Yeah, this sounds like a classic Irish solution. It's hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel here between the shortfall, cost and availability of labour and materials, and so on. To paraphrase what someone once said on this site — housing as an investment or a human right, choose one.
I bought a house in Cork city six years ago, paid more than I hoped because it's quite the fixer upper — we've done almost nothing and "the market" suggests that its value has increased about 50% since. Which is meaningless to me but means a lot to many people I know who can no longer afford a buy a home.
As an Irish person from Cork, I'm a bit embarrassed I've never heard of him until now.
That said we're probably not great at acknowledging historical figures in the field. George Boole's house is three minutes' walk from my house and it's basically derelict (and was literally falling down at one point). It would be a wonderful building for a museum of his life and achievements.
I've sometimes wondered if I am the only person who actually likes the syntax :D There's a reason for it, but additionally, I like the fact that it's explicit — I can look at `some_call.()` and specifically know it's an anonymous function.
Very interesting! Many poor people in Ireland emigrated or were sent to the new world too. The rhotic "r" is prevalent in the Irish language, and it is a distinct characteristic of the sound of Hiberno-English (and other accents with a Celtic influence of course).
There's a cool video on YT called "A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Centuries"[1] — I'm sure it's not meant to be definitive, but it's very interesting to note the presence or absence of the rhotic "r" during different periods.
--
Speaking of the New World — this is something of a side topic, but I think it's fascinating that "caulk" is commonly used in the U.S. and Canada; e.g: bathroom tiling. In my experience at least, you wouldn't really hear someone use the word in that context in the U.K. or Ireland. Most people I've asked associate it exclusively with boats.
I have a speculative pet theory on this — originally, caulk specifically referred to the materials used to fill the gaps between boards in a wooden ship.
Since practically everyone who originally came to the New World came on old wooden ships, it's not hard to imagine that "caulk" — once specific to ship building and maintenance — became well known to emigrant populations and took on a broader meaning over time.
In contrast, it's likely very few people who remained in the Old World at that time were ever in a wooden ship, and "caulk" remained less well known and retained its specific meaning.
Absolutely. Apparently, the amount of trade between Ireland and the UK has collapsed since Brexit, and it's not hard to imagine why — given that both countries have long been close trading partners, and now ordering from the UK is going to come with a raft of customs charges and often VAT etc. Doesn't even matter if it's some second hand item from eBay or whatever.
This pretty much rules out buying anything from the UK for me, something I and many others I know would have done without much thought. It's really frustrating because you'll often find UK vendors are better stocked and have (or at least had) better prices.
I can only imagine this has hit UK based sellers pretty hard. And vice versa — perhaps more so. Brexit is a poke in Ireland's eye too, frankly.
I believe a compounding factor in this problem was a 2015 decision to ban onshore wind farms in England.
Leading to the somewhat perverse situation where it's now necessary to build new or bigger lines from Scotland all the way down to the south of England where most of that generated energy is needed.
The Skelligs are a must see in my opinion but be aware that visits are seasonal and quite restricted. If memory serves they don't start until about May.
Then you roll the dice, if you get a booking (most boats leave from Ballinskelligs, Co. Kerry) be prepared to be thwarted by the weather, sea conditions can make for a hectic swell all the way out there and it's not uncommon for sailings to get cancelled as a result. I think I got out there on my third attempt.
Indeed. About a decade and a half ago I went backpacking, which plucked me out of my western European reality for a few months.
When I returned, I was very shocked every time I walked into any convenience store for a snack to realise that these places pretty much exclusively sold nothing but sugary, nutritionally void garbage wrapped in plastic. If there was a deli, the food products were the lowest imaginable quality.
At that moment it felt like a very large and problematic social addiction. I'd normalised this all my life.
I actually found this a long time ago, totally forgot about it and found it again this week. I've been doing a lot of MC-202 related searching I guess. I tried the demo and it works well! I do like the idea of a more matrix-style editing interface. Nevertheless, I will probably shell out for this.
This is pretty accurate :D The third mode is the gate mode, you can choose a note to have a gate value of 0 to turn the note off, up to any value matching the length of the note.
One reason why I'd like a more expressive editor is to really play with stuff like this. For example could have two patterns, otherwise identical, but one might have a final note length of one less then the other. Then they would phase in and out with each other over a period of time, like some sort of acid house Steve Reich :D
Interestingly, since I originally posted I came across a really interesting mod project for the MC-202 that's currently work in progress. Sounds like an amazing upgrade, will definitely be checking this out!
Interesting article with some very useful information. This reminds me of a perennial, and mostly untouched back-burner project of mine :)
I've owned a Roland MC-202 Microcomposer for many years. It's an early '80s analogue monosynth with a two track sequencer that's a LOT of fun, but is infamously awkward to program. It allows you to dump sequences in an audio-based format to tape and load them back.
Rather than endure the slog of programming sequences directly on the machine, I've often dreamed of a workflow where you could program sequences in a UI, and then encode that information to generate an audio file that you could then load into the MC-202.
For example, it'd be relatively straightforward to create a web-based UI using HTML5 audio to create a simple sequence builder that you could then dump to some text/cell format.
The challenging part would be using this information to encode the final audio file. I've done a little research, and I read the MC-202 uses an encoding format that's similar to, but not the same as, the Kansas City Standard. One day I'll dive into this (hopefully it won't be too complex for me!)
I'm very glad I read this comment! I've recently started learning French and I'd threw together a simple flashcard app to practice what I'd learned.
But without spaced repetition and the ability to categorise it's not that useful, and I quickly realised that I would end up spending more time coding than learning French if I continued!
I've been trying out Mochi for the last few days and so far I'm very impressed. It's easy to use and looks great. I'm tempted by some of the pro features like speech/translation so I think I'll sign up.
One thing I'm curious about — I've read that writing is a particularly effective way to hammer home what you're trying to remember. When learning a language in particular, I feel it's very useful to write out words to practice spelling etc.
I wonder what your take is on this and if this is a feature of Mochi? I know there's a drawing mode for practicing Kanji etc. but that's somewhat different to a "typing mode" for the want of a better word. Or is it better to incorporate writing practice in a different way?
To add something coincidental to this subject that happened yesterday:
I'm in Nottingham in my holidays at the moment — I spoke to an elderly man who was originally from the north of England and he happened to bring up accents.
He was in the army for a few years and he said he had to change his accent because [putting on a strong northern accent] "if oi talk loike this, people thought oi was a blimmin' idiot".
This surely cannot be correct. Even the title of the linked article doesn't use "shranked". What?