Four months since I last made an update! Maybe twitter really is killing the blog?

I think that in the not to distant future this blog might be subjected to the mighty powers of “rm -r -f /home/blog*”

In the meantime I’ll leave this here:

Many many years ago the communist journalist Claud Cockburn described Youghal as “standing at a slight angle to the universe.” I’m beginning to understand what he means now.

Originally came via an email but I Photoshopped™®  it slightly.

I haven’t left the house in that length of time either. I wonder if much has changed?

Anyway back to the flu. I have no idea if it was swine flu or not as I didn’t bother with any doctors or health professionals because I simply cannot afford them. A visit to the G.P. and a prescription would cost me in and around €100 which is half what I have to spend per week. Ironically of course I haven’t spent anything in the past week anyway other than getting someone to buy me the odd packet of cigarettes so I might have as well got myself checked out.

I’ve already mentioned alternating between being roasting hot and freezing cold, so what else can you expect? Absolutely aching bones and joints for a start. My hips were so sore I could barely walk at times. This started to fade after about the fourth day. Another thing is the dizziness. At times while sitting it was like the whole room was spinning around. Close your eyes and it felt like being in a washing machine. A week later and I’m still having dizzy spells and pounding headaches although not as frequently thankfully. I’ve discovered that lying down on my right hand side seems to stop the dizziness for some reason. It doesn’t work if you lie on your left

Oddly one thing that hasn’t been affected is my appetite. On the contrary I have been constantly hungry and no amount of food is satisfying. There must be some truth in that “feed a cold, starve a fever” adage.

The worst thing (apart from the suffering of course) is the boredom. Any of you following me on twitter may have read recently about the television falling off the wall, well the second T.V. is constantly tied up by my mother recording bloody soap operas so that ruled that out. Staring too long at a computer screen resulted in a few dizzy spells so that ruled that out as too it ruled out reading for the same reason. Still I’m on the mend at last so time to get through some of the bills and other letters that have been piling up while I’ve been laid up.

I see from a cursory glance that college are looking for €1,500 that I don’t have for a registration fee so I guess I will be finishing up there next week and my NCT is due as well.  I guess I should have stayed in bed.

Number 1:

And number two:

First up was to try to aggregate all my online presences from Twitter, Flickr Last.FM etc. I was considering using FriendFeed but since I’ve recently been extolling the virtues of Microsoft’s Web App Installer, I noticed a new application was available to install called Amplifeeder.

As I tend to like to have quite a lot of control over my own data I decided on this over the alternatives and I have been very impressed. Unfortunately you need a Windows Server with IIS and Microsoft SQL server so if you have a *nix hosting package you will be out of luck.

So my new aggregate site is now available at http://aggregator.sweetnam.eu if you fancy a look.

The next thing on my todo list for my summer holidays is to erect an antenna on the house for yet some more long range WiFi testing. Only thing is I’m terribly afraid of heights

There should now be a widget somewhere on the right of this post with my most recent ‘tweets’ and should you for some reason feel like following me on twitter you can do so by following “rgsweetnam“

Nevertheless, rather than use it for processing and editing photos, I decided to try to create something new. I was helped greatly by a tutorial I stumbled upon but I’m pretty pleased with the final result.

Now if only I can figure out a use for it! I use the Crystal theme icons over on my main site so I think maybe now I might try to change over to some home grown ones.

PSD available on request.