So. You may have, at this point, realized that there has been no episode of View From The Quad so far this week. This is because of many reasons, and will be something that will start to happen more and more often as this school year continues on. Happily, I have some prerecorded material I can just chuck into the feed for when things get really bad, but not this week. If you simply HAVE to listen to my wonderful voice, how about watching this video of me unboxing a Secret Santa gift I got in the mail?

Anyways, if you were mentioned as winning a copy of 7th Son last week on the show, chances are that you should now be holding it in your grimey hands. Let me know what you think, and if you have got it!

Laters,
Cian

Not sure what to get that geek in your life? Worry not! I have selected some of my favorite books, DVDs, Games and other stuff and compiled it all together in a nicely laid out Amazon store! Take a browse around the place, and if you see anything somebody you love (or you!) would like, click “buy” in the knowledge that your money is going through Amazon, and a percentage is going to your favorite podcaster!

To get to the store, click Here

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.7MB)

This is a special mid-week edition of VFTQ, in which I review Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. It comes out in the US, UK and Ireland on Wednesday the 15th of July.
I recommend that you listen to this review, as I have included a bit more information in the recording then appears in the script below. Click “Read More” to read the text of the review.

Sponsor:  Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

(more…)

So, now that the Star Trek movie is just about to come beaming onto your screens (It’s a double pun!), Amazon are having a HUGE ASS sale on all their Star Trek stuff. Like, really REALLY big. How about 51% off Star Trek Voyager: Seasons 1-7 ? Or maybe 42% off Star Trek: Enterprise: The Complete Series, which come in pretty awesome boxes? Or 44% off the Star Trek: The Original Series (Remastered) – Three Season Pack, getting you all the seasons for something painfully cheap like $139.99?

In fact, just head too The Star Trek Store over at Amazon to check out the rest of the swag they are offering. Oh, and if you happen to have free tickets to the Star Trek Premier, I would be happy to take them off your hands…

Until you head to the screening, check out the trailer. It looks epic. A bit TOO epic, in fact. Time will tell, though.

As some of you may have noticed, Twitter and Facebook were under Blackout orders for the past while. Everywhere you looked, you would find avatars completely black. This was to protest the Guilt Upon Accusation law which was coming into effect in New Zealand which would basically disconnect anybody in New Zealand from the Internet if they were even accused of downloading copyright content. While you can read much more about this (Partially successful – they postponed the law) protest here, this post is to suggest something similar for Ireland.

From SBPost.ie,

Irish Internet users are to be blocked from accessing music swapping websites, as Internet service providers bow to pressure from the music industry. Eircom, the country’s biggest Internet provider, is to start blocking its Internet customers from accessing music swapping.

What’s more, the Irish Recorded Music Association (the Irish RIAA) has told all the other ISPs to follow suit or face legal action. Add this to the new three strike rule Eircom imposes on it’s users, and madness may well break out.

If the music industry is successful, Ireland will become the first European country to completely block access to hundreds of file-sharing websites.

I think that it is time for Ireland to try a similar tack to show Eamon Ryan TD and the Irish Media. Here are a few ideas on how to protest this without spending much time on it at all.

1. Make a totally black avatar and set it as your avatar across as many sites as you can. In case you are lazy, I have attached a few at the end of this blog post.
2. If you use Twitter, search for the tag #BlackoutIRL and keep watch there.
3. If you are on Facebook, write a note about the blackout and get all your friends to blackout their avatar as well. In fact, just copy-paste this entire blog post if you want. It’s not copyright, after all.
4. Contact Minister Eamon Ryan about this important communications issue. Tell him how important this issue is, and how he needs to stop it. His details are as follows. Please be polite.

Eamon Ryan TD
Dáil Éireann
Leinster House
Kildare Street
Dublin 2
Ireland

Tel: 01 – 618 3097

Fax: 01 – 618 4363

His site is at www.greenparty.ie/people/eamon_ryan (side note- that site really needs cleaning up. Apparently his phone number is “http://www.eamonryan.ie“. His email address is eamon.ryan@oireachtas.ie, if you are not going to send a letter. Again, please be polite, and thanks to James Cooley for pointing these out in the comments!

The IRMA may be contacted at 353 1 280 65 71

Much more information can be found about this at the following places

http://torrentfreak.com/music-industry-orders-bittorrent-blackout-090223/

http://www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=NEWS-qqqs=news-qqqid=39782-qqqx=1.asp

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0217/1224241279708.html

Here are the pre designed avatars I made. If you want to use one of them, go ahead. Right-click the image, and press “Save image as”

Tags: blackout, eircom, Facebook, twitter

Here at VFTQ I am well aware that even in this floundering economy, I am much better off then many people in the world.

I have time to be talking to YOU, for instance, instead of fighting for my life on the streets or in a hospital.

This is where Blog Action Day comes in. Today, the 15th of October, blogs all over the world aim to help put a stop to poverty. How can you help? If you have some spare change, donate it to the fund. If not, just blog about this event. Facebook, Bebo, Blogger, Wordpress… I don’t care how you get the word out, just DO!

Thank the lords of Cobalt that you have the chance to be listening to me yabber on ever week, and help us reach our goal.

Tags: blog action day

I’m heading down to Podcamp Ireland on Saturday 27th of September. It’s a free event in Kilkenny city, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting there. Shoot me an email if you are coming and we can chat! Cian@viewfromthequad.com

Tags: con, podcamp

Warning: If you do not wish to read an article which MAY feature in episode 110 of VFTQ, please do not read on.

I sit at my desk, drinking my first cup of good tea in three weeks. And I don’t want to be.

I want to be sitting in an overcrowded canteen at 8 AM, drinking overbrewed orange-twinged rubbish which I got from a huge vat. I want to be sitting at the very same over-crowded canteen eating undercooked chips, sloppy oily pizza and drinking water from a plastic cup. I want to be lying in the grass at ten to ten, holding somebody’s hand and laughing about something silly.

In short, I want to be in CTYI again. But I never shall.

For the past nine years, I have spent a portion of my summer at Dublin City University. Here, I have done college level courses over a short period of time. For the past four years, I have spent three weeks residential in the campus and done what amounts to the entire first year of a college course.

In 2005, I did 21st Century Science. 2006, Game Theory. 2007 brought Speculative Fiction Writing, and this year, I did an intensive course in Journalism.

During this course, I learnt about the many aspects of being a journalist. We watched films, documentaries and a writer for the Irish Independent explain the ins and outs of daily journalistic life. We created a 26 page newspaper entitled The American Pie. For this paper, I interviewed Paul Howard (Ross O’Carroll Kelly), made jelly in a bucket and even went to Dublin Zoo. The course was fantastic, Andrew Payne was an awesome instructor and it broke the really high standards usually set for CTYI courses.

However, it was not all about the course. Imagine this:

You are locked into a bubble with almost everything you need in it, along with around 249 other people. Here, hardly any news of the outside world gets in, and hardly any news of inside the bubble gets out.

The people in the bubble with you are all in the top 95th percentile in literature comprehension and maths. They wander around in bathrobes, argue about the validity of the Large Hadron Collider as a weapon and spend the entire three weeks pretending to be pirates. Crazy people. Fun people.

These are MY people. Geeks, Geniuses, whatever you decide to call them, they are fun to be around.

During Passionfruit, a little spoken of event for people who are too old to return to CTYI the following year, me and about 30 other guys and girls spoke, one at a time, about how CTYI has changed our lives. It was done in confidence, so I can’t share what others said. I can say what I told though.

I would not be this Cian Mac Mahon without CTYI. View From The Quad, Starting WoW, StuffSlasherSaw, my MINE submissions: All of these would not exist was it not for CTYI. 5 years ago, if you were to shove a microphone in my face, I would probably lash out at you. I hated being on camera, never mind editing my mistakes later. CTYI has brought out the loud-mouth in me, given me inspiration for short stories, projects, comedy pieces and articles. You would not be reading this right now were it not for the Computer Programming teacher who introduced me to Q-basic six years ago.

I would not have had the chance to meet all these amazing people were it not for CTYI. You all know who you are, and had I not met you, I would be a very different person. Some of you made me think about the bigger picture, what I want to be in the future years, some of you made me feel amazing and some of you are the best friends I could ever ask for.

This is all done now though. Never again will I be able to call myself a student of the Irish Center for Talented Youth. Never again will I drink the tea, eat the pizza and lie under the sky, next to the four walls we call The Quad, sharing the feeling with a friend. Maybe in three years I will go back and sit, nervous, in front of Colm O’Reilly as he decides if I am good enough to become a Residential Assistant and join the legion of the strange once again.

Are you attending Podcamp Ireland?

“PodCamp Ireland is the very first stand-alone event to promote the use and provide guidance and tips on the subject of social media in Ireland.

Podcamp Ireland is an unconference. In other words it relies on the active engagement and collaboration of participants to make it happen. Everything about an unconference comes from the participants. That includes the topics which will be discussed, the time and place, and even the decision as to whether to hold such an event at all.”

I will be there. It is on Saturday 27th of September, in Kilkenny city. Go to www.podcampireland.com/register to register for the free un-conference. Should be great fun!

Hey there kids! The Starting World of Warcraft (or Starting WoW for slightly shorter) podcast has just been launched at www.StartingWoW.com and you are invited to listen! It is only a short 3-4 min episode, explaining what will be going on, but remember to subscribe in order to get it for free every time an episode is released! If the iTunes button doesn’t work on the site, click the RSS Podcast button next to it and then select iTunes on the page which opens if you are using iTunes.