In fact I have recently given up programming, on a temporary basis, for the greater good. Until a few days ago I had done near no programming since Christmas. But a client asked me to do a reasonably small job for him since I wouldn’t have a chance to do it again for a while… In my absence I had actually completely forgotten how much I enjoyed programming, well now I know again and am dreading giving it up next week.

Alas, the light at the end of the tunnel is near. Two months further to test my tolerance and then an eternity of freedom. There’s so much I want to achieve and after the Leaving Cert I will have my chance to do that and to program to my hearts content.

Almost immediately after I get bored of that I will be submerged into the party atmosphere which is college. At the moment I am planning on going to UCD, with Trinity coming in close second. Anyway what more could I want in life than college? Programming by day, drinking by night. The odd ridiculously crazy fiasco…

But until then I must return to my world of cramming.

Anyway to celebrate the birthday of my Blog I decided to do it up a wee bit. I added a nice wee sidebar to my theme, which I am actually thinking of releasing at some stage in the near future. Also I added a new download manager to http://files.macaoidh.name . It is very useful; it keeps track of how many people are downloading what. Hopefully in the future it will give me an idea of what people that view my blog like and don’t like. I will actually have to go over all my previous posts and make sure that the download links are correct considering there was a big change in the link format.

The only real reason I wrote the thing is because someone has commissioned me to do something similar, starting next week. But the commissioned work will be a bit more complete and stuff. So feel free to try and hack my system. I don’t want to find faults when I’m finished writing it and then have to go back… The manager also serves as a very useful tool for me. I have included an admin area in which I can log in, upload files and choose to store them, make them available for download or even to download + password protect them! This feature will no doubt come in handy, I like to think of it as my personal, non-user-information-gathering, version of Google Docs!

What else has been happening recently… ooh I am in the process of making/releasing an album with The Dominican Affair. It is called Stealing the Ceiling. We have our last mixing session this weekend and hope to have it available on piratebay towards the end of October! It will also be available to purchase or download at http://www.holygrailrecords.com

Just thought I’d mention that 6th year is terribly shit. I can manage to squeze about 2 hours of programing in thrice a week. Also I am doing an Introduction to Computer Science Programing course in UCD over the next few months just to prepare me for college and to make sure that I actually want to study Computer Science! It will be good craic to learn Java at that course; I plan to make a facebook application/game when I have learned Java and base it in Monaghan.

Oghgbjkc damn! I just realised that I still haven’t renewed my macaoidh.name subscription! Better get to it… three days left…..

It was 100% text but didn’t display so well so here’s an image!

Conor In Characters

It’s all about characters today. Who can guess what this means:

01000011-01101111-01101110-01101111-01110010-00100000-
01001101-01100001-01100011-00100000-
01000001-01101111-01101001-01100100-01101000-

Oh and the ‘-’ are spaces

It really has been taking a hell of a lot of time out of my life recently. For the last three weeks I have endured the drill of school, panto, school, panto… The only free time I got (like an hour a day) I spent on my CMS. This years songs weren’t all that great either. Among them are ‘When I Grow Up’, ‘When the Cat Crept In’ and ‘Rehab’ – which is actually my favourite song of them all to play! It goes downhill from there, the rest of them are either pop or country!

The show has been running for the last two weekends. One on Friday night, two on Saturday and one on Sunday. I have to admit despite what I have just said it is a good experience and it has benefited my musical capabilities. Mainly because of the jamming, not the show itself. Every year I say that I will not do it next year… but I always do! So I’m not going to bother saying it this time.

Anyway I have two shows left, one tonight and one tomorrow. Then I am finished and ready to concentrate on Furasta, which will be released in beta stage next weekend. Look forward to it!

1. I was sixteen on 19th September > Virgo (What a sign – a fucking  mermaid!). I am still in fifth year at school which i absolutely detest. In fact the only thing that is keeping me in there is the promise of College. From my perspective that is heaven! Parties all the time – and when there are no parties I will be studying for tests by Programming! What more could you want? I should probably mention that I have been in an all Irish school for my whole life and that I talk Irish at home. Native language gotta be done. Oh and just for the record my name, Conor Mac Aoidh is pronounced “Mac í” or “Mac e”.

2. I play the Drums in two bands > The Pot Smokin’ Pirates and The Dominican Affair. Guess which one I enjoy more? I started the drums when I was 13. Before that I played the bodhran (What a load of shite). I went to drum lessons for about a year then I tought myself. When I finished teaching myself I moved on to teaching other people. At the moment I am practicing for the local Panto. I have done it three times before, it is good crac on the night. Gotta hate the music though! The Pot Smokin’ Pirates where the first band I joined, or should I say formed! They were a school band but soon enough I discovered that school and rock music don’t go so well together! We used to practice in the lead singers garage. One day his older brother asked me to join his band ‘The Kamikaze Potato Men’. Thats when I really got to grips with the drums – I was playing with a band three years older than me! Eventually ‘The Kamikaze Potato Men’ got rid of the lead singer, found a new one and formed The Dominican Affair!

3. I am Oifigeach na hAirgeadais for Ógra Shinn Féin Muineacháin. I don’t want to delve to deeply into this because once you start me I can’t stop! Basically I support and am a member of Sinn Féin. I am in favor of a democratic-socialist, anti-neo-libiralist, egalitarian 32 county united Ireland. Make Partition History! 26 + 6 = 1.

4. Oh what else… I am half Scotish, half Irish and was born in England. I used to collect Warhammer! God I have to include that because it was not a minor thing in my life. For those of you who are familiar with the way it works, I had a 3,000 point Empire Army! That is pretty massive for a ten year old in fairness. The strange thing is that I used them for display. I only ever played a couple of times and found the games to complicated. My main concentration was actually painting the things. I used to paint them like a machine. I also had millions of nobles and all that I couldn’t use because I didn’t have enough points to incorporate them! Come to think of it my first army was High Elves. By the end of my Empire collection I had gotten pretty good at painting the models. Then I started with Bretonians. I had just enough of them to play – two core units and a general. I recently got rid of almost everything in my collection. I kept only a few things. My two best painted pieces – ‘The Green Night’ and a Celtos model which I made a cool base for. Also I have an old White Dwarf from the 80′s signed by the Eavy Metal Team. I might Ebay it! I think that I have enough to make a core unit and general army at the moment!

5. PHP. This tagged thing is directed towards the language users so I had better talk about it. I started learning HTML at the end of 2007 as part of a school transition year course. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. Then by chance I got work expierence with the local web design company, webworks last summer. That is were i learned CSS and began on PHP. Not to soon after that I got hooked on the language and I love it! I am currently writing Furasta CMS, which will be in beta of it’s first “stable” version by the end of next week, hopefully! I am a linux user and have been since November! I started out with Mandriva One 2009 and then recently moved on to Fedora 10. I think that Linux bears a big role in the future of computers in general.

6. I can fight. With a sword I mean! I trained for Medieval Historical Re-enacting for too many years. I did all the shows where you dress up and people stare at you and ask you if they can look at your sword. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be really. It’s like any other physical sport. You do the same thing over and over and over untill you can do it in your sleep! Then finally once you have done it for a few years you dump the wooden swords and go on to metal! I have to say the proper equipment is pretty cool. It’s quite tough to fight with armour actually because it weighs a ton. I learned how to fight with a sword. shield, staff, pike, bow and arrow and claymore. I haven’t really done anything with it in the last year but there is talk of it starting again so you never know!

7. This is tough… Em… I am an atheist. I believe that believing in God is a completely personal thing and that it should have nothing what-so-ever to do with the state and especially the schools! I don’t have a problem with anyone else that believes in god I just hate the fact that so much trouble has been caused in this world because of religion. I was not baptised and brought up to make my own decision – and I have! It annoys me that my school gets massive “grants” from Catholic Associations and therefore it is a Catholic School. Not only that but the fact that I have to take time out of classes to go to mass four times a year. Basically I think that religion in schools should be eradicated, but the religion class should be kept. I think it is a good idea to discuss religions and to make people aware that there are much more religions out there than Catholicism and that they should make their own decision rather than blindly following the crowd.

Now onto the tagging. I am bound by the rules to tag seven other people. The problem is that I only know one PHP developer and that is the person who tagged me! So for now I will leave this part. But I will update it once I meet other enthusiasts, so I’m not breaking the rules!

Rules

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter