Turtlehead presents:

MASER versus GAETAN BILLAULT

with free beer!

Image pinched from Turtlehead blog

Those rocking t-shirt designers Turtlehead (”touching cloth since 2006″) have done it again with their latest Versus. Local graffiti star Maser will be dueling it out with Gaetan Billault hanging, spraying and sticking and drawing directly onto the walls, ceilings, floors and windows.

Date: Oct 2nd 2008

Time: 6:30pm

Location: 1/2 Smock Alley, Temple Bar, Dublin 8 (I think the map below is right, if not, someone please correct me!!)

Map

Based on a few recommendations on Twitter over the last week, I decided to try and have a play with Tumblr.

Tumblr themselves link to Wikipedia to explain exactly what they do:

A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.

I’d been looking to change up http://ellybabes.com* away from the basic, crappy looking HTML that I had originally created there. Tumblr provided me with an easy way to collate my online life, by pulling in my blog posts, Flickr photos, Del.ic.ious links and Twitter posts. It’s nicely arranged by date and it’s going to be something that will be cool to look back at in a few years time to see just what I was up to on a specific day.

Tumblr can pull in any RSS feed and info from many other sites and you can also add snippets yourself manually. It’s look is highly customizable, so you can make it look and feel just the way you want. I have great hopes for this tool and I hope that they keep developing it more in future.

* Don’t worry, my blog will stay at it’s original home: http://blog.ellybabes.com for those who just want to follow my posts and not be bogged down by everything else in my life!

Class! Although I’m not sure how practical it would be with the amount of rain we have in Ireland…

If you’re a geek like me, you’re always being called upon to fix computers and explain new websites and concepts to your friends and family.

A while ago a short video did the rounds on blogs and email, explaining RSS in plain English. It was quite popular and now Lee LeFever is back with another couple of videos explaining Social Networking and Wikis.

Check them out and forward to your non-geek friends!

Social Networking

Click To Play

Wikis

Click To Play

And in case you missed it first time round: RSS

Click To Play

Now that you know what RSS is, you can grab Lee’s video RSS feed from here and will be automatically notified when the next video in the series comes out!

Update 11th Dec: Donncha has a great post about “Blogs in Plain English“, check it out!

Oh God, I’ve been meaning and promising to post this for ages, and now that the wedding is out of the way I no longer have an excuse!

Our wedding was originally planned for 120 people, but as a lot of them were from overseas we ended up with 85 at the ceremony and meal. But anyhow, it was still kept to under €10k, which in today’s world is something of a miracle. I can’t guarantee that you can do the same for your wedding, but here are a few tips that might help (and a few geek notes along the way…)

Firstly, find out who in your friends and family you can tap for expertise. Send out a general call to all you know asking for advice, recommendations and suggestions for service providers. To that end, here are my top ten money saving tips!

1. I was able to ask my mother (grannymar) who is an excellent seamstress to make my wedding outfit, and as you can see - she did me proud!
2. My cousin, RichardM, is a wedding photographer. I didn’t want too many formal shots or any ’staged funny’ shots, so going to someone I was comfortable with was a great help, I could be completely clear with him. Most important advice here, have a clear list of any family/friends shots you really want and make sure they know they are needed. Give a copy of this list to the photographer, bestman and chief bridesmaid so that they can locate people in advance and therefore avoid stress for yourself.
3. My aunt is a florist so I was able to get my bouquet from her. Research in advance what styles and colours you would like and have an idea about the size - I went for side plate size (photos will follow soon), but what I hadn’t realised was just how heavy the bouquet would be by the end of holding it for an hour of photos.
4. Ask around and see if anyone knows a D.J. or band and compare rates. Try to see the band/D.J. at a previous gig if possible and give them any requests at least two weeks in advance. Having both a D.J. and band will push the costs up to well over €1000, we went with D.J. only and it was €350 for the night - a massive saving. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the music and the floor was crowded all night.
5. Make your own invitations. We went with plain card and designed and decorated our own, but you can also buy packs that come with invite, menu, placecards etc. Try and find out if anyone you know does calligraphy, always looks best on the placecards.
6. Take the headache out of doing your seating plan and managing your RSVP by using simpleseating.com it automatically takes people who you mark as not coming off the table assignment and displays everything in a nice visual manner. Also makes it easy to share your seating plan with your wedding planner / mother / groom wherever you are.
7. Check our the corkage charges at the reception venue. We found that it was cheaper to bring our own wine and let them open as many bottles as needed. I actually went to Lidl during one of their wine sales and picked up 24 white and 24 red and they went down a storm. Even if it doesn’t save you any money, it gives you more flexibility in your wine choice. We also brought soft drinks for the children and non-drinkers, hotels will normally not charge corkage on these.
8. Serve your wedding cake as your dessert. We cut the cake before dinner and then it was plated and served to the guests as dessert, which resulted in a saving of €1.50 per person to us! It may seem small, but all the little savings soon add up!
9. Decorate with helium ballons instead of flowers. Part of our hotel reception package included them putting flowers on all the tables, but I wasn’t sure about them fitting in with my colour scheme. I contacted a local party equipment firm (and availed of my work discount of 10%) and they decorated the function room for me for €250. This included a bunch of 4 on each of the tables, a small double arch over the cake table and a large twisty arch (solid ballons, no gaps) with flowers and netting behind the top table. I then completed the look by printing up my own menus, and designing my own favours (tall, solid bottomed shot glasses with little wedding themed stickers on them, filled with mini-eggs - because I hate sugared almonds!) and scattering little hearts in purple & silver over the tables (these were my colours).
10. Our biggest saving overall for the reception was doing buffet food instead of serving to the tables. We saved over €20 per person by doing this and no-one complained at all, in fact some people were seen to head up for second and even third helpings! People were able to pick and choose what they wanted from the hot and cold food selections, and they still served the top table so that the parents didn’t need to get up.

Get wedding insurance! Due to illness in George’s family, we were considering having to move the wedding date (luckily we didn’t have to). In the case of anything going wrong you’ll be incredibly glad that you bought the insurance. Shop around online and you can pick up coverage for a €20k wedding for as little as €200.Now for the geeky stuff as promised!

We used WeddingWishlist.ie to put together a nice little wedding website with the ceremony and reception info, accommodation, maps and our wedding registry. The choice of shops to choose from for the wedding is limited, but the cool thing is that you can also set up ‘Couple Funds’ which your guests can contribute to. We did this for our honeymoon hotels, grand prix tickets and our ‘new flooring funds’ for our new house.

Finally, on my blog I used a nice little applet from whenismywedding.com to count down the days to the wedding date - handy so that you can keep a track of just how many days you have left to panic!

I hope that this info is of use to some of you out there, and if you have any questions then just leave them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them!

Normally I don’t mention who I work for, as all opinions on the blog are my own and not my employers. But when the vid below and associated press releases started circulating around the blogosphere, I just had to post about them…

Click To Play

See Josh Bancroft’s blog and the Intel Software blog for more information (and bigger pictures)….

Certainly to be filed under the ‘IWOOT’ (I Want One Of Those) category - drool…

One of the reasons that I hadn’t blogged over the past few weeks (apart from being sick) was that I had got bogged down and behind in all my surfing. I read a ton of blogs and news sites via NewsGator every day and if I don’t make time every day I soon fall behind and other things get dropped.

I finally got caught up over last weekend (even with my mum dropping in unexpectedly!), the other main reason for this was the death of our lovely Media Centre… We had been expecting it for a while now and had put off the planned rebuild for far too long - culminating in it bluescreening about 8 times in 4 hours on Saturday. George formatted the C: drive on Sunday, but the fresh install just refused to take… so we’re stuck with only normal TV at the moment and no way to access all our previous recordings… Luckily we both have laptops, otherwise I’d be suffering serious internet withdrawal at this point (my previous record for managing to not check my mail stands at 48 hours!).

The old PC was a testament to George’s excellent PC building skills, he had upgraded components as we went along and with a new motherboard it’s going to make a good server for us for a long time yet. The one thing I won’t miss about it is the noise it generated - ever since the power supply fan had been replaced it was really noisy! But we’re about to order ourselves a lovely new quiet Media Centre, under heavy consideration is a highly customised Shuttle 2000M - packed with an Intel Core Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, 300GB hard drive and a dinky ejectable USB 80GB external Hard Disk Drive!

Anyway, the point of this post was to explain why the internet pleases me once again, not to ramble on about our PC troubles!! This week I found two wonderful new websites that have restored my faith in the internet and made me want to blog again!

Firstly, VideoJug - the site that titles itself “Life Explained. On Film”. It’s a brilliantly simple concept, lots of short videos explaining everything about life and breaking it up into easy-to-follow steps. They have a huge collection of recipes, but a quick look at their most popular videos of the last hour gives an idea of just how vast and far-reaching their content is:

And don’t worry if the video you require is missing - they’re constantly making new videos and the site is crammed with links asking you to suggest what new videos you want. Below each of the recipe videos is a list of the ingredients required and an option to shift between metric and imperial measurements. It gets even better if you own an iPOD or PSP, as all the videos are available for download in those formats, perfect if you don’t have a wireless connection in the kitchen!

The second site was one that was only launched yesterday, but it’s going to revolutionise how we search for lots of products. If you haven’t heard about like.com and checked it out yet, then go do it now. Seriously, I’ll wait…

If you’re a guy in a relationship, you’re probably crapping your pants right now. If not, you should be! My first look at this site lasted for over 20 mins as I clicked around and realised the potential. I need to replace my favourite brown suede boots - mega comfortable, low stacked heel, just under knee high. I entered my search and all the results are returned as pictures, allowing me to instantly see if it fits my criteria or not. I can then select a portion of the picture and refine my search based on that, telling it how much weighting to put on colour or shape by clicking on simple Web 2.0 style buttons. I can filter my results based on colour, price and brand. You can even browse through pictures of various A-list celebrities and click on their shoes and accessories to find similar ones. I’m going to end up spending sooooo much money here! (P.S. - there’s free shopping for the first 10,000 customers!)

or I Want One Of Those, for the uninitiated…

Two things showed up this week:

The Multi-function Desktop Digital Frame - digital photo frames are a great idea, but until recently they were wayyyy too expensive… This one’s fairly reasonable at $70, it slideshows through 22 pics, shows the calendar and temperature as well as functioning as an alarmclock - and it looks good! As they say, “Christmas is coming!”

The other item I spotted, I have no real need for, but it’s just a brilliantly cool idea…

How do you make this:

Turn into this:

By doing this….

And it’s not even from Ikea! Click the .gif to make the jump…