February 2007 Archives - 8/8

Is Online Poker Popular Amongst Irish Bloggers?

February 2, 2007 By Ken McGuire 4 Comments

Don’t be afraid now…. are you a blogger who plays online poker? You know, the Paddy Power kind or Full Tilt kind? One thing that I haven’t seen coming across any blogs that I read on a daily basis is the mention of online poker. Now, either some people don’t tell others that they’re playing or some people would rather keep that kind of information to themselves or Irish bloggers just plain don’t play online poker.

Now, I’m not much of a poker player, I rather keep my money firmly in my pocket or in the bank where I at least know that the money is still mine. Sure enough, if you’re any way good at cards you can win a few pennies for yourself but I’d rather play it for the laugh.

Now, there’s only so much you can take before you have to try your hand at online poker. All I hear day in, day out from one source or another (namely around work) is poker, poker, poker. “Won a fortune”, “cleanened such and such a person out”, “almost had it”, “head is wrecked”, kickers, trips, hot flushes, cold flushes – whatever. When I say there’s only so much you can take, that pretty much translates into me saying I tried online poker for the first time on Thursday.

I got into a play money game and it was obvious from the outset than nobody gave a rats ass, everyone firing all their chips off in one go. Not being familiar with the on screen options I suddenly found myself out of the game, ticking the wrong option for playing the hand. The second game however, beginners luck or whatever you might call it I went on to win. Only thing is, it took the guts of about 90 minutes to get that far, maybe a bit longer. Seen as poker is one of those games where you’ve got to be paying attention to what goes on around you, I reckon that if you’re into a game you don’t have much time for anything else – that includes blogging.

Now, I also know people who will spend hours online in the evening playing poker, as it happens none of them are really bloggers. People who run poker blogs don’t count either. But I know that if I got into online poker seriously there would be no time at all for blogging.

So I ask, is online poker popular with Irish bloggers? And don’t be afraid to admit it either, its a genuine question. Whether you’re in it for play money or you’re in it to win it. For something that is so popular through the online world, I read little about it through blogs – or is it something that just isn’t worth blogging?

Filed Under: Internet

PXN8 Before I Blog (with some tyre kicking)

February 2, 2007 By Ken McGuire 3 Comments

Walter Higgins put out a call for tyre kickers for Pixenate and I figured seen as I got the photo blog back in some kind of structured form that I would lash into Pixenate to resize the photos a bit before uploading them to the blog.

Impressive stuff. The K800 delivers a 2048*1536 shot at around 800kb average, upload was relatively quick and playing around with the basic tools was a breeze. Slight bit of cropping, cropped well. Slight bit of resizing, nice to maintain the aspect ratio. Honestly it was the first time I went to PXN8 with the intention of using the finished photo online as opposed to toying with photos there to see what can be done.

Knowing that, and also knowing that I’m extremely particular about photographs and quality I’ll say that I was impressed when working in colour but a little disappointed in the grayscale and sepia conversion as the image seemed to lose quality around areas close in colour (become very pixelated, grained out). The preview window works really well though Walter, fair play. Good to be able to check everything out without having to do the whole “apply and undo if unhappy” trick.

The final image was cropped at a width of 470px and when saved to disk clocked in at 160kb. One thing I would like to see, unless I missed it, is the ability to compress the photo further. 160kb isn’t ideal if you’re looking at ten posts on a blog homepage, each with a minimum of one image so I’ll confess that I brought the two photos back into Photoshop to drop the size to about 40kb.

Honestly, if I wasn’t a stickler for well compressed web images and I didn’t have access to Photoshop, I think I’d find PXN8 ideal, particularly if you’re blogging your photos and want to make a few adjustments to them. Usability is great, no problem doing anything, uploads well, saves back to disk well plus, the fun effects are actually fun Let me compress those photos even more and I’d be real happy with it…

See the finished post (contains two images), here on the photo blog.

Filed Under: Blogging, Photography

Some Pre-Blog Awards Fun

February 2, 2007 By Ken McGuire 5 Comments

Paul Browne has thrown down the gauntlet in a race to 100 subscribers. Now, I’ve never been one to gloat about how many people read the blog – or even pass any comment in my desire to increase readership via FeedBurner - but the chance of a free pint in Dublin at the blog awards in March is good

Loser buys the winner a pint.

Of course, if there’s other people getting in it could be loser forks out a hundred quid for a round but I’m game for the pint anyway! Must actually check out about accommodation, its not that far to March and a good night out in Dublin…

Mine’s a Heineken if I beat you to it. Think you could spring for a packet of salted nuts as well?

Filed Under: Irish Blogs

Changing My Approach To Photoblogging

February 2, 2007 By Ken McGuire 2 Comments

The first of the month has just passed and with about two hours to spare I managed to get my photo blog back in some kind of order. Not that there’s much to put in order – I’ve gone and pulled down any post that previously existed on it, somewhere around 30 odd in total.

I love photography and love my D70 more. I’ve put time and money into techniques, study, lenses and all the rest but day-to-day constraints mean that I don’t get out an awful lot to spend the time I want on photography. Christmas was the best opportunity I had for photos and came away with some fantastic shots from Sligo – all because I had the time to take the walks to plot locations to plan shots in advance.

What I do have is a half decent camera in a 3.2mp Cybershot bundled into the Sony Ericsson K800i. I’ve also started to carry my Konica Minolta dImage X60 (with a 1gb SD, bargain at the time) in my bag as well so I’ve got something handy and quick to shoot with. So thats the approach I’m taking to the photo blog. Two previous attempts to manage the blog showcased what was pretty much a back-catalog of existing works. I could trawl through 10, 20, 30,000 images in my collection, pick out a few, tweak them as I see fit and then pop them online.

But there’s no challenge in it. I’ve already got the photos, so where’s the motivation? It was the shoot over Christmas (in between my two weeks spent lying on the flat of my back coughing my lungs up) that gave me the motivation to get back into the photo blog side of things, only this time, using the tools that are already at my disposal. Some people blog their thoughts, I figure I’ll blog moments – through photographs. Snapshots, thoughts captured in image form, all at the spur of moment. No tricks, no photoshopping, no showcasing exhibition material, just down-to-earth photos of moments that grab me during the day. The push for me is to snap the photo that day and blog it the same day – its fresh when it goes live. Also a way for me to see what exactly I was up to on a particular day, sometimes when you’ve your head buried in four jobs and countless projects its a bit hard to remember!

That said, the blog is relaunched, I put a new theme together this evening and the inaugural post (take three) is live. Will likely put a little more development work into the theme over the weekend but I’m enjoying it for now….

Filed Under: Photography

Help Yourself With Business Blogging This Lunchtime

February 1, 2007 By Ken McGuire Leave a Comment

If you’re knocking around Kilkenny for your lunch today it might be worth your while to drop over to the New Park Hotel where Keith and Aidan have moved the Help Yourself series of talks to a lunchtime fixture, away from the 2006 6pm slot in Langton’s.

This afternoon’s talk looks at the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of business blogging. There will be a 30-minute “nibble time” from 12:30pm to 1pm with the session set to get underway at 1pm and finish up around 2pm.

Don’t know how to get there? Click for directions to the New Park Hotel.

Filed Under: Help Yourself

Newspaper Annoyances

February 1, 2007 By Ken McGuire 11 Comments

The press release came from KilkennyMusic.com. It was sent via my email address, ken [at] kilkennymusic DOT com. The name in the header of the email said Ken McGuire – KilkennyMusic.com. The signature of my email had KilkennyMusic.com all over it. The end of the release stated ‘For full details, visit www.kilkennymusic.com’.

So why do they print it as ‘www.kilkenny.com.ie’ ? The whole organisation is called ‘KilkennyMusic.com’ – nothing more, nothing less (except for the cliqueish types who like to refer to it as KKM, me included – I do like the pet name). Surely its not that hard to copy and paste details or at least CHECK your final article against the details that have been sent to you. Or has someone been really sneaky and launched another level to the .ie domains without telling me, then gone and hijacked everything I do musically and move it to this new secret website?

When the newspaper contacts YOU looking for the information, rather than the other way around, you think they’d want to get it right when putting it into print don’t you think?

Small gripe but its late and I’m annoyed…

Filed Under: Annoyances