Author Archive

Blog Worms – Adding to the book hoarder chatter

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

Sinéad gives a summary of those recently posting about their book obsessions in the Blog O’Sphere. I actually would think everyone is into books. They do seem to go hand in hand. My book reading is suffering but the amount I read daily now outweighs the amount I ever read when I was not blogging and into books.

Sinéad thought I might come up with some tech/geek suggestion for this. I’m more thinking why don’t we all bring a book to the Blog awards, one we have that we haven’t read but we would like to, and maybe do a secret santa kind of thing? How non-geek is that? 🙂

Hello Patrick Tufts

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

Patrick Tufts visited my site and commented on the Aine post. Howdy Patrick. Don’t know who Patrick is? He’s into AI. You use something he developed everytime you use Amazon. Amazon’s “customers who viewed this item also viewed …” recommendation system. That was his baby. See more of his CV. Nice having you visit Patrick.

Check out this Goatse Zen like moment on one of his blog posts. Subtle!

Why Macs suck (part whatever)

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

I was going to do a Russell Beattie on Friday to boost traffic. What’s an RB? Blog about why Macs are shite and you’ll get a lot of traffic. Baiting Mac fans always generates traffic. They protect the brand so much they almost put a Jihad on you. Russell probably does it for an increase in ad revenue or maybe like me he loves winding people up. However the Sligo post generated more traffic than I have ever gotten on this site. Some 1200 page views on Friday alone and now that the Metafilter people have seen the page (thanks to Jett) my Sunday traffic has surpassed 600 page views. Sunday is normally the dead day for this site. Coolness.

So there was no need to take the piss out of the petulantati but just for fun here is the video rant about Why Macs Suck.

Previous posts by Russell on Macs: Russell switches back to the PC
Russell and 33 things that bug him about MacOSX

and we’re back (kind of)

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

On Friday I logged into my GoDaddy control panel and changed the dns settings on ten of my domains and on this one too. I did not mean to do this one. I changed them back quickly but as a result the dns settings fell off the Internet and this site is still unavailable to anyone on eircom.net or IOLBroadband. Fuckity fuck. I’ve done some tweaking on my own computer thanks to advice from Conor and so now I can blog and I have so much to empty out of my brain.

Steven celebrated the first birthday of his blog and threw a question out to his readers about blogging and what would we do if we didn’t blog. I kind of gave a long meandering answer:

Blogging consumes me but if it wasn’t blogging it’d be something else. There’ll always be something else. Many of us have this personality trait and I guess technology has brought us together.

Blogging helps me remove thoughts from my head that would only go stale and start to smell in there. A smell worse than gone-off milk. I blog about these thoughts and ideas and share them with my audience who really I feel are friends. Friends who I sit in a room with the TV on but turned down and eventually gets turned off. It’s a dark winter evening and the temperature is just a little too warm so many of us have flushed cheeks. In this room which is really the Blog O’Sphere we talk about different things and the conversation goes all around the place and moves on. The interesting thing though is that as this happens some in this large group restart or add to previous parts of the conversations and in a very quantum way we chat about new things, present things and old things all at the same time but yet none of us talk over the other. Once those thoughts are out of my head and shared I am happy to move on and allow fresh thoughts to run around the head until it is time again to do the blogging equivalent of the little teapot song and tip my head over and pour the ideas out. So, maybe blogging keeps me sane or less insane?

This is blogging to me. I’m sure I’ll have slumps where I don’t blog but in that time I’m sure my obsessive personality is concentrating on something else.

And with that I have about 6 blog posts to write.

and for my next t-shirt purchase

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

threadless

The French Army Knife. Handy that I just threw out about 20 t-shirts tonight. (By threw out I mean gave them away.)

Aine Chambers is a legend – Sligo’s Dame of Tourism

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

Aine Chambers guides you around the sights and scenery of Sligo via her Sligo Tourism website.

Aine Chambers

Check out her video guides to Sligo.

Lissadel beach and a special Christmas message are some of the more fun ones.

I’m now hearing rumours that these vids will be on Podge and Rodge soon. Let’s make her number one in Google for the search phrase “Sligo”. Link to her site with the phrase Sligo Tourism.

Ambrand has linked to Swimwear with the Irish Tricolour. Cringetastic!

EDIT: Hello MetaFilter readers

Amazon announce 450 jobs for Cork

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006

Amazon coming to Cork Airport 450 jobs. Sounds like customer service jobs. Will they offer free posatge in Ireland now? C’mon lads.

Smashing the Broadband excuses

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006

As part of the IrelandOffline submission to the Department of Communications I compiled a list of the most common excuses used by the Govt and eircom/ComReg as to why we are the donkey(donk-E) of Europe when it comes to broadband.

Facts, figures and PR machines spinning overtime.

One of the reasons we believe we are in such a dire situation in Ireland when it comes to broadband is the insistence by so many groups that there is nothing wrong with the broadband market in Ireland. Problems cannot be addressed if they are not given recognition. Forfas have reported how bad we are, they gave solutions. The Information Society Commission issued reports and suggestions as did the Oireachtas report on broadband. Many reports and many valid suggestions have been made but the majority of the recommendations have never been carried out.

Growth Rates
Claiming to have one of the highest growth rates in the EU to make it appear we are doing well is disingenuous. If the penetration rate of Ireland is 5% and we have a growth rate of 100% it means we are going to go up to 10%. A country with a penetration rate of 25% and a growth rate of 60% will boost the penetration rate to 40%. Ireland is being lapped and lapped again by every developed country in the world. Patting ourselves on the back for a high growth rate is deceptive and dishonest.

The fungible excuses of no cable competition, starting late, telecoms bubble bursting, population density, pc penetration and lack of demand need to cease. These excuses can easily be shot down as will be shown in the next few paragraphs.

Cable Competition
The excuse of not having cable competition as a reason for Ireland being a world joke when it comes to broadband penetration does not hold weight. Cable is not the cause of worldwide broadband penetration increases. Many countries have aspired to high penetration rates without cable. A cable famine is another excuse and deflection of the truth.

Telecoms Bubble Bursting
Additionally the technology and telecoms “bubble� “bursting� is used to explain why we were a late starter in the area of broadband. The telecoms market and the bubble bursting were not localized to Ireland. Every country felt it and some even more so than Ireland. Those same countries are way ahead of us now. Why is that?

Population Density
Population density is another favoured excuse for rollout issues and as a result low broadband adoption in Ireland. Many of the Scandinavian populations are less dense than Ireland and have much better broadband penetration rates. Northern Ireland has 100% availability and a penetration rate than the Republic. Same geography, same population density.

PC Penetration
PC Penetration is fast becoming the favoured excuse for lack of broadband penetration. The excuse runs that since we have low PC usage we have low broadband usage. PCs are now primarily network access devices. Why buy an expensive device if you cannot use it for what you want it to do? Consumers are being blamed for lack of broadband penetration because they are not buying PCs. Have consumers ever been blamed for poor mobile network coverage because they are not buying enough handsets? Meteor built out their network and generated almost 100% coverage and as latest figures showed their customer base jumped a large amount.

Irish consumers use Playstations and X-Boxes more than any other nation in the world apart from Japan. We adore technology but we are not stupid. We would not buy something that we could not use. We will not buy a PC if we cannot get high speed Internet to amke use of it.

Staying with the X-box theme – you cannot blame the lack of X-Boxes for lack of games being sold if it transpires that the number of games out there were severely limited and only a certain percentage of the population could access the shops where the games were sold. Yet this backwards excuse is used about PCs and broadband. Build a broadband network that reaches all and PC usage will jump. The corollary is not true.

Lack of Demand
A very hostile and silly excuse for low penetration rates is lack of demand. We do not for one single second believe this to be true. We instead believe it to be convenient for avoiding the hard work of getting Ireland from bottom to near the top of all the broadband league tables.

ISDN usage has increased not decreased. It should be obvious why this is. People want broadband and cannot get it and resort to expensive ISDN. Satellite usage is increasing not decreasing again because people need something like broadband and resort to a inferior and horribly expensive system to get them close to what they need. Why would people pay €1000 install fee and minimum €70 a month for such a service if it wasn’t because they need broadband or fax-broadband services and will pay so much for something that isn’t broadband but is better than dialup.

The IrelandOffline survey showed the majority they surveyed who were on dialup (circa 400 people) wanted broadband but could not get it. The Chamber of Commerce of Ireland recently showed that 30% of businesses who wanted to upgrade to broadband could not do so because of the lack of availability of broadband. Anytime there is a radio piece on broadband the switchboards are bombarded by people who cannot get broadband. There is not a lack of demand, there is a lack of believing there is demand.

Unless the energy put into creatively coming up with excuses for the current situation is channeled into something more constructive, we will be held back from moving forward.

Pisstake of Sony Ad

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006

Brilliant!

Mac Mini is now a media centre and iPod HiFi is out

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

Mac Mini is now a media centre