My weblog

I recently went it alone, and now I’m trying to start my own business InHouseIT.ie ,providing(linux) IT support. I finished up in Blacknight in July after a year and a bit working there.

From my conversations on the phone to different (blacknight) clients I figured out that there is a market of this Linux stuff

So 2 months on and its really going slow, Who knew it would be this hard to start a business

I think my problem is that I’m not a business head and so I’m learning the hard way about starting a business.

To be continued….

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 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.

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!

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.

I recently needed to get broadband, so I went with 3 as the provider, 19.99 a month seemed reasonable.So far I’m unimpressed with the service, I’m in Kilkenny and according to the 3 website I am in good broadband coverage. I use linux on my laptop and configured it as per these instructions and i have it working as I’m typing this using it…

First impression was great, small modem and with some Velcro I could attach it to the back of my laptop screen(which would be cool). Using the service has been anything but cool in the 2 days I have used it I am not impressed. I get an average of 5-10KB/s, sometimes for the odd second or two I would get 40-50KB/s is this broadband ? I think I will just have to return it within the 14 days, I have already rang them in regards to this and I get some tech support person from India or what seems to be India, I’ve nothing against Indians but for its really hard to understand them and they just read from a script anyway, I told the guy I was using linux and fair enough there are few companies that support linux so I was not expecting any, but considering that I have the connection working, I just wanted to know why I have such a shite connection speed.I get a text book response, which is not helpful. I don’t even have a public IP address as I have a 10.x.x.x private IP address they must be using NAT or something similar, maybe 3 are trying to spare ipv4 address space.
That’s not my main problem! (I wouldn’t care if I have a good connection speed)

It seems that mobile 3G broadband is not ready for the masses, especially from 3 so if anyone reads this… Don’t buy into the bullshit or the service.

I’m going to see if I can get my money back next week. I wonder if clearwire is any good or the Broadband from O2, I wonder….


PING ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=268 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=4 ttl=53 time=182 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=5 ttl=53 time=171 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=6 ttl=53 time=182 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=7 ttl=53 time=172 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=8 ttl=53 time=193 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=9 ttl=53 time=123 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=10 ttl=53 time=433 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=11 ttl=53 time=142 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=13 ttl=53 time=159 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=14 ttl=53 time=267 ms
64 bytes from ftp.heanet.ie (193.1.193.64): icmp_seq=15 ttl=53 time=499 ms

--- ftp.heanet.ie ping statistics ---
15 packets transmitted, 12 received, 20% packet loss, time 14012ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 123.151/233.149/499.513/112.979 ms


See, I done proved it!

Well, As of next months I’m going to be unemployed I’m not getting fired! but a due to a lack of cold hard cash within the company. Its a pain in the ass but I see its as a good thing, I’ve not been a happy camper here for a while but didn’t quite know what to do, so I stuck it out… I’m going to try and take my CCNA part 1 as soon as possible, within the next few weeks or the next available exam period, and hopefully part 2 soon after, I’m self studying for it and it is tough going to sit down and read/take notes etc. I’m doing about 1-2 chapters per night. so I should be through the 17 odd chapters quite fast(fingers crossed).

I’m going to use RouterSim to study the parts i need access to H/W. The $229 it costs seems like a reasonable price. Virtual Box comes in handy for running windows

Now to fix my CV up…

This is a must watch documentary its about how humans dominate the world and our dependence on animals.
Warning:This is a very graphic film

I’ve been a vegetarian for the past 13 years, and watching this film gives me even more reasons to stay vegetarian!

I’ve been reading alot about the American Deficit and the Debt of 8+ trillion Dollars, Every day now it seem that the Dollar against the Euro is sinking like the titanic It’s pretty scary when you read how the finance of the country is setup! I would love a bank that would keep lending me money no matter what:) I came across this website www.militaryindustrialcomplex.com and it had the entire farewell address to be people of America from Dwight Eisenhower when he stepped down as president. It amazing that for everything that he warned about, is coming to pass… Really scary stuff..

I’ve read a great number of articles about Oil Peak, and for me it’s a ticking time bomb of our own doing..
I was just doing a comparsion of Cars from GM and Cars from a few European Manufactures, I’m really shocked that even still today the vast majority of Cars from GM on average get about 25MPG (highway)(Petrol) taking that US gallon is 3.78 Liters I’m amazed that Cars in Europe can get for 100KM 4.1 Litres with is roughly 55+MPG (Diesel).

So while the World is running out of Oil the US is happy to go ahead and still produce very inefficient cars. Why ?
I have read, if oil producing countries were tomorrow to ask for payment in Euro, the Dollar would not survive, and the Banks would call in the loans….the Dollar becomes virtually worthless if oil is not bought or sold in dollars, the need for banks around the world to have Dollar reserves would for the most part be null and void except for the usual foreign exchange(I think) The more I read the more I get worried that the house of cards is going to fall, and it won’t be a soft one! I have to wonder can Europe survive without the America ? Ireland is greatly reliant on America, A lot of American companies have HQ here, I suppose the question is, will Ireland survive without America?

A number of people wrote some books on the subject of Empires and compared America to that of Rome! Amazon has a few books on the topic!
Hmmm, only time will tell i suppose, and on that note.

Went on a stag 2 weeks ago, we hired out some boats and travelled up and down Shannon, here’s some Pictures.

It was very fun time, and I think that i would hire a boat out again, maybe smaller..
Thats about it.
In anycase I had a great time!

I Don’t normally post that many pictures.
But here is a few that I took over the last few months!

Pics from Kilkenny

Czech Rep and slovak Rep

What can I say

upgraded word press…