Posts from — June 2009

Really just using this post to test a nice little plugin courtesy of Claire which gives you the option of displaying your exif data with a rollover.

The pic was taken at the weekend on the Isle of Wight – it’s one of Queen Victoria’s garden sheds, snapped in the grounds of Osborne House.

When I heard the news about the demise of the spiceburger, I knew there was one person I had to speak to. One person who it had the potential to hit harder than anyone else. The Spice Burger Kid.

A friend of mine, back in the day, was the kid on the Spice Burger poster. He was, in very real terms, the Spice Burger Kid. He’s now a respected businessman, so let’s call him Mickey da Spice.

Me: I heard the bad news

MdS: What bad news? What do you know?

Me: The spiceburger. It’s dead, no more spiceburger. The company went bust.

MdS: Aaaa ha ah ha haa. I thought you had something important, you had me scared.

Turns out that Mickey da Spice wasn’t the biggest fan of the product. Always a finicky eater, no spiceburger ever passed his lips,  and he refused to eat them at the poster photo shoot, much to the dismay of: ‘the guy from the company – he was there. It was pretty bad’

He rang me back later in the evening, after I had been to my local chipper for a final dose of spiceburger.

Me: Mr Spice.

MdS: Mr Nolan, what you up to?

Me: Actually, I’m having my dinner, I have two spiceburgers in front of me.

MdS: Seriously?

Me: Yeah.

MdS: Whaddya think? Will you miss them?

Me: They’re fucking vile.

A lens splurge motivated me to finally get around to filing some of my photos. Voila.

It’s not every day that the pub across the road goes up in smoke. The Graduate Pub in Killiney, just around the corner from my house, was the centre of a five-engine fire yesterday, closing down all the roads in and out of the area and drawing a huge crowd of onlookers.

The pub had apparently changed hands in the last few weeks, so the new owner won’t be a happy man. More pics on my Flickr Page, discussion on Boards.ie and some vid below:

Eight-year-olds today have it easy. One narky letter to the Guardian and you get whisked in to be G2 editor for a day. Charlotte Jones (8), emailed the Guardian to give out that her cartoon insert had disappeared, only to be replaced by a football supplement. In return for her letter, she got a day in the chair at G2, helping make decisions on the content of the mag for the next day. In fact, it wasn’t even a letter that she wrote, it was an e-mail. It may, or may not, have been dictated to a grown-up. No stamp bought, no envelope addressed, no journey to the postbox. Charlotte Jones, eight years old, you don’t know how good you have it.

I don’t usually launch attacks at intelligent, confident eight-year-olds, but having put in twice the effort at half the age for zero reward, someone has to speak out. Twenty-five years ago, aged four, I laboriously scrawled out a letter to the BBC expressing disgust at my programmes disappearing from the television. If you read their response, it’s clear that the convenient medium of e-mail was not available to me. On the letterhead of the BBC’s acknowledgement, there’s a telex number and an address for telegraphs. Email just wasn’t an option, so I got out my crayons, rolled up the sleeves, and set to work.Note the care and attention to detail manifested in the coloured crayons. Yes, the handwriting needed work, but note also the clearly stated complaint and the equally clear demand for action, both of which are absent from Charlotte’s admirable but brief two-sentence rant. Note the LOVE at the end. I’m angry, but still capable of separating my love for the good people who produce television from my anger at their one-day walk out. Incredible emotional intelligence from a four-year-old.

I did get a letter in response from the BBC, however. A letter is good. (Better than an email, Charlotte, nyah nyah). It’s below the fold.

But I didn’t get my day in the seat. Taking into consideration that I was half Charlotte’s age, worked twice as hard to make my point, and have been delayed justice for 25 years, I’m probably due about three months’ editorial control at the BBC, and am now clearly mature enough to put it to good use.  I await their response.

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Ever since a family holiday in Crete back in 1988, I’ve been an avid yottie. Not to the point of a crowd of my mates, who have gone on to compete in the Olympics and the like, but to a point where I’ve been involved with the sport in almost every aspect, from teaching it to kids to organising large events. It’s meant I’ve never had to work behind a bar or stack shelves – sailing jobs have occupied my summers.

The last time I taught in Ireland was back in 2001, and the two most enthusiastic kids on the course were also two of the youngest. Matty O’Dowd was a blonde photon, bouncing off the walls with energy that you can’t bottle. Once you got him into a boat, he was a picture of focus, and embarrassed kids several years his senior with skills and speed on the water. Similarly, Jenny Andreasson was so anxious to get out sailing at the age of eight that I thought she might implode on herself with excitement, becoming the first human to spontaneously create nuclear fusion. Both her brothers were on the course, but her desire to be on the water was a vast multiple of their combined enthusiasm.

In both cases, their parents were worried that they were too young to start sailing, but in both cases they had siblings on the premises and so it seemed pointless to hold them back, meaning they started younger than most.

So it’s great to hear that this year, Jenny and Matty make up half of the squad travelling to the ISAF Youth Worlds, where they’ll represent Ireland against the best youth sailors in the world. Matty’s also winning a Laser Europa Cup event in Denmark at the moment, ahead of last year’s Europa Cup series winner, Jon Emmett.

We’ll have a podcast with Matty up on Afloat.ie later on, hopefully. Fingers crossed he can hold Emmett off during the last day’s racing. Although it looks like he’ll be more worried about Danish sailor Pascal Timshell, who has a string of race wins to his credit.

UPDATE: He only bleedin’ won it:
Matty Wins

What with interviewing Torben Grael, and waxing on about Ericsson 3, you may have guessed that I was a guest of the Ericsson Racing Team down in Galway. Somehow I forgot to post about my Sunday Business Post article last Sunday, about the branding side of the VOR, and in particular the gear development angle.

Helly Hansen talked me through their product research programme as main clothing sponsors on board the Ericsson boats. One of the big outcomes has been the Helly Welly and their range of footwear in general. As a sailor, you learn early on not to expect much from footwear. Ireland led the way for a while with Dubarry boots, but their lining always pulled inside-out within a few months, which made them increasingly uncomfortable. The Helly Welly is lighter, more comfortable, and dispenses with the lining. And they’re bringing out one with a gaiter for super-duper offshore sailors.

What’s particularly nice is the way it rolls down to make it an ankle boot when it’s hotter – very clever.

The article on the Ericsson/Helly Hansen development programme is here.

Sunday Business Post, June 7, 2009

Ocean Race works as live lab
by Markham Nolan
When the Volvo Ocean Race fleet left Galway yesterday, it marked the end of a unique 18-month exercise in clothing product research and branding, Two crews headed out of Galway Bay bound for Sweden on board Ericsson-branded boats, clothed head-to-toe in technical sailing gear from Helly Hansen. Much of that gear had evolved considerably since the crews started training 18 months ago in Lanzarote.

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Originally uploaded by K!T

I’ve had a good few people asking me how they can use Twitter to better their business, and, on a greater scale, how to get the most out of social networking. I always start with the same thing: “It’s a conversation”. And like any conversation, and particularly like a tin-can phone, it only works if pulled from both ends. If there’s no-one on the other end, your line goes limp and, well, you’re just shouting into a tin can on a string.

The utility of the likes of Twitter only becomes obvious when a company with a Twitter presence moves from using it as a loudhailer to using it an always-on conference call with your followers. Any business/person/website that merely shouts about itself on Twitter will never reap any rewards from it. To ‘get’ it, you have to use it.

Case in point are the people at www.yourlocal.ie, or @yourlocaldotie as they’re known on Twitter.

I have been trying to list my business on their local listings for a while, but it hasn’t been working for me, and yesterday I posted the below tweet venting my spleen.

I then made a point of searching for yourlocal.ie on Twitter, and when I found their profile, followed them.

Were they a mere ‘collector’ of followers, that would have been that. But within the hour, this popped up:

Someone in there had either been trawling Twitter for mentions of the site, or had taken the time to read back through a few of my tweets.

Either way, they were clearly using Twitter actively, rather than passively. It also proves that Twitter is often the direct line to customer services, trumping phone, email or whatever clunky ‘live chat’ options companies come up with to mesh with their existing webshite.

I had tried to get in contact with yourlocal.ie via various channels to no effect, so the response via Twitter was heartening.

Via: www.sailinganarchy.com

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

Taken from the stern of Ericsson 3

Judging by the green gills around me as I headed out on Ericsson 3 in Galway, this next statement will seem like a gloat no matter what the context. As of the in-port race weekend in Galway, I had sailed on three of the current crop of Volvo 70s: Delta Lloyd, Green Dragon, and Ericsson 3. It’s a pretty privileged position for someone who can offer little to a race team, and it allows me make some interesting comparisons. [Read more →]