If you’re interested, the station broadcasts to the world for limited hours daily from March 8th to 12th. More info will be on the web site (which I’m responsible for).

On a slightly unrelated note, here’s Thin Lizzy with “Emerald”:

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One example is this god awful “80’s rock megamix” track doing the rounds (- and it features on our jukebox in work) which melds classic 80’s rock tracks from Guns ‘N Roses, Metallica, Nirvana, Europe, Bon Jovi, AC/DC and a few others – all sped up or slowed down so their BPM’s match – together with a horrible dance style drum-machine beat, and yes, I must admit to having used it in gigs before…

And a quick youtube search, and here it is… (*cringe!!!*)

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way… you’ll understand how pleasantly surprised I was to stumble across a band like Rock Sugar. They’re making pop rock… mashing up pop tracks with metal songs live and making it work.

Check out their version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” in the style of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”:

Love it!

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• Metallica + Journey = Rock Sugar (metalsucks.net)

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Here’s some of them:

“Brief History of Willie O’Dea” package for iWitness News by niallok

“Love is…” package for iWitness News by niallok

“Youtube Dating” package for iWitness News by niallok

“Immigration” package for iWitness News by niallok

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The highlights of the week for me included:

Singing and busking in the Big Busk-Off with the “iDrive with Nadia & Phil” team in the Bridge Centre, Tullamore. We were up against “Breakfast with Bernard & Keith”. I played the drums (a.k.a. the empty water cooler bottle). Highlights of our performance included Valerie, Fields of Athenry and Hit Me Baby One More Time. Yes. The crowd loved us. Got plenty of hugs and gave out “Hugs & Handshakes” vouchers while there. Bernard & Keith still won. Foul play was suspected. Great craic, all the same

… and I liked it so much that despite having a pile of college work yet to do this week, I’m going back down there again on Tuesday morning.

Hurrah!

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I was in town yesterday for the Ireland vs Italy Six Nations rugby match in Croke Park. I was there with my cousin, a friend of hers and a couple of Italians she knew. It wasn’t a great match by any stretch of the imagination but we had good fun all the same.

Walking back from Croker to my car, I passed along Summerhill Parade where a samba band was playing. An Italian fan decided to help them out and provide us with even more entertainment by popping a horses head mask on and doing a little dance… This was the result:

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The station, which broadcast from the D4 Hotel in Ballsbridge, managed to raise a whopping €70,000 for their most Christmassy of chosen charities, the Simon Communities of Dublin and Cork – an incredible achievement – while helping bring a bit of Christmas spirit and joy to it’s many listeners.

Here’s a brief documentary video (by Jen) about the station, that even features me…

The plan is now, of course, return next year – when we hope to cover more cities and raise even more money for charity.

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Here’s a simple tip that heps you do just that,- stopping images and pages from a long list of notorious web sites from being displayed on your browser. These particular ones are hosted on the domain “content.yieldmanager.edgesuite.net” and link to a url at “ad.adperium.com” – literally just a couple of sites among many which are purely for shoving advertising and spam down the viewers throat.

One easy way to stop such ads appearing is to use customise your HOSTS file. This is basically like a local version of a DNS server (those servers that translate domain names into numbers so your browser can find web sites). In the HOSTS file, you’d have a list of all the sites you want blocked and have them correspond to 127.0.0.1 (also known as “localhost”) – so that your browser would try to load the images and pages from your own PC instead of the actual web site.

Handily, someone’s already written a customised HOSTS file for you to use and it’s pretty simple to install. First things first though, – better safe than sorry.. back up the file you’ve got.

In Windows XP, Vista or 7:

Press the Windows key & “R” together to bring up the Run dialog box, then enter:

%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\

In the folder that pops up, copy the file “hosts” to something like “hosts.bak” to back it up

Then right click here and choose “save link/target as…”. Enter “%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\” (without the quotes) and hit Enter in the dialog box that pops up to change the folder, change the file type to “all types” and you should see the hosts file there – click that and hit save to overwrite it.

(Note: Windows Vista and 7 may not let you download files into the etc folder. If this is the case, just change the permissions on the file first, by right clicking it, then clicking properties, then security, hit the Advanced button, then Edit, double click on the Users () line and tick the Full Control box. Then close all the dialog boxes by hitting Ok and try downloading and overwriting the file again. Bingo.)

In Ubuntu Linux (should work in other Linux distributions or Mac OSX too):

Open the terminal and enter:

sudo mv /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak

sudo wget -c http://zelut.org/projects/misc/hosts -O /etc/hosts

(You’ll have to enter your admin password the first time you use ’sudo’. Still… much simpler in Linux, eh?)

And that’s it… the hosts file you’ve just installed (which I didn’t write, but is freely available for distribution) contains references to over 15,000 nasty sites which will now be mapped to your PC. You can, of course, add domains to the list yourself by simply editing the file. As the images and pages at those URLs won’t be found on your PC, the browser will show either nothing or a broken image icon in its place.

The only issue that this sometimes throws up is that, depending on your setup, it can take some time for your browser to fail in the search for the non-existant image – this can be gotten around by installing something like Hostsman (Windows only, unfortunately) which has a built-in web server so that the browser can show a blank image in place of the missing one.

Note: While you could just install a plugin like Adblock Plus to block ads in Firefox, – that works on an ad-by-ad basis in just one browser whereas this hosts file solution will block the sites in every single program on your computer.

Hope this helps.

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And yes… Jim’s still bonkers… and he’s still going on about the New World Order stuff that he ranted about on the Last Word almost two years ago ahead of the first Lisbon Treaty. He’s still in way out of his depth and still abusing his fame and celebrity to spread this stuff and (repeatedly) promote his activist shite peddling web site.

I mean SURE… he’s entitled to his opinion and he’s certainly entitled to express it if he wants to… (although I believe RTÉ gave him way too much airtime here and any other presenter would have pulled him up on a few points far better than O’Connor could) – but if you’re to believe him, you’d have to believe the following:

Swine flu was created deliberately by the World Health Organisation to reduce the burgeoning population and sell vaccines, global warming is a lie and just a scam to raise taxes, 9/11 was a US Government conspiracy where they bombed their own cities, killed their own people and blamed it on Islamic terrorists so they could go to war, full body scanners in airports will be taking pictures of your privates, storing them on a hard drive and emailing them to a location where they’ll be held on a central database and the devastating earthquake in Haiti which killed over 200,000 people may have been caused by an American tectonic weapon (he essentially agrees with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez here).

Mentaller.

Maybe it’s time for his hot sisters to give him something better to be doing and get the band back together…

Anyway… you can see more of this on the excellent RTÉ Player here for a limited time (scan ahead to about 50 mins in and watch from there until he’s thankfully interrupted by the usually horrendous Twink after 10 minutes).

UPDATE: Here’s the full Jim Corr interview (audio only): Download audio file (JimCorr.mp3)

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The voice I REALLY want on it though is Peter Dickson – aka Voiceover Man (he of X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, etc. etc. fame) – his particular dramatic “ooomph!” would certainly make car journeys that bit more exciting and appealing! Here he is… just generally being awesome…

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