Damien Mulley

Aer Lingus wanted to discriminate on age grounds. Seems Aer Lingus lobbied the Minister for Inequality to allow them to be excempt from the Equality Act. It is bad enough that there are loads of exceptions in the Act since McDowell took a hatchet to it, but now the State Airline wanted to give the older staff better benefits. Some nerve.

Overlawyered.com explores an American legal system that too often turns litigation into a weapon against guilty and innocent alike, erodes individual responsibility, rewards sharp practice, enriches its participants at the public’s expense, and resists even modest efforts at reform and accountability.

Common Good’s Top Ten New School Rules.

Many educators spend their days complying with burdensome regulations and dodging lawsuits. So, for those teachers and principals heading back to school this fall, Common Good has put together a list of ten new school rules to help them stay compliant and lawsuit free.

That blurb was sarcastic by the way. The list highlights some scary and stupid legal cases involving schools and students. Suing because you got an F? Jeez.

IrelandOffline (a lobby group I’m involved with) released a press release late last night in regards to stats released by ComReg yesterday.

Basically, Ireland sucks when it comes to telecoms prices.

• Ireland 2nd worst for Broadband in the EU.
• Ireland most expensive for mobile costs.
• Ireland has most expensive line rental in the EU.
• Ireland above the EU average for average landline bills.

Funny that when any of this is highlighted the Minister says it is a liberalised market and he can do nothing. Er, right. Another Minister has always told us to “shop around” but one can’t really shop around with such a stagnant market. Wholesale costs are destroying any chance of competition. Another typical excuse is that telecoms is a luxury item. Conversations are not luxuries, they are necessities. I think it is quite galling that we are paying massive premiums for simple communications.

EDIT: Here is the mobile ARPU Graph:

We are 2nd most expensive when Switzerland is factored in. They’re not in the EU though and they are only 1 Euro more expensive. Bit cheeky of ComReg to use a non-EU country when in other graphs they were talking us up for being better than EU averages.

Go Opera!

Your backbone can’t erode away if you never had one. What you had was a cork so far up your ass that it gave the appearance of a spine.

Boy Eats Girl trailer. Another Irish zombie movie and not just because Samantha Mumba is in it. Found this via TCAL and for once it was content that was new to me and not found n MetaFilter, populicious or BoingBoing. Hey lads!

It is no longer rocketscience to tie a database into a webserver. Why can I not look up what movies are in Chartbusters or Xtravision? (I’d link to the websites but they are of no value in my view and do not deserve a link. )

But yeah. A live database and with rss feeds for searches. Allow me to store links to my favourite movies too while you’re at it. Allow me to see what other movie snobs like.

But, a bit of reality check. You’re gone anyway lads. Video on demand has been vapourware for years but it is almost here now. Time to start aligning yourselves with the broadband companies and the movie distributors. Now in fairness, the movie companies will gladly knife you to bits to get a bigger share, so what you need to do is build up a much larger clientele and find out their movie tastes NOW and use that as leverage to be the middleman when the time comes.

You also need to be that clichéd movie facist in the video store that knows everything about movies but without the fucking attitude. You need to be the friendly guy. You need to know what the customer likes, no actually, not just a customer but what your buddy the customer likes and so you can say:
“Damien doooood, you’ll like this one. ”
“Well I dunno VideoStoreGuy.”
“Tell you what, take it, g’wan, no charge, if you don’t like it, fine. I’m thinking you will and if you do there are 5 other movies by that director and I know you’ll rent them.”

It’s a cluetrain moment. Conversation. That’s the nugget there people.

Tags: cluetrain cluetrain irishblogs

“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them.”

Found lots of good stuff on Marc Canter’s blog:

First up is NetVibes. Another one of these start pages. A Digital Lifestyle Aggregator Marc calls it. I suppose it would be like moving your taskbar online. The RSS reader is meant to be fantastic with NetVibes. Protopage is another thing like this. A start page with all your fav online activities all glued together. Start.com is another though I doubt it’ll allow you to use Google as the default search engine.

As APIs become the norm for every web app, these Start pages are going to become a lot more powerful. Doesn’t Google have a deal with Firefox for access to their start page? Be nice of the firefox start page had all this kind of stuff. Speaking of APIs LastFM and Audioscrobbler now have APIs. More to add to the start page.

Moving on comes the fact that the IMDB is doing tags. Sweet. I’m sure the genuises will start to play with this more too.

Datablogging. Ok, I’m not getting this. How is this a blog? This to me is just data entry. This is information that is not shared or viewable and is used soley for sales. Is this just not a CRM system with feeds?

Fantastic presentation at OSCON2005. Very interesting stuff about Identity but even if you’re not interested in this, the presentation style is quite captivating.

Tags: MarcCanter oscon2005 identity dla

Google has officially commented on George Bush being a miserable failure. Kind of cool that they used the phrase Googlebombing. Also glad they said they would not adjust their results just because of this. Though they’d do it for China wouldn’t they?

I really like that
Google Maps shows the Whitehouse for Miserable Failure.

Bonus link: Google Earth mixed with National Geographic.