I know that I made a bit of a fuss yesterday on my personal blog about the price of Snow Leopard being just under 45% higher in the EU then in the US. But let’s get real. This is going to effect almost nobody’s buying decision. Specially those of you who LIVE in the US. So I thought that I would link to a few different ways that you can save yourself some moolah when buying. (Sorry to those who don’t live in the US. The UK version of Amazon doesn’t seem to be listing any savings.)

First way I found was through Amazon. They are selling it for $24.99 which is a fairly tiny saving, but a saving none the less. The folks at MacMall are also selling it for that price.

The Snow Leopard Family Pack is also reduced in price on both Amazon and MacMall, down too $43.99.

If the Mac Box is what you are after, Amazon and MacMall will do you a deal on that as well! Save a round $20 by clicking the links!

One interesting point to note is that it was not Amazon, but MacMall who instigated these savings. Amazon just matched the price. But are these rather insignificant savings enough to stop you from just walking down to the local shop and purchasing a copy yourself? I know that I will!

If you have any other places to get Snow Leopard on the cheap, link to them in the comments!

Tags: Apple, geek

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View From The Quad #113 – Walk like an Olympian can be downloaded for free at www.ViewFromTheQuad.com

Hello and welcome to this fine episode of View From The Quad! Today on the show we cram as much content into our allotted time as we possibly can, covering diverse topics such as new iPod rumors, PC Guy’s secret long lost brother and how to become an Olympic contender. If you have the money. And the will to work out a lot, of course.

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

Links

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http://gizmodo.com/5040318/10-gadgets-that-help-you-play-like-an-olympian – Things to make you feel like an olympic competitor. Or not…

http://totallylookslike.com/2008/08/21/john-hodgman-totally-looks-like-dr-bunsen-honeydew/ PC Guy’s secret alter ego?

http://gizmodo.com/5040823/kevin-rose-ipod-rumors-price-cut-new-itunes-80-features-and-tall-rounded-nano – Kevin Rose’s iPod predictions.

Vote for me in the European Podcast Awards!
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Starting WoW and View From the Quad have both been entered into the European Podcast Awards, and now they need YOUR help to get through! Please vote for Starting WoW by clicking http://tinyurl.com/67hqzo, clicking “Vote” and then by giving 5 stars for each catagory. Then, if you have the time, vote for VFTQ by going to http://tinyurl.com/63n3zd and voting in the same way. If you only vote for one of my podcasts, vote for SWoW please. Thanks!

Tags: ipod rumor, olympics

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.

There are a few things which have gone wrong in the last year or so with Apple. In my mind, the main one was charging for the iPod Touch update a few months back, hearing the uproar and then deciding to charge AGAIN for the June update.

However, some would say that Apple’s move to get Safari 3.1 out into the Bill Gates ruled world of Windows computers was walking a little far over the line.

More after the jump.

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