Archive for February, 2009

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Brian Cowen sends me an email

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

Got two emails tonight, one from Brian Cowen:

Dearest Gracious Friend,
I am Brian Cowenagai, son of proud King Bertierobber, do not be surprised I am writing to you. I am the holder of greatest wealth from my proud King which he minded for friend builders of giant palaces. My proud King was removed by rebel forces and now I hold money but the rebel forces know me and my 34 proud chins so I will need your helping. In return for a banker bonus of 200Million euroses, you will mind 7Billions of money that is currently in a giant trunk of friend minding it….

Brian Cowen watching for those on stage left
Image stolen from the FF website. Where the name of the image was: brian_cowen_ard_fheis_hero.jpg

And then I got this 419 scam email:

Dear friend,

I’ve just come off stage at Fianna Fáil’s Ard Fheis, where I’ve outlined the difficult measures we’re having to take to help return the country to growth. I was frank about the scale of the problems we face, but I’m optimistic about the ability of the Irish people to meet these challenges through the hard work and ingenuity we’ve always shown. We’re a resilient and creative nation and we’ll meet our challenges together.

You’ve heard from me, now I want to hear from you.

I’m asking each of you to submit a question for me, which I’ll answer as many as I can via video right here on the new Fianna Fáil website. Submit your questions at:

http://www.fiannafail.com/askthetaoiseach

To better serve you, and to help lead us out of this recession, I want to hear what you thought of my speech, the questions you might have about some of the important measures I’ve announced and your ideas about how Fianna Fáil can set Ireland back on the road to growth and renewed prosperity…

Seriously? Dear Friend? What an asinine email. How about including the “important measures I’ve announced” in the damned email besides telling people to go to the website? Of the 1000s of emails sent, the dropoff rate is going to be savage. Email marketing 101.

Posted in irishblogs, politics | 10 Comments »

Via the Pin:

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

Silence is Golden

Posted in business, irishblogs, politics | 3 Comments »

Fluffy Links – Friday 27th February 2009

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Eolai is auctioning one of his fantastic paintings he displayed at the Blog Awards. I really wish I could buy every single onf of them. He’s a gifted artists and he is generous enough to auction this for charity. Bid here.

More like it. Dublin City Council are interacting with the public online for their development plan. They’ve directly asked people on Boards.ie for feedback. This is how you do it.

The recession and your credit card. Some tips.

Journo Mark Tighe is now a-blogging.

New Irish blog – A Harmless Fraud.

More details on the next eircom Innovation Fund.

And speaking of eircom. A new website to protest them blocking the Pirate Bay has popped up. eircom here is at most an agent and it’s disappointing they are. The focus I think should be on the fact a comapny feels pressured enough to do this and if they feel it, others will. So tackle IRMA instead.

As has a way of routing around this.

Another campaign site is caleld BlackoutIreland and I was asked to write a guest post. Filtering our sites and jailing our websites without trial means eircom and others are contributing to a Digital Guantanamo.

Bye bye The Chancer. And they left before getting sued to death. Ahead of the lawyers so!

Ronan from Tenaka drfiting now has a blog. Guess the name!

Placebo and Frank Black – Where is my mind? (Live)

The new Barry’s Tea ad:

Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | 1 Comment »

HP-Upline is shutting down, move your HP backups to Putplace, get discount

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Via the Putplace blog:

We are putting together a discount plan for HP-Upline users. In the meantime you can user the invitation code “joe” to get started with a free plan for three months.

Sign up.

Posted in business, irishblogs, technology | Comments Off on HP-Upline is shutting down, move your HP backups to Putplace, get discount

Joe is looking for a link

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

To a blog post from Rick O’Shea.

Posted in irishblogs | 9 Comments »

Almost almost

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Still not back to normal. Right after the Blog Awards I’ve had to travel for work to far flung places like Dublin, Galway and Cork. Should be back to normal sometime Thursday.

Meanwhile grab an amazing chance to hear one of Obama’s Online strategists talk in Dublin today.

Posted in business, irishblogs, politics | 5 Comments »

Words by Harvey Milk

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

via Una

From a speech by Harvey Milk:

The world has changed since he made that speech but it seems not by a huge amount. There are still kids in this country that try and do kill themselves all for something that should be unimportant to the individual and the culture they live in. Invisible people have invisible rights was a tagline on my blog when I started and it’s been the tagline now for years and years. Milk’s speech doesn’t just cover gay people, it applies to the fantastic diversity we have in the world and in this country yet Dermot Ahern and his goons would rather some groups who point out inequalities would rather disappear. Niall Crowley was shafted, many of the organisations fighting (and it is a fight) for equality were ripped to shreds by Ahern and Fianna Fáil, while the Green Party stood silent. The piecemeal offering of Civil Registration with “I can’t believe it’s Equality” rights while so many other rights are taken away is either sinister or delusional.

As peoples’ anger with a tougher life in 2009 gets channeled into racist and homophobic attacks and just general violence for looking at someone “the wrong way”, there needs to be more representation, not less, not none. Still, in a way it is a lesson for many of these organisations that they cannot depend on a Government to help fund their work or those wanting representation to depend on groups bankrolled by Chuck Feeney to represent the needs of a community by hosting award ceremonies.

Posted in irishblogs | 4 Comments »

The business case for freedom of speech

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

As the Business Post and Metro newspaper mention, eircom are now going to block websites, starting with The Pirate Bay. Case by case basis from here on in. Once IRMA go to Court asking for a site to be blocked, eircom will not challenge it.

So first they’ll start with the Pirate Bay. Then comes Mininova, IsoHunt, then comes YouTube (they have dodgy stuff, right?), how long before we have Boards.ie because someone quoted a newspaper article or a section of a book? And don’t think they’ll stop there too, any site that links to The Pirate Bay and the others on the hate list will probably be added to the list too. Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

This is bad on many accounts. 99% of people are being punished for what a tiny percentage of people are doing. Sometimes this can be justified. Handgun bans etc. I don’t think a website is a loaded weapon though.

Pirate Finger Puppet (from Logan)
Photo owned by _cck_ (cc)

I’m sure the business case for eircom was they didn’t want any more costly High Court actions with McDowell biting at their legs on the command of the music industry but this is going to open up a can of worms with IRMA demanding more and more attacks on how people surf the net, this is what it is in my view an attack on our freedom to read, our freedom to write, our freedom to move around the web. All so a very rich but rapidly becoming poor group of luddites can feel better for seeing the future and trying to fight it.

And of course the costs of communications with IRMA and of the filtering is going to be passed on to the consumer. The cost of blocking a single site will be almost nothing I suppose but as more sites get added and as the arms race between the pirates and the ISPs escalates, then it’ll become complicated and complicated costs more. So again the majority get to pay for the inability of the music industry to work with the modern world and the pirates who want to bring all digital content to the masses without any technological or monetary restrictions.

I really don’t like the idea that I can’t be trusted to surf the Internet unsupervised. I hope the other ISPs fight this.

Posted in business, irishblogs, technology | 31 Comments »

Normal service etc.

Friday, February 20th, 2009

The Blog Awards, being tomorrow means I have no free time at all to witter away here posting videos and links to shiny things.

Meanwhile:

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – White Corolla

Posted in irishblogs | 5 Comments »

Bord Gais Energy did something interesting last night

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

They talked to bloggers. They told us of their new consumer electricity offering ahead of the press conference about it which is one right now. They asked us for opinions and answered every question. Genuine consumers got genuine answers in a nice relaxed atmosphere. They’re now in the electricity market with a guaranteed 10% cheaper than the ESB offering.

This is the ad which will be seen on TV soon enough.

I was seriously impressed with the transparency from a company of their size. Others will fill you in on the consumer issues they addressed.

Posted in business, Fluffy, irishblogs, music | 16 Comments »

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