The artwork in this music video, not to mention the remix of the amazing song Phoenix – Rome is by far one of the best I’ve seen in some time.

Enjoy

Sometimes we get far to bogged down in our frantic lives. We’re running around from here to there and we’re missing so much in between.

Take one day perhaps next week, where you half your speed. If things get frantic, ignore them, take 5 minutes and just breathe. It’ll be fine. Mindfulness is the art of being happy with what you have in your current moment.

When your peeling carrots you should try to be completely content in that moment rather than letting your mind drift off to what TV you are going to watch that night. This is mindfulness.

I got sent this video today which instantly made the world motionless for me for all of 5 minutes.

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

I think this is a brilliant idea. It’s only functioning in a couple of cities over in the US at the moment but this would work really well in Ireland. You can read more on it here.

I was given this device as a present. I’ve fallen completely in love with it. It measures how much energy you are consuming on a cents per hour basis.

There’s not much to setting it up, you basically have two devices. One sits out where your main feed comes into your house. You clamp it around the main live feed. This then transmits wirelessly to a device that gives you real time readings.

It is a novelty, but it does give you some perspective. For instance, turning on a light costs me 3 cents per hour!

Electricity companies tend to hide their cost per kWh. Which is what the device uses to calculate your consumption. Their websites seem to hide it deep down.

Then I found this wonderful little chart. Which is available to see over at Money Guide Ireland.

This has been one of those extremely annoying problems for me. Multiple nodes that I wanted to upgrade from r1soft’s CDP agent 2.0 to 3.0.

However when I ran the specified command to remove the old CDP agent I got the following:

r1soft-uninstall-buagent -R
This uninstaller will remove the following..

File /etc/init.d/buagent
File /usr/bin/buagent
File /var/lock/buagent.lock
File /var/run/buagent.pid
File /usr/bin/r1key
File /usr/bin/r1soft-cki
File /usr/bin/r1soft-report.sh
File /usr/bin/r1soft-uninstall-buagent
File /usr/share/man/man3/buagent.3.gz
File /usr/share/man/man3/r1key.3.gz
File /usr/share/man/man3/r1soft-uninstall-buagent.3.gz
Directory /etc/buagent
Directory /usr/lib/buagent
Directory /lib/modules/buagent
Directory /var/cache/buagent
Directory /var/db/buagent
User buagent
Group buagent

Would you like to continue? (yes/no):yes
stopping buagent.
removing buagent from services.
removing File /etc/init.d/buagent
removing File /usr/bin/buagent
removing File /var/lock/buagent.lock
removing File /var/run/buagent.pid
removing File /usr/bin/r1key
removing File /usr/bin/r1soft-cki
removing File /usr/bin/r1soft-report.sh
removing File /usr/bin/r1soft-uninstall-buagent
removing File /usr/share/man/man3/buagent.3.gz
removing File /usr/share/man/man3/r1key.3.gz
removing File /usr/share/man/man3/r1soft-uninstall-buagent.3.gz
removing Directory /etc/buagent
removing Directory /usr/lib/buagent
removing Directory /lib/modules/buagent
removing Directory /var/cache/buagent
removing Directory /var/db/buagent
removing buagent user…
unloading backupdriver kernel module…
ERROR: Module backupdriver is in use
done.

Rather annoying. The first port of call would be of course to remove the module manually:

# rmmod backupdriver
ERROR: Module backupdriver is in use

Rather bloody annoying. It’s not in use! Lets see what lsmod has to say for itself:

# lsmod | grep backupdriver
backupdriver          305848  1

Pretty useless.

The Solution

For starters, this issue only seemed to be happening on agent version (and previous):

buagent (Righteous Backup Linux Agent) 1.60.0 build 5611

1. Upgrade the agent to the latest version of the 2.0 agent. All found at download.r1soft.com
2. Then run the r1soft-uninstall-buagent command
3. It should successfully un-install

Challenge is the key to getting better at something. Challenge is limited. It’s limited by the amount of people you have possible contact to. Your neighborhood, your city, your country.

At least, it use to be.

Now with the aid of the Internet, challenge is no longer limited. It’s open and free for anyone to communicate and challenge others online. Challenge is good.

These guys were all found on youtube, challenging each other with dance moves. Now look what they have become:

I’ve had acne since I was a teenager. It’s always been a complete pain. It sits in the back of your mind and just when you think it’s all over and done with, up pops another spot.

I’ve a bad form of acne too, it’s cystic acne. This pretty much means, they are big puppies. Not the regular pimples that every teenager or adolescent would get.

It’s only in the last year that I’ve really gotten to the stage of needing to do something about it. I thought I would grow out of it, I didn’t, lets fix it.

I’ve been to my GP a couple of times. They prescribed the regular anti-inflamotories which basically kill bacteria within the cystic acne. When you think about it, this was never going to work. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Basically, acne comes from too much testosterone. Your body needs to have a happy equilibrium. Mine currently does not. I have too much testosterone.

This testosterone then increases the oil excreted by my skin. This oil is basically my body’s way of keeping itself moist and moisturizing itself. Ensuring it’s elasticity is good and high for my 25 year old body.

Too much testosterone = too much oil. The oil gets caught within your pores which the bacteria sees as a threat and inflames. In a way my body is thick and things it’s attacking itself. This makes me think of my dog chasing her tail, but anyway.. moving on.

You can stop oil! How ? A drug called acutane. This is like vitamin A. It basically stops your skin from producing the oil. No oil, no clogging of pores, no acne. The problem is, what happens when I’m 40 and I’ve had no oil in my skin the last 15 years ? I’ll look like a fucking 70 year old.

Thus I decided to give the dermatologist a miss and try some natural methods.

Logically, its a hormone imbalance. This can be caused by your diet.

Take cows for instance, cows are not meant to produce milk 10 months of the year. Some friendly farmers give the cows more hormones, causing them to lactate more, increasing the milking season. Fat lot of good organic milk would do you here.

Cows milk is consumed by myself ALOT. The amount of tea a day would equal at least 300ml of milk consumed. The cheese in my sandwiches etc etc.

Instead of going to the doctor, I’m going to drastically cut down my dairy intake and monitor it over the next 2/3 weeks. Expect a blog post update then!

This is where I work in Dublin. I work here about 70% of the time and the other 30% is mainly spent at Blacknight Head Quaters in Carlow, Ireland.

1. Things

This is my To-Do list organizer. It’s become the pillar of my organized life. I have tried to use others like Omni-Focus and the Ta-Da list from the guys at 37 signals. There is something about Things, the clean UI, the polish and all of the other idiocentracies that the guys over at CulturedCode have pumped into this app that makes it my number one. It’s opened, on my mac, all day, everyday.

2. Tweetie

I enjoy my twitter stream and keeping up to date with current topics that my friends and others are talking about. Tweetie doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t take over my entire screen and automatically refreshing the stream so often that if I choose to not look at my stream for a couple of hours, its baffling me when I get back to reading it. I can leave Tweetie alone for hours and when I come back, it’s ready to take me from where I left off.

3. Newsfire

I love my RSS feeds. I have plenty of people and companies that I love to continually read up about. Their advancements or whats new in the world. Google reader is the choice of many. I used Google Reader and for some unknown reason I just cannot leave Newsfire. It’s the definition of the perfect RSS reader for me. If it’s not broken, why fix it ?

4. Expresso

I used Microsoft Visual Studio for years. Which is why when I see a nice IDE such as Expresso, I fall in love with it and my Mac again. You hit save, it uploads it. I know lots of apps do this, but I love it.

You can setup your development and live envoirments, ack… You know what – It does everything a normal IDE will do – except the Mac way.

5. Skitch

We all do it. We all have something on our screens that we easily want to share with someone. Skitch is what we all need. You open Skitch and you hit the screenshot combo (except with 4 instead of 5), you snap it and it uploads it and gives you a link to share. Perfect.