Merry Christmas…

Posted by Ronan on Dec 21, 2008 in random | 1 comment

Merry Christmas everyone!!!

Seize the Opportunity

Posted by Ronan on Dec 17, 2008 in random | 0 comments

Walking down O’Connell Street last Saturday night we bumped into Jackie from the Stables Club. We hadn’t seen him for a while so stopped to say hi. He was happy to stop and chat about his new business “Spice of India”. He opened 3 weeks ago and I hope things go well from them. He brought us down to see the place, gave us menus and said when we come in ask for him.

Now he did a couple of things during our short encounter – he basically secured another 2 customers, got some free advertising (this blog entry) and showed me what good and simple customer service can do for a business. After last nights Prime Time (Service with a Snarl) on RTE 1 – a lot of companies need a lesson or two!!

It's Snowing!

Posted by Ronan on Dec 9, 2008 in random | 3 comments

Add a little Season Greetings to WordPress – Download the plugin and make it snow on your blog.. For those hosting off wordpress.com you can go to the dashboard and turn the snow effect on!

1. Go to your dashboard.
2. Navigate to Appearance -> Extras.

Tada!

One year on

Posted by Ronan on Dec 7, 2008 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

This time last year I was in Hospital with a cast around my foot and a screw in my leg after a wee tackle on the astro turf while playing soccer. One year on and the ankle is fine, ligaments are strong again and the only thing that reminds me something was broken is the odd twinge. The break on the fibula can be felt physically – most of the bone is smooth but where the break occurred a bumpy callous bit can be felt. The ankle itself is fine and has been for the past couple of months. I’ve been ramping up the number of games since July and I’m now back playing 3 or 4 times a week. Mentally I don’t think about it anymore and I’m almost back to the same level of rash and slightly late tackles I dished out before the break!

Review of Sony VGN-SR19XN

Posted by Ronan on Dec 2, 2008 in technology | 4 comments

I’ve had Dell laptops pretty much from day 1. I like Dell, you get value for money but Dell machines were never the prettiest of laptops. Recently I got my light as a feather (1.9kg) stunning Sony Vaio laptop.

The first thing you notice on picking up the laptop is that it’s light but yet very sturdy – it’s not made with flimsy plastic (which I often felt Dell laptops were ). Opening the lid you noticed something borrowed from Apple. It has a mac’esq keyboard which I love – I suffer from stubbyfingeritis which means I mash and bash most keyboards. Not so with the Sony. The keys are very well spaced out and I haven’t hit a wrong key yet!!

The screen is insanely thin – but with metal back it feels solid and cool to the touch. There is no catch or lock for the screen – it simply closes and stays closed. With a 13.3inch widescreen it’s plenty big for most things.

The mouse pad is sweet – although I would like the mouse buttons to ‘clunk’ a little less. The fingerprint reader works well and can double up as a means of scrolling through pages – although the mouse pad has the right hand side and bottom edge as a scroll bar so I don’t use the fingerprint reader much.

The motion eye camera and inbuilt microphone is clear with skype/gtalk – people haven’t notice much of difference.

The one thing I love is the eery green power button in the hinge – very cool..very distinctive.

- it flashes orange when the lid is closed or in standby.

Elsewhere around the chassis it has the usual wifi on/off switch, SD flash card reader, pro magic reader, 2 usb ports, vga out (no digital out – booo),  headphone & external mic, modem and ethernet port (hidden behind a plastic cover!)

Software:
It comes with Vista Business and it runs fine but I’d rather XP over Vista any day. Also bundled is Adobe Acrobat 8 which would normally cost 200 euros. You get a trial of 60 days of office which is more annoying than helpful. But even more annoying than office is mcafee antivirus. I hate mcafee so it was the first thing to be removed.. how can Mcafee consistently produce software that cripples every machine?? I was happy to find out there was no real other bloatware apart from mcaffe.

The only downside I’ve had with the laptop is I keep pressing the cd eject button when I pick it up – this should have been a slotin CD type drive.

All in all a super laptop. 4.5/5 stars!