Damien Mulley

In order to cut down on costs, the HSE are implementing the following in Cork University Hospital, according to a source in there:

• Contract cleaners are having their hours cut to save money. Cos we need less clean hospitals with MRSA rampant.
• Staff are going to be charged for parking now, when before it was free.
• The hiring freeze is til December or January, not September as has been stated.
• They are thinking of going back to a monthly pay system instead of a twoweekly system as they can let three people go then.

Seán is right. The eircom hotspot logo is almost the same as the RSS logo.

Conor Pope tells you how to tune in the free rugby matches on Le Sky box.

The Album Archive has moved to wordpress. Change your blog rolls. Anyone know about putting redirects on blogger for it?

Irish Uber design guru and Irish SEO expert call bullshit on another SEO “expert” coming along. Lions playing with their meal.

I agree with Russell here. I can’t read any blogs or websites with white writing on a black background. It hurts my eyes and brain quite quickly so the bookmarklet he links to is perfect.

Oh god I just adore these trainers.

23 and me. Have some of your DNA analysed and see your genetic traits. Sounds though like they’ll add it to a big DB.

Via Ben Hammersley: This is a tackle, please sing “Bomb Track” when watching this –

This is for all those (like me) who have terrible luck trying to get Arcade Fire tickets:

To the Google employee who is slagging me and my blog off in private emails and is continuing to harass me after I asked you NOT to contact me anymore, below is space for your right of reply but just a few notes for you and your colleagues:

Attention all Google employees who are apparently pissed off that I slagged off their company on the Marian Finnucane show last weekend. I will not indulge or entertain your demands for me to justify what I said in private when you and your company don’t have the balls to come on the radio and answer questions. You’ll happily go on to talk marketing bullshit but it seems when it comes to anything challenging, you need to seriously control the debate or you won’t go on.

If you can’t challenge me in public because of your company’s policy on being more secretive than the NSA then don’t skulk around in the shadows putting questions to me and calling my answer lame if I tell you to kindly piss off. You signed up for the company and their rules, live with it.

The same of course goes for Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and everyone else I have a dig off. (There are loads). Of course when I’ve taken shots at companies before I’ve actually had people contact me and explain their side and they’ve done it officially and without the confrontational attitude.

If Google of course would like to have a public debate about their ability to totally fuck over your life if they abuse their technology, then let me know. I think it would be good for the tinfoil hat wearers like myself, the quite balanced people in DRI and the Google lfanboys to get all of this out in the open.

In a conversation on Facebook yesterday someone was asking me why I blog so much and so often. I answered them in a stream of consciousness mini-rant which is below. I currently have 3-4 blogs with this one, the Blog Awards one, IWillNotHold.com and another one I mess on. I’ll be launching another two in the next two weeks and I think another shortly after. One of them will be designed to at least pay for itself. Now, your turn, if you are a blogger, why do you blog?

Mine:

Why the obsessive blogging and writing? I think too much, I don’t unwind, I go to bed exhausted after putting a long day routing around information, consuming it, playing with it and exporting it back to a blog or draft post. When I wake in the morning it’s to my brain playing some song over and over and I have about 10 ideas and thoughts and new events I want to organise. Once I’m awake and the song is playing I cannot get back to sleep again. My brain is a cruel mistress I think, the more I do, the more I think I should do.

I also find that blogging allows me to pour out these various thoughts in my head and structure them so they make more sense to me as I fix them to make sense for others and I also find that as I write things down, I make new discoveries about what I’m writing about. I find new connections to disparate pieces of information I’ve read about as I start writing stuff down. It kind of keeps the excitement going, as the more you write, the more you discover.

Of course the blog posts too are a numbers thing. I know if I don’t do two blog posts a day I’ll get less visits and my ego likes the attention. I do find it very good training and it keeps me regimented a bit too. The fluffy links make me think in a kind of popculture mentality where like a magpie I pick up shiny things.

As I surf the net I’m categorising everything and checking to see have others mentioned it. The afternoon posts I try to make about a specific topic, general tech and business. These have a little more thought to them and I have some of these pieces in draft for months. I recently cleaned my drafts section on my blog as I think I had about 60 of them made of all sorts of crap. I write maybe a little too much. So yeah, that’s me and blogging.

Happy Birthday Elana!

Keith is on the IIA board. Congrats!

Fuck off EU. EU wants to block certain web searches.

Fuck off Poland. Get arrested for Google bombing.

Interesting new image search engine called Behold.

I love clever ideas like this. Turn a used coke can into a safe syringe disposal unit.

And another clever idea. An ice cream vending machine that gives you more goodness if it detects stress.

Fab photo from Pygment.

Fab photo from Caitriona.

Via You Aint’ no Picasso: Iron Man trailer. Uses the songs “Iron Man” and “Hey man, nice shot.” Lame. However the trailer other than that is fucking cool:

Weird Japanese Fanta ads. I like the DJ one:

Swearing Lady is signing off. Go and protest and stuff.Pretend you’re french so you can burn cars out and the like.

Straight from the PR company of the Irish Domain Registry:

From Wednesday, 31st October, 2007, if you are John P. Smith you can get one of the following domains on a first come, first serve basis:

An applicant named ‘John Paul Smith’ can register the following alternatives:

· Johnsmith.ie [first name / surname]
· Johnpaulsmith.ie [first name / middlename / surname]
· John-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / surname]
· John-paul-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / middlename / hyphen / surname]
· Johnpsmith.ie [first name / middle initial / surname]
· John-p-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
· Jsmith.ie [first initial / surname]
· Jpsmith.ie [first initial / middle initial / surname]
· Jp-smith.ie [first initial / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
· J-smith.ie [first initial / hyphen / surname]
· J-p-smith.ie [first initial / hyphen / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
· Paulsmith.ie [middle name / surname]
· Paul-smith.ie [middle name / hyphen / surname]
· Psmith.ie [middle initial / surname]
· P-smith.ie [middle initial / hyphen / surname]

Also:

To obtain a Personal Domain Name (PDN), applicants will need to supply any one of the following documents. The name in the document supplied must match exactly the domain name applied for eg a document showing Mr. John Smith is not acceptable if the domain name required is johnnysmith.ie

Irish applicants:-

· Irish passport

· Irish driver’s licence

· Irish revenue / social welfare document showing PPS number

· Irish birth certificate

· Irish marriage certificate

· Irish utility bill (e.g: NTL, Chorus, SKY / ESB, Airtricity / Bord Gais / Eircom / Vodafone, O2, Meteor, 3 – bill pay phones only).

Northern Ireland applicants:-

· UK driver’s licence with Northern Ireland address.

· HM Revenue & Customs / Northern Ireland Social Security Agency document showing National Insurance number

· Northern Ireland birth certificate

· Northern Ireland marriage certificate

· Northern Ireland utility bill (e.g: NTL, Chorus, SKY, UTV Internet / NIE, Airtricity / British Gas / BT / Vodafone, O2, 3, T-Mobile, Orange, BT – bill pay phones only).

Congrats to John on his launch fo SocialMedia.net

Elevator Love Letter – Might feed your Blogorrah needs. Certainly catty enough. Props to Oisin for alerting me to this.

New Irish blog on Satnav stuff.

Think I’ll get this 1TB portable hd, though 500GB for 99 euros is nice too.

Gotta love Vista

Ooops. Google accidently released a private video on the future of Google Reader and feeds.

Cos we all want fake sunroofs.

Via Una, forget the story about that gobshite Kathy Griffin, the bit I like is that the sketch Dick in a box won an Emmy but the Emmy people did not know how to present the win. Here’s the origina, yeah 26Million views:

Via the Rickster, is this fantastic trailer for the horror flick Black Sheep, first we had Snakes on a Plane, now we have mutant killer sheep:

Sharron Shannon was on the radio yesterday and talked about an Irish dancer/freestyler called Nathan Pilatzke that dances at her show, this is a mySpace video of Nathan and his brother John:
dancing part 1
And them on YouTube:

Know of any? Friend is looking for one and doesn’t know where to start.

I’ll be one of those giving a talk at Digiweb‘s Online Edge Seminar on Thursday week.

Some details:

Online Edge Seminar

3PM to 5PM on Thursday 20th September in Digiweb Blanchardstown office.

Speakers:

• Alastair Mc Dermott, Login.ie – Online marketing and Search Engine Optimisation
• Damien Mulley – Blogging and Social Networking for business.
• Barry Hand, Digiweb – Web analytics, best practices and what to look for

Hoping to tour their data centre too and see if this mobile broadband solution of theirs is vapourware or not.