a wedding weekend break in Warsaw. All the hype that I heard about Polish weddings was well justified, and even though my expectations were high they were completely satisfied. Warsaw itself wasn't the major attraction though, the place is rather dull and the weather didn't help make it any better. I will write a bit more about the Warsaw trip when I upload the pictures.
In the mean time I'm rather busy writing a literature review on Social Network Visualization, interesting but quite time consuming. Hopefully I'll be back to normal in a week's time.
Inbox - Feeling like a glowworm
I'm feeling like a glow worm with a broken bulb.
cool, wedding,... do you know the bride and broom?
This week is a bit low on e-mail quotes recieved but don't worry I found a site full of quotes (via Tom's Blog)
DSLR or not?
It's that time of the year when I get the urge to buy a new gadget. This time (like always) it's a gadget that I need - a new camera. I'm torn again on whether to get an SLR or not. Will I carry an SLR around as much as I would a smaller camera, and would it be worth the investment? Any suggestions?
Update (13-Apr-2008)
After UNcareful consideration and a rush of impulsive judgement, I got the Canon S5 IS hoping that it'll arrive before going to Warsaw next Wednesday. I had a Canon S2 before it mysteriously stopped working and was very happy with it, so I thought I'd give the newer model a try. Getting a new camera was the same price as fixing the broken one. Thanks to R I managed to get a very good price for it on ebay from DigitalRev. I guess the DSLR has to wait. Btw, thanks for your suggestions.
Moved house
After 3 days of packing I finally moved house last Tuesday. I reached that point where things could no longer fit in the matchbox sized room so I had to expand. The amount of stuff I managed to collect in these two years here is staggering.
Everything doubled, the bed, the bathroom, desks and cupboards too. I even managed to place my TV which I never previously used into the room. Not that I watch loads of telly but now I've got a place where my little Latvian gargoyle can stand (need a name for him - any suggestions?)
Lord Hiisi really liked the new room. He spent the whole day exploring the new surroundings when we move in. He also had a clean vivarium which he shortly after popped in.
The only thing that degraded was the speed of the internet connection. Moved from 2Mbs to 1Mbs. the state of the ISP's here in Ireland is far from optimal. Even the dot is introducing 10Mbs connections and here the norm is still 1-4 Mbs. This is supposed to be one of the most developed countries for christsake.
Inbox - Pyrotechnic ideas
I get many pyrotechnic ideas what to do with Alf's bedsheets
Do you know what happened ... I dropped my pink mobile phone in the lift shaft
Those skirts, they destroy the shape of the body
..., but I know my sister, her boyfriends are never normal
but yesterday i brought some monster carrots - enormous!
women are like wolves, if you want a wolf you have to trap it; you have to sneer it, and then you have to love it.
CAPTCHA's used to digitise books
CAPTCHA's are those annoying pictures with characters on them that you have to type to prove to a website that you're human. They're meant to prevent automatic programs to mimic humans and spam. While they undoubtedly are a great good for the internet, they're also a bloody waste of time. The inventor of the CAPTCHA's Luis von Ahn, realised this and decided to put this human effort to good use - to convert old books into electronic form.
Listen to this interview with Luis von Ahn at the IT Conversations Network
Inbox - i didn't fall from her nose hole
i didn't fall from her nose hole
O: he looks too italian ... without any offence
P: yeah but what does it really mean?
O: well I shouldn't like him .. or it's should not make a difference, it's you who should like him
P: u r my friend
O: but i never slept with you
Today in the morning my office is half empty as:
...
Who should work then? :-) no no, don't look at me :-)
Find hot singles in ...
After two weeks, today I made friends with the internet again.
I had a ton of bookmarks to sort, and while I was going through them I clicked on Scary Personals site. This image came up on the left menu bar. I'd say the probability of meeting any one of those chicks in that village is just about 1/27,500,021. What a whole load of bullocks!!
For any Simpson's fans out there. On this site you can watch all the 19 seasons of the simpsons for free.
For any alcohol fans:-
Internet Box - my g/f is pregnant
I haven't posted inbox quotes in a while but today I found this on yahoo answers.
ok im kinda worried an all. my g/f hasn't had her period she she got pregnant. do you think the baby is drinkin the blood??? shes 6 months pregnant. Link
... on risk and disclosure
This is one of the best articles I read on the web this year. Via
Some snippets:
Psychologists call this behavior "learned helplessness"--convincing ourselves that we have no control over a situation even when we do. ...
MY FAVORITE LEARNED HELPLESSNESS experiment is this one: People were asked to perform a task in the presence of a loud radio. For some, the radio included a volume knob, while for others no volume knob was available. Researchers discovered that the group that could control the volume performed the task measurably better, even if they didn’t turn the volume down. That is, just the idea that they controlled the volume made them less distracted, less helpless and, in turn, more productive.
Control is the thing, both Fischoff and Slovic say. It’s the countervailing force to all of this risk disclosure and the learned helplessness it fosters.
...
DREAD IS A POWERFUL force. The problem with dread is that it leads to terrible decision-making.
Slovic says all of this results from how our brains process risk, which is in two ways. The first is intuitive, emotional and experience based. Not only do we fear more what we can’t control, but we also fear more what we can imagine or what we experience. This seems to be an evolutionary survival mechanism. In the presence of uncertainty, fear is a valuable defense. Our brains react emotionally, generate anxiety and tell us, “Remember the news report that showed what happened when those other kids took the bus? Don’t put your kids on the bus.”
...
But even that “one in 50 million” characterization is problematic. It still causes people to exaggerate the risk in their minds, a phenomenon called "imaging the numerator." In one experiment that showed the dramatic effect of imaging the numerator, Slovic notes, psychiatrists were given the responsibility of choosing whether or not to release a hypothetical patient with a violent history. Half the doctors were told the patient had a "20 percent chance" of being violent again. The other half were told the patient had a "one in five" chance of being violent again.
Startlingly, the doctors in the "one in five" group were far more likely not to release the patient. "They lined up five people in their minds and looked at one of them and saw a violent person." They imaged the numerator. On the other hand, 20 percent is an abstract statistic that hardly seems capable of violence.
It sounds illogical, but our minds think that "one in five" is riskier than "20 percent."
Major Events of the Year
(I'm writing this here as a reminder of the events that happened this year.) Last weekend was election weekend in the dot. The government provides very cheap flights to encourage dottians living abroad, to travel to the dot to vote (there was a 93% turnover this year, the lowest turnover since 1971). I went to vote and thank God now it's all over. That's all my election blogging.
On a very sad note my miss’s dad died unexpectedly on Thursday night. He was having dinner with his friends and had a severe heart attack. I took the first flight to her house to attend the funeral.
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