Blog Ireland

An old blog. Set up a new category entitled “Geansai gorm”. Unlikely to make a difference. You just never now.

I thought I’d do a quick post on Geansai Gorm, an SEO competition about coming first in the Google SERP’s for a term that means blue jumper in Irish. The purpose of this post is purely to give link love to my entry. Yes I am selling myself out.

Google have just launched their Video Viewer. Only downside is that they haven’t done a Linux client for this. I hope that because they are major users of Linux themselves it will only be a short time before this becomes available. Of course it’s good news for their share price which has pipped over the $300 mark.

It’s also a pity that most of the videos listed on http://video.google.com, the “Beta” version of their video site, cannot be played back - possibly for copyright reasons. Who knows?

It fits nicely into Google’s range of products/services…giving plenty to the user without being pushed to make from it. Google have the scale, momentum and nous to get away with that approach.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees! I just got 2 tickets to the gig tonight at face value. The best band ever. Haven’t missed a Dublin gig in years. Look out for us in the Hogan Stand, Lower Tier (binoculars not required).

Of course I’ll sell them to the first bidder of Euro 200 per ticket. Only kidding. Not a chance.

It’s great to see some momentum behind development issues at the upcoming G8 summit in Scotland. Tony is being chased by Sir Bob and soon-to-be “Sir Bono” (in my opinion) and he is trying to avoid the credit going to the future ex - Prime Minister Brown. Having lost credibility with the Iraq war this is Tony’s last chance to regain that elusive hand of history that has been moving on to other shoulders. GWB wants to earn some humanitarian stars before his departure. So the timing is good.

The huge consensus now needs to be realised into additional hard cash towards dropping the debt. The resources for this should not come from existing allocations to the world agencies, thereby restricting their current operations. Gordon Brown has put together the International Finance Scheme. It is time the G8 subscribed for their share of it.

It is time that Conor Lenihan redeemed some of his buffoon status and took his own slice of history, bringing Ireland’s contribution to 0.7% of GDP as soon as possible. But does Conor have the weight let alone conviction to deliver? Maybe now it is clear why he was put in the job in the first place.

I was at a talk given by Bishop Desmond Tutu’s last night in the College of Surgeons - sponsored by Afri. It was a bit of a love-in with most of the attendants there to heap deserved adulation on Bishop Tutu. There’s no doubting the charisma and humility of the man. Some of the focus of the evening’s speakers was on the $900 billion global miliatary spending. However I was taken by the assertion by Arch. Tutu, having attended the Peace & Reconciliation tribunals in South Africa, that we all have the capacity for such evil. (Bob Geldof wasn’t there - picture shown is an old image).

OK I’m rambling a bit. Back to the G8. Let’s see:
- Debt dropped (without affecting current allocation of funds)
- Aid doubled
…I actually think it might happen this time.

On the environment I’m less hopeful. I don’t see a way past the current China crisis. They’re not going to take coal and steel out of their industrial revolution - and the US will not play ball until they do. Added to this there’s a Texan in the White House. No, the successes in Gleneagles will be the Development Issues, with the environment being shelved for another year.

This image is actually taken from an article on CNN. I’m not sure what the article is about, treasury yields and payroll data don’t do it for me. But this picure says many more words than that article ever could. I can’t imagine Alan will get too upset about it, given that Yoda is probably one of the most popular, albeit ugly (ok, so it’s a subjective view - not being from his planet myself), creatures.

BTW, I saw the latest Star Wars - “Revenge of the Sith”. It’s a must-see, even if it is only for its rendering of some of the most spectacular imaginative cityscapes ever. By day six, Sith out-grossed all other films released in 2005, taking in over $50m dollars in it’s first day.

In the promotional material for the new baths site the fact that their are 181 apartments is barely featured. The even mentioned the sauna before the apartments. Neither the number of apartments in the scheme nor the scale of the 8 storey high building is highlighted in the presentation, however we should be reassured by the fact that the building is “eco-friendly”.

The building would be more accurately described thus:
Apartments, Indoor waterworld, Apartments,25 metre swimming pool, Apartments, Seaweed Baths, Apartments, Wave pool, Apartments, paddling pools, Apartments, Sauna, keep fit, Apartments, Apartments, Spa/therapy rooms, Restaurants, Apartments, Retail, Apartments, Apartments, Apartments, Apartments, Apartments, Public viewing tower, Apartments.

Now I know that the council is short money. But surely the price paid by the destruction of one of Dublin’s nicest piece of coastline is too high a price to pay for an apartment complex with a swimming pool and a few small plunge pool type things.

They should learn from the mistakes with the Pavillion at Dun Laoghaire centre - one of the ugliest buildings in the area, only usurped by the chocolate brown shopping centre.

I just couldn’t let this go by without commenting on it. It is now official that President’s Bush’s nominiation for the post of World Bank President is Paul Wolfowitz.

Wolfowitz has shown that he is a champion of the US’s unilateral approach in recent years. From his track record we are to suppose that he will make sure that all donations and assistance coming from the World Bank will come at the price of complicity with US political foreign policy.

Even as it is the World Bank pushes for policies in it’s various client countries that serve to go against the interests of the citizens of those countries. Wolfowitz’s nomination serves to push the World Bank further in that direction.

Every cloud…….The only upside to this is the Wolfowitz is no longer in the Pentagon. One less neo-con hawk patrolling the halls of the US military base. Now if we could only find a nice retirement home for Donald Rumsfeld….

Personally I thought Bono would have made a great president of the World Bank. It would have pushed us one step closer to Louis Armstrong’s vision.

HIV/Aids is the scourge of the 21st century. With the advent of cheap travel and communications we can no longer view parts of the world as distant outposts. Those suffering have shown their faces as our neighbours. It is time for us to act.

Ireland made a commitment to achieve a donor level of 0.7% of GNP. Since Conor Lenihan has taken over as junior minister in this area there has been a reversal of the trend towards the target. It doesn’t look like Lenihan will be quite as valuable a player as Tom Kitt (as shown in image to letf) was in this brief. Come on Ireland, you’ve never had it better, you can do better.

I read about Hunter S.Thompson and his death by self-inflicted gunshot. I don’t know much about Hunter but apparently he was a great sportsman before he turned to journalism, where he became quite controversial. Hmmm, sound like anyone we know. Don’t do it Eamon!

I read in the FT (offline) that France is digitising over 2.1m pages of its newspaper articles. Apparently a major motivation is to thwart Google and US influence over French culture.

Maybe France is over-reacting to George and his cronies. They’ve only another 3.75 years to go. Not everyone in the US believes in pre-emptive strikes. The Google twins seem to have a very measured approach in what they do … although with all that power in the one couple of hands…. peut-etre ils ont raison.

Thabo Mbeki must stop his support for Mugabe. I can understand he might fear that anti-Mugabe feeling comes from form colonial powers, but the evidence is there that Mugabe is a despotic leader responsible for human rights abuses and corrupting the democratic process in Zimbabwe. As the most influential leader on the African continent Mbeki must exert his influence.

Muckrodrift, the major software company are working hard on redesinging their new spyware detecting software so that it doesn’t detect their own operating system as spyware.

"It seems there is a much finer line between spyware and our program than we originally thought. We can either change our operating system or the spyware detection software. Obviously changing the operating system would be a bigger job, but then changing the spyware not to detect our system could make it worthless", an un-named company programmer said.

Today the CIRA aka the Continuity Irish Republican Army decided to rename themselves the Real Continuity Irish Republican Army. A spokeswoman for the RCIRA said that it would serve two purposes. “Firstly we will be seen to be at least as ‘real’ as the Real IRA and secondly it will discourage a split because of the subsequent difficulty in renaming.”

She said that the organisation did not discriminate on religious grounds and those of all religious beliefs should not be put off by the “RC” at the start of the acronym. “Although there isn’t a queue from the Protestant community to join”, she added.

Mark Shuttleworth gets added to my list of quirky coincidences in names, alongside Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager. Who would think that as the first African into space you would have a name with "Shuttle" in it.

Anyway as the founder of Thawte and partaking in one of the many internet duopolies around in the 90s, he made a mint. Now he’s turning his focus on some very worth causes and in particular he had head-hunted a bunch of Debian developers to create a similar open-source project called Ubuntu Linux. The main difference is that this will be funded by Shuttledollars. Go to their website. They set out there stall as being free, friendly and not out to screw you. Excellent. It will be concentrate on ensuring accessibility and language support. A small step for Mark but could be a giant leap for linux users.

Robert O’Brien-Lynch writes in today’s Irish Times that:

“When Irish bloggers want to talk politics, they tend to discuss US and global affair, particularly Iraq. This is a self-defeating process; US politics and the war in Iraq are well-documented, with thougsands of blogger based in Iraq……..there also seems to be an unconscious snobbery towards Irish current affairs - all Iraq and no IRA.”

Maybe it is just that these Irish bloggers are not just trying to make their blog popular but actually are pationately concerned about world affairs. Maybe they’re just fed up with the IRA and their criminal activities and believe more can be achieved in contributing to global activities.

The world is getting smaller and we must now see Africa, Asia, USA as our neighbours. We can no longer turn a blind eye and pretend we do not see.

A taste of things to come when Ikea open there super-store in Ballymun, Dublin. One man was stabbed and several injured after 4,000 people flocked to the midnight opening of a new Ikea furniture superstore in north London. Five other people were taken to hospital, one suffering from chest pains. Road rage now moves to the shop floor. I saw it first. It’s mine. Get your grubby mits off.

Kevin Myers is a thundering disgrace. With his usual gleefull smugness this week he takes pleasure in referring to the children of lone parents as "Bastards".

Myers has frequently taken to offending the more vulnerable in our society, often personalising attacks. Even the dead are not safe from his vicious uncaring attacks.

In this same week he discredits Nelson Mandela, Bono, Jaque Chirac and labels anyone wanting to help Africa as "goody-goodies". Mandela says that poverty is not natural. Myers ridicules this by calling it "gibberish". It is clear that Mandela is saying that poverty should not be an accepted norm. That it is in our power to address it. But Myers chooses to attack this belief by denegrate Africa by referring to Pygmies and cannibalism.

Myers should stick to insightful rather than inciteful commentary.

As a skillfull driver can use a car as a weapon, Myers uses his obvious talents as wordsmith with reckless and careless abandon. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword and Myers has used his to wound many. Resign!

Kevin Myers is a journalist for the otherwise reputable Irish Times.

Well it seems to be true what they said. Bush is now in his second term. No need to get re-elected, so he can now try to do some good for the world. The same thing happened in Reagan’s second term with a more caring president coming to the fore.

So now it’s Condoleeza Nice. It’s all about using soft power, softly with friends. We’re going to invite around our nice French and German friends to have a kebab. And Sharon is having tea with Abbas. What a cosy world it is. At last a bit of sense is prevailing.

…but there’s no way were inviting those Northern Ireland knackers to our St. Patrick’s day partee…… For the first time this year there will be no Northern Ireland public representatives at the official White House party. In my view they deserve the snub.

I’ll put my hand-up. I am a city-zen so I’m sure those rurally cultured will have “suil eile” as they say on TG4.

I think the recent changes made by the Minister for the Environment where they loosened the regulations in relation to once-off housing are a disaster for the way life in the countryside. It seems to be suggesting that any form of town planning is not necessary. It is a hugely regressive step backwards (as opposed to a regressive step forwards).

Yes it is prescriptive to tell people that they can’t build wherever they want - but isn’t that the point of Government. It can make decisions that are for the common good in the long term rather than those based on individual short term gain.

What will happen now is that every family with three kids will try to build three houses on their land. Who would blame them. The average house costs about Euro 150,000 to build but would be worth Euro 275,000 to sell. There’s a gain of Euro 125,000 spread nicely among the kids. So you have sons and daughters racing back from Dublin to Glenamaddy for the chat with the local planning department, telling them how much they love living in Glenamaddy, near Mum and Daddy.

What’s wrong with that? Well these houses are not built near any services, effluent, water supply, waste disposal and electricity. Nor are they built near schools, shops, churches, pubs, swimming pools etc. So you end up with a society which is expensive to service based around car travel and with unspoilt open spaces of the countryside being ruined permanently.

With proper planning there is an opportunity to create new towns with new town centres with public open spaces and good transport to and from the best facilities and with access to the countryside for all to enjoy.

See this Press Release - possibly not a “one-off” for Martin Cullen.

This is the kind of thing you’re up against…..in an interesting Dail Agriculture debate:

Senator Scanlon advocates speculative site sales to boost farm incomes, but again, Government policy, through the national spatial strategy, precludes this.

Credit to the deceased Denning L.J. for the “appalling vista” phrase used in the title above and for showing us the true nature of the British justice system in the 1980s.