When Virgin doubles cable bandwidth to 20Mbit. The real question you should ask is, when are we going to reliable 3MB 2.5MB 1MB (from a 3MB line) service in Ireland from Eircom and BT?
Ireland
With Eircom, seeing is believing
Eircom to invest €60m upgrading network
The correct answer is, It’s about time!
Tax Cut Reality Check
Here is the real question, has any party in Irish history ever delivered real tax cuts after they have been elected?
While I voted in the last local elections in Cork a few years, my poor election memory has raised the the yellow card with regards to political promises. They never seem to happen.
So with that in mind, can you really believe any politician, or any party when they propose a tax cut?
Could it really only be an attempt to buy votes?
I’ll cash in that reality check!
NO, I don’t believe them.
and
YES, this is just idol political jockeying.
I guess we will just have to tighten our belts again.
Real Gourmet Burgers
Having read Conor’s experience with Real Gourmet Burgers I finally had the opportunity to try them out on the way back to Cork from Dublin Friday night. And while I did think the chips (cooked in non-GM oil) were interesting, they were a bit greasy. But the Barbecue Burger was just great.
Thanks, Conor.
Real Gourmet Burger
057-8666669
M7/M8
Portlaoise
Co Laois,
Long trip to Shannon
Never ever take the Dublin to Chicago Airlingus Flight 92.
This Christmas I and the wife decided to save some time, I’ve been working in Dublin this fall, and the idea of driving to Cork to pickup the wife and drive to Shannon to catch flight 92 seemed too much work. So the wife took the train to Dublin, and we would catch the flight at Dublin after a short taxi ride. Knowing that we needed to get to the checkin early, I got us to the airport with three hours till the flight. Waiting in the nearly empty queue, watching a thousand others in their queues, I thought I was smart. We checked in with ease, and then spent the next two and half hours waiting on a plane arriving thirty minutes late. No bother we got on the plane for a thirty minute flight to Shannon, where we were instructed to deplane for an hour trip through customs.
We could have slept in and driven to Shannon and had a good lunch in less time then we wasted in Dublin. Take a bus, drive yourself, if you have to go through Shannon customs just to get to the U.S. save yourself the pain, don’t fly out of Dublin.
Bye Bye BT Broadband
It looks like after the many exchanges of emails, I will have to drop BT as a broadband provider. They are either unable or unwilling to pursue the VPN issues I’ve been having.
When I can connect VPN to my office with a 28kbs dial-up, and can’t sustain VPN traffic on a 3MB/512kBs BT connection, it’s time to change providers. Mind you I still believe that Eircom is at the root of problem. So with that in mind, what are the options?
I’d love to hear of any good broadband providers in the Cork area!
Render all your opinions, please.
Bumped again
I’m either getting popular or NOT, depending on how you read ‘Bumped’ but in any case I look to be, in the popular ‘reality’, bumped off Cork and Irish blog aggregators. 😉
A Generation lost
Crime statistics aside, much of the current crime has been committed by gangs. Gangs formed in the absence of alternatives in the infrastructure and jobs. Note also the glamorization of drugs and alcohol and the easy life. All these things are the results of neglect 10, 15 and 20 years ago of community infrastructures and youth facilities. Facilities still missing, and continuing to contribute canon fodder, in form of a lost generation, to the crime.
The old saying, the crows have come home to roost fits perfectly. And this will continue to happen until facilities, good facilities, youth centers, job training, and educational facilities. More funding for schools, and school facilities and good jobs, for students to look forward to working at, could provide alternatives to crime.
And of all things decentralization, of all things, could also be the facilitator of less crime. Rat studies years ago have noted that high population densities increase community violence. Decentralization of industrial jobs and government must lead to increased community infrastructure, schools, shopping and transport in more rural areas.
We are living in a generation lost, and it will not be mended by treating the symptoms, but by attacking the root causes. We will not save this generation until we save the next one.
The age of consent, should vote
Here is a novelty, if the decision on the age of consent should be lowered, why not let the citizens most affected by the decision be allowed to vote on the subject. Why not lower the voting age to 16 and put the decision up to the people. That would let the TD’s and Dail off the hook for any hard decisions that might affect their reign.
Passing the buck to the church, given their way, everyone will not permitted sex, at all! What’s good for priests, are good enough for the general population. How normal is that, no thanks.
The reality of he situation is, some 16 year olds are criminals, having nasty sex, in defiance of the law. The real issue is really education, no one in this puritanical country wants to educate the kids about sex, sexual health, and the emotional issues associated with sex.
Time for this culture to growup and find out where babies really come from.
What will 500€ buy these days
500€ that’s proximately what the surplus means to every man woman and child in Ireland today. What could you do with 500 Euros? Maybe buy a new government, or maybe add it with your neighbor’s 500 and help fix up the local medical facilities, or maybe your estate residents could help fund a rapid transit stop in your community. Maybe with the next budget, we the citizens of Ireland could vote for what we thought the budget surplus be spent on?
This Government is not in Business
Interesting, almost everybody I’ve talked to knows that government is not a business. So why is the government hoarding it’s our money? We gave the government money to spend on maintenance and infrastructure build-out, to help people and make the future brighter and better. If they aren’t spending it, give it back, they obviously don’t need it.
They are being told by ‘economic’ genius, that they should hold on to the surplus so that there would be funds for any crisis in the future. However the only known constants in the world are death and taxes. The government will ALWAYS have enough money, This government will always increase taxes when it needs it. It always allows energy, communications and transportation businesses to increase their rate at will, so we know that they will increase taxes should a crisis arise.
So why don’t we have a world class health system, why do we have high speed trains that can’t go high speed due to poor railroad tracks. Why do we pay taxes and get nothing back, except back talk from this government?
This week we will see how bad the hoarding will be. Who are they saving our money for, us or their ‘friends’?
Irish Mad dog
Why does Ian Paisley look like a man with a mad dog on a leash with regards to the Stormont attack by Loyalist killer Michael Stone ? Why is this a great thing, appearing to be a real moderate by demonstrating to the public what a real Unionist looks like? What a great tactic to insure control of Stormont by implying that he is the only one to claim control of the radical unionist movement?
It seems to be entirely too convenient.
Post Bertiegate comes the silent lie
Has any one noticed that the Irish Government has returned to the silent lie? That the Stardust does not need to be investigated, because no new evidence was found by the non existent follow up investigations that never happened. That the nursing home reports are never publish so long as the bathroom tiles are fixed?
The fact that the Irish freedom of information act will postpone any evidence from from coming to light about this corrupt and incompetent government does not make the problems go away. Except for the ministers, who can continue to be unresponsive to their responsibilities to the public.
Time for a change, will an honest politician restore the Freedom of Information? Or will we continue to be governed in the dark?
Or will the press begin to ask the hard questions, and not bow to the governments requirements not to questions their decisions?
Carnage week
Daimen Blake has a Stop the Carnage Week starting today, and I wanted to add my two bits worth. This last weekend four young men lost their lives. Everyone in the government is set to blame their youth and inexperience. But I see it differently, the accident happened on a bad road, near an unmarked (no center line) section of the road, in the wee hours of the morning, coincidently just as the pubs were closing.
Let’s put it in perspective, they were drunk, underage and driving too fast on an unmarked poorly build roads, a prescription for killing anyone, not just the young. The government won’t fix the roads, or close the pubs, or enforce the drinking age, so they are forced to blame the inexperience of the drivers as a lame diversion of responsibility.
Let’s face it we all had a hand in their deaths, for not teaching responsible drinking, and NO driving, and for accepting this government’s lack of attention to social, and infrastructure issues.
Polls and politicans, Truth is who you trust.
I find this amazing, when political polls indicate a rise in popularity like when Fianna Fáil soars in poll as Opposition suffers decline. Everyone in the captive press spew hours of dialog about how such results could have happened. But when polls are negative, they spend that same effort trying to demonstrate that the polls were flawed, or biased.
The press can not get it into their heads that the positive poll, while reflecting an unexpected result could be flawed, or even false in it’s results.