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

Well, what a stormer of an announcement today - Bertie Ahern finally got around to announcing that he will be stepping down as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland on 6th May.

While I greeted his stepping down news with delight, I quickly stopped when he mentioned the 6th May date - “That’s my birthday you bugger!” was screamed at the TV and noted on Twitter. The answer from the Twitterati was swift - just have a big “birthday / Bertie be gone” celebration bash! So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Based on further Twitter recommendations I’ve booked an area in the Longstone pub on Townsend Street. Celebrations start at 7pm on Tues 6th May and will probably go on until late (I know I’m going to take the next day off work!). I’ve even organised some finger food for 8pm. And finally, we’ll have some helium balloons to help you find us in case you don’t know what I look like!

Because of the food providing, I’ll need to keep some sort of a track on numbers, so if you think you might make it, then leave a comment below.

View Larger Map

Well Saturday night’s Random Drinks session (organised via Twitter and our blogs) turned out to be a roaring success, with 14 attendees (plus a couple of blow-ins from my IRL friends). As with any event that I’ve been to like this, it’s not easy walking into a large pub and trying to locate people that you only know from small avatar pics or who you met once previously. In order to try and make this simpler, I pinched an idea from the recent Ladies Tea Party and bought some helium balloons to put on our table - making us much easier to find!

As usual, it’s always nice to see familiar faces and catch up on the gossip, but it’s really cool to meet new people and add to your circle of friends. In order to spread some of that wonderful linky goodness, our attendees were:

• George - my hubbie, who is just back to blogging.
• Darragh - hell if I was there, my stalker had to be!
• Niamh - a friend of Darragh’s, who I didn’t get to talk to enough
• Darren - he claims to be shy, but he’s sooo cute!
• RedMum - surprisingly, without her camera, but looking as glam as ever.
• Suzy - the voice of Maman Poulet took a night off from politics.
• Laura - recently moved up to Dublin and throwing herself into the geek social scene.
• Anthony - known as the owner of the coolest gadget there on the night!
• Ben - he claims to not like his photo being taken, but poses all the same…
• Sam - it felt like 20 Questions at the start of the night as we tried to work out if/how we knew him
• Alexia - One of Damien’s “One to Watch in 2008″ list, her blogging has been shit-hot recently
• Niall Larkin & Dawn - who popped in briefly but then left…

The gorgeousness of this event is it’s simplicity - anyone can call a meet-up of the Random Drinks club in any city or town - you simply need to pick a night and a venue, blog/twitter about it and bring something along on the night (e.g. €4 worth of helium balloons) so that people can find you easily.

Two other thought-provoking write-ups of the night can be found here and here, courtesy of Darren and Ben.

Rest of the photos can be found here.

 LOOK FOR THE YELLOW HELIUM BALLOONS TO FIND US TONIGHT.

Just a quick reminder about the Random Drinks on Saturday this weekend.

If you’re in Dublin and fancy joining us, then we’ll be in O’Neills pub on Suffolk St from 7:30pm.

Map and current list of sign-ups on the original blog post.

Update: The pub is a bit of a maze, so Laura & I are planning on getting there early to stake a claim to an area/tables. I’ll twitter our location once we get settled, so make sure you have twitter updates turned on! If you want my mobile number to help you find us, mail me at ellybabes at gmail.com.

LOOK FOR THE YELLOW HELIUM BALLOONS TO FIND US TONIGHT!

Update: The pub is a bit of a maze, so Laura & I are planning on getting there early to stake a claim to an area/tables. I’ll twitter our location once we get settled, so make sure you have twitter updates turned on! If you want my mobile number to help you find us, mail me at ellybabes at gmail.com.

It’s been a while since the last OpenTweetUp or similar, so after talking with @czajkowski today we decided to organise a Random Drinks Meet-up on Sat 22nd Mar - and yes, we know it’s Easter weekend, but some of us will still be around!

So if you’re in Dublin and fancy joining us, then we’ll be in O’Neills pub on Suffolk St from 7:30pm - location below. If you’re thinking of joining us, then drop a comment below so that we can grab an appropriately-sized table when we get there!

View Larger Map

The biggest date for most people in the Irish blogosphere in the coming weeks won’t be Mother’s Day. It will, of course, be the Irish Blog Awards held on March 1st in the Alexander Hotel in Dublin.

Before that, under the umbrella of IWTC, will be the inaugural Ireland Geek Girl Dinner, organised by Martha Rotter and sponsored by Microsoft. This event isn’t totally exclusive, as men can attend, but only when invited by one of the geek girls. Since Paul Walsh had been begging for an invite for a while now, I finally took pity on him and invited him!

The end of the week sees the 2008 Irish Blog Awards ceremony taking place at the Alexander Hotel. Once again, Damien Mulley has put in a phenomenal amount of work in organising this event. Unlike some of the other technology awards ceremonies on this island, it’s a more informal event, costing only €10 entry, which is donated to charity. The shortlists have now been announced and the hard-working judges have slogged their way through reviewing all these blogs in order to find the winners in each category.

On the same day as the ceremony, several different meetups have been arranged, as people take the opportunity to catch up with those travelling in from round the country. Firstly, we have Red Mum’s Photo Meet, where they are welcoming people of all skill levels for a simple non-themed photo walk - should see some great shots out of this!

Just after this is the Ladies Tea Party, organised by designer extraordinaire Sabrina Dent. If you’re not into tea, then don’t worry - Microsoft Ireland have kindly offered to sponsor some nibbles on the day and I think a lot of us will be swigging back Martinis!

Sabrina was also responsible for the wonderful logos in use for the Photo Meet, Gourmet Brunch and Tea Party:

On the day after the Blog Awards, Deborah is organising a Gourmet Brunch for those left around Dublin.

A few others will be heading directly back to Cork for WebCamp/BlogTalk 2008, including a bloggers dinner that is currently being organised by Alexia Golez / Tom Raftery. However, I reckon that I’ll be taking a rest on the Day after the Blog Awards!

The following weekend sees the latest incarnation of the BarCamp phenomenon in Ireland. CreativeCamp in Kilkenny Castle on Sat 8th March. I’ll be attending, along with my Husband, George. He, along with several of his colleagues, will be representing Blacknight, who have been sponsors of all the Irish BarCamp style events so far. Their MD, Michele Neylon, was even kind enough to purchase the domain barcamp.ie when I bugged him about it, so that all future Irish camps can have their own sub-domain there.

I’m also delighted to see that the CreativeCamp organisers have ditched the traditional wiki format completely. It never worked on the previous camps, and I’ve bitched about it at length before. They have a lovely sign-up system, where people can input the details of the talks / panels that they want to organise and it transfers to the speakers page here The exact same applies to the registration and attendees pages.

I’ve signed up to be on one of the panels, entitled: Women & Technology - grabbing the blogosphere by the balls - a panel discussion facilitated by Krishna De on women & technology (as titled above).The panel includes Elly Parker, Sabrina Dent, Martha Rotter & Alexia Golez. I guess I should really start prepping for this to make sure I have something coherent to talk about!

then you should love “Long Way Down” with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, starting on BBC2 at 9pm on Sun 28th October.

And even better than that, I’m finally escaping the house tonight as the lovely Maryrose has invited me to join her AND meet Charley Boorman who is publicising the new series in Ron Blacks bar in Dublin tonight!

Do you Tweet or Jaiku? Live in or around the Dublin area? Fancy a nice evening of wine, vibrant conversation and phones vibrating constantly?

Then the Dublin TweetUp is for you!

Ripped blatantly from Alexia:

We’d love to meet you. We’re altogether a great bunch, just to be modest. You don’t have to be a geek to Tweetup, just be ready for good conversation about life, loves, technology, music — whatever you want.

Here’s some coverage of what happened when we last Tweeted-up.
My thoughts on Tweetup 1, Olivier, Elly, Maryrose.

Venue is as yet undecided, but you can ‘watch’ the event on Upcoming and decide if you want to attend nearer the time. Getting rough numbers makes it easier for us to decide on a venue and book it if required…

I was at the inaugural PodCamp Ireland in Kilkenny on Saturday, which proved to be a really fun day.

As it was shortly after the honeymoon and I was still tired AND I don’t podcast, I was simply planning on turning up as the driver for my mother, Grannymar, I had no plans to talk or really participate. That was blown to shreds almost as I walked in the door, when Krishna spotted me and mum! We were asked to do a talk on mum’s experience podcasting, so we rehashed “Getting Granny Podcasting” the talk that I originally gave at BarCamp Cork just over a year ago (Original Video). The talk was well attended and we received good feedback at the end.

The last session of the day was a panel on the future of social networking and communities - what can be done to build communities and how did we see it changing in the next 5 years. As they were setting up the panel, Krishna grabbed me again and asked me to sit in. I’ve watched panels at several of these type of events, and considering I can usually pontificate on most subject matters, I jumped at the chance to be on this one, instead of sitting in the back and heckling as I normally do! If you fancy watching the video of the panel session, here it is (beware - it runs to 88mins in length!):

As my prediction for the next 5 years, I suggested the following:

Currently we build blog communities by people commenting on posts that others have written and seeing the responses. Often the only way to both comment and see responses is to visit the site/post in question. I stated that in the next 5 years we would see new platforms or growth of existing ones, allowing us to combine reading RSS feeds, commenting and seeing responses to comments within the one site/platform. Imagine being able to click a ‘reply’ button in Google Reader, type in your comment and have it auto-published to the blog post in question, without having to type in your identifying details each time or deal with annoying captchas.

It was interesting to see a twitter from Paul Campbell this morning that linked to an article on TechCrunch about Fav.or.it, a product that seems to do exactly what I was talking about!

It looks like I can tell the future after all!

I know, sad I am! But I have a reason at least, while it’s decorated and functioning, it was only so that we could take some photos of it!

I decided this year that the christmas cards that we send should be Moo Cards, which I will make into fridge magnets before I send them. The little cards are so cute, but I figured that I should give people a way to display them, as they are a little too small to sit alongside the regular cards.

I struggled in getting small envelopes to put them in for sending, I resorted in the end to buying some small cheap prefabricated xmas cards, and will use the envelopes from them. The image below shows some of the cards I’ve ordered, some images from ourselves, others from Flickr - hopefully by next year we will have enough images of our own to use!

I was also reading this week (on someone’s blog, but I’ve forgotten who - sorry!) about a list compiled by BBC website users back in 2004 of “50 things to eat before you die“. I did better that I thought I would on having tried things on the list, but I still have a few to go - marked in orange below. It seems a trip to Australia is required for some of them, but there are a few more that I can mark off by keeping an eye out in my local supermarket - and I’ve been meaning to order scallops at some point!

I’ll be back in Arizona in February, I should use that as an excuse to try a proper diner breakfast - I’m sure that my fellow gastronome Todd will be able to suggest somewhere good. The last time I was there he asked me what kind of food I wanted one night - “I’m in America”, I replied, “Take me out for meat and lots of it!”. So he took me to Fogo e Brasa, one of Phoenix’s best kept secrets… an all you can eat meat fest! They carve the meat table-side and it’s all cooked on skewers with tons of fat and tons of flavour - he had to roll me out of there that night!

As for caviar, well I’m just going to have to try and persuade George to buy me some… wonder what my chances are? Possibly better now that a lot of supermarkets have started stocking Russian and Polish food!

I had to look a couple of the dishes up, Durian fruit and Jerk Chicken were new to me, but I’ll try and find an opportunity to try them at some point!

I’d also add a few favourites to the list above, snails (tried) and frog’s legs (not yet tried) are definites, along with foie gras - there’s nothing quite like it in this world! Another couple of Scottish items that I might add are deep fried pizza (used to be a big weakness of mine) and Roll and Sausage - bought from a roadside van early in the morning - a slice of square sausage cooked until crunchy on the outside, served on a buttered crusty roll with tomato ketchup… mmmm, no better way to start the day!