Last week a friend and I took ourselves off down to the Black Valley in Co. Kerry. The Black Valley has the distinction of being the last part of Ireland to be connected to the national electricity grid. Indeed it is still something of a black spot for telecommunications. As recently as last week a farmer living there was quoted €29,000 to have a fixed telephone line installed.

Having spent the night camped near a river we decided to set off and drive the Ring of Kerry. Some spectacular scenery around there. I have tons of photos which I have to sort through but for the moment here are some photos of the Black Valley:

And finally here is a panoramic photo: Click for full size

• Can now send and receive MMS messages
• Can now forward SMS and MMS messages!
• Spotlight search feature
• Landscape typing for Apple Apps
• Can now stream video and audio

So is it now worth your while buying one? Well, no it’s not. Battery life will still be atrocious and the damned thing is only now getting features that it should have had before it was made available.

There is a full list of updates over here on Wikipedia. Most of which should never have been considered updates to begin with.

At the moment it isn’t yet available for download and if you have an iPod touch you will be screwed for $9.95 as you will have to actually buy the update. So that will probably be something like €1000 for us in the Eurozone or 20p for anyone in the U.K. Given Apple’s exceptionally discriminatory pricing.

Lots happened that I can remember and some parts are coming back slowly as the pain in my head subsides. I did manage to meet everyone on my like to meet list though and of course I met lots more people who I’m looking forward to meeting again. Despite having a camera with me for most of the night I didn’t take many pictures.

There were a couple of funny incidents that happened over the night. I’m going to have to write about them tomorrow I think because I can just about barely focus on my screen. Bock will probably write about one of them. It was something that could probably only happen here in Ireland!

Anyway here are some (bad!) photos to look at. I’m heading back to bed!

Have a look at this:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/bushfires_in_victoria_australi.html

They have an RSS feed for their Big Picture series and it is well worth subscribing to.

Time and time again the photos they pick are utterly incredible. Not least of all because they are of a decent resolution and of amazing quality but they are extremely thought provoking. They seem to provide the missing link for where the printed media meets the internet. (Despite that fact that  the images are often from the same sources) However their Big Picture series always takes the form of a photo essay, which I reckon is the feature’s strongest point: Pictures can speak more than words.

The series linked to above are of the recent bush fires in Australia and pictures really do speak more than words in this case. And certainly speak more than any 226px × 180px image that doesn’t link to a more detailed picture can. Or for that matter a 102px × 130px picture that links to nothing on a site that is optimised for a resolution of 640 x 480 ever can.