Monday, December 15, 2008

Review: The BoardWalk - Cork

I was at a function recently in the BoardWalk in Cork. It's your typical glitzy gaff with dark wood and beautiful people. The toilets look like Darth Vader's bathroom i.e. all the ceramic ware is black. No paper towels. Service was excellent and very patient. The food was fine but not outstanding and a number of people commented on the fact that the steak was only available in "Medium", the spud was quite like Smash and the carrot puree was too pureee'd (I liked it). I had a New York cheesecake for dessert and it was still fairly cold and a few people's dessert was still frozen (and wasn't ice cream). They have cool steak knives - large and business like and not the usual wimpy knives that other places give you. It was interesting to see that Niall Prendergast walked up and down a good few times but studiously ignored the customers. It wouldn't have been out of place for him to come over and make a bit of small-talk seeing as he's part-owner. Would I go back there again ? No. Not my style.

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Viigo - a useful tool.

I got a Blackberry Storm at the beginning of the week. It's a nice device that probably still needs at few tweaks here and there to reach it's full potential (much like the way the iPhone needed a few firmware updates before it got its act together). One of the programs I downloaded was Viigo - this is a nicely designed feed reader which takes advantage of the Storm's beautiful screen. You can add feeds directly or you can just use it to access your Google Reader feeds. It also has stock/financial info and weather feeds. If you're in the market for a free reader and you have a Blackberry or Windows Mobile device then go give Viigo a try. It's nifty and well designed - unlike other feed readers it doesn't use the "old" Blackberry font and unliek AvantGo it uses the whole screen. The tech support is good as well - I'm having issues with updates but I'm putting that down to a combo of beta software and dodgy cellular connectivity.