Archive for the ‘blogs’ Category

Fluffy Links – November 16th 2006

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

Don’t forget the Politics in Ireland competition! (I’m saying this too much I guess.)

Education in Ireland. A view from the coalface/Western front. We need more teachers blogging and explaining what it is like from day to day.

How to tie a double windsor.

Irish energy regulator once again acts as Bord Gais apologist. Maybe now that the Consumers Assocation get less money from the Government, they might start making bigger noises. Though they’re still getting paid by numerous quangos to be on their “advisory” panels e.g. they are paid €1500 to attend consumer meetings with ComReg. In return at a meeting with the EU the Assocation sang the praises of ComReg and their consumer initiatives and rattling off false ComReg figures.

Mmm cupcakes.

Who wouldn’t want a rampaging Willie t-shirt? No filthy, not that. Wash your mind out with soap!

Via Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: Jumbo landing on an airstrip that’s really really short and really really narrow. Final flight of this jumbo. Magnificient piloting of this sky giant:

Ist Bruno! He’s just a gay version of Borat. Baron-Cohen got 40m for a Bruno movie? I’m curious are they just making something like a Borat sequel with this character.

Got a complaint? Join a Choir

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

Via Neil Gaiman – This is absolutely brilliant. I really love this. Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen created a performance piece called “Complaint Choir” which gave Finnish people a chance to complain about anything and everything. Complaints were gathered and turned into a choral piece. The results are below:

Check out some of the lyrics:

You can’t get rich by working
And love doesn’t last forever
In the public sauna they never ask
If it’s ok to throw water on the stove

Old forests are cut down and turned into toilet paper
And still all the toilets are out of paper

We always lose to Sweden in hockey and Eurovision
Christmas season always starts earlier every year
Why do people never agree with me?

Anyone found the complete lyrics to the above piece?

There also seems to be a Birmingham Complaints Choir.

I wonder could there be one for Ireland? Lots and lots of people complaining here. A fringe festival might sponsor such a thing.

Anyone want to string together some lyrics?

A shared Subjectmatter Expert List of bloggers?

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

I get emails or calls once or twice a week from journalists and researchers asking for comments or asking me do I know anyone who is willing to comment on x or y or do I know experts on w and q who could help with their article/radio slot. I do my best to help.

Dave Winer recently gave out that journalists are using the same old tried and tested people when doing stories on politics or tech. He considers it an incestuous relationship. One of his solutions is to document who quotes who how often:

a simple project would be to build a network model for who gets quoted by which reporters at which publications

I think that’s a fair point and we get the same here. Remember the days of the Late Late when the same wrinkled faces were on nonstop talking about whatever was topical at the time? In defense of journalists and researchers, most are commissioned to write about certain subjects that they don’t know much about and unless you’re a full-timer in a paper with a specialist area it is quite hard to cover certain subjects within a 6 hour deadline. I feel sorrier for radio researchers who have to go and find panelists on subjects that the current news cycles deems important and making sure that the person won’t freeze up on-air.

Would having a group made shared list of names/bloggers work for both bloggers and journalists? It decreases the same old faces in articles and voices on radio and pays more attention to genuine experts who were not getting coverage up to now due to time restraints of journalists. Is it win win? Or is it just encouraging lazy journalism?

The list would be on a webpage and contain categories of expertise and the names of bloggers and links to their blogs. Being able to read their blog archives would be a way for the researcher to see that the blogger is not a grade 16 cat lady. (Each grade = no. of cats you own.) The table/list would also contain a list of publications or radio shows that the blogger has been quoted in or participated in. Naturally such a list is opt-in and it would not be sending journalists to bloggers who do not want to be contacted.

What are your thoughts on this?

Who needs Crimeline when you have the Limerick Blogger?

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

Lets hope their spot the scumbag section becomes a regular thing. Why wait for highly paid RTE presenters to ask you if you know those faces? Were I more inclined I’d used this Firefox extension to download all those videos before the uploader deletes them. The trouble with those downloads is that they are saved as FLV files and if you want to have them in your own YouTube account you have to reencode them to avi and then upload them once again to YouTube (which then encodes them to FLV).

EDIT: See comments. The file is on the LimerickBlogger account. Good good. And it seems you can upload FLVs. Better again.

While Cork may kick ass for tech events, Limerick is proving to be the place for the best regional blogs with the Limerick Blogger, Alive in Limerick and The Newswire all reporting on Limerick.

Fluffy Links – November 15th 2006

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

Bernie asks should the G.A.A. sue YouTube?

How to customize embedded Google Videos.

A Dr. Laura doll. Fucking scary. This is her bio.

Great pic of a wave breaking.

Earth from space, Winter 2004.

John releases an OPML list for planet.journals.ie and quickly enough Justin makes an application out of the data. I wonder will we see anymore apps created.

Ofcom has won back a huge amount of ground on the TV Without Frontiers directive. The only regulator in the EU to give a crap. Remember the telecoms poodle and others wanted to regulate YOUR blogs and websites if there was video on it.

Colbert Tribute to the outgoing Republicans:

Ben Folds sings “Such great heights” (live)

How to wreck the home-life of a work colleague

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

Buy his/her kid the new Elmo:

I’ve ordered mine. I actually think the toy is brilliant. There could be a shortage this Christmas so stock up on 5 each and sell them to desperate parents the first week of December.

Definition of regulation: to let monopolistic companies run riot?

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

So Cullen is setting up the Dublin Transportation Authority about 20 years too late. One quote annoyed me:

It’s also going to be in charge of traffic management, bus and rail fares and overall integration of the transport in the capital.

Going by the way the telecoms poodle looks after pricing and the way the energy regulator allows energy companies to do what they want, I wonder how long before fares become some of the highest in Europe?

We have the highest telecom prices and some of the worst service in Europe. (Despite the monopoly winning world awards) Our energy prices are about to follow suit and instead of following the advice of consultants about how to make the energy market more competitive Noel “Dialup” Dempsey instead is just going to maintain the status quo. He says in hindsight they should have split eircom into a wholesale and retail division and sold off the retail yet he won’t do this with the E.S.B.?

The energy regulator like the poodle, allows the likes of Bord Gaid and E.S.B. to price their services based on cost of the network. So with all increases in oil and gas, the E.S.B. and Bord Gais are allowed to massively increase what they charge the consumer. How about telling them to make their networks more efficient and cutting back on the massive fat in their organisations? Why not just deny the price increase? I heard the energy regulator on TodayFM a while back and he was nothing more than an apologist for Bord Gais and the E.S.B. Independent my arse.

Any time someone complains about a telecoms issue Dempsey says “Not me boyo, that’s ComReg, they’re an independent group and I cannot interfere in what they do.” When someone complains about energy he does the same thing. He has a boilerplate reply to any issue in regards to telecom. In fact Dermot Ahern used the exact same boilerplate when he has the CMNR gig:

The provision of telecommunications services, including broadband, is a matter in the first instance for the private sector companies operating in a fully liberalised market, regulated by the Commission for Communications Regulation.

Why are we letting the Government wash their hands of these issues? Why are we accepting the lies that the Government has no control of these markets when they are the ones legislating for them? It’s been often discussed that IrelandOffline should expand their remit to cover more areas like energy which seems to have been completely forgotten by everyone but we have enough on our plate with a regulator that has gotten so bogged down in their own lies that they release counter-releases to our counter-releases and try and stop articles being published with data we have supplied.

Regulation should be a good thing in the short-term but instead the words regulation and regulator are dirty words in Ireland and convenient excuses for bumbling ministers.

Enjoy this site about regulation.

Drugs are bad mmmkay

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

Requiem for a Dream is one of those movies that you watch once and maybe that’s it. Below is a fan made trailer for the movie containing one of the excellent tracks that Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet made. I think it’s better than the studio made trailer but might be slightly spoilery. I don’t know how effective preventitive campaigns are but show some teenagers this movie and you’ll scare the shit out of them. This gives a far far more genuine view on what the life of an addict is like and it certainly doesn’t make it a romantic notion. Addicts in this movie are heroin addicts as well as those on prescription pills.

Fluffy Links – November 14th 2006

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

Don’t forget the Politics in Ireland competition.

Handy blog for those in the ad business: The Ad Feed.

Trailer for the Simpsons Movie.

More fun from the best callcentre in the world.

And more again.

Oh and just a smidge more.

Pay as you drive car insurance. Would that work in Ireland?

Get a free copy of Vista Home Edition.

Ian McKellan does an audibook version of The Odyssey.

Orkut now has a crush register. Something original from this dating site? You register a crush on someone but they can’t see it. Only when the mutual parties both register crushes do they know the other person likes them too. (By the way sub to JP’s blog, JP is BT Global’s CIO.)

Sepultura – Original Group members reunited doing “Attitude”:

Minibar Ireland is to BarCamp as shots are to pints…

Monday, November 13th, 2006

Walter talks about the idea of Minibar – a smaller, less formal version of BarCamp. Come along, have some beer, listen to just one talk?, have more beer and network. I like the idea of that. Jaysus Dublin, Limerick, Galway, Kilkenny, can ye not keep up? 😉