The CAO deadline is fast approaching (about 17 hours away!). The CAO is the small office located in the picturesque city of Galway that handles college applications from about 60,000 students a year. Quite a task for the nine full time members of staff! Thankfully I completed mine online about a week a go and after checking over it a few times, I’m now quite happy with it. Unfortunately, the “ah sure, we’ll do it later” stereotypical attitude of the Irish holds true when it comes to life changing decisions as well and as a result, the CAO website crashed last night – causing widespread panic amongst Irelands procrastinating teens!

Speaking of procrastinating, this day week sees my school commence its mock exams. The idea behind them is that we all get used to examination conditions and are handed out exam papers similar to the ones we’ll be getting come June. The beauty of it all is that we’re being examined on all aspects of all our courses – even the areas that we haven’t covered yet! This means that when we get our corrected tests back, the results should be less than awe-inspiring – inspiring to put in tonnes more study and devoting the next few months of your life to the way of the hermit!

Of course some people won’t be getting bad results in their mocks. These are those who have had the cop on to study over the past year. Am I one of those people? Far from it I’m afraid! Sure the Leaving is ages away… I have plenty of time to study for it! Funny that, I could have swore I said that in September about the mocks…..

Many schools, colleges and workplaces have taken it upon themselves to block access to social networking sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace, not to mention thousands of other “questionable” sites that they don’t want you looking at. Fortunately, there is a way around this and that is to use a proxy. To quickly explain how a proxy works, you type what website you want to look at and it downloads it to its server and then what it downloads is displayed on your screen, tricking any content filtering software into thinking that you’re looking at a non-blocked website! I have included a small utility which refers to an extensive list of these proxies when browsing. Enjoy!

Our plants seem to think that it’s Spring, so I thought I’d get in on the act and partake in some Spring Cleaning as of late. Of course this is my website I’m refering to as the traditional “dusters at the ready” version of Spring Cleaning is far beyond my capabilities!

I have updated my version of Wordpress to the latest release – 2.1. With that I hope to have eliminated most of the low-cost prescription drugs and insurance messages which have been clogging my database. I also upgraded to a nightly release of the K2 theme that I’ve been using for the better part of 6 months now. I have reverted back to my old theme which seemed to be causing some odd display bugs in IE6, but now that IE7 is upon us the problem seems to have been solved!

Most other changes are behind closed doors and their only purpose in life is to make my job of posting all sorts of crap that little bit easier – No more accidently losing drafts! Although for centuries, man has been attracted to shortcuts, the easy way of doing things you might say. Now that posting to my blog on the laptop won’t be as cautious and headwrecking an experience that it used to be, it should result in me being posting more… despite my Leaving Cert fast approaching!

A few months a go, I published a quick how-to guide about downloading music for free from the RadioBlogClub website. After trying many sites and various methods of downloading songs, I decided on RadioBlogClub because of its ease of use and more importantly its vast selection of songs which far surpassed the offering of any other sites that I came across. If you are after more popular songs, you’ll probably have an easier time by going to BlogDigger.com who have a powerful media search tool which allows you to uncover songs embedded in blog posts from around the world! But as I said, it’s only really useful for very popular songs.

Times were good for music downloaders for a couple of months until RadioBlogClub caught on to this exploitation and, as already mentioned, started encrypting the URLs to their songs. For months I haven’t been near the internet, so haven’t had an opportunity to tackle this but now that I’ve managed to find a spare 10 minutes, why don’t you join me as I once again explain How To Download Almost Any Song off The Internet For Free!

1. Visit The Site

CLICK HERE (opens in a new window)

2. Search

In the search box type the name of the band (or song) that you are looking for. In this case I’m searching for “Snow Patrol”, a band that I recommend each and every one of you check out .

3. Select the Song You Want

You are now presented with a list of songs available for that band. When you see the song that you like, click its blue play button to the left of it.

Look towards the right column and you’ll notice that something like the above has appeared.

4. Find The Song Code

In the grey box, there’s lots of “HTML” code. For those who are familiar with this guides previous outing, you’ll know that this is the part where you’re meant to select a particular bit of code. So select, like I have done in the picture, the bottom lines of the code beginning with “FlashVars”. Make sure that you select EVERYTHING after this and then continue.

5. Paste The Code Into AdamsRants Code Stripper

Check out My Code Stripper which will decrypt the music code. (opens in a new window)

Paste the code into the First box. Now you must butcher the code! Erase everything BEFORE the “http” and AFTER the “.rbs” and you’ll end up with something like this:
.
Now press the “DECRYPT” button which were convert the encrypted code into easily understood code like this:

6. Download

Now you can copy and paste the code into your address bar. Once you have done this, press enter and you will be asked to save it! You are almost there….

6. BUT WAIT!

After downloading the song, you may notice that Windows doesn’t know what to open it in, this is because the file ends in “.rbs” which isn’t recognised by Windows. However, this is only a basic ploy to stop people downloading the song because it’s actually a “.mp3″ which has been renamed to fool people! What you need to do is raname the file! Note: It’s been reported that unix based operating systems will automagically realise that it’s an mp3.

A “.rbs” file.

Right click the file and select “Rename”.

Change the file extension to “.mp3″.

VOILA!

Double click the file and it will now open in your preferred Media Player. It might seem a bit daunting to have to do this for every song, but you’ll soon get the hang of it!

A lot of people previously commented that this is a very longwinded system, but I’d have to disagree. After the first few songs, you’ll be able to download songs in no time at all once you get used to it which makes it perfect for situations where you’re asked to listen to a certain song by a friend but don’t fancy having to wade through the unreliable LimeWire or download the full album from BitTorrent.

Some people also commented on the sound quality which usually weighs in at 92kbps. The good news is that this means it takes seconds to download. The bad news is that audiophiles will be disappointed. This isn’t Dolby Surround Enhanced Audio that we’re downloading here. It’s slightly less than CD quality which, in my opinion, is perfect for phones or small MP3 Players with little space!

In the past, people tried to make some further addons to this hack such as an automated downloader. Once again people are welcome to make an any further additions to this exploit, but remember, if you’re leaving a comment, please leave some form of contact!

If you like what I’ve done, as a token of your appreciation, I’d be very grateful if you could find it within your hearts to feed me for a day by donating a euro or two

Recently (okay, ages ago!) I posted about how I thought that The OC Season Four wasn’t particularly up to scratch when put alongside it’s previous outings. However, the new season soon grew on me and I was actually pleased with how the show was being directed. So it came as a surprise to learn that FOX were cancelling the show with its last episode being aired in the US on January 22nd.

To the best of my knowledge, no European broadcaster, such as Sky, has snapped up the rights to season four. E4 have been working their way through Season 3 for the past few months now but I’d imagine that they’d be very cautious about acquiring the rights to a show that not only has been experiencing its lowest ever ratings but has also been cancelled outright by its network! Therefore I’d be surprised if English fans of The OC ever get to see season four at all!

The writers of the show had an uphill battle when setting out to write season four. They were down their most popular character, a character that they had tried so hard to demonise throughout season three which undoubtedly led to a slice of the fan base losing interest. With all of the main characters graduating from high school, they had to try and find other characters to carry and propel the show into the future. It wasn’t just the characters that were graduating though, its viewers were also coming of age and began to tune into other shows such as Greys Anatomy and CSI – shows which were directly competing with The OC! This is where they stumbled! Season 4 made a very sluggish, uncertain and at times haphazard start. We were presented with drastic changes in vital characters that turned people off the show. It just didn’t seem solid. You just couldn’t even take a guess about where the show was going to go!

After the first three or four episodes, the show began to find itself on more certain footing. People had some idea about what was happening but it was already too late! The show had plummeted in the cut-throat ratings war that is American Television. People had already left the show in their droves and from there-on-in it was just a matter of retaining its loyal audience. Fox invariably decided that that audience was far too small an amount to be practical.

In a press release, Josh Schwartz noted that “The O.C. Season Four finale will also be the series finale. This feels like the best time to bring the show to its close. Thanks to the hard work of our cast, crew and writers, we have enjoyed our best season yet, and what better time to go out than creatively on top. It has been an amazing experience and a great run. For a certain audience, at a certain time, The O.C. has meant something. For that we are grateful.”

For me, The OC is drawing to a close at an apt time with my 18th birthday being only a few months away! I mean can you imagine me being 18 and STILL watching The OC. It’s bad enough that I watched it already! And there, in one paragraph, is a typical example of the battle that Josh and his partners were facing – a battle against age, which any “seasoned” adult will tell you is futile!