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

To get to the store, click Here

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Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince review

Please note that this is meant to be heard as an audio review. Hence the script is audio-based. It might read a tad weird. And not contain the full story. I do tend to ramble a bit, after all…

I was a guest last night at the premier of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Know what that means? That means that I got to see it two days before you; Harry Potter Fandom! So I decided to do a review.
This review should not be considered spoilerful unless you have not yet read the book. If you have read the book, I will not be spoiling anything that doesn’t happen in it, yet happens in the movie.

Once we were huddled into the theatre, free water and popcorn in hand (Apparently us guests are important enough for free water and popcorn, but not free FRESH popcorn. The box that I ended up getting was stale. But I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I’m not going to complain!), some crowd from that farce of a radio station, 98FM took the stage and tried to rally us all in excitement. Between shamelessly pimping their morning show and squeaking like children, I didn’t quite understand a word that they said. Most of this part of the night was spent trading cynical comments with people sitting next to me.

About two and a half minutes later, the stars of the show arrived into the auditorium and took to the microphone. Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood) and Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom) welcomed the fans, to quite a responsive roar, and then took to their respective seat.

I bet they got goddamned fresh popcorn.

Let’s just get a few things straight here. I didn’t really like the previous films. This piece of filmmaking is 153 minutes long. And maybe 145 of those minutes are cinematic gold. Each and every single one of the actors has matured through his or her run through the series. I loved it.

However, there were a few things that ticked me off. There was a bit too much subplot for my liking. Don’t get me wrong, pretty much all of it was emotionally perfect, but I would have liked to have seen the main plot brought a bit forward more. I’m not sure whether cutting some of this out, or simply making the movie a tad longer would have been a better answer. Because I liked what was there.

Another thing that kind of ticked me off is how cheery the movie was. Ok. It was a lot darker then previous instalments, but I can’t get over the fact that I remember being riveted to the spot in certain parts of the book. I found Dumbledore’s death scene to be rather lacking, as well as his scene in the cave. Something about the cave scene, in particular just didn’t resonate with me. The menace just didn’t seem to be in it, and I expected Dumbledore to put up just a little more fight while drinking the potion.

However, all in all, I suspect that this film will be in the box office for a damn long time. Well done to the cast and crew, this was certainly a very enjoyable night.

Except for the popcorn. Did I tell you about the popcorn?

You can contact Cian by emailing cian@viewfromthequad.com, and you can contact Liz by emailing liz@viewfromthequad.com .

Follow Cian on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/cianmm, follow Liz at http://www.twitter.com/blondeleftie and follow Scodio Studios at http://www.twitter.com/scodio

Leave a comment on the show at www.ViewFromTheQuad.com and phone the voicemail line at 001 206 203 4610

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.

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”

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.

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

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.

“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!

I have decided that I refuse to take any more of this, and want to switch to Libsyn. Imagine my surprise when it is hinted at that not only will I have to give up my feed when I stop paying because of the switch, but switchpod will start inserting advertising into my feed.

Continuing, Switchpod support staff have REPEATEDLY refused to answer two simple questions, related to the above thing which surprised me.

1. Is the redirect feed option available for non-paying members
2. will ads be inserted into the redirected feed.

I feel that if it is not available for non-paying members, or if advertisements are inserted, I deserve to keep my “paying” account without actually having to pay for it, for the sole use of redirecting my switchpod feed to a libsyn feed or maybe my own feed from my own web hosting service. I believe this for the following reasons

1. From the get go, switchpod lied about their service. When I signed up, they were promising “The most advanced stats” and, as we can all see, the stats system is an utter joke. The joke even goes as far as to STILL have the following message printed on the stats page. “Hi, We are experiencing some technical difficulties. We are working to make the new stats page better for the site. We will be moving the stats engine to a new server to improve server performance. We will email when every thing is up. Thanks. – Jan. 28, 2007″. Rob, over there at wizzard.tv personally promised me, in person, at the PNME that switchpod would have a nice stats system running withen a week of the PNME 2007. We shook hands, and he went on to say that if there was not a new stats system, The coder responsible would be fired.
I mean, january 2007, we were being promised new stats. Have they shown up? NO.
2. Check through your support files to see how many problems I have had with switchpod, from files deleting themselves to my account being inaccessible for large amounts of time, remembering that I actually have to give the support staff my username and password, something which I find really… silly. Not forgetting that they tend to dance around questions so that they don’t have to answer them.
3. I was promised by somebody at wizzard.tv that you were working on getting “Switchpod up there with the big boys of podcast hosting”. Has this happened? Clearly not. Switchpod is a system which by rights, should have a warning on the front page saying that any podcaster who takes themselves seriously should not sign up.

In conclusion, I am requesting a transfer to Libsyn, with however much “credit” I have left on switchpod going into the libsyn account. I would also like for switchpod to redirect my feed for free, without inserting advertising into it. I will remove all my files from switchpod, and host them on libsyn instead, because leaving them on switchpod would not only be useless, but unfair to them.

Yours Sincerely,

Cian Mac Mahon
—————————————————————
Cian Mac Mahon
Professional Podcaster
Available for voice work, consulting

www.viewfromthequad.com