When it's that time of year again...

Every year, without fail, the hits on the following two pages go through the roof (relatively speaking) around February and March. I can't imagine why :-) One of these days I'll put a graph here;

Irish Phrases that drive me NUTS!

Years ago (1995!) I threw together a page with a recipe for Irish Stew, based on a usenet post from Fiona Hyland. It's still there, complete with links to Fiona's much more extensive set of pages with Irish recipes. Yum!

Irish and Celtic Passages

In my copious (HAH!) spare time, I maintain a web page called Irish and Celtic Thingies (and no, I don't remember why I called it that; must have been low on inspiration that day). This was originally on my local test server at NRAO, then for 5 years it was hosted on the Ceolas web site run by Gerard Manning, with a mirror on Cornerstone Networks in Charlottesville; thanks to Chris Morris for making this available. Now it's right here on goof.com along with my home page, and lots of good stuff about the Pentium Compiler Group, and more. Thanks, Matt!

Also I'm caretaker for the Thistle and Shamrock NPR Stations list. This is a fairly comprehensive list of all National Public Radio Stations that carry this program of Irish, Scottish and other Celtic music hosted by Fiona Ritchie. I recently revised it to show stations state by state.

Here's a Travelogue of my vacation (holidays, holliers) in Ireland in 1996. Now has days 1-4. I've not finished the work on day 4 yet. It may get done before I visit there again...but don't count on it!

Radio Teilifís Éireann (RTE, the Irish National Radio and Television Station) is now online. They were one of the first to produce RealAudio files generated daily on an automatic basis, and one of the first to have live feeds (for both Radio 1 and 2FM). However, they did have some prodding :-) in the form of an interesting experiment in the early days of the web. That experiment shut down long ago, but it sure was fun while it lasted. It's interesting in its later days that the open source part of the experiment proved more reliable than the proprietary part.
RTE News is one of the best sources of news (see next item for another) if you really want to know what's going on in Ireland. They also have Aertel Teletext, a service updated every half an hour or so, provides very current news from Ireland in a fairly low-bandwidth form. Originally, each page was about 2k and downloaded very fast even with old modems or a noisy phone line, but as with most of the web, bloat has taken over and they're up to more than 10k per page. It looks better, but can take time to download especially when the transatlantic link is saturated :-(. IMHO they should go back to lean and mean...

The Irish Times (part of Ireland.COM). Real news about Ireland from the source. See RTE above too.

I'd be lax if I didn't mention Liam Ferrie's Irish Emigrant. Started as an informal e-mail newsletter over a decade ago by a volunteer in what was then the DEC plant in Galway, and when I discovered it in the early 1990's it was like a lifeline; finally, good honest, solid, accurate news on a weekly basis from Ireland!!! (Remember, the web back then was a few machines at CERN and text-only browsers; we're talking pre-netscape, pre-mosaic here). Anyway, Liam's efforts have grown into a truly wonderful resource.

The Republic of Ireland Constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann).