iGoogle

I'm really enjoy iGoogle. It gives me daily updates from the Irish Times, New York Times, RTE News, RTE Business, BreakingNews.ie, BBC News and People.com with the latest in news and gossip. I find it a great way to start or finish the day by keeping up to speed with the world around me.

I also have get a photo of the day from National Geographic (Today's Atlatntic Walrus, Canada). They are all really astounding, Google have done some impressive things with their search engine and they keep doing more and more.

The picture on the right is taken from the gadget 1000 places to See Before you Die. It's a picture of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe and Zambia.

I recommend anyone to have a look at it at least and see what they think.

Aardvark

A friend of mine recommended me and invited me to Aardvark. He mentioned a little bit about what it was to me so I figured I may as well check it out.

You can add it in different ways into a few messaging services. I decided to add it to my gmail. It adds itself as a contact and you talk to it as you would anyone else in gtalk. The basic idea is that you ask this contact Aardvark a question and it tries to figure what tags to attach to the question before sending it to other people who have these tags added to their profile to answer these questions. Aardvark then asks these people these questions and gives the option to answer it, pass, skip or busy. If the tag doesn't belong to a group it sends it to people who have offered to receive any question if it doesn't have a tag or an answer. I've asked it a few questions now already and I've liked the responses.

One example is: “Does anybody know a good restaurant in Dublin to bring my girlfriend?”

Answer:
Cillian:
Mona Lisa's is a good restaurant on d'olier street that has a good menu, nice atmosphere, won't break the bank and is quite romantic


So check it out, tis a good program and very easy to use. It is new and it won't be able to answer every question you ask.

Check it out at http://vark.com

PC Gaming, I'm back!!

So I finally logged back into Steam last night for the first time in a long time and I think I'm gonna try get back into gaming like I used to. I really do miss the all nighters. I think since I quit World of Warcraft I haven't been able to play like I used to. Plus having a girlfriend and having travelled around the world also changes things a little. No longer will I be a lonely gamer longing for uber nerd girl to touch me or look at me or cyber. Now I've got a hot girlfriend who'll tell me to come to bed instead of playing stupid games, haha.

Anyways, I've added a quick pic here that I added as my avatar last night. It's from Dead Space, a truly magnificent game that I've been playing on and off for a few months now. It's terrible, I bought this game for my brother for christmas and I haven't given it the proper time it deserves. I recommend checking this game out, if you liked F.E.A.R., any of the Half Life series or Doom 3, then you'll like this. It'll send chills up your spine and has a very interesting storyline too. You can also download the movie (Downfall) which gives you the background story to the game. You can find it on youtube in parts. It's a pity the movie wasn't put on the disk along with the game. It's animated and nothing amazing, but it's always good to see some background story before playing.

A little inspiration

Ok, so I know this blog has not been the most inspiring or interesting in anyway whatsoever. So taking a little inspiration from Robin Blandford of ByteSurgery, Why This Blog?, I've agreed with my old college buddy Robin who I studied Telecommunications with, and I think I will stop hiding my ideas and thoughts that I've been trying to store in hidden places all the time to never be looked at again ever and actually write them out. Why not sure? Hopefully someday someone will read them and pay me to stop giving people ideas to use.

Today I was talking with my Dad about how cheap shopping up north has been. Now I know everyone's giving out that we should shop in the Republic so the taxes go into our government and economy. But why? they just go into a corrupt government that is only now seeing all the corruption happening over the last few years. I find it kind of funny to think that when the recession hits, only then do people watch where the money goes, beforehand these big public figures had no problem hiding their dealings by paying everyone off.

Anyways, the idea is a small business idea, until these prices become a little more reasonable, a small logistics company could do people's shopping up north for a small fee and have it delivered directly to your door. Get a big van, do a number of people's shopping for a small fee and you've made a few quid while probably doing your own shopping up north as well, sweet as. We all save a little money and a lot of fuel.