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I was looking for a hotel listing and it appears that 1800 hotels has been force into “bankruptcy proceedings to restructure its debt”.

It seems the recession is rumbling on, Is this to to with the banks not giving credit to already established businesses ?…

I was listening to newstalk last night (the show was a repeat). David Cochrane was being interviewed, the topic was to do with a post that was made on the site.

David explained that he was contacted by the Gardai in relation to a post, he also went on to say that the Gardai can track down anyone who posts quite easy.

It’s easy enough to track down people if  all the information is given,  username and the details of the posters contact details (if any), also the IP address of the computer that access the site.

What is the law when then website is hosting in another country ? is Irish law or foreign laws ? (As politics is hosted in the US).

My advice if making a questionable post or transaction is to use an anonymous proxy service( google for it).

Or even the TOR network can be used.

The Mozilla plugin:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2275/

Also some addional sofware will need to be installed.

http://www.torproject.org/easy-download.html.en

NEWS FLASH!!!!!

The Moriarty Tribunal solicitors need jobs , switches focus to the banking crisis.

This to me will be the news headlines sooner or later.

Investigating the business transactions of Esat Digfone 20 odd years ago is a dead duck and a massive was of tax payers money!

I used my DIY skills a few weeks ago, I took it upon my self to tile a kitchen floor.
Here’s some picture of it:

I went to see this last night and all I can say is what a load of rubbish! If anyone can say that they did not cringe and laugh in horror at the embarrassment of this film, I would be surprised!

The film was trying to be something different than the normal Irish “depressing” films that have being made over the years. The comedy style was suppose to be quirky and “blue brothers” , but it fails miserable at this. The montage scenes are just to fill space and pad the film out, it doesn’t work.

I wonder who paid for this review?, I could not disagree more with this review. This is not a 4 star film, its a 1 star at best, I give them credit for trying something new.

And also what the hell is this : “Like a particularly inspired Father Ted episode, Zonad is a comic gem. From Ireland.” What head shop stuff was this guy smoking when he watch the film ?

And another review , would all these people not get paid if they gave the film a bad review.

NEWS FLASH !!!! the film is the “worse movie ever”.

I’m all for supporting Irish films and I have so far went to all of them that were release this year, but I felt that the media hype around this film is misplaced as i felt that after the film. I want my money back.

I feel that that after working for 4 years (IT dept) on a project
that employed up to 400 people across Europe and further afield, I
can’t understand why a short film that took six months to make is
getting more headlines than a the first FEATURE film out of Ireland
since the Bluth studios.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_Bluth_Studios

Again today RTE compound is ignorance but give a short film more of
the headlines:

Quote:
”
There is Irish interest in five categories. One of the nominees,
‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’, is in the running for the Best
Animated Short Film award.
Advertisement

Other Irish nominees include Tommie Moore, Director of ‘The Secret of
Kells’, Peter Devlin for sound on ‘Star Trek’, and Octagon Films for
the short film, ‘The Door’. ”

The Secret of Kells gets nominated for best animated feature film and
RTE adds this as a secondary note, I think as a news organisation
that can’t even get facts corrects should not be writing news.

If other news organisations can get it right, why can’t RTE ?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/movies/awardsseason/03kells.html

Come one, please see some common sense!

Just and update: 15 March I have not received an email back about this, I suppose I should not expect one either!

I’ve had alot of experience of hospitals lately, my mother has been in and out of them for the last 4 months.

The one thing I take away from the experience is that using hospitals in Ireland are anything but fun. There are alot of people who work in the industry that do their job and do them well, but I do think that sometimes they don’t do enough.

My main complaint is lack of communication between the doctors/nurses and us, they never offer up any information, (blood from stone comes to mind).

Taking days off to meet the doctors who make an appointment and then never show up till 3 hours later is extremely annoying.

Another problem was administration, sometimes the they did not even know if my mother was even checked in, or what part of the hospital she was staying in, (at one stage is said I’ll ring my sister to find out which ward she is in).

I suppose the biggest problem is passing the buck, no one is really responsible for anything.
The doctors are too busy only come around once a day(unlike ER , they don’t do everything for their patients). Not getting assigned the same doctor is another problem, having a doctor that knows the history is common sense.

I do think there is a lack of upper management skill and compantance within the HSE(Health Service executive), Mary Harney is an ideal role model for such a messed up system.

I registered a new domain bananarepublicofireland.eu and redirected it to the www.gov.ie website
I saw the documentary by David Mc Williams last night,its about the financial crisis.

It was nothing that the Irish people don’t already know, It nice to see the perspective that he gave it.

For example more people having less cosmetic surgery leads to job sheding in Ireland, or at least that’s what David Mc Williams said….

He is right the worse is yet to come, I think myself this is just the tip of the iceberg…

As very one knows china is trying spend its way out of recession, America is broke, Europe not far behind.

I think this might be the time to live in the middle of nowhere, like the Antarctic, its a bit cold but I’m sure it will be warm up soon.

I switched hosting provider within the last few months, I was running a VPS with unixshell in the states, but some of their transatlantic links dropped about ~20% of packets so it was slow for me.

Also for the resources I was given the cost was not worth it. My experience with plesk/virtuozzo is that it can be over subscribed. My new hosting company Byte mark give me a guaranteed amount of resources to my VPS a d so far the uptime has been good.

Bytemark uses linux KVM for their servers and have native IPv6 which is great, I also have twice the amount of ram and HD space.

This is a email that I send to the RSA in relation to eflow and their website.

Hi,
It seems that i cannot even register for an account with eflow tonight as the website is broken.

I want to make an official complaint against eflow

1. The website does not work correctly.

* I have tried unsuccessfully to fill out the form on the website and it keeps giving an error.

* Why should my tax money got to a service that does not operate correctly.

2. I cannot see if i have any plenties against me before I pay ( where do i check this)

I will have to pay a fine for not being able to pay the toll.

It seems that this service is suppose to be easy, from my experience of using it, it is anything but.

I am writing this strongly worded email to you so that I may voice my concerns and opinions of this so called value for service.

Regards,
Nils

I know this is not going to do anything about eflow and the crap over priced service that we (tax payers) have already paid for!
ARGH!!!!!!!

I was once active in a Linux group in Ireland, I tried to turn up to as many events as I could. But I have am not active in the Irish Linux user group for many years now, I suppose my frustration set in, in the fact that I was not based in Dublin. Promoting Linux became just too hard, maybe it was the way in which i tried to promote it, who knows ?

I look at the Ilug website every so often and I see the mailing list is getting less and less active all the time, why is this ?

Are people moving more towards IRC, instant messaging, has skype etc. taken over the role of having discussions online ?

I can take some responsibility, I suppose in the downfall of the Irish Linux user group. I don’t mean that in a bad way, myself as a loose member, never contributed an article, I did get involve in discussions every once in a while I was active in going to events. I found I gave up asking question on the mailing list, I just instead did all the research myself even though it took longer, in the long run it was better for my self-esteem doing it that way!. I think, correct me if I’m wrong, the I idea of a local lug for me anyway, would be learning and gaining knowledge from your peers. Why “reinvent the wheel” every time something needed to be learned. To be honest we would not have got passed the stone age then!

I think for new users of Linux having a good place to ask the “stupid questions” and get “good” answers is what a LUG is all about, when it ceases to a nice place, then new users turn away from trying to access this information, it almost becomes elite to be a member.

I gave a friend a lift to look at a new car recently, and I had to use the M50 toll road. Known that we where going to get changed 6 Euro for the journey my friend offered to pay the toll when we got back to Kilkenny.

We went on a Saturday, he but did not get a chance to pay the toll until Monday morning, the toll was paid and I forgot all about it. Then about a week later a letter came in the post from Eflow stating that I “unpaid toll”, thinking that it was already paid I ignored the letter(I should have checked). Then 2 weeks passed and I got another letter from Eflow saying that I have being fined €47.50…

I rang Eflow and it turns out that although the toll was paid, it was paid too late and the 1st letter was a fine notice of 6 Euro. So I rang the NRA (National Roads Authority) to complain against Eflow’s business practice that given people just until 8pm the next day to pay a fine was “a crazy business practice” and I argued my point for 15-20 Mins. Hey, I’m unemployed I have the time
In fairness he was nice on the phone and I sure was at the end of many phone calls like mine, He took my details and about a week later I got a phone call from Eflow, stating that they have accepted my argument(complaint) and the file is now close…

They never gave me a reason as to why they canceled the fine, I still think the policy of only giving people a day to pay the fine has to be against consumer rights in some way!

I think all the money put into Eflow could have being spend better and the toll road should be abolished, we pay enough in road tax already. If anything, given the current climate, they are more than likely to increase the toll charges.

I have enabled and used ipv6 on a number of machines, I did have this website enabled at one stage but due to the ipv6 pop being down for several months now, I deleted the AAA record from my DNS . I have my account and all my ipv6 tunnels with SIXXS using Heanet and OCCAID Inc. I never had a problem with Heanet so far, but occaid reliability has left me wondering if ipv6 at its basic level (tunneling) is ever going to get better. I have had to apply for two tunnels so far as occaid first pop that I chose has being Offline now for 8+ months now and their second pop is off line for at least 4+months with no fix time allocated. I could switch ipv6 broker again

There is a big push in the networking community to get ipv6 up and running and to get as many users using ipv6 but what happens when a pop goes down and all the feed back that is given is: tunnel broker has been notified. Sorry for seem sarcastic but Wow that useful information, a fix date would be better! Also I have noted before, asking such question to sixxs support people get rude or not very informative replies.

I do know that sixxs are offering a free service and they do rely on the pop ISP to make the service avaialble, I suppose when you have to go through the process of applying for a new tunnel changing ipv6 DNS records, changing the tunnel information in /etc/network/interfaces. It can be a Inconvenience and frustrating experience.
I will as of today apply for my third tunnel through another broker in the US. Sigh!

It seems that the Christmas blues are around the corner, people spending more money than they have I would assume with the banks not giving cheap credit any more and it will become more and more difficult to spend over the Christmas period. I for one will not be buying any expensive presents, to be honest if I do, I will make sure that its a useful present or at least show that I have put some thought into it!

I’ve always had issues with whaling of any sort; NORWAY, JAPAN, ICELAND say they are doing it for scientific reasons, I say that’s bullshit! It’s a way around the Whaling ban!!
And everyone knows it! Anyway I recently read on the BBC news website that there was suppose to be an agreement supporting the statement that Whaling does not decreases fish stock…

Quote from BBC news site

“Japanese scientists have regularly argued that whales may be competing with humans for fish”

You know what the whales were here before us, and I think they have more of a right to eat fish than we do! And in any case it is because of us Humans that the fish are being over fished! So if anything we should stop fishing and leave the Whales alone.

NORWAY, JAPAN, ICELAND are until they stop whaling off my list of place to visit!

Trying to pick a day when there are good waves, is a bit of a hit and miss affair. Thankfully there are some good websites to check and see what the local weather is like at the nearest surfing spot, which for me happens to be tramore, waterford.

Some site are:

http://www.windguru.com

http://www.magicseaweed.com

But I think for the best advice, it’s better to make friends with the local surf shop guru, ring ahead and ask the whats the story with surfing that day!

An organisation called Future Proof Kilkenny is holding a number of events from September to December.

It would be worth it for everyone of all ages to check out the events.There are kids and adult events,

from workshops to showing films on green and environmental issues.

I was in Galway with a few friends… Well they were all girls which is fine by me.. We rang some Hostels around 7pm(not the best time to call), which were all booked out but we did manage to find accommodation for the night. Then hit the night clubs of Galway in a bit of a pub crawl….Sunday we did the sights of Galway, not much to see. And heading to the Coral beach, it wasn’t great as it was pretty windy and a tad cold, but its was a nice stop, Then we went of the visit some islands. Driving till we ran out of road….There is some spectacular views along the way.

Then we drove to Clifden to out next hostel, Nice place, Cooked dinner (1KG of pasta). drank some beer and went to a pub. Then back to our accommodation for the night.

Monday we went and did some stop around Connemara, and had a BBQ near Dan O’ Harra’s house, that was nice, but a little windy. Then on to the Connemara, National park, at this stage it was cold and windy and raining, we trekked to the Hill top(well half way), The wind and rain was too much, but the experience was GREAT!
The there was about 5 hours of driving ahead which I was not really looking forward too… we made it back, for me to tell the tail

I’m starting a course in TEFL( Teaching English as a foreign language).This will allow me to travel to a different country and work without all the hassle of trying to find a job in the IT area. For a long time I wanted to learn a foreign language, so I hope that this will allow me to achieve this goal!

I am doing the 100 hour course which involves a 20 hour weekend course, 40 hours on line, 20 hours cert in grammar, then 20 hours in 4 special certificates. I hope to complete this a soon as possible, then start looking for jobs.
My initial plan is only to spend about a year teaching English as a foreign language, I want to go to a mainland European city but I’m not sure which one yet!
Watch this space!

I’ve been unemployed now for 2 week! hooray!!! I really only just begun to look for further employment. I’m a little lazy, the weather has been so nice,But the party must end soon. I have made use of my free time, I went surfing for the last few weeks in Tramore, Waterford.

Surfing is good craic! and when there are good waves it’s “like” totally cool and great fun.
One or the nice thing about Kilkenny, is the Castle it has a really nice park. I think every city (medieval) should have something similar, its nice just to relax on the grass or read a book but also the good thing is I live about 2 minutes away from it.

Once again I have my driving Test Fingers Crossed I will pass it this time.