a blog by António Farinha
The image above is part of the satellite imagery that Google recently released of the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) - commonly known as The Boneyard. It's a collection of over 4,000 retired aircraft including nearly every plane the US armed forces have flown since World War II.
Get more info at BBC News, or just explore the whole thing in Google Maps.
(via Gizmodo)
That's right! This little corner of the web is already one year old. And so I feel obliged to do some kind of summary.
It's was on the 17th of January 2009 that I inaugurated Flour Power. One year later and it's still here, after 239 posts with 292 comments. The site has seen a total of 83,512 unique visitors that produced 105,092 pageviews. Most of them got here from search engines (76.87%), of which Google was the biggest contributor. Geographically speaking, the 4 biggest sources of traffic were the USA, the UK, Canada and Ireland. But there was also 1 person from Rwanda that considered the blog interesting enough to spend more than 5 minutes here.
And what made all those people come here? The 10 most popular posts of 2009 (excluding the Facebook "incident", which alone caused about 50% of the total traffic) were:
As far as content is concerned, Flour Power started off as a daily frequently updated diary of my "adventure" of leaving my home country for 6 months to live in Galway, Ireland. As those 6 monhts turned into a year (and now probably two), the frequency of said reports was reduced, and the type of posts changed with it. This is now a place where I post the most fun/interesting/useful stuff I find around the web, along with the occasional rant about whatever is bothering me at the moment. And that's how I plan to keep it going forward.
So if you enjoyed it so far, stick around for a while longer. I'll try not to disappoint 
There's more to the 2010 Irish budget, but what most people notice is signs like these at pubs:
It's not a major reduction. Actually, it's just about 15-20 cents per pint, but it does feel good paying less than €4 for a Guinness.
I've been wanting to write about this tool, but for the sake of credibility, I didn't want to write a review before actually using it. And today I did.
Ninite calls itself an "easy PC setup and multiple app installer. And that's exactly what it is. It couldn't be any simpler, I guess. The website is just a list of the best Windows applications divided in several categories. You just select the ones you want, download a customized installer and run it. The selection is very good, and all the essentials are there, like Firefox and Chrome, uTorrent, VLC, ImgBurn, 7-Zip, Notepad++, etc.
The installer doesn't ask you any annoying installer questions. It just downloads the stuff you requested and installs it. Simple.
To make things even faster, it fires up several downloads at once, so that when when program finishes installing, it is very likely that the next one on the list has already been downloaded and ready to go.
But not everything is good. In my test the installer froze while installing Dropbox. I'm guessing that was because Dropbox requires, in the end of the install process, a login to the service, and the automated wizard couldn't deal with that. It would be nice to have a way to skip the current app and install the remaining ones (I had to cancel the whole thing and go to the site again for the ones that didn't install in the first run). Also, it's not possible to specify an installation folder other than the default (typically C:/Windows/Program Files), although this might be a necessary evil to make the whole thing as simple as possible.
In short, it's a great little tool that makes the task of setting up a new computer much, much easier.
I'm confused now. Is it large or is it petit?
FYI, petit is French for small. And pain is French for bread. They should really italicize that sign...
This Halloween, Galway's streets will be taken over by fancy dress parties, traditional games, Trick or Treating, and a re-enactment of Michael Jackson’s Thriller dance routine.
On Friday 30, the streets and pubs of the Latin Quarter will be the venue for a massive fancy dress party. And for those who like to compete, there are rumours that a €5000 prize will be awarded to the best costume will be prizes to the best costumes: 1st place €1000, 2nd place €500 and 3rd place €250.
Saturday 31 will have quite a few "Halloweeny" activities. In the afternoon: a kid's fancy dress party where the costumes have to be environment friendly, and Trick or Treating and traditional games along the Latin Quarter streets. At 4pm comes the big event of the weekend - a re-enactment of Michael Jackson’s Thriller dance routine and video in The Fishmarket at the Spanish Arch. The Galway Abooo Festival reaches its finale with the Saturday Night ‘Spooktacular Street Show’ - street performances will take place across the streets of the Latin Quarter from 8pm, leading to a display at 8.40pm at St. Nicholas’ Church.
To help bring as many people as possible to Galway, Irish Rail is providing a few "Ghost Trains" from Dublin at a special rate of €10.
More info can be found at the festival's official page.
This all looks promising indeed.
If you thought that 5€ to go from Galway to Dublin Airport was still too expensive, here's a price reduction - now it only costs 1€! Yes, that's correct, 1€ for a 217Km bus journey!
It's part of Citylink's campaign for their new "Non-Stop" service, that also includes the routes from Galway to Cork, Shannon Airport and Clifden:
The "Super Singles" ticket is available 7 days a week but must be bought, in advance, through Citylink’s on-line sales reservation service.
Tickets will be made available in limited numbers, so it’s essential that travellers book their tickets early in order to secure themselves the most affordable travel ticket Ireland has ever seen.
If the price of the bus ticket when planning trips was already an afterthought, now it's even less than that, because it's almost free. I pay more for the bus ticket to get to work...
The only thing missing now is a late bus from Dublin Airport to Galway. The last one is at 21:15, and in the last couple of trips I've arrived later than that and the only option was Gobus. And speaking about GoBus, I'm curious to see what they do about this. First they had the WiFi (which, by the way, I never managed to get to work) and the WC services to justify the triple price (€15). And they could also argue that their service was faster because it was non-stop. But it seems that Citylink now provides all that for MUCH less. Either GoBus lowers their prices or invents some other service that compensates for a price 15x higher.
Strippers?
Eh, even with the posting schedule all messed up, I can at least help spread the word about stuff happening here in Galway.
The gathering is being organised by the Portuguese Association of Ireland to celebrate the 99th Anniversary of the Proclamation of the Republic. And this time I got the information in advance, so I can show up and get to know the other Portuguese denizens in Galway. See you at Aras n'Gael!
