Paul O'Flaherty

The First Ice Cream (revisited)

“The First Ice Cream” is pulled from a very old blog that I used to have and was written back on the 9th of May 2004. It came to mind today as it was pointed out to me by Sara as she was browsing the archives of it and to be honest, I would just like some ice cream today!

Ah.. what a wonderful day… you’d almost believe it was summer out there at the moment… and it’s only Easter! It’s currently 15 degrees, the sun is shining and there’s no wind… (parp!! oops.. there is now!!)

Today marks a special day of the year for me as it is the first day that I’ve been out walking around and decided to pop in and buy a "soft ice" (ice cream cone thingy)… mmm ice cream… mmmmm….

Now, while this might not seem very important to most people, it is to me… You see, the first soft Ice, marks the beginning of the best part of the year. Now come the time for parties, festivals, women in skimpy clothes, and time to get into all of my summer time hobbies.. (which are my winter time hobbies, but with less clothes on, hee hee!!)

Now, most people don’t realize that the humble ice cream cone is such a potent and powerful symbol.. but there you go that’s adults for you… I guarantee you every kid knows it…

Let the fun begin…

Tell us what’s up at 5:10 to win an iPhone 3G

Fancy wining an iPhone 3G? If you do then drop along to the Fuelmyblog blog where we’ve just launched a new competition in conjunction with the guys from Tsheets.

What do you have to do to win? Just tell us what you’re up to at 5:10pm.

Good luck!

It’s a kilt damn you…..

Thanks to Sara for this one. You couldn’t let it be could you… LOL

You only get out what you put in

If you want traffic from social networking sites (like Fuelmyblog)to be driven to your blog then you need to participate in the sites.

Simply signing up, adding your site and then buggering off and ignoring the service will benefit you nothing and is quite simply a waste of time.

A word of warning. If after signing up for a service and not using it, you then have the nerve to email me and complain about the lack of traffic you received, when you’ve never so much as left a comment elsewhere, then I will take a very big stick and beat you round the head a few times with it.

Enough said!

My ring smells funny!

I was trying not to go there but it’s the truth.

You see I’ve been wearing this stainless steel ring with a small dragon engraved on it on the middle finger of my right hand for years now.

I’m wearing the ring in the picture of Scot Duke and myself taken in The Foundation Room of the House of Blues in Chicago. (Click the picture for a full size version)

A few minutes ago I lifted my hand to my face and got hit with this terrible smell that was almost like a mix of syrup, sulphur and stale coffee. I have no idea how it could have picked up that smell (well except for the coffee anyway).

Funny thing is that my fingers don’t smell.. (Yes, yes, cue all the jokes about sniffing fingers after they’ve been in your ring… you perverts) .. so I have no idea why my ring smells.

Oh well, best go wash it and see if it does anything to improve the smell. If it doesn’t I’ll just have to keep my ring off my finger (not the other way around .. sicko) permanently.

A day of new starts

A new morning always brings something fresh and today’s was no exception.

We launched the new Fuelmyblog blog today after finally prying it from the icy fingers of blogger.

There is still much work to be done, but even at this early stage it is a vast improvement over what it was.

Now that the core features are in place, it’s time to start adding all the bells and whistles and truly tweaking it to perfection.

On another more personal note, I want to wish Suburban Oblivion all the best with what is transpiring for her today (I’ll leave it to her to say what, when she’s ready). I know it will go well Sara and I know you don’t need luck, but I wish it to you anyway.

I’ll be sitting here anxiously awaiting news with all my crossables crossed!!

Dear twhirl, won’t you help out my stalker?

Yesterday I managed to pick up a real stalker on Twitter and of course the person was daft enough to perform their stalking using their real name.

So, when I was sitting eating Sunday dinner a few minutes ago I was thinking about the tools I use for keeping track of Twitter and how they could be improved to enable my stalker to do a better job of it.

One of my favorite desktop tools is twhirl and one of the best features is that it notifies you with a pop-up and a sound of direct messages and replies.

What would be killer here would be the ability to enter a bunch of twitter users that I follow so that I always get notified of their tweets, otherwise some peoples which I really want to get, end up being  get lost in the crowd.

This would not only make my life easier, but my stalkers job would become a little easier as well (see I’m always thinking of others.. LOL)

What are your favorite twitter tools and what features do they have that could make my stalkers life easier?

The Ladybird – funny animation

@datalore_tv linked to this funny animation on twitter last night and I just had to share it with all of you guys here as well. This is very well done and to me, funny as heck!

BlogRolled: a quick route to the Google penalty box?

Back in February of 2007 I removed my blogroll from this site and declared blogrolls to be dead. My logic, at the time, was that links from within my posts were of more value to people I read as readers may actually click on them, and the fact that if I were to link to everybody I read then my blog roll with be a couple of hundred links long.

If you want to know who I read and get the best of what they write simply subscribe to my link blog.

Yet, as much as they are a dead duck to me the fact is that the vast majority of bloggers feature a blog roll on their site and those blog rolls pass a lot of Google juice around the web.

In fact, considering how much link juice they drive (most blogrolls exist on every page on a blog) and I’ve been wondering how long it would take for a service to come along which would make it easy for advertisers to purchase space in your blogroll or even the whole thing.

The benefits of having your companies link in a bloggers blogroll are enormous. Not only does space in a blogroll generally mean a site wide link, but blogrolls are looked upon as endorsements on the internet.

By adding someone’s link a blogger is essential saying “I trust and respect this source, you should to!” and I’m sure Google sees it the same way.

Well it looks like that trust is about to be shattered.

A few days ago I received an email asking me to enroll in BlogRolled, a service looks to be the middleman between bloggers and advertisers and sell links within your blogroll or even your entire blogroll.

I signed up for the service, added my blog (even though I don’t have a blogroll) and waited until I got approved to try to get under the hood of how this works.

I wanted to see what kind of code they were using to embed the links and see if it was “nofollow”, even though I knew it wouldn’t be as they are touting “natural search benefits” as one of the selling points to advertisers.

Amazingly, there is no embed code. Or at least none that I have seen yet because there are no opportunities available in the market place.

You can read that as “No advertisers have signed up with us yet”. (Maybe this is a good thing!)

It looks as if the code is only given to you after an advertiser has purchased your blogroll.

Considering how much trust is put in blogrolls, I can see this a being potentially damaging both to bloggers who sell links within their blogrolls and the blogosphere as a whole.

Considering how hell bent Google is on cracking down on paid links, (Matt Cutts is actively asking people to report sites with paid links and Michael Gray is calling for Google to shift its focus from SEO’s to PR people and top bloggers) I’m wondering how long it would take a blogger who used this system to fall afoul of Google’s penalties and worse yet, if this selling of blogrolls became widespread, how long it would take Google to reduce the value given to links from within blogrolls.

If that happened I’m sure that more than a few bloggers would see a hit to their PageRank and to their wallets.

Security for the dumbass generation…

Since I’ve been back in Ireland I’ve found the need to get broadband installed in my grand parents house, (they’ve been kind enough to let me stay here until I move on again) and in my search for a reasonably priced provider with a reasonable service I ended up ordering a DSL connection from Eircom.

Now while I don’t have any complaints about the service (as yet) I do have some complaints about the setup of the DSL routers when they arrive at a customers home.

One of the most important steps in encrypting your wireless network is the use of a good random key of minimum 20 characters in length. I normally go longer than that but lets keep that at a minimum.

Now, all Eircom DLS routers come with WPA security enabled by default.

“Well and good”, you might say, “What the hell is he complaining about”?”

What makes networks keys secure is that nobody is supposed to know them.

One of the worst things you can do is write them down in case some unscrupulous little git, like say your neighbors teenage child, gets hold of it and then decides to use your internet connection to download gigabytes of hardcore porn.

But Eircom in their infinite wisdom have chosen to ship their routers, not only with a pre-enabled WPA key which is PRINTED on the router, but also to provide you with a stupid little manual that has the serial number, MAC address and SSID of the router printed on the front of it. Not only that, but the WPA key is also printed on the front.

So now, all little one armed bandit Johnny from next door, has to do is lift that booklet or get a quick look at the router in order to know your WPA key. He can happily use your internet connection to download porn, until one arm becomes disproportionately larger than the other and someone finally takes notice.

Lets be honest here, the majority of people are scared of concepts such as encryption and tend to opt for the easiest an laziest solution.

If the router comes with a predefined key, the chances are that 98% of people will use it, and we ALL know how careful most people are about holding onto crappy little manuals or not just leaving them lying around the place.

I think what really ticks me off most about this is that the manual doesn’t, in any way encourage the user to change the WPA key from the default.

The closest it comes in it’s 24 pages of encouraging changing the default key is two lines at the bottom of one page which read:

Your modem comes with WPW (WIFI Protected Access) security enabled.

For further information and to make changes to your security settings please go to www.eircom.net/wirelesssecurity.

We know they’re all going to be rushing off to follow that link…

One month out…

It’s exactly a month since I set my Irish backside on a flight from Copenhagen to Dublin in order to begin on a new course in my life.

I must say that while the last few weeks have been damn hard they’ve also been exciting with the realization of a new future and new opportunities.

Since I’ve been back in Cork I’ve had the opportunity to catch up with old friends, to reestablish links with family that I haven’t seen in ages and even to add another position to my ever growing list of current job titles.

For those of you who aren’t members of Fuelmyblog (and why aren’t you?) you may have missed that I became the “Sales & Community Development Manager” for FMB at the beginning of the month.

As we’re a month out, I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank everybody who has made my returning to Ireland as comfortable, smooth and enjoyable as possible.

I’m not going to get into naming names here, but thank you, to each and every one of you.

I look forward to spending as much time as possible with you all before I head off for my next destination!