I took a break from the writing and dusted off my camera. These guys appeared after all the rain we had over the weekend.
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Mu Shrooms
Category: Ireland
It’s been about a month and a half since I set up my Portfolio site and I’ve been watching my stats with a curious eye ever since. So far I’m realising that I have no clue about how to get high rankings in Google, I know nothing about meta tags or keyword density or optimisation, although I see them mentioned everywhere. If you type my name into google I think my portfolio site doesn’t appear until half way down page 3 of the results and that’s not even a link to the actual site, it’s just my CV document. As for other terms like Irish Animation or Freelance Animator or anything else that might bring a possible client my way, well I don’t think I even make the charts. So basically, until I can wrap my head around all that technical stuff and get some idea of what I need to do to get my site up there nobody’s going to find it right?
Well, actually no. Thanks to this blog, I’m getting some traffic. Even with my rubbish marketing of my portfolio site it’s still getting quite a few hits every day and if I look again at the google search, gingerpixel.com is the number one result for anyone searching for me. A large portion of my traffic comes from people looking for animated related searches even though I don’t blog about animation too much. So, I’m thinking that maybe that ought to change. Now I’m not saying I’m never going to blog about anything else ever again…I’ll still be taking photographs and moaning about Eircom and boring you with stories about Eve…but expect to see a little bit more about the animation stuff. Just a little heads up.
Now, on a whim, I decided to go searching for other Irish animators who are blogging. I expected to find loads because there are just so many Irish animators all over the place. You’d be hard pressed to find an animation or games studio anywhere in the world that didn’t employ at least one Irish person. Thanks to wonderful colleges like Ballyfermot and Dun Laoghaire Irish animators have a pretty good reputation. So, I was a little disappointed when I didn’t find as many as I’d thought I would. Anyway, I’ve put together a little list of those I did find and if anyone can point me to any that I’ve missed please let me know because I’d love to add them.
Donnachada Daly
This one was an easy find since he’s been on my Blogroll for a good while now. He’s an animator at Dreamworks and has worked on Shrek, Madagascar, Over the Hedge and Flushed Away. I visit his blog pretty much daily to see his latest drawings of those wonderful curvy ladies.
Conánn Fitzpatrick
Although he’s not in animation anymore he did work for Sullivan Bluth back in the day. He has some amazing paintings on his site of Irish seascapes. As well as some other work that show his animation roots.
Aiden McAteer
Aiden is another animator who’s left Ireland for pastures greener this time in London. He did work on one of my favourite cartoons, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends while he was living here though. His blog hasn’t been updated in awhile which is a pity since I was really enjoying his sketches.
Dermot O’Connor
Dermot hails from Arklow and was another Bluth animator who left to find his animation fortune in the States. He’s a Flash animator nowadays and has some really clever games on his site. I remember playing his Gulf War game a few years back but I had no idea it was created by an Irish guy.
Garrett O’Donoghue
A fellow ex-Ballyfermot student Garrett’s got some wonderful doodles on his blog, he’s more into the layout/storyboarding side of things but it’s still the animation business. He was down in Limerick until recently and is now over in New York. It’s sad but so many of the animators I managed to locate aren’t in Ireland anymore.
Fran Power
Well, strictly speaking Fran has a blog but so far he hasn’t gotten past the first post which is a pity because I love the animation I’ve seen on the main site in particular Santa’s Kingdom (must be the time of year).
And that’s all I could find. Great blogs but just nowhere near as many as I’d hoped and not a single female among them. In fact I couldn’t find any indication that any of the 7 girls I graduated with are still in the animation business. Mind you, it’s harder to find girls because we have a bad habit of changing our names.
There were a few more animators who had News pages that they update occasionally but I didn’t think they were strictly blogs so I haven’t included them. One blog I follow isn’t by an Irish animator but I want to mention it because it’s about the making of the Cartoon Saloon‘s first feature animated film, Brendan and the Secret of Kells, which is happening down in Kilkenny. I drool over the character designs on a regular basis and this is a film I can’t wait to see when it comes out: The Blog of Kells
As for the Irish Animators I’d love to see with a blog, (or even a webpage in the case of the first three)…on my wishlist would be:
Jason Ryan
Eamonn Butler
Richard Baneham
Niall O’Loughlin
***
Update: Ask And You Shall Receive
I got an email from Niall O’Louglin this morning and it seems he has just started blogging! I definitely need to start wishing for more stuff. So I can now add Niall to my list:
Niall O’Loughlin
You may already know of Niall through his hilarious and uncanny caricatures of celebrities. He’s been on the Late Late Show and his work appears regularly in magazines and newspapers. But he’s also been an animator since he worked with Sullivan Bluth back in the late 80’s. So go check out his new blog and leave him a comment. I’m really looking forward to seeing what he posts.
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Sunset Over Greystones
The view from my backgarden last night.
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There’s A New Beach In My Life
Just a few shots from yesterday when Eve and I met up with my sister and her little boy to go to the Greystones Arts Festival. The place was packed and the weather was hot so we took a break from the jugglers and acrobats to go take a walk on Greystones beach.
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How Eircom Lost A Customer
**image borrowed from www.eircomtribunal.com**
Ah, sure it’s no news to anyone in Ireland that Eircom, our state phone company, are a right shower of crooks and scoundrels. Dealing with them is like taking a time machine back to the days when Haughey was Taoiseach and monopolies ruled the roost. I can’t understand why we always seem to take it though. I mean we know they are useless but we just shrug our shoulders and say “ah, that’s Eircom for you.” I suppose that’s the frustration of a monopoly. There’s nothing we can do.
As of today, we have been in our new house in Greystones for one month and one week. Before we moved I checked with Eircom to make sure that our phone was connected and suitable for broadband and they assured us it was and gave us our new number. The day we moved in we plugged in our phone and the line was dead so we rang Eircom. Here is a run down of what has happened since. I plan to update this until we finally have a connection just as an outlet for my frustration:
June 7: Line is dead so we ring Eircom. We are told that there has been an EE failure on our line which means that they cannot reconnect it electronically so a technician will have to come out. They cannot give us a date for when this might happen but the technician will be in touch to arrange an appointment.
There was a letter waiting for us from Eircom when we moved in with forms to fill out for Direct Debit billing. We fill these out and get them sent off to Eircom.
June 10: We receive a bill from Eircom charging us €28:16 for our line rental for June…on a line that doesn’t exist. There is also a charge for reconnection of €20.65 which is waived because of some kind of promotion. I can only surmise from this that if the promotion wasn’t running they would have charged us for a reconnection that never happened.
As we meet our new neighbours and get talking to them, we discover that one family waited 4 months and another waited 6. This is not good as I conduct all my business over broadband and the only broadband that is available in Greystones requires a phone connection.
We have an overlap in rent with our old house so I can continue to work there for the time being. I commute to and from Greystones for the next month in the hope that the line will be reconnected in time.
June 25: We call Eircom once more as the deadline to hand over our old keys approaches. While speaking to them they notice that the details they have for us are incorrect. Somehow they have our old details down on our files. Guess what…that means start over. AAAAH!
July 1st: Hand over of keys so I no longer have access to broadband. I move all my computer equipment to my parents’ house in Killiney so I can use their broadband. I am in the middle of a crazy deadline so I can’t stop working until this is sorted out. Being freelance, if I don’t work I don’t get paid.
July 6th: Today I ring Eircom once more to try and get some kind of answer to when they might get around to connecting to us. I’m told, in a tone of voice that suggests this is a well-used answer, that there is a minimum of 28 days waiting list for a technician to call out. When I ask what the maximum is they tell me they can give me no further information and that everyone waiting is in the same boat. When I try to explain about needing the broadband for work he repeats the mantra…”I’m sorry, but there is a minimum 28 days waiting list…blah blah blah.” He can’t even tell me when this mythical 28 days started from.
**Update. July 7th: I have discovered that there is one company that will provide wireless broadband (no need for a phone line) in my area. On paper the deal even looks better than what I had before…2mb upload and download, 1:24 contention ratio, no limit on downloads, no installation fee. Wow, sounds great right? Yeah, only problem is that it’s with Irish Broadband…one of the most complained about Internet providers in Ireland. A quick search on www.boards.ie returns pages and pages of unhappy customers. There are a few happy ones…but mostly it’s bad. I won’t know which camp I’ll fall into until it’s installed…so, do I take the chance or do I sit it out and wait for Eircom? Rock< --Me-->Hardplace
**Update. July 10th: Well to be honest, we’ve heard nothing more from Eircom; still no word from a technician, still no idea when we’ll be connected. We did however make an appointment with Irish Broadband and they will be coming over tomorrow to hook us up, so I guess we’ll see what their service is like. If it’s fast and reliable I think we’ll be looking at ditching the landline altogether and using VOIP instead. If it’s as bad as some out there on the boards are saying…we’ll drop them and be back to waiting for Eircom.
**Update. July 14th: Irish Broadband came and hooked us up with no problems three days ago. I moved my computer out of my parent’s house and started working from home again on Wednesday. Straight away the connection is faster than we had before using U.tv internet. The other thing we were worried about since it was wireless and dependent on line of sight to a radio mast, was lag but this hasn’t been a problem either. My online gaming habit is in no danger 🙂
So, yesterday, when we received yet another bill from Eircom charging us another month’s line rental for a line we cannot use, we had the pleasure of ringing them and telling them we would no longer be needing their services. We told them that Irish Broadband took three days to come and connect us whereas we’d been waiting over a month for Eircom to even give us a callback. So from here on out it’ll be Skype and mobiles for us and no more Eircom. I need to retitle this thread to “How Eircom Lost A Customer.”