I’ll admit that I don’t travel that much. If I did then I would be looking in to getting a MaxRoam chip and account. MaxRoam is the brainchild of Pat Phelan and Cubic Telecom, and its a sim chip that lets calls be routed through local numbers and VOIP for the international sections of the call.
It also means that you can have multiple local phone numbers in different cities around the world.
But, until recenty it was mostly for voice (not sure about texts). About two weeks ago they struck a deal with Qik. This deal, called Qik Roam, is a Qik-branded SIM that users can user for cut-price calls and data.
The partnership with Cubic Telecom will see Qik give its users the opportunity to purchase Qik-branded SIM cards enabling them to stream video live from all corners of the planet – without coming home to an astronomical phone bill. The Qik SIM also provides massive savings on voice calls, email, web browsing and texting while they travel. Under the tagline “Go mobile, not broke,” Qik is offering its users a simple, inexpensive way to share live video no matter where they are.
This is something I should have posted sooner, but other things got in the way. I know Pat through the Cork Open Coffee and I haven’t met anyone with as much passion as he has.
I’m having (OK getting) a hard time getting out on the bike. So I thought “let’s try a more organised approach”. I tried out for the Track Cycling Ireland Open Day in order to get accreditation and try out track cycling properly.
To begin with track bikes are different to road bikes. Imagine a standard road racing bike. Then remove all the brakes and gears. It turns out that a track cycling bike is a fixed gear bike. Namely there is only one gear, and no freewheel. To go faster, you pedal faster, to slow down, you slow down pedaling. To stop in a hurry… well trying to back pedal is an interesting thing to do once you have a bit of speed built up. Its a different mindset to standard road cycling.
The truly weird part of being on the track; once you’ve picked up speed, you feels like you’re playing a racing game with the sound down. It might be me, but there is a slight disconnect between your legs motoring away, and your view of an empty track.
The velodrome on Sundrive Road in Crumlin is interesting too. Its an outdoor track in the middle of a park. Apparently during training you can get spectators hoping for a crash.
Its been upgraded, but since its an outdoor track, and track cycling is a high speed event played out of very thin pieces of rubber, if it starts raining heavily it becomes a dangerous practice.
About halfway through the accreditation, it started raining heavily. So I’ve not got the paperwork. yet.
The season starts properly in May, and I’ll have to try to finish things off on May 11. A bit like Tog, this is something I want to do.
And maybe try out the legs in a few open championships.
No this isn’t a trailer for the sequel to the 1948 movie Ladri di biciclette or (as far as I know) the sequel to the 2004 movie Banlieue 13 (there is a part 2 called B13: Ultimatum). But it could be.
Instead here is a video of Inspired Bicycles team rider and The Clan member Danny MacAskill showing a collection of street trials riding/ bike parkour / dangerous stunts shot on (and over) the streets of Edinburgh.
In the video, Danny does stuff on a fixed gear bike that would fit in a District 13 sequel. And suddenly I want a fixed gear bike for a different reason.
(some RSS readers may need to click through to see the video)
I have a secondary school reunion coming up in December. Not so interesting, but I’m in the slightly unusual position of being back home after 12 years away. Coupled with the fact that I didn’t go to my local secondary school, but one a few miles away, I could get away with stuff.
In short, I haven’t been back since I sat the Leaving Certificate. With the exception of three or four people, I haven’t seen anyone from the school since then.
Why bring this up? Well, I could go, or I could send someone else in my place. Like a stripper.
That is exactly what Andrea Wachner did, and she filmed the results producing the movie / documentary / reality show “I Remember Andrea“.
An exotic dancer chosen by Andrea called “Cricket” (I’m assuming its her stage name and not her real name, then again, given my name…) attended the reunion in Andrea’s place wearing a tight black dress and high heeled spiked boots with fishnets. She then told her classmates she had reconstructive surgery and had suffered amnesia after a car crash which wasn’t altogether to far from the truth. The car crash was true, but not much else.
For those doubting the story, Andrea was in the hotel, set up in the room above the ballroom where the reunion was taking place, Cricket information through an ear piece and watching the monitors of the roaming cameras (and on occasion phoning home with reports of the action in the room below).
No details on when the movie is coming out in Ireland, but it might be fun to do something like this.
I needed to run in to B&Q. Then I saw this and needed to run out again to grab the camera.
After all, you never know when you’ll need something for rage, portable anger for those moments when you can’t throw in the towel. Maybe something to soak up the rage afterwards. Or wipe away anger.
You can even get a personalised (well fake personalised) poster of the shirtless player, if you have a printer attached. Apparently (crashed my machine when I tried).
I wonder if there will be a Leinster and Munster version shortly? Could the version of Goys and Fiens cope?
A little background for you. I stopped using Facebook a while back due to lack of interest. Recently I’ve updated my version of Tweetdeck, which now allows cross posting of your updates to both Twitter and Facebook.
I cross-posted that I had uploaded my photowalk photos, and the question arose (from my dead account); “What is a photowalk?”
Well, generally a photowalk is what it says on the tin. Two or more people get together and go for a walk taking photos. In practice, the walk portion can be replaced
But what makes that different from the clichéd image of a hoard of tourists snapping everything in site, including each other? (Yes, photobloggers take photographs of the other photowalkers).
So I posted the question on Twitter. And a few replies came back.
Tommy pointed out that “In my experience, photowalks are done by people from the same country. Also, tourists want keepsakes, p’walkers want good quality pix”. Given that the organiser of the Dublin photowalk isn’t from the Republic of Ireland, this isn’t quite true. Besides, I think that I have a few “keepsakes” in my collection. This was promptly followed by an invitation for the usual Irish photowalkers to go on a photowalk in Amsterdam. So there goes that definition.
McAWilliams then chimed in with “generally we take good photos and not snapshots!”. The “generally” then had a little discussion. Maybe photowalkers edit the results (literally edit the photos and not just sort them in to a ‘display’ and a ‘hide’ pile).
Eventually K.E. Southall came up with my favoured definition “photowalk = pre-emptive gathering of like-minded folk snapping random things. Tourists snap loved ones in front of famous sites”.
And she is right. Photowalkers tend to snap strangers that they find interesting, sometimes in unknown places.
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