Damien Mulley

Updated Aug 4th 2005. (See additional comments below)

Not so long ago I called for the re-ignition of EFF Ireland and Bernie also talked about it too. Since then there’s been nothing from it as far as I can tell.

I wonder how many people see a need for it and how many would commit to supporting it? What would be needed? Would funding be needed, resources, how would it be structured, what would be its remit? Lots of questions, but not even these questions seem to be asked by others.

There was a lot of good discussion at OpenTech 2005 about setting up a UK EFF and Danny O’Brien weighs in more here about the need for one and what can be done with some money. He talks about pledging a fiver a month via direct debit but only if 1000 others do the same. Good idea that.

What can you do with a monthly budge of 5000UKP a month? … we did some back of the envelope calculations after the talk, and agreed we could do something: Probably two staffers and an office.
…

The biggest lesson for me with NTK was that your best way to influence the agenda, and generate support, is to generate stories, and point people to the right experts. Just having someone at the end of a phone, handing out quotes and press releases, and pro-actively calling journalists to make sure they know what’s going on, putting them in contact with all the other orgs in this area in the UK, is half the work.

The rest of the job is actual activism (one person can do a lot, if they don’t need to cram all their white paper writing, research, and lobbying between contract coding sessions, and finishing their university degree) and bootstrapping more funding.

Good wisdom there, some that I may be able to use for other projects. So, if the money was there, could EFF Ireland work?

Update August 4th 2005:

Graeme the Irish Liberal says he’d be up for it.
The Freestater (sorry I don’t know your name) is also of the opinion we badly need something like the EFF. I must say I’m quite impressed with that post. Very very well researched.

Further Update: I started an EFF Ireland discussion thread on boards.ie

Dick O’Brien has added his thoughts too.

BTW, I tried to open up comments and it didn’t work for some reason. I’ll commit to upgrading the site over the weekend to get them working.

Someone posted this on the LGB Forum on boards.ie this evening.

Im interested in working at a adult chat line, part time to earn some extra
money. Where and how do I go about applying for a job with one of them? all
the ads in the papers are for callers only. How much do the earn per hour?
any advice would help hugely. Thanks.

I asked the mods to keep it around but they don’t have a sense of humour. So here is what I tried to post before the thread was deleted:

It is actually quite difficult to get a job in this area in Ireland due to the controversial nature of the industry. There is strict regulation and you have to be a member of the Federation of Entertainment Chat and Adult Lines.

To be a member of this group means attending a 3 day intensive course run by the federation. The course is called “Matters”, it includes how to rationalise a conversation, knowing when to terminate a call, identification of breathing rhythms so you can judge call “completion”, first aid in case a caller has a medical emergency (quite common). The second day has a four hour long course on the special language that is used on these Adult Lines. The course is called the Alphabet and Neologisms of Adult Lines. This is where you use all the various phrases and “dirty” words to stimulate a caller. Remember at the end of the day you have to give the caller good service or they won’t call back or hang up the call early.

The third day is all role playing (but not in the sex game type way though I guess it’s close!) where each participant plays a caller with a specific need and the other person acts as the line operator or “taker” as the industry calls it. At the end of the day is a written test as well as oral. If your oral is good and what you put down on paper then you’re certified can can join the industry. The Federation are the ones who’ll put you in touch with employers.

Good luck with it all!

Seems when you search for damien on Google.com now I’m 23rd. I almost reached the top 10 the other day too. It’s great to see that Google updates itself so often. It’s great that the rankings aren’t so stagnant.

Just found the URLTrends website. An easy way of finding out the pagerank of a website as well as other data. Put my website url in there and got this in return:

Current Rankings:
PageRank: 4/10
Alexa Rank: 2,335,797

Incoming Google Links: 86
Incoming Yahoo Links: 937
Incoming MSN Links: 1,759
Incoming Alexa Links: 408
Overall Incoming Links: 3,190 (Overlap is possible – Estimated 2,774 unique links)
Outgoing Links: 179 (Ratio: 0.480% – Each Link Receives Approx. 0.019 PR)

Might be interesting to use this or the Google API to collate info on the irishblogs via Planet of the Blogs.

Alcoholic kind of mood, lose my clothes, lose my lube. Cruisin for a piece of fun, looking out for number one. – Placebo

Eunoia which seems to mean “beautiful thinking” is apparently the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels

The Ultimate Taxi.With a mirror ball and a keyboard it damned well is !

Prisoners Escape, go to offy for beer and return, then head back out for more beer.

Quotes on Homosexuality, some choice stuff in that list.

baeball Caps designed to cool you down.

And the day came when the risk it took to remain closed in a bud became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

It’s called “Senescent Shaman” and it’s done by Corey Le Chat. You can look at more of his work and loads more of other artists work at Grainbag. You can also buy these works. The curators blog is great, pity it doesn’t have an RSS feed.

The Rasterbator. The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge rasterized pictures out of relatively small image files. The pictures can be assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 5 meters in size. You upload an image it spits out a pdf which you print off and put together. I tried a butterfly photo but it seemed to complicated to fit on 8 pages. I’ll try something like someones face. Still it’s fucking cool.

The New Yorker takes the book ‘Eats, shoots and leaves’ to task .