My recent posts have been showing off the scenery we find around us in our new home. The downside of all those fantastic hills turned out to be a lack of line-of-sight for Airwire.ie service. So I’m going to use O2’s 3G internet service as I’m unwilling to pay €25 per month for line rental before I even start paying for ADSL service which is lacklustre at best. However, I need to be able to connect multiple machines and so we need a router.

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One of the things that really attracted us to move to Moycullen was the fantastic scenery in the area. Not only are there beautiful lakes (as you can see in the previous post) but there is also a lot of woods/forestry in the area. Makes for a tranquil Sunday wander. Have a look at the rest of the Flickr set from the weekend.

Just a short post on the Irish Blog Awards 2010 – my first time to attend and Liv came along too (which was great, she got an insight into my online life). As ever, it’s great to catch up with the people you know and finally say hello in person to a number of people you’ve chatted to for ages but never actually met face to face. Of course, you won’t get to meet everyone you wanted too but that just means you have to get out more and actually travel to some events.

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So everyone is tablet obsessed at the moment, in the sense that they’re either loving or hating all the hype on the topic at the moment. Sitting on the plane waiting the other day I got to thinking about what I’d like in a tablet. I will admit that I’m an Apple fanboy but this isn’t about their rumoured device. I guess we’re coming from the notion of previous tablet computers that were really just variants on laptops and the inspiration of e-reader devices like the Kindle and so on.

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DSC_2272 Originally uploaded by JamesGallagher (ciotog) I don’t know why I really like this photo (not a technically good photo) , I just do.

Borne out of trying to get a meaningful view of Galway City Council meeting minutes (see Council Meetings) is a pet project of mine to parse those minutes. The idea being to extract contextual information like the councillors and officials present, the agenda items, the chronology & outcome of motions and similar information. I haven’t fully considered the end presentation – since I’ve been inspired by KildareStreet.com I may look at the open source software used there.

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This was my big cycling project of the year and truly was fun. I’m debating putting an internal gear hub on it in 2010 but currently being advised against it. Well worth reading the set of posts I did recently on it: Part 1: http://www.jamesgallagher.ie/new-bicycle-fun-part-1/ Part 2: http://www.jamesgallagher.ie/new-bicycle-fun-part-2/ Part 3: http://www.jamesgallagher.ie/new-bicycle-fun-part-3/

So, this is the final part of the three-parted on my new Xtracycle setup and covers out-and-about with the bike. I’ve been cycling it for about three weeks now I guess and so far the only problems I’ve had are two punctures and the chain coming off the front cog a couple of times. The chain problems may have been due to leaving the chain a bit loose – I’ve remedied that and just had one ‘off’ recently.

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In a follow up to my first post; this one talks about assembling the bike. Now, I said it before, I’ve never assembled a bike before so this is going to be a laugh to read. Lots of mistakes and I’m still fine-tuning. First thing was to take the Electra Townie frame (I’d love to link directly to the ‘Original 7D’ model page but the site is flash …):

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