Decs Rambling

Swine Flu Worry

2009-11-08T14:32:00.003Z

This morning in Clonskeagh church the priest gave over a few minutes to discuss swine flu. A couple had recently approached him and asked what the parish was going to do to reduce the risk of spreading swine flu. You see the woman is pregnant and they felt that the sign of peace where they shake hands with fellow church goers was an unacceptable risk to her and the baby. They wanted the priest to ban the gesture in the church. The priest tried to reason with them, pointing out that it is not necessary for people to shake hands. Church goers can just make a gesture towards others by raising their hands in a wave like motion and that other parishioners would understand. This was not good enough for the couple, you see they feel bad when they refuse to shake hands with the others in the church so the only solution for them was to have the sign of peace banned in the church and then no one would try to shake hands with them.

The priest explained to the congregation the advice the parish had received from the HSE on the control of swine flu along with the steps he and the other priests take before and during mass to insure their hands are clean. How they wash their hands with soap and warm water then dry with clean towels. He said that the parish had decided some changes were now needed. The sign of peace would no longer be offered during mass. The holy water fonts would be emptied, washed with soap and left to dry. Finally communion with wine would not be offered as had been traditional during Christmas. The priest hoped these changes would be temporary and that normal routines could be restored soon.

To me this is an over reaction to a situation hyped in the media to sell newspapers. Yes swine flu is a risk but so is the annual flu. People get sick every year, the vast vast majority recover but some may die. Until Sky News and the like displayed the latest in a series of *the world is ending* headlines, swine flu was heading to the annual "there is a bad bug doing the rounds" classification we all talk about every winter. The media would not let that happen. In the last few years we have had CJD, SARS, Avian flu and Bio-terrorism to make us afraid to shake hands. At the same time we had asteroids, ice ages, global warming, and mega tsunamis to stop us going outside at all. The world has been ending for so long that sometimes I just cant remember what is about to destroy us all, at least not until I turn on Sky News and the yellow Breaking News banner informs me as to what will be killing me later that day.

It's called apocalypse fatigue. The media has spent years selling newspapers and pulling in viewers by hyping up some risk or other that has a cool sounding name like SARS or Swine Flu. They want people to be worried and scared because no one buys a newspaper to read about someone from one town away who died from the common cold but thousands will buy a newspaper that tells them 10 people are sick from Bovine Flu at the other side of Europe and how that virus could sweep the planet.

The risk is real but is it any greater than the risk we face every year from normal flu? Is the danger of swine flu worse than the danger of offending a neighbor by not shaking hands with them? The whole parish of Clonskeagh now has to stop offering each other the sign of peace not because of swine flu but because one couple were too worried they would offend others by not shaking hands.

Going quiet for a while

2009-10-25T13:28:00.002Z

Looks like I'll be cutting back on my blogging for a while since I have started a new job and will be traveling for a few weeks. I'll get back to this blog as much as I can. :-)

Robot Doctors

2009-10-14T22:43:00.003+01:00

Some what less cool than Terminator, RTE is reporting that a robot doctor has started work in Tallaght Hospital this week. Unfortunately by now it has gone on strike and wont treat any patients unless it gets a voltage increase and an extra can of oil per injection. It is also working in a private practice as an IT consultant so if you go to Tallaght Hospital you will actually be treated by an AIBO.

Ireland V Canada Song Contest

2009-10-06T19:36:00.003+01:00

My girlfriend, who is from Canada, showed me a video of the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper singing so I decided to show her a video of the Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen singing. I think Harper wins this one.

Stephen Harper:

Brian Cowen:

Open House Day

2009-10-03T15:33:00.003+01:00

The annual Open House Dublin is on again this year, in fact it's on next weekend October 8th to 11th. It's a wonderful opportunity to visit some of the iconic buildings in Dublin. For photographers there is the opportunity to go up onto the viewing deck of Liberty Hall to take photos of the city skyline. For political fans there is the chance to visit Leinster House and Government Buildings. It's well worth having a look at the schedule, some buildings require an advance booking others are on a first come first served basis.

The End of the World Started in Dublin

2009-10-01T19:12:00.007+01:00

The end of the world is coming in 10 years time and it appears to have started in Dublin. That is according to the new movie The Road starring Charlize Theron and Viggo Mortensen. The movie is described as "A post-apocalyptic tale of a man and his son trying to survive by any means possible".

In typical disaster movie style the trailer starts with news footage of the start apocalypse. In prominent position is footage from the 2006 Dublin riots. That means we have 7 years until most of us are dead and the survivors are pursued by gangs of lawless killers. So really if things keep going the way they have over the last year 7 years might be an optimistic estimate.

Vodafone getting iPhone Soon

2009-09-29T09:38:00.002+01:00

Vodafone Ireland is getting the iPhone 3GS "soon".

Voting Card

2009-09-28T16:48:00.003+01:00

I got my voting card for the Lisbon II referendum. Somehow the polling day has crept up on us and as usual my apartment has not been canvassed by either side. Not that I particularly care about canvassers since I've already made up my mind which way I'll be voting, yes. I think it is best for the country to be close to the EU and I believe a No vote will see us pushed to the margins if not on paper than certainly in the minds of the other EU governments.

O2 strangle hold on iPhone comes to an end?

2009-09-28T11:30:00.003+01:00

Good news from The Guardian this morning, O2 UK's two year exclusive contract with Apple for the iPhone in the UK is coming to an end. Orange is entering the iPhone market later this year. That means for those of us who use the iPhone in Ireland there might be hope that O2 Ireland will soon face similar competition. I am almost 1 year into my 18 month contract for the iPhone 3G so I wont be switching networks straight away but I hope that with some competition in the market O2 will be forced to finally implement the features they have ignored up to now.

Visual Voicemail: now it's not a big thing but for some people it was an important feature when the original iPhone launched two years ago. A year and a new iPhone later O2 just announced it was too expensive to implement the advertised feature and they were shelving the project.

Tethering: a simple feature available on many other phones and just recently introduced on the iPhone 3.0 OS. Unfortunately O2 have not been keen to allow iPhone subscribers to use tethering. It appears they were worried that tethering, supported with other phones and contracts, would destroy their broadband market if it was allowed on the iPhone.

Hopefully O2 Ireland have a similar 2 year contract to O2 UK which might mean other networks should be preparing for the iPhone sometime between now and March next year. That might see me and other iPhone users getting more and paying less sooner than that if O2 wishes to keep their current subscribers.

Airships Return

2009-09-23T14:54:00.004+01:00

The US Military is looking to deploy airships in Afghanistan which can stay at 20,000ft for 3 weeks and can watch the battlefield.

The airship, that wonderful military technology of the first world war, is now about to hover gracefully over the people who figured out how to shoot down Soviet helicopters with RPGs. It sounds and looks cool from the video but I hope they remember the other technological advancement made for airship crews during World War I, parachutes, because 3 weeks in a floating target has got to be one of the worst assignments going.

Emigration is back

2009-09-22T17:05:00.002+01:00

RTE news is reporting that net emigration has returned to Ireland for the first time since 1995. In the year to April the number of people leaving this country grew from 45,300 to 65,100 while the number of migrants to Ireland fell from 83,800 to 57,300.

30,100 East Europeans left the country and 18,400 Irish.

LCD Ads in Magazines

2009-09-17T17:56:00.003+01:00

BBC News just showed a piece discussing the future of adverts in magazines and a new LCD advert page in Entertainment Weekly. The consensus was that it was novel but the advertisers would not get their money back based on approximately £20 per magazine.

Maybe in pure circulation of Entertainment Weekly they wont but for that £20 they just got 5 to 10 minutes of news and discussion on BBC News showing parts of the adverts for Pepsi and CBS shows including Big Bang Theory and NCIS as well as several appearances and mentions for Entertainment Weekly. For a station that does not show adverts like BBC News they just gave Pepsi, CBS and Entertainment Weekly a great free advert. You can bet other news stations will do similar. Suddenly £20 each for a few thousand magazines seems like a pretty smart investment when you are the first with these screens and can get the news coverage.

My head hurts

2009-09-14T14:35:00.002+01:00

After watching this video describing the 10 dimensions I think my head hurt in at least 7 of the 10 ;-) Some where around 8 I was thinking, right they are just making all this up now but when I got to 10 it did make a little sense, I think.

Liffey Swim 2009

2009-09-13T13:30:00.002+01:00

Congratulations to all the participants in the 2009 Liffey Swim. I understand over 200 men and 70 women took part this year. They had a lovely sunny day for it and that brought out the crowds of spectators along the quays and over the bridges. Special praise has to go to the swimmer who while bringing up the rear of the mens race was still gracious enough to joke with the crowd. At the Ha' Penny bridge some jokers cheering on the swimmers shouted "you're going the wrong way". The swimmer looked up seemed to smile and shouted "Oh Really? Thanks!" turned around and started swimming back up the river to the amusement of all present.

I have not been able to find official results yet but from what I can find out the mens race was won by Pat O Driscoll of the Templeogue Club. More photos from the swim can be found on my Flickr account and in the Dublin Blog Flickr Group.

Back to Photos

2009-09-11T21:53:00.006+01:00

It's been weeks since I took any photos. Kinda got out of the groove and had too many other things on to be lugging my camera gear around with me. Still I went into town on Wednesday with the intention of taking some photos. It was fun to get back into it again and I did get at least one photograph that I liked. A photograph of the Ha'penny Bridge with the sun setting behind it.

iPhone 3.1 and Tethering

2009-09-10T14:06:00.006+01:00

Apple announced iPhone 3.1 and iTunes 9 yesterday and part of the upgrade closes off the hack that people used to enable tethering. Basically networks like O2 Ireland have exclusive deals to supply the iPhone and cant be bothered to implement the features of the iPhone. No Visual VoiceMail and no tethering. They don't need to invest the time or money in the infrastructure because they can just pay Apple for exclusive deals and the only people who suffer are the consumers. Monopolies suck.

Still no movies of TV shows in Ireland, that's not O2's fault but it's just another indication that the Irish consumer is being screwed at every turn.

The sooner Vodafone and other networks get the iPhone the sooner we will get iPhone services from O2.

[Update] Looks like there is no support for ringtones either in the Irish iTunes store, or I should say I cant find it where Steve Jobs said it would be, replacing the podcast button on the iPhone iTunes app. Not that I particularly want to download ringtones but I'm sure other people do and I cant understand why they are not allowed here as well.

Property Tax in Ireland

2009-09-07T21:32:00.004+01:00

The government seems to be giving up on ever restarting the stamp duty gravy train they have lived off for the last decade and instead now wants to tax residential homes. In other words, we taxed you when you bought the house and now we want to tax you again because no one else is buying houses. Add to that the plan to tax children's allowance, pension lump sums and the sale of rezoned land and the government could well be facing protest marches numbered in the hundreds of thousands instead of just the thousands that brought down the medical card changes.

Cowen upset to be asked questions

2009-09-06T19:36:00.007+01:00

Poor Brian Cowen, you almost start to feel sorry for him then he turns around and cries like a baby to random journalists. The leader of this country comes back from a few weeks of holidays and claims he was ambushed by questions on the new Late Late Show with Ryan Tubridy.

Tubridy asked him questions about the economy, his role in creating the economic bubble that had burst so painfully and Bertie Aherns timing in stepping aside to let Cowen come to power just before the bubble burst. Tubridy did also ask Cowen about reports of his drinking but the leader of Fianna Fail managed to deal with the question in a good "everyone enjoys a couple of drinks at the weekend with friends" kind of way. Perfectly valid, who doesn't like the odd drink at the end of a hard week in work. I watched the interview on RTE Player and initially I thought that Cowen had come out of the interview quite well and he had gone up in my estimation. A man trying his best in difficult circumstances and holding on to the belief that what he is going is the right thing for the country as a whole. According to a survey run by the Sunday Independent 41% of people who watched the interview thought the same. Not bad for a politician who prior to the interview had a 15% approval rating.

Now it turns out that after the interview Cowen sat in his dressing room removing his makeup and cried to a Sunday Independent journalist that he had been mugged by Ryan Tubridy. For anyone who doesn't know Tubridy the idea of him "mugging" Cowen is laughable both physically and mentally. Tubridy is a light weight fluf TV presenter whose idea of heavy weight issues is a debate on who had the better tailor Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. Cowen on the other hand is supposed to be the elected Taoiseach of this country, though he wasn't actually elected Taoiseach, he was appointed Taoiseach when Ahern resigned.

Whatever sympathy I had for Cowen after the Late Late Show interview vanished when I read his comments to the Sunday Independent. First of all why on earth is he crying and whining with journalists after coming out of a TV studio? Who allowed that to happen? Someone should be fired, either his press secretary for incompetence or Cowen for insanity. Secondly after all that has happened since he became Taoiseach where does he get off being publicly annoyed at any questioning. The man has led us into the greatest recession in decades. He has overseen a property bubble and crash. His budgets bought elections by putting this country into hock to pay for benchmarking. Yet at no stage has he faced the public and answered their questions as a party leader seeking election. I suspect Cowen now will never face questioning from the public. He'll be dumped by Fianna Fail before the next election. He is a millstone around the party, a walking talking PR disaster, stumbling from one bad news story to another. Get rid of him now and salvage what little is left of the government and the Fianna Fail party. Feel sorry for him if you want, he'll just go cry on the shoulder of a journalist and moan about how unfair life is.

Dublin in 1911

2009-09-02T22:01:00.001+01:00

The National Archives of Ireland have released the 1911 census. This is a fascinating resource with scanned copies of the original forms filled in by households around Ireland available to download. Personally when I downloaded the form for my grandfathers family I discovered that my great-grandfather was born during the famine. My great-grandparents spoke both Irish and English, something I can not do and neither could their children. They had 10 children 7 of which were still alive at the time of the census, my father remembers that another 2 died young after the census. Those were harsh times in Ireland.

But my family came from outside Dublin, for Dublin people there is even more than just their family history. The website contains lots of information about the city in 1911.

There were, by 1911, 330 trams operating on lines which ran for 60 miles along the city’s roads, drawing the suburbs tightly to the city.

Those trams ran on 17 routes around the city. Today the Luas has 2 routes, covers 15 miles and has 40 trams. Maybe in some ways times were not so bad in 1911...

Brendan Grace is Still Alive?

2009-08-31T18:38:00.003+01:00

The Irish Road Safety Authority today dusted off the classic old safe cross code in an attempt to educate todays children about road safety. An it would appear that Gay Byrne has decided that the RSA needs to be hip with the cool young kids and rehired the 57 year young comedian Brendan Grace to dress up as a school boy once again and re-record his Safe Cross Code Song.

I understand next few months the RSA will be launching several new campaigns. The first will warn people about the dangers of not checking the shoes on your horse before setting out on a long trip. In October they will highlight danger areas of the country where highway men like Dick Turpin have held up stage coaches. Finally just in time for Christmas a new set of maps will be launched with the "Here Be Dragons" print moved west to reflect the fact that Mr Byrne, now into his third millennium as the number one celebrity in Ireland, remembers hearing news when he was younger that a Spanish explorer called Columbus has claimed to have discovered a new continent across the ocean.

Big Brother is Dead

2009-08-26T21:46:00.003+01:00

Channel 4 has announced that they are canceling Big Brother after this season. The world will be a richer place though the British government may now need to find a new employment program for hopeless fame junkies. The job losses in the paparazzi alone may add a couple of percentage to the unemployment numbers in the UK.

The death of the first hit reality TV show may not be the end, but if may be a sign that the plague of "reality" TV may one day come to an end.

Why Apple banned Google

2009-08-22T13:18:00.007+01:00

Apple have responded to the FCC's questions explaining the reasons why the Google Voice app has not been approved. The bit I found most interesting was how Apple used Visual Voicemail as one of the many reasons to not approve the Google app.

The Google Voice application replaces Apple’s Visual Voicemail by routing calls through a separate Google Voice telephone number that stores any voicemail, preventing voicemail from being stored on the iPhone, i.e., disabling Apple’s Visual Voicemail.

So Apple think Visual Voicemail is something worth challenging other companies on when those companies try to mess with Visual Voicemail and other features. Such a shame they don't apply the same logic to the networks who have exclusive contracts with Apple for the iPhone. Look at O2 Ireland who after launching the iPhone with Visual Voicemail in March 2008 have still not actually enabled Visual Voicemail and have in fact shelved the project. Then when iPhone 3.0 was launched back in June tethering with iPhones was added. O2 Ireland haven't figured out how to enable that either. Tethering works fine if you get the settings but O2 Ireland still do not officially support it. Why should they, they have an exclusive contract for one of the most popular phones on the market so why bother investing supporting the features of that phone. I guess Apple only need to protect the features of the iPhone when it's Google who change those features.

Happy Birthday Phil

2009-08-20T13:40:00.003+01:00

Today would have been Phil Lynotts 60th Birthday.

Happy birthday Philo.

Photos for Peoples Photo

2009-08-18T18:09:00.005+01:00

I've selected the photographs I want to display in Peoples Photography 2009. In the end I picked more than 20 but I'll narrow it down on the day and it's always good to have spares in case I sell some and in case I get bored looking at the same set of photos all day. Head on over to my photography site to see the final selection :-)

O2 TV

2009-08-18T15:38:00.003+01:00

O2 Ireland have launched a mobile phone TV service, something other networks like 3 had done years ago. Channels include RTE News, BBC World News, Sky Sports, and kids TV with new channels to follow later.

Sounds good but unfortunately the new service does not support the iPhone. Yet another service O2 does not provide for the iPhone same as visual voicemail and tethering. This time the iPhone does not support 3GPP 3GP which is used for streaming TV. I suppose we cant blame O2 for that but I'm looking forward to the day when O2 loose the exclusive deal with Apple for the iPhone. The prospect of competition in the market might see them finding solutions to all the problems with the iPhone on their network that up to now have been rotting on the TODO list.