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Been busy lately… going to be even busier over the next two weeks, as we launch Emerald Radio – our college’s 1 week long Internet-only radio station, which I’m manager of – and the reason why I recently created a 15 minute documentary programme on the Irish language (thanks, Orlagh!).

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”:

Sick of these ads? Of course you are… Well what if you could avoid them altogether?

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.

Just saw this… According to the Wall Street Journal:

After a series of meetings over the past week, Yahoo’s board determined that the $31 per share offer “massively undervalues” Yahoo [...] The decision to reject the offer signals that Yahoo’s board is digging in its heels for what could be a long takeover battle. The company is unlikely to consider any offer below $40 per share [...] It’s unclear whether Microsoft would be willing to pay such a premium, which would increase the value of its original cash and stock bid by more than $12 billion. [...] Yahoo’s board appears to be betting that Microsoft doesn’t want to “go hostile” and try to acquire the company against the wishes of management and the board.

Oh, things are hotting up alright…

[edit]: More here. Currently both MS and Yahoo! are refusing to comment on this report…