Colin Manning

Bye bye Facebook

2012-01-11T20:31:00.001Z

I deleted my Facebook account today. So maybe you'll be seeing more of me here.

Music Downloads

2011-10-16T12:45:00.002+01:00

I noticed that the latest version of iTunes includes iCloud. I took the opportunity to download some tracks I had purchased over the past few years on different machines. Ironically the only full album I ever bought from the iTunes Music Store can't be downloaded because it's not available in the Ireland store anymore.

It's interesting how big corporations and content companies want a free market when it comes to them expanding into new territories, but when it suits them they like to do things country by country. Last christmas I got some free downloads as a result of making some CD purchases at Amazon.fr. But I had to actually go to France, to download them!

I bought the album back when iTunes Music Store used DRM. It will be interesting to see if iTunes will still authorize it for playback.

When will content owners realize that they should stop pissing off the people who are actually prepared to pay a fair price for their content. It seems they are determined to make me install file sharing software on my computer just so I can access the content I've already paid for.

[rec]

2011-10-08T09:48:00.000+01:00

I watched [rec] last night. I had been meaning to watch it for a long time but it's not easy to do that in a house with kids. I was a non-stop scary ride. It's interesting that someone can still find a fresh take on the zombie after so many years of the genre. I was worried that the Spanish language and English subtitle might take from the raw reality TV feel, but it didn't get in the way at all.

If you haven't seen it, think blair witch meets 28 days later. It was surprisingly not that gory. Much of the violence happens off screen.

It's definitely worth a look.

Writing a Debt Ceiling into the Constitution is Pointless

2011-08-18T16:09:00.000+01:00

Recent proposals from the French and German governments on dealing with the Euro debt crisis are interesting. But writing debt ceilings into national constitutions is a bad idea. Countries that have constitutions generally use them to specify the relationships between the state institutions, details of how the democracy works, the rights of individuals, and the limits of state’s power. Very few constitutions anywhere go into specific details about state finances. Constitutions set out basic principles and ideals. The grubby business of politics is left to fill in the details. How to money is raised and spent is a policy issue and is largely left to the governments that the people elected. It is not a constitutional issue. The Constitution of Ireland goes into great detail to specify how laws are passed and the role of both the lower and upper houses in passing these laws. However it treats finances differently. There’s a section of the Constitution called “Money Bills” containing Articles 21 & 22.

One of the key functions of a constitution is to protect the people from the state. Constitutions are rarely designed to protect the people from themselves. The basic principle of most democracies is that politicians put forward policy options and the people vote for the policies they prefer. In many countries the people have voted to spend more money than the state earns and to run up huge debts to make up the shortfall. This is of course a stupid thing to do. But it is doubtful that a constitutional amendment ever should, or ever could, stop people from being stupid.

Allowing politicians to do whatever they want can cause problems. Electorates, for the most part, believe that the state is awash with cash and that it should spend that cash on them and their families. This is especially true in Ireland where the electoral system rewards clientelism. Politicians who refuse to engage with the client centric model, or those who propose fiscal responsibility do not generally get elected. The question is, however, should the Constitution be modified so that the state cannot borrow too much money. And if it should be done, would it actually work?

Debt ceilings might limit states so that their governments could not be stupid even if they wanted to be. But that might be a bad idea in itself. States may, from time to time, need to borrow lots of money (for example during a flu pandemic or war) Long term projects might also require money. If debt ceiling limits were in place in 1990, the unification of Germany might not have been possible. It is not certain that laws can stop governments from being stupid. There is very often wiggle room.

The main problem with constitutionally mandated debt ceilings is that they require states to super-dooper double-swear cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die promise to be good. But a constitutional amendment is still a mechanism internal to a state. A society that wants to borrow and spend will find ways to do so if it really wants to. It’s still only a form of self-regulation. Only external forces can cause a society to change its ways. That happened in Ireland when the markets started demanding very high rates of interest on Irish debt.

The amendment of the Constitution of Ireland poses some interesting problems. The President of Ireland has very few powers. She can, when the Taoiseach (prime minister) requests a disillusion of the Dail (parliament) refuse to do so, and she refer any bill to the supreme court for adjudication if she believes it to be unconstitutional. Interestingly the President is specifically precluded from referring any “Money Bill” to the Supreme Court. (Article 26) Despite the central role of the President in the Constitution, when it comes to money the President is expected to zip it. So clearly writing a debt ceiling into the Constitution of Ireland will keep some constitutional lawyers busy for some time.

Even after the many changes were approved by the Irish people, no one could be sure that Irish governments would behave more responsibly as a result. It is too late for Ireland. Someone else is already calling the shots. Constitutional shenanigans at this stage will make little difference. In fact, if the IMF demanded that we suspend the constitution and round up all the ginger people and put them in jail, we would probably have to do it just to keep the lights on.

A more useful question is whether or not such an amendment would have prevented Ireland from getting into trouble in the first place had it been in place. Imagine the Irish people had modified the constitution to include a debt ceiling before the collapse. How would that have played out? During the last election before the state went bankrupt the incumbent political party said that the good times could continue forever, and the house prices would rise forever, and the the banks were all in good shape. [No change there]. The electorate bought into this and voted for them again. [No change there]. The government proposed a somewhat flawed finance bill to the Dáil [no change there] but as a result of the changes to the Constitution the President now had the power to refer this bill to the Supreme Court.

So now what? What would have been different?

On a very good day a President of Ireland my be a civil rights activist, or a trained lawyer. On a bad day a President may be a career politician, a sports star, or a christian chat show host. Nobel prize winners in Economics only become Presidents on TV. It is not very likely that a president would have the competence or the confidence to tell the government and the people that elected them that they are wrong. Where would a president find an expert who hasn’t been drinking the same cool-aid as everyone else. How could the President be able argue that government policy was wrong, and still act within the constraints of the office.

Even if a President was able to determine that government was wrong, why would a President go to the political expense of triggering a supreme court review of such a bill? If the electorate didn’t want fiscal responsibility, it wouldn’t appreciate a President insisting it had to have it. Fortunately the President’s term is 7 years, so a first-term president might have time to be proved right, and a second term President can’t run again anyway. So half the time a President might have nothing to lose by doing the right thing.

Suppose the President sent the bill to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court judges are all trained lawyers. They typically know no more about economics than a chat show host President does. All they can do is listen to the arguments and make a call based on the evidence presented to them. What Supreme Court could argue with the State’s economists, numbers, and projections? In the run-up to Ireland crash, the few economists and commentators who asked tough questions that no one wanted to hear, were dismissed as crackpots.

Only external regulation can requires that governments behave. But what state would willingly surrender its rights to do as it chooses, and if giving up those rights required a constitutional amendment who would vote for it?

My Amazon Spending

2011-03-24T18:50:00.000Z

I was buying books online before the web. That sounds impossible, but believe it or not there was a company that allowed you to telnet into its server, search for, and order them. Books have traditionally been expensive in Ireland. Retailers had high margins and books were priced based on IEP/EUR equivalent of UK prices. There is no VAT on books in Ireland so they could be safely imported from the US without additional taxes.

I've been looking at my Amazon spend over the past years. My account details in Amazon list pretty much everything I've bought. It's been instructive. The main thing I've learned is that I probably need to buy less and read more.

Some of the figures are staggering. In 2007 I spent well over $1000 at Amazon. That was all books. I can't buy DVDs and CDs at Amazon.com. That doesn't include any books I might have bought at other sites like Barnes and Noble. My buying habits have changed. Amazon.com was my long term favorite, but Amazon.fr's free shipping in France has proved attractive. Now that Amazon.co.uk offers free shipping to Ireland my spend there is up.

2000 was strange year. I was actually living in the US then so you would think I would have spent more. I did a lot of shopping online in 2000, but not at Amazon I guess. I was a member of one of those 12-CDs-for-a-buck clubs, and so I ending up spending a lot on CDs, but not at Amazon.

2011 is shaping up to be a quiet year. I'm broke. Maybe I should start selling at Amazon.

The chart above is a class example of a misleading one however since three different currencies are shown in the same bar. US Dollars, Euro, and Pounds are not the same. An accurate chart would convert all the values to one currency before rendering the bars.

Have I bought my last CD?

2011-03-24T16:32:00.000Z

I did a bit of shopping in the January sales at Amazon. There were some excellent offers.

I bought 4 CDs at Amazon.fr in the 4 for €20 sale. I am quite happy to pay €5 for a CD. That's a good price. It's not that long ago I was lashing out €20 - €25 a pop.

But I think I am done now.

I have little sympathy for the troubled music industry. Even a few short years ago when I wanted to buy a particular single, it was not available. In fact there was no legal way to get it except wait until the whole album came out.

Amazon has gotten a lot of my money over the years, not because of price but because of choice. I remember many years ago going to one of the main retailers in Cork looking to order an old movie. They had no interest in acquiring it for me. Their business was based on selling many many copies of the most popular items.

I guess in time I will buy more at iTunes. So far I've spend less that €30. For now I think I will just enjoy all the music I've bough over the years.

Social Networking & Location Based Games in 1812

2010-12-22T13:25:00.002Z

Today is the draw for Spain’s Christmas lottery, known as El Gordo. It is indeed a big lottery, the biggest in the world. Tickets cost €20, but there is a very large number of prizes and some are very big. The ritual draw has been conducted in the same was since 1812. Wooden balls spin in large globes, one containing numbers and the other prizes. One school child sings the winning number, and a second sings the value of the prize. This shepherd like singing wafts from televisions, radios, and web browsers the length and breadth of the land and it goes on for hours.

The Christmas lottery is hugely successful. One report puts the participation rate at 98% of the population. Many people who do not gamble the rest of the year, buy a Christmas lottery ticket. But the lottery’s success is due to more than tradition and scale. Despite its age, it has two very modern ingredients: social networking and location based gaming.

One aspect of the Spanish lottery that makes it different from that of other countries is that a number of people share the winning number. It is common for family members, friends, or work colleagues to each buy tickets with the same number. If one wins they all win. This adds an unusual social dimension to the lottery. Tickets are also physical objects and unlike the computer generated tickets of modern lottery systems a winning ticket will be purchased a particular place. All of the winners of a large prize might be customers of the same bar. Tonight’s news will have reports from the village or town where the main prizes were won. Many Spaniards buy a ticket when they visit a town or go on holidays.

So the morning of the lottery many Spaniards will have their collection of tickets laid out on the table and it represents both their social networks and a log of the places they have been. For each ticket he or she will be able to identify the social group to which it belongs or the exact place it which it was purchased. It is this connection with people and places that makes the Spanish lottery so special. It seems that almost 200 years before Facebook and Foursquare, the lottery discovered some of the secrets of their success.

Hotel Termal Burgo de Osma. Remarkable Building. Unremarkable Hotel

2010-08-27T16:54:00.002+01:00

P1090546
Originally uploaded by colinmanning2002

This is an amazing building that is well worth a visit. Built around an old university, the building is respectful to the magnificently detailed stone structure but at the same time is modern, airy, and stylish. The glass dome at the center of the quadrangle that covers the underground spa. The building is a triumph of architecture and interior design.

The rooms continue the innovative mix of the old and the new.

The underground pool area, which is free to guests, is very impressive.

But Hotel Termal is a very good illustration of the difference between a great building and a great hotel. The service is terrible. The staff, if you can find them, are surly and unhelpful. One gets the impression that they would prefer if you simply went away and judging from the largely empty cafe and restaurant, it seems most guests have.

If facing grumpy staff does not start your day badly, the breakfast buffet will surely disappoint. The food in the café is embarrassingly poor and seriously overpriced.

Luxury and comfort is about more than designer furniture, stylish lighting, and nice sheets. It's about a feeling. And a stay at this hotel will not make you feel special.

If you are in Burgo de Osma you must come to see the building. But, if you manage to find a waiter, just have a coffee or a beer while you admire it. Resist the temptation to stay.

CAO Denial of Service Attack - My Arse

2010-08-23T17:02:00.002+01:00

The Irish Times today reported that the Central Applications Office website that students use to accept their college places was unavailable for a time this morning due to a denial of service "cyber-attack".

A denial of service attack is not like a hacker attack where a criminal tries to gain access to a server in order to read some files contained on the server or to modify the contents in some way. During a denial of service attack the criminal attempts to overwhelm the web server with thousands and thousands of bogus requests for web pages. The requests become so numerous that the server cannot handle the traffic and so legitimate customers cannot access the site contents either. It as if seventy thousand customers tried to get through the front door of a shop all at the same time. In extreme cases the web server is so overwhelmed that it just keels over and dies.

Since a denial of service attack does not really get the attacker anything, most DoS attacks are motivated by spite. Lithuanian banks and government services have been disabled on more than one occasion by attacks that originated in Russia and many believe these attacks were state sponsored cyber-terrorism. It might be interesting to speculate about what the motivation for an attack on the CAO website might be.

The CAO was very quick to announce that the failure of service was the result of an attack. Without detailed analysis of the server logs it would be difficult to distinguish between a DoS and seventy thousand customers simply turning up all at once. In the case of the CAO, however, the office actually asked all seventy thousand customers to turn up at once, so it is no great surprise that there was a short sharp spike in server requests.

If it turns out that the bulk of the requests came from overseas computers in Eastern Europe and Spain, for example, then it probably was a coordinated denial of service attack. I suspect however that the bulk of requests came from Ireland where thousands of of anxious teenagers got up out of bed early and went online to find out which college courses they got into. That so many of them did so as soon as they could, should not have come as a shock to anyone and the appropriate infrastructure should have been put in place to deal with them.

In a world of invisible online badies lurking in dark corners of the Internet it is far to easy to blame anonymous others for an institution's incompetence. If the CAO got it wrong it should fess up and apologise instead of blaming the online boogieman.

Charter Cities

2010-08-16T21:59:00.000+01:00

I read an article about Charter Cities lately and I'm facinated. I was thinking about something like that, but my ideas were not at all on the scale being considered. Econimist Paul Romner has really thought it through. The idea is that a first world country would lease land in a third world country and administer it. It is fairly radical, and of course politically incorrect, to suggest that anything other than infrastructure and geography is holding back the thirld world. But corruption, poor government, and poor policy making also plays a factor.

The classic example is Hong Kong which did much better than mainland China despite similar conditions.

I have been thinking that the transition in Cuba, when it does come, could be more successful if the government of Spain loaned the country a large number of civil servants. They are largely incorrubtable, well qualified, and Spanish society has experience with transition from a totalitarian dictatorship to a democracy.

More about Charter Cities at CharterCities.org

Your Country Your Call - Cisco Sponsored Censorship

2010-03-23T01:07:00.006Z

YourCountryYourCall.com is a very interesting site where people are invited to make proposals for improving Ireland. The project has a prize fund of EUR200 000 and its major supporters include the President. Cisco is one of the main corporate supporters.

Some of the proposals are very good and very interesting. Some are just interesting.

Contributors can comment on proposals and vote for them.
I proposed the following:

Allow the public to pose questions to the Taoiseach and Minsisters online to be answered in the Dail (9 votes)
Allow taxpayers to allocate a portion of THEIR tax to what THEY think is important (12 votes)
Make Ireland a digital privacy safe harbour for data (9 votes)
Open source text books (12 votes)

The most popular (non-spam) proposal has 609 votes, so I am not expecting a trip to the Aras to collect my EUR200 000 any time soon. I did make one other proposal which got 32 comments, but you can read neither the post nor the comments. The moderators of the website have removed it.

My proposal was that we "Abandon the Irish Language". I'm sure many readers thought it was just a troll (noun: an e-mail message or posting on the Internet intended to provoke an indignant response in the reader) but I was quite serious. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, but that's for another post. There were many comments and some name calling. I pointed out that the Irish language movement has been hard at work now for about a century, and it has not succeeded. It is time for this society to have a serious discussion about what aspects of our culture can be saved and what aspects are worth saving.

The moderators of the site do not agree. This is from the site blog:
"Inappropriate proposals
A core objective of YCYC is to create a platform that will enable the presentation and development of ideas that can be put into action to develop opportunities for investment, employment and consequently prosperity in Ireland.

Unfortunately not all the proposals submitted to date are similarly motivated. ... The source of those postings have their own agendas and are not compatible with the objectives of Your Country, Your Call. On that basis they are no longer posted."

I have some issues.

The proposal with the most comments (267) and most votes (798) is about some drug that should be made available. And while I have no opinion on the usefulness or otherwise of this drug, I suspect there is a bit of spam voting at work. But no corrective action has been taken there.

I have no doubt that if Irish became the primary language of the country (ahead of Polish and English) that the opportunities for investment, employment, and prosperity in Ireland, would be severely hindered. Yet somehow utterance of this heretical fact is not permitted. Furthermore I have no doubt that investment, employment, and prosperity in Ireland is being held back by forcing our young people to study Irish.

However, even if my proposal was of no merit, I do not believe that the moderators should have taken the extreme step of removing it. The rather ridiculous proposal to solve the twin problems of energy dependency and low self-esteem in pets, by putting cats and dogs on power generating treadmills, remains. As does the impossibly impractical, but presumably noble proposal to make Irish the official language of the USA.

In a week when Google moved from China to Hong Kong rather than tolerate censorship, I wonder how Cisco would feel about sponsoring censorship. I guess like China, Ireland too, has subjects that may not be openly discussed.

Air France Overnight Bag - some thoughts on lost luggage

2010-03-02T16:41:00.000Z

[I found this cleaning out my website. It was written in 1999. There were no blogs back then]

Should you ever have the dual misfortune to transfer through Charles de Gaulle and find that your baggage did not do the same, be sure to ask for your consolation prize. After you have been told that your transfer time was too short, despite being six hours, ask for your Air France overnight bag. This is a veritable treasure trove of chinese plastic goods and French perfumes, that will keep you in top condition over the following days. Well, following day anyway.

In addition to the obligatory tooth brush and toothpaste it contains a handy T-shirt. Proudly boasting that it is a gift from Air France. What it should say is "my bags went to France, but all I got was this lousy T-shirt." Designed to prevent you sleeping naked while your clothes are located, this one-size-fits-all T-shirt affords discretion to only the shortest of men.

A fold out hair brush with a mirror for a handle will ensure that yout hair is in order and a comb provides more portable matainance. A sachet of Roger & Gallet Fragrant mild shampoo will let you wash your hair. once.

The packaging on the Roger & Gallet bar of perfumed soap informs you that this is the kind used by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Why her majesty uses men's soap is not explained on the box, but it is not the place of economy passangers to comment on the washing habits of the Concorde classes.

A nail file and clippers tends to your tired feet and the shaving foam and razor inclded in the pack give an excellent shave. Those with unsteady hands will be gald to know that a pack of tisues and a plaster are also provided, should either of these procedures result in injury. The tube of moisturiser included is excellent for finsihing the job off. A tube Lancôme gentle smooth deodorant cream and a bottle of Lacoste aftershave will ensure that you smell nice, even if the clothes you flew in have to be worn for days.

Swanning around your hotel room, clean-shaven, clipped, coiffured, moisturized, smelling like royalty and wearing nothing but a T-shirt must make you irrestable to French women because Air France also provides you with a condom. Only one mind you, but travelling between terminals at CDG takes a lot out of a man. And, like the T-shirt, one size fits all.

Ryanair Strikes Again

2009-12-21T21:59:00.000Z

The master of the small print and nickel and diming, Ryanair, has figured out yet another way screw customers. Over a year ago (15/11/2008) I advised the reader to take his or her chances with the bank when paying for goods at UK Duty Free since the exchange rate offered is invariably worse than what most banks charge.

Ryanair has been converting UK Pound purchases to Euro for some time now in order to cream off the usual 1.5% cut for itself. So despite insisting that flights originating in the UK are priced in Pounds, it is quite happy to actually charge Eurozone customers in Euro. I recall complaining, some time ago, to the Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs at the time, but nobody there seemed terribly concerned. What's interesting is that Ryanair is no longer content to take just the bank's cut for itself. The rate it calculates is way off the prevailing market rate for the currency exchange.

But at least now customers have the option to choose. I guess displaying prices in Pounds and then charging in Euro at a totally made up rate would not have fooled regulators for very long. So choose to go with your own bank, and not Bank of Ryanair.

For bonus points pay with a pre-paid MasterCard gift card, like those available at shopping centres. These don't attract the EUR5 per person per leg charge, that regular credit cards do.

Article on Public Servant Bashing

2009-11-30T17:50:00.002Z

I enjoyed this article in this weekend's Sunday Tribune about media bashing of public servants.

snippet:
DNA tests on a nurse from Enfield recently discovered she is a direct descendant of a family of cruel kitten killers from the 1890s. Investigations into the background of a teacher in Kilkenny revealed that wealthy ancestors on his mother's side used to stand outside the homes of starving people during the famine, munching potato salad sandwiches and feeding the leftovers to the local bird population. What else would he do with that kind of history but look for a job in the public service?

Courts Service Online

2009-11-29T13:07:00.002Z

I went this morning to the website of the Courts Service in the hope of downloading a PDF of the forms needed to make a Small Claims application. My fabulous German kitchen is still unfinished, and the company that was installing it seems to have ceased trading.

I was amazed to discover that I didn't need to fill out the form because I was able to complete the entire process, including paying entirely online. The Small Claims Court is designed to be cheap and easy, and the application was certainly that.

That's what online government should be like. Hats off to the Courts Service.

Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, and Charts

2009-11-12T22:22:00.017Z

The recent Irish Government report Delivering the Smart Economy provided me with a number of great examples for a class I like to give sometimes about how poorly (often deliberately) designed charts and graphs can be misleading without actually lying. Now I can replace some of my contrived examples with real life ones.

The first example Business Expenditure on R&D is unusual. It shows business expenditure on R&D by indigenous and foreign companies over the years. Bizarrely the graph codes the information with bars of three rather colours than two. The far too subtle drop shadow above the bars is meant to point out that the bars are overlaid on top of each other. At a glance it would appear as though the foreign investment is not significantly greater than the indigenous because the total areas of of their respective colours is comparable. A more honest designer would simply have used two colours and stacked them one atop the other. This (the designer might retort) would make the individual data points more difficult to read since some mental subtraction would be required. But this problem can be resolved by actual values appearing on the chart as they do anyway. My stacked two-colour version shows the relative performance of both sectors more honestly.

In Edward R. Tufte's superb book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
the author warns of the Lie Factor and cautions against using two and three dimensional shapes to represent one-dimensional data. The second graph Growth in Total Turnover is unusual in that it uses colored circular areas to show the values on the linear axis in the center. As with the previous graph the overlay of one colour on the other is deceptive. But the use of circles here instead of rectangular bars adds another deceit. When the height of a rectangular bar is increased by 10%, say, the total area of the bar is increased by same amount. Increasing the height of a circle by 10%, increases the area by 21%. Doubling the height of a circle, increases its area four-fold. This effect of makes the increase from 2004 to 2006 appear larger than it actually is.

The Total R&D Expenditure chart pulls the same trick, but this time confuses the issue with off-center circles and semi-circles. Strangely the data points do not appear at the circumference of each coloured area, but at the mid-point between the area boundaries. The caption is confusing. I am not sure if these are year on year figures or cumulative ones. Either way the Lie Factor is very big. The 2008 value is roughly 2.7 times that of 1998. Yet the circle used to represent it has an area 7 times greater.

A similar technique is used to illustrate the Trend in Higher Education R&D Expenditure. In this chart a near five-fold increase in expenditure is depicted with an circle well in excess of 100 times the size. My more mundane line chart reflects the increase more accurately.

Bad Spelling

2009-10-27T20:28:00.001Z

I saw a sign today at a hostel that said "NO VACANCY'S". What really puzzled me was that it was a LED sign that appeared to have been mass produced. The end of civilization, as we know it, is nigh.

Dexter Season 1, Google's China Policy, and Blasphemy (way to segue!)

2009-10-19T22:06:00.004+01:00

I am working my through Season 1 of Dexter. It is slow going. Not because it is poorly written, but because I find it so disturbing. When something in on TV you have to watch it or miss it (so 90s), but on when watching on DVD you can come up for air if needed.

Dexter is a psychopathic serial killer, who only kills other serial killers. The violence in Dexter is not cartoony, and although much of it happens off screen it is still a bit disturbing at times. But what worries me most is that Dexter might get caught. Having already paid good money for Season 2, it is safe to assume that he doesn't get caught, but I find the suspense and the tension too engaging at times.

Feeling for Dexter is strange. It does not sit comfortably with me and I wonder if the show is experienced differently by US and non-US audiences. Dexter goes to great lengths to ensure that he only kills bad people who have beat the system. This makes it OK, sort of. And this is a recurring theme. In one episode a police officer shoots someone in broad daylight apparently without cause. We subsequently learn that the victim was a very bad man who had done very bad things in Haiti. So that made it OK.

The show is set in Florida, where, no doubt, evil serial killers end up being executed anyway. So Dexter is only meting out justice really. But if your value system does not accept the basic premise of the death penalty, his actions are harder to justify.

With only two episodes to go I hope the climax does not disappoint.

----

As a total aside I was very impressed the other day to hear on NPR the Google CEO's explanation of the company's China policy. After all, Google should and must comply with the laws of the countries where it does business. What fascinated me was the 19th century anthropologist tone of condescension about countries with no political freedom and no human rights. But of course laws vary from place to place. If Google's technology was used by law enforcements agencies in the US to capture and convict a teenage murderer, most Europeans would be horrified by company's role were the teenager to be subsequently executed. But Google isn't responsible for the laws of the US. And lest I delude myself that I come from a society more civilized that both China and the US, it is worth noting that it won't be Google's fault, if one day my blog results in my being convicted in Ireland of blasphemy. I won't be dissing any saviours, prophets, nor space aliens (you know who you are) any time soon.

Interlacing of the Body Snatchers

2009-10-07T22:02:00.004+01:00

Classic Sci-Fi Collection
EAN: 5050582513738

I recently bought a Sci-Fi Box set that had six old movies in it: Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Thing From Another World, Incredible Shrinking Man, This Island Earth, Creature From The Black Lagoon, and It Came From Outer Space. I like old movies and I thought some of them would be fun. I was most interested in Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956] since this is a very famous movie. Mercifully the movie came in both the original Black & White and the colorized version. Someone who is going to be interested enough to pay for a movie like this is not going to be interested in seeing a version with colour added sometime in the 1980s. I was very disappointed by the quality of the picture. The box claimed that the movies were digitally re-mastered. Not only was the picture quality shabby in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it was interlaced. This means that the DVD was made using a transfer from video tape rather than actual film. That is very disrespectful to the film maker and to the customers who forked out hard cash for the DVD. This is the kind of shabby treatment from Hollywood that makes would be paying customers turn to illegal downloads.

More than you bargained for at Dunnes

2009-09-22T20:30:00.002+01:00

This evening at Dunnes the checkout girl had a terrible cold. She was wiping and blowing her nose the whole time. That's not the kind of thing one should be doing during a global flu pandemic. And in the course of her work she touched everything I am going to eat for the next week or so. Interestingly Dunnes is also one if the few public places I have been lately that didn't have hand gel despensers at the doors.

Bye Bye Eircom

2009-08-06T15:15:00.002+01:00

My Eircom broadband will be disconnected in the next 24 hours. The company made the classic mistake that large incumbent near-monopoly operators make : denial. For almost two weeks I had problems with my internet service. I concluded it was an issue with the name servers. I went several times to the Eircom website to see if it was a known issue but there was nothing there. When I eventually read about the problem it was in the Irish Times. I continued to have problems but the Eircom website insisted that although there had been a problem it had since been resolved.

When I contacted Eircom to find out how to have my service disconnected (there's no easy way to find this information) I got a form response telling me that all was well, but telling me none of the things I asked for.

When I eventually spoke to someone today I got the expected "not our fault" attitude. That was a mistake. "Eircom is very very sorry" was the only appropriate stance to take. At various stages over the past few weeks Eircom could have taken corrective action that might have resulted in my not quitting the company. Only some of Eircom's staff were working on stopping the cache poisoning attack. What were the others doing? They could have been contacting customers explaining what was going on, apologizing, and offering refunds. Despite repeated requests to Eircom to stop calling me to tell me about their fantastic offers, I still get calls. Except the one time I actually wanted one.

Small companies need to get new customers to succeed. For a big company like Eircom success is all about keeping the customers it has.

President signed Bills

2009-07-23T23:16:00.003+01:00

I was disappointed to learn today that President McAleese signed both the Defamation Bill 2006 and the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Bill 2009 into law. The president of the Republic has only two non-ceremonial powers. One is to refuse a Taoiseach's request to dissolve the Dail and the other is to refer a potentially unconstitutional law to the Supreme Court. One would think that since both of these laws were so controversial that they would have been worth testing.

In fact the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Bill 2009 is probably exactly the kind of law that the framers of the constitution would have had in mind when they wrote it. The President's role is to protect the people and against any government that might attempt to trample on their basic rights. But President McAleese is not the kind of president that is going to rock the boat or stand up to the government. She never was.

The people of Ireland are slightly less safe now and their civil liberties are damaged. Hopefully the Supreme Court will repair them in due course. I wonder though if the presidency itself is now damaged beyond repair.

Regulation Good, Free Market Bad ?

2009-07-20T12:30:00.003+01:00

Recent problems in the finance industries have given many commentators good cause to call for better regulation of the sector. I am a great believer in the power of the market to sort the wheat from the chaff and I generally think that the market should be left to its own devices. Free market economics has gotten a bad rap lately, especially in Ireland. For many years government policy fanned the flames of the property bubble. A variety of tax incentives distorted the property market and cause prices to rise much higher than they might have had the market been left to function normally. Yet somehow the facts have been distorted and much public discourse seems to revolve around the premise that the free market is to blame for the country’s woes. There are indeed reasonable arguments that tighter regulation of the financial sector might have made things a little better. But of late these have been distilled into the simplistic principle that regulation is good and deregulation is bad, and that this principle may be applied across many sectors of the economy. This troubles me.

Political and economic discourse is hampered by the use of one word for two very different kinds of regulation. One kind of market regulation is necessary and proper, while the other is not.

Consider the airline industry. If I inherited an Airbus 380 from a rich uncle, I could not immediately start flying paying passengers from Dublin to New York. I would have to demonstrate to the relevant authorities that I have qualified pilots to fly the plane and engineers to maintain it to the required standards. This type of regulation (let’s call it standards regulation) is entirely sensible. However, it is not that long ago that all flights between Ireland and the U.S. were required to stop a Shannon Airport whether or not there were any passengers wanting to embark or debark. The Shannon stop-over was kept in place to provide an income to the airport and to satisfy the political and economic special interests of the region. It is only very recently that the U.S. and the E.U. agreed an open skies policy. Before that airlines could not fly to and from the cities their customers were interested in. This kind of regulation (let’s call it market regulation) is entirely improper and is usually employed as a result of political pressure by special interest groups or as a form of protectionism.

The taxi industry in Ireland is a good illustration of the way in which the single term for both forms of deregulation muddies the debate. Until a few years ago in Ireland the taxi industry was market regulated. Any person who had met all the standards regulations had to first purchase a taxi plate. The number of plates was limited because of market regulation and so a plate cost the order of €100 000. Existing taxi drivers opposed deregulation because they had the market sewn up. At certain times there were not enough taxis on the street. It was not until this indirectly resulted in a death, that the system was changed. Now in order to operate a taxi the only regulations are standards regulations. In fact the standards have become higher, with fares more tightly regulated and new meters that issue receipts. Existing taxi divers who were in favour of more (market) regulation were very much opposed to more (standards) regulation. Taxi drivers now complain that there are too many taxis on the street and they cannot make a good living. Interestingly in recent times Irish drivers have become resentful of the mostly African immigrant drivers. Despite their initial opposition to higher standards regulation, they are now calling for higher standards in the form of language and geography tests in an effort to make it more difficult for foreign drivers to work. This is interesting because it uses the usually useful standards form of regulation in lieu of the usually unhelpful market regulation. This is indeed a clever trick, that is often employed where the appearance of a free and fair market is required.

The debate on the deregulation of the bar industry was similarly muddied by the lack of clarity. At present in Ireland if you have premises suitable for use as a bar, you cannot open a bar without separately securing a pub license. The number of licenses is limited by market regulation and so they have a high value. The sole purpose of this market regulation is to maintain the income levels of current bar owners (quite a few of whom are politicians themselves). However the entire debate centered around how deregulation would be bad for society. All of the examples used related to lower standards.

So next time you hear someone talking about regulation ask yourself a few questions. Are they talking about market regulation or standards regulation? If they are supporting market regulation ask who are the vested interests and what to they stand to gain? If they advocating improved standards regulation, you can breathe more easily provided you assure yourself that the standards regulation is not being used as de facto market regulation.

Regulation good, free market bad, is just far too simplistic for these complex times.

A bit of humour

2009-07-08T23:19:00.002+01:00

I saw this on a student's page. Thought it was funny. Very Pet Shop Boys, methinks.

Spencer Tunick (non) Exhibition

2009-06-29T12:47:00.003+01:00

Th exhibition of photographs taken by Spencer Tunick last year was on recently. It was called an exhibition, but they didn't even go to the expense of making prints. The photos were projected from a PC. It is interesting that despite the huge fanfare that accompanied the taking of the photographs, the display of the photos themselves was a non-event. The artist, as far as I know, did not even put in an appearance.

This suggests that my suspicions were justified. It was never about creating photographs. It was about hundreds of people getting naked in a field. The photography was a side show.

I am a bit disappointed by the pictures that were displayed. I found some of Tunick's other work very interesting. The Blarney pictures are a bit twee, sort of John Hinde postcards with naked people.

Googlemobile

2009-06-04T14:56:00.004+01:00

The googlemobile drove past my house today at 1442, so I guess I will be on street view in due course. I was expecting it to look more impressive. I had hoped to stage some frightfully clever piece of performance art in the front garden. Perhaps a commentary on the survielance society, but in the end all I had to show was my empty coffee cup on the window sill. The siñorita will probably give out about about that once a week every week until the googlemobile comes around again.

The month in the run up to an election seems like an unfortunate time to build up a street view database. Election posters all over the place will obscure some views, will date the pictures, and will send the face blurring algorithm into overdrive.

Weeds Season 3

2009-05-24T22:47:00.005+01:00

I like Weeds. The episodes are short and densely packed with plot and wit. It is a dark drama based on a widow who turns to drug dealing to support her suburban lifestyle. There's plenty of interesting commentary and observation of the conformity of suburban life, and the thin veneer that cover the dark goings on behind closed doors. Weeds inhabits the same world as American Beauty.

I think though that it misses the mark slightly. The problem with Weeds is that it is not dark enough. The inevitable violence of the drug business has a cartoon quality. So the danger that drives much of the plot and the tension is somewhat unreal. When one character is very seriously injured in a non-drug related incident, his injuries and his pain and suffering are played for laughs. Some interesting characters have become cartoon stereotypes. So when another character is beaten up (off screen) by a drug gang it's hard to take it seriously. Instead of being like the Desperate Housewives meets The Sopranos, Weeds has a Buffy the Drug Dealer vibe that disappoints.

I don't think I will buy Season 4. Season 3 ends on a stroke of genius. After three seasons some of the characters are tired. The plot is constrained somewhat by the world it inhabits. Having moved up in the drug dealing food chain the man character Nancy and the story arc doesn't really have anywhere to go. So the writers have destroyed the entire suburb in a fire. Nancy is going to move on, literally, and any characters that no longer work well can be left behind. This is very clever. But is also provides me with a perfect opportunity to say goodbye to Weeds. Wherever Season 4 take Nancy and Co, I'm not going with them.

Secretly tethered to the cloud

2009-05-16T12:02:00.004+01:00

Thee doesn't seem to be a place to report a concern about an application on the iTunes music store. So I am posting my concerns here.

I downloaded Lemonade Tycoon last night for my iPhone. I'm very new to the App Store and I was surprised to find so many free applications.

Apple vets all the applications before putting them on the store. The vetting process, is by all accounts, very tough and developers complain a lot about it. But I guess it's important to make sure that applications don't contain anything malicious. After all, an iPhone virus sweeps around the globe story would be too juicy for the world's media outlets to resist.

I think Apple has missed something though and I don't think the vetting process is strict enough. I downloaded a translation application last night. The free version of this program connects to a server to do the translation online. The paid version has off line translation built in in to the app. The iPhone is clever enough to send data to and from the web across any WiFi network it is connected to, in preference to the 3G phone network. But if it's not connected via WiFi then it uses the phone network for the data transmission. In some markets users are very sensitive to how much data they transmit across the phone network becaue their bundled data alowance is small. In Ireland it's only 1Gb. I really needed to know that this application was working online. And it didn't seem to be very obvious. As it happened I was at home. But if I was on the bus while I was checking it out, I'd have been very annoyed to find out when my mobile bill arrived that I had been paying for the priveledge.

Apple needs to work on some sort of labelling scheme to make it clear when an application is online, offline, or both. Obvioulsy, when I check the weather or the newspaper I am aware that this information is online and doesn't live inside my phone. But applications like this are actually available in two versions, so my expectations could easily have been wide of the mark.

Which brings me to Lemonade Tycoon. This is a repackaged version of a very old PC game. It's actually a great little game and it's free. Bizzarely, however, the game asked me for my sex and my age group. This information had no bearing on how the game was played. Was this information relayed back to EA Games? Did my phone send information about how long I played for? If so this raises two very important issues.

Firstly I had no expectation that an application such as this would use some of my monthly data allowance. If it does it sould be clearly labelled as such.

Secondly and more importantly this is the serious privacy issue. If an application is going to send back information about users to the developer, then the user should be advised of this up front. In Europe we have laws about that kind of thing. This is all the more worrying because my iPhone is not even remotely anonymous. Since the application was purchased with my iTunes account and the phone has a telephone number that identifes me, the potential privacy risk is much greater than that of a regular web browser. Any data collected is easily connected to me, my credit card, and my phone number.

If this sort of data gathering is allowed to continue unchecked then the handy shopping list application I download some day might end up relaying details of all my purchases to the application developers who might later use it for purposes I had never agreed to.

Apple had best take care. If users discover to their horror that the hours of game play on the commute to work, resulted in hours of expensive data transmission the iPhone's halo may become tarnished. And iPhone used to spy on customers headlines might prove irresistible too.

iphone

2009-05-10T21:02:00.002+01:00

I got an iPhone for my birthday. So far I'm pretty impressed with it. If I was in charge of Apple there are a few things I'd change, but it's pretty clear that a lot of thought has gone in to it. I wouldn't want to write a novel on it. But I could certainly read one.

How We Blew the Boom

2009-04-27T19:59:00.001+01:00

I saw a very interesting documentary recently that did a very good job of explaining how the Irish economy went so wrong so quickly.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0318/howweblewtheboom.html

Boxer does a runner

2009-04-21T10:29:00.002+01:00

Boxer has decided not to go ahead with its plans to offer commercial DTT channels in Ireland. One wonders if they thought the whole thing through properly in the first place. Between the cable companies and Sky, pretty much everyone in Ireland who wants more than the four national channels, has more. Boxer would have had to compete either on choice (impossible given the bandwidth constraints) or cost. Certainly offering the basic selection of UK stations and a few more for about EUR10 a month would be attractive to many since the entry level pricing for cable and satellite is the order of EUR30 a month.

However satellite customers wanting to pay less can just cancel their subscriptions (as I have done) and get the UK free-to-air channels free anyway.

The Broadcasting Commission of Ireland is now looking at Plan B. But the consortium that came in second place is a rogues' gallery of companies that I wouldn't have a lot of faith in.

The Digital TV rollout is of national strategic importance. It's a pity that the rollout is not going smoothly.

If after the rollout of Digital TV all viewers have is the same number of channels off air as they had before, but viewed through an expensive set-top-box, they might ask what was the point. I have always argued that spectrum over Ireland is not that much in demand. The market cannot support any more mobile phone companies. There is little need for the time being of the bandwidth that the switch to digital would free up.

http://www.boxer.se/?page=1365

Ode to the Phonecard

2009-04-07T21:51:00.004+01:00

I don’t remember precisely when Phonecards disappeared from the cultural landscape. They somehow just faded away. Once almost every wallet in Ireland was incomplete without one. I guess I personally stopped using them in the late 90s when I got my first mobile phone. Many people with mobiles continued to use them because they were the best way to make international calls without a home phone. So for collectors of phone cards, and there were many, foreign students were the best source of used cards.

Phonecards were obviously, in hindsight, an intermediate stop gap between technologies. Cash payphones were cumbersome and expensive to maintain. Prepaid phonecards allowed phone companies to collect money for calls without physically having to go to collect the cash. Mobile phones were expensive to use and required minimum monthly commitments. But when mobile phone companies began offering prepaid mobile calls, the phonecard’s days were numbered. Anyone who was organized enough to prepay for calls from payphones, was organized enough to prepay for mobile calls too.
In the early days Irish phonecards were not unlike postage stamps. They were expected to reflect the national identity and the earliest cards depicted idyllic pastoral scenes of the Irish countryside and later national monuments. Soon however, eircom began selling advertising on callcards. Bands, concerts, movies, and breakfast cereals were all advertised on cards. Callcards were an ideal way to get a brand in front of the lucrative youth market.

I recently saw a notice on a phonebox near my house. The phone company is planning to take it away because no one uses it. I guess the humble phonebox is also destined to just slowly fade away.

Interesting links:
http://callcard.eircom.ie/news/index.html
Eircom Callcard Gallery

Adobe abandons Ads for PDF

2009-03-31T21:03:00.003+01:00

I thought it was a really clever idea. Many people publish content on the internet as PDFs instead of HTML pages. Thanks to schemes such as Google Ads, content publishers can make some money from ads embedded in their HTML pages. Publishers of PDF content could not do likewise until Adobe developed Ads for PDF.

Imagine you download a document on how to build your own PC. When you view the document and ad in one of the panels is downloaded from Adobe and displays information about an electronics store near where you live. It's a very clever idea.

But Adobe has abandoned this technology as of today. That's a pity because I think it could have worked with a bit of imagination and some elbow grease.

Oh well. Not all brilliant ideas make it. Google's plan for world domination is back on schedule.

Elgato Digital TV Decoder

2009-03-31T10:02:00.002+01:00

The recently bought an Elgato digtal TV decoder for my mac. I bought it bundled with a hardware accelerator for video compression. Both products worked very well but were a few things that disappointed me.

The digital TV decoder does HDTV only on Intel Macs. I have a G5 with 2 PowerPC chips and buckets of RAM. I expect it would have been able to handle HDTV. But the software didn't even try. The website did say that performance would vary from machine to machine depending on spec, but if it had say flat out that it wouldn't work on my G5 I wouldn't have bought it. The box did actually say this up front. But it was in my living room at that stage.

The hardware accelerator worked well but had some frustrating limits. Elgato's EyeTV software stores captured TV in an uncompressed format. The hardware accelerator did an excellent job of converting this to MPEG4. However the dimensions of the compressed video were limited. So even if I captured HDTV the accelerator would shrink it down. This is fine for folks with AppleTV since that doesn't do HD anyway. But the media player I have does HD.

I returned both products. In fairness to Elgato there was no fuss with the return. Although I did have to pay the shipping myself. Had I bought it at the AppleStore someone would have been sent to pick it up.

I will probably buy some Elgato products again. But only when I can do everything I want with HD TV.

Delicious Library 2

2009-02-24T23:46:00.000Z

Delicious Library is a really great product for Mac users. It is a library application that allows books, DVDs, CDs and the like to be cataloged using their bar code numbers. The really cool part is that if you have a webcam you can just show the application the barcode and it will do the rest. After it reads the barcode, it downloads track listings, author details, and cover art, and what not.

I felt very cheated that I was expected to pay to upgrade from version 1 to Version 2. I'm sure Version 2 is great. But I don't want to pay again for something I already bought.

Canceled my SkyTV Subscription

2009-02-13T09:48:00.004Z

I finally canceled Sky today. In fairness the service is excellent and is good value. But Sky pissed me off just one time too many. I have been angry at Sky ever since the data privacy fiasco when the company wrote to all its Irish customers telling them it had change the privacy policy and would be selling on customer details after all.

This morning I got a letter saying that I was going to have to pay 75c extra per month because I was paying by credit card instead of direct debit. That kind of pettiness really annoys me. Americans have a great term for it. It's called "nickel and diming".

Sky was keen to keep me. I was offered a 10% discount for the next 6 months. That more than makes up for the 75c. But I was pissed off.

So now I have 31 days of Sky TV left. I wonder what programs I'll miss?

Mac Mini DOA

2009-02-04T13:49:00.002Z

My work Mac (mini) arrived yesterday. It was dead on arrival. That's amazing. In my life I have bought 5 macs. And all 5 were faulty out of the box. It makes you wonder what kind of quality assurance systems Apple has. Of course, I'm a bigger fool to keep coming back again and again for more abuse.

Digital TV

2009-01-29T23:31:00.002Z

Los reyes magos left a digital TV decoder under the siñorita's Christmas tree as they did in many homes across Spain this year. It was a Philips decoder and was slightly more expensive that the others but was nice and compact. It very easy to set up. It prompted me for a country (Ireland wasn't there) and then a postcode. I hope the postcode was to make it more efficient in some way and is not part of some rights management issue that would prevent viewing of otherwise available channels. I was impressed. There were some twenty-odd channels and most of them were useful. Spanish networks are in the habit of broadcasting programmes both in Spanish and in the original version. That usually means English, although it was briefly entertaining to watch manga in 日本語.

I visited my sister in France over the break. Digital TV has come to France also. There, however, the programmes seem seem to be only in English. This is a wasted opportunity.

A buddy of mine called to the house today with his laptop and digital TV decoder. I wanted to see if the signal was strong enough at my house to justify splashing out. It was. Cork is one of the first places to have a digital signal. The only question now is do I buy a decoder for my computer or my TV. The live ability to record to the hard disk is pretty cool. But I would really like to get to see HD TV on my nice TV. It seems a waste not to use it if I can.

TV decoders are not available to buy in Ireland at the moment. That's a pity on account of the recession and all it might be the only thing in the shops actually selling. If I want one I'll have to import one from one the countries that uses a similar system to Ireland. And Amazon.fr ships electronics to Ireland. Strangely Amazon.co.uk does not. But in any event a UK decoder is no good to me. Both Spain and the UK are using a different system from Ireland. As far as I know the French system is the same as Ireland.

Decisions. Decisions. Decisions.

Munich

2008-12-19T13:46:00.002Z

I was in Munich last weekend for long weekend and visited the Christmas market in the old town. It and the shops nearby were mobbed. There's no sign of an economic downturn in Munich.

It is a very clean and organized city. I was struck, however, by just how many shops didn't have lifts. That's not something I would have noticed until I started going places with the buggy.

Eating out was about the same or slightly less than in Ireland. But I guess there are very few places left that are actually more expensive than home.

There's lots of shopping to be done in Munich. But I wasn't really in the mood and so came away empty handed.

But the Christmas market did fill me up with Christmas vibes.

Isaac's, MacCurtain St. Yawn

2008-12-10T21:51:00.002Z

We went to Isaac's on MacCurtain St tonight for the first time. I was surprised. I really don't know what all the fuss is about.

Apart from an interesting tempura, the menu was very boring. The sinorita's tempura was fun and as far as I'm concerned wasabi is the new black. But we were hard pressed to find anything else interesting on the menu. I opted for a goat's cheese salad. The salad was boring and the goat's cheese very thin on the ground. The sinorita, for want of anything interesting, opted for lamb. It was nice, but not special. I had some stuffed chicken. Again, nothing wrong with it. But very uninteresting.

The atmosphere at Isaac's is casual. Too casual. It hits that sweet spot that lies somewhere between cafeteria and bus station. Atmospheric 18th-century warehouse my arse. There's nothing screams not-atmospheric-18th-century warehouse like Formica.

I thought the food was over-priced. Isaac's certainly is not special enough to warrant the prices it charges. But I guess a place can get by on reputation alone for years. These days Isaac's just phonin' it in.

Merry X

2008-12-10T12:51:00.001Z

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Irish Pork Recall

2008-12-07T14:25:00.002Z

All Irish Pork products have been recalled because of a dioxin safety scare. Confidence in beef is surely to be hit also. This will have a serious impact on these industries.

Ironically I have been finding it increasingly more difficult to actually buy Irish pork and beef. Whenever I go to the supermarket for ham for my sandwiches it takes me ages to figure out if the ham is actually from Ireland or not. Often there are no Irish ham slices at all. Of course many traditional Irish brands no longer use Irish meat preferring to source it in Brazil.

This places these faux-Irish brands in a well deserved position. By not coming clean on the product labels about where the meat is actually sourced, they will suffer the same fate as the Irish products at a time when they could be cleaning up because of the scare. Now the misleading Paddy's Irish Style Rashers and Sausages and suddenly less attractive than the more honest Paulo's Pork and Samba Sausage.

Aldi refuses to say where many of its products are from.

Anyway all bets are off as far as I'm concerned. There was the chicken scare some months back, and now this. The government should have strict controls on all parts of the food chain and people in the food business should know their supplies. I'm not going to pay twice the price anymore for Irish meat. I'll buy the cheap and cheerful meat from who knows where, and us the money I save to buy health insurance.

Pay in Pounds at UK Duty Free

2008-11-15T14:48:00.002Z

In most UK airports it is possible to pay in Euro as well as Pounds. However even credit card users are now given the option to pay in Euro. This seems a bit strange but it may suit some customers to have the transaction posted in Euro rather than a foreign currency. In addition it saves them any extra or hidden charges that their credit card company may include. Whether or not this option represents good value depends on the extent to which your credit card company screws you and the Euro price offered.

Anyway Stansted Airport screws you more on the rate than Visa does. So now you know.

Ryanair, incidently, always charges you at your home rate even if the ticket is priced in Pounds. At the exchange is at a rate that Ryanair deems appropriate.

Lufthansa charges Irish residents more!

2008-10-25T19:53:00.005+01:00

I had an unusual experience this week trying to book a flight from Munich to Madrid with Lufthansa. I thought it was a bit silly that a one way ticket cost about ten times the price of a return, but the return was so cheap that I didn't mind so much.

I went to the Lufthansa website and selected English as my language choice and didn't pay too much attention to the country selection. I chose my flights and went to pay. On entering my credit card details I was told I had to start again because I was in Ireland but I had said at the front page that I was in Germany. I found it very inconvenient to have to start all over again.

I was startled to see that as a resident of Ireland I had to pay more for the same flights. And in addition to this the days on which the best fares were available varied also.

I contacted Lufthansa and after some initial very shabby customer service I found out that Lufthansa charges residents of different countries different prices. Some of this may well be related to taxes. If I am in Denmark, but I live in Ireland, and I buy a flight from Munich to Madrid with my French credit card, it could be difficult to determine where the point of consumption is and what the appropriate taxes are. However the difference in fare was much greater than can be accounted for by taxes alone. In addition Lufthansa explained in an e-mail I got form them that "for marketing reasons some countries can have more convenient fares".

I think this is a bit cheeky. If I turned up at the airport and asked to buy a ticket from Munich to Madrid it would be considered discrimination to charge me more simply because of my country if residence. So why should it be different online. Lufthansa is entitled to set any price it chooses for a flight from A to B on a given day. But that price should not vary with the nationality of the passenger.

I wonder do they charge Swiss more?

Idealism is not naivety

2008-10-13T23:30:00.010+01:00

I went to, what I thought would be my last, meeting of the Progressive Democrats tonight. However, it now seems likely that the party will continue after its leader and its Oireachtas members have abandoned ship. I don't blame them for doing a runner. The Irish electorate has never rewarded straight talking. It has never rewarded people who put the country before their party and before their own political futures. The PD brand is hugely unpopular and most who run for office as a PD will not have a snowball's chance in hell of being elected.

The party leader wants to give the party a decent burial before he goes to Fine Gael. I guess he hopes the party's epitaph will list all the things the party did for Ireland and will honour its legacy. It may in time. It the short term all it will say is The going got tough. So the PDs took their ball and went home.

I believe that Ireland needs a party that is prepared to stand up to vested interests (in the private AND public sector), a party that is not prepared to use the machinery of the state to prop up monopolies and cartels, a party that is not prepared to peddle power and influence for cash and support, and a party that puts the national interest first. The only question that remains is whether or not the Progressive Democrats wants to be that party.

The meeting was quite heated. People quite rightly wanted to know what the leader knows now, that he didn't know when he ran for the job. They expressed the view that he shouldn't have become leader of the party if he didn't want to lead it into the future. He is of the view that now that almost all of the party's policies have become mainstream, it is time to call it a day. He quite genuinely believes that there are no new policy fronts on which the PDs would be able to distinguish himself from other parties. I think he is wrong. We do not yet live in a Utopia. When we do we can call it a day.

The fact remains that very few people are prepared to vote for the Progressive Democrats. However a party with nothing to lose is uniquely placed to tell it like it is and to propose radical, perhaps even unpopular, policies. With 2 members of the Oireachtas it could once again be the voice of reason and point the way forward. A seat in the Oireachtas is not a worthless thing. It is a platform from which one can serve one's country.

When Michael McDowell took his ball and went home he failed to understand one very important thing. Serving one's country is often a thankless job. Running a country is like rearing a child. You measure your success by how well the child does. Not by how grateful he is.

My Pre-Budget Submission

2008-10-12T16:19:00.005+01:00

Dear Brians

Youze are muppets. Your policy of propping up your buddies in the building industry with tax breaks and incentives so that prices would keep going up has failed. Property in Ireland is over-priced. Some people paid too much for their homes (probably I did). The economy is slowing down, and house prices, if left to their own devices, will fall further. The bubble has burst. So just deal with it.

Please do not come up with some hair-brained scheme to distort the market even further just so you can prop up house prices a little bit longer. Any proposal that makes a distinction between new and second-hand properties will be a transparent attempt to keep the developers happier a bit longer.

The people of Ireland need to be cured of their obsession with property. 25-year-olds do not need to own their own homes. Renting is perfectly respectable. Borrowing 10-times one's annual salary is just thick.

Any further attempts to keep on the good side of the property developers will eventually cause more problems. It's just a question of now or later.

Why foreign banks should not avail of Republic of Ireland guarantees

2008-10-03T17:18:00.002+01:00

A number of non-Irish banks operating in the Irish market have expressed concern that they are at a competitive disadvantage because the state guarantee on bank deposits and debts does not apply to them. They are right to be concerned. No sane Irish depositor would leave their money in a non-Irish bank where they would risk losing it, when they could easily move it to an Irish bank where it would be safe.

However the Financial Regulator of Ireland has the power to regulate only Irish banks. RaboBank, for example, is regulated by the Dutch Financial Regulator. If RaboBank was behaving recklessly or improperly the Irish regulator would be powerless to act. So I think it is very reasonable that the guarantee apply only top those banks over which the state has some control.

Once again the Irish have pissed off Sarkozy, this time by ruining is planned EU-wide guarantee. However I think this was always a bad idea, again because of very national nature of the regulators. I would not like EU-taxpayers' money to be used to underwrite some shabbily run Bulgarian bank. Because responsibility for Bulgarian banking rests solely with Bulgaria, any costs associated with a failure to do so rests solely with the taxpayers of Bulgaria.

It is very clear however that Irish banks have been very reckless in their lending. Their lending practices caused the property bubble. Had banks lent money only to those who could afford to pay it back (like me) house prices would have satyed at reasonable levels. For many years the Central Bank and the Finacial Regulator both complained about their behavour - but did nothing. The government did nothing either. It is as though everyone was happy to continue in their delusion that everything would be great forever provided nobody actually pointed out that the emperor had no clothes.

Of course the government of Ireland has bailed out financial institutions in the past. In the interm, Irish banks have acted illegally, acted against the national interest, and even helped customers evade tax. And now they are to be bailed out again.

Irish Solution to a Global Problem

2008-10-01T21:57:00.002+01:00

The Irish government's guarantee of deposits and debts issued by Irish banks puts the US bailout in the ha'penny place when considered on a a per capita basis. My personal share seems to be about €100 000. Of course the risk being taken with Irish taxpayers' money isn't as great as the risk in the U.S. I don't expect the U.S. tax payers to ever see much of their money again.

What amazes is the interconnectedness of the money markets. The Irish guarantee has seen an unanticipated rush of capital into Irish banks, especially in the U.K. where one can simply walk in to a branch. This is causing a knock-on crisis there and across Europe.

There's a very interesting article on the Irish Times website.

Nearly There

2008-09-29T12:25:00.002+01:00

I've been sick for over two weeks now. But I think I finally have those little microbes on the run. Hopefully the anti-biotics will finish off the last of them, or I'll be back to square on. Sometimes I wonder if the cure won't kill me!

Bus Muppets

2008-09-22T19:30:00.002+01:00

I was on the bus the other day and it passed a number of people waiting at a bus stop because the driver believed the bus was full. The bus wasn't full. In fact, there were even seats but this was a reasonable conclusion for him to come to because there was a big crowd of people bunched up the front. I guess some people prefer to stand. But why don't they stand then at the back so that more people can get on the bus.

The Other Billion

2008-09-08T01:51:00.005+01:00

As if my day hadn't been multi-cultural enough, I went to a Brazilian bash tonight. It was the drinking tail-end of a capoeira weekend. It was great fun. The DJ was good. The live music was superb, and the dancing was fantastic.

As if my re-integration weren't tough enough, the people working behind the bar were Spanish. I found myself worrying about whether Heineken is masculine or feminine. Heineken sounds masculine, but ceverza is definitely feminine. Is it un pinto or una pinta? I went with pinta.

Brazilian parties are not where married men go to avoid temptation, but I wore my wedding ring on one hand and my super gay watch on the other. I made it home safely, but not before concluding that, more or less, the entire population of Brazil is going straight to hell. And I successfully deferred the decision to join them.

Onam Festival

2008-09-07T17:39:00.003+01:00

I went to a dinner today in Bishopstown GAA as part of the Onam Festival organized by some members of the Indian community of Cork. The food was tasty and good fun. It was vegitarian because some Hindus are vegitarian. I thought it would be very hot but it wasn't. The flavours were wonderful. Thankfully our hosts organized forks for my buddy and me. The deputy mayor was the guest of honour and he was a bit late. That meant there was a bit of waiting. I was looking forward to the dancing but left before it started.

I met some very nice people. All of my Indian friends have left Cork now. I'd forgotten how welcoming, hospitable, and kind Indians are. I know it's a bit much to draw conclusions about one billion people based on having met only a few of them. But I don't care.

Wine Museum

2008-08-25T20:57:00.003+01:00

The wine museum in Peñafiel is quite missable.

Chañe Fiesta

2008-08-23T20:43:00.005+01:00

I survived the Chañe fiesta. It was hard work. Despite the reputation Irish people have for drinking we are not a patch on Spaniards. Of course the reputation Irish people have for drinking is so great, that most Spaniards simply conclude that I am a poor excuse for an Irishman.

My sister-in-law was one of the reinas de la fiesta. This meant that she got a new dress but had to perform a few official duties. She was more concerned, however, that with only days to go she and her buddies didn't yet have a peña. I thought my nickname of reina sin peña was hilarious, but no one else found it funny. Peña is a difficult word to translate. The best I can do is shebeen. A peña is a drinking den where teenagers go to drink, smoke, and make out. In Spain parents accept that their kids are going to drink. They don't just give them money for this, they often give them real estate too. In Chañe most peñas are disused farm buildings. Not so long ago people kept their farm animals in the village. Now that that practice is no longer allowed there's a glut of sundry unused sheds and shacks. However since my sister-in-law and her friends had not secured a decent peña she informed us one day that they were going to build one. I haven't seen that kind of gumption since I lived in the US. Sure enough they found a plot of land and built a peña. As a rule I don't think children should be allowed to do their own welding, but no one was injured.

I spent time in my brother-in-law's peña. This was a bit less third world, with couches, a bar and theree fridges. Thursday was the first night of the fiesta. It was an uneventful night in the peña until someone noticed that the guy who ran the kiddy train was packing up for the night and offered him money to drive us around. So for the rest of the night we went from bar to bar drinking, like everyone else, except we went from bar to bar in our very own train. It was a real hoot. I had great fun doing my regal wave to the plebs.

I adopted a one night on one night off strategy, so Friday night I took it easy. I went to the ecological bull run. These bulls were more interesting than those I'd seen in other villages because these bulls squirted water. This meant that even grown ups ran away from them screaming. The layout of the street was bad and everyone was bunched up in one corner so it wasn't as much fun as it could have been. It was still terrifying for many children and one little boy pissed his pants.

Saturday was a drinking night and so after dancing with the siñorita in Plaza Mayor until 4 when I went to the disco with my brother-in-law. The disco is always interesting because it has become a de facto Romanian bar. The owner even plays Romanian music so it's always an interesting night. I left my brother -in-law to his fate at 7. He surfaced hours later.

There was a procession on Sunday after mass. At various stages the procession stopped, the band played, and people danced the jota. I must learn the jota.

I was horrified to learn that when people said Sunday was the last day of the fiesta they didn't mean a beer shandy after mass. Sunday was in fact another all out drinking night. But not for me. I had cashed in all my party chips on Saturday night and there was nothing left in the bank. There was no band in Plaza Mayor Sunday night on account of el crisis (the recession). Bands cost several thousands of euro a night and so Chañe had opted for just three nights worth.

The siñorita went to a bull fight and decided without any prompting from me that it is cruel and pointless.

Spanish Journalism Reaches New Low

2008-08-20T19:43:00.002+01:00

Spaniards are not big newspaper readers. The tabloid end of the news market in not in print at all but on television. Spanish TV stations are awash nightly with B-list celebrities and their comings and goings - often from the airport. The sight of a celebrity walking away from the camera, ignoring a "journalist" repeating the same question over and over is a nightly occurrence on TV. Footage, that in most markets would be considered useless, makes it to air in Spain. A celebrity not giving an interview is still "news" worthy.

But today Spanish journalism reached a new low. Perhaps in was the panic. Or perhaps it was the familiar territory of MAD-T4 that cause a lapse of judgment. Today after a plane crashed on take off at Madrid Barajas Airport I saw family members of passengers on TV not giving an interview. One distraught woman was being pursued as the left the terminal building.

Celebrities court the media. The don't get to complain when the attention becomes too much. But everyday people should be treated with more respect. And victims of crimes or accidents and their families should be allowed to deal with their trauma and terror in private, if they wish. Even if such people give their consent, and this woman did not, there's no was under the circumstances that that consent can be informed and considered.

Even if the "journalist" on site was caught up in the moment. The news editor should not have allowed the coverage to go to air. Shame. Shame. Shame.

Ella Elle L'a is No.1 in Spain

2008-08-12T15:57:00.004+01:00

I am both happy and sad that Ella Elle L'a is No.1 in Spain. I am a big fan of the original France Gall version from her album Babacar. I think it is one of the greatest pop songs of all time. It is also one of the few French songs that have been popular in the English speaking world (Voyage Voyage, and Joe Le Taxi come to mind).

That this tarted up dance beat cover by Kate Ryan has made it to the top is interesting. It proves that you can force something to be a hit if you play it often enough. While the Baila Chikki Chikki EuroVision song promised to the the ubiquitous summer hit this year interest waned very quickly after the La Macarena). In addition this song was only available for sale on iTunes. This of course makes sense. The business of selling CDs has long since died in Spain. Members of the target market for a song like this probably don't even own CD players. And it's a long time since they paid for music of any format.

But if a dance remix of this classic Fench pop song about Ella Fitzgerald had to be made, couldn't they have used the original vocals by France Gall and given her the recognition and money she deserves.

Oh well.

Ecological Bullrun

2008-08-10T16:45:00.003+01:00

I was at an ecological bullrun yesterday. A bullrun is an event where the bulls are encouraged to run through the town, usually to the bull ring, and the locals run with (although sometimes after, beside, and under) them. The oldest bullrun in Spain is in Cuellar and the the most famous is, thanks to Hemmingway, in Pamplona.

I'd witnessed the Cuellar bullrun once but not participated. But I'd never seen an ecological bull before. An ecological bull is not one with so sophisticated a diet that it has a zero carbon footprint. An ecological bull is like a cross between a wheel barrow and a sittee!

Some children took it very seriously and dressed in the traditional white pants and shirt with red scarf. Others suspended their disbelief and ran terrified down the street as the crowd and bulls approached. Some skillfully crossed the path of the bull, like they'd seen on TV.

The rules for bullruns invariably state that those under the influence of alcohol cannot run. However as the bulls twisted and turned to chase the children drinkers in the crowd regularly topped their hind legs.

The fiesta in Chañe next week also has ecological bulls. But they cost the town hall €1000, so I am expecting something even more fun.

I saw a snake

2008-08-06T11:25:00.001+01:00

I saw a snake today. It was very small, but seeing a real live snake in its natural habitat is a big deal if you are Irish.

Iscar Fiesta

2008-08-03T23:33:00.003+01:00

Went to the Fiesta in Iscar last night. Saturday night is generally the biggest night of any fiesta. We arrived, unfashionably early, at about 11. The band didn't start until 12. The singer was not very good at all. It seems that the fiesta in Iscar was such a big deal that they had two bands!

It was about 3.30 by the time we left. Things were only getting started then.

The siñorita is having trouble finding someone to go to a bullfight with her on Tuesday. She knows better than to ask me. Kill it and eat it, or leave it alone. That's my view on torturing animals for entertainment.

Digital TV in Ireland

2008-07-22T12:26:00.005+01:00

The BCI announced recently that it has awarded three multiplexes for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) to Boxer. I’m quite excited because I am very interested in the technology, my master’s thesis was on video compression algorithms, and I think more competition in the market would be good. I have a number of reservations however.

DTT is not really about giving viewers more choice. Most Irish households who want multi-channel viewing are served by either cable or satellite. TV ownership has reached saturation point. Most people who want a TV set own one. The promise of High Definition TV and discs (Blu-ray) is a great way to increase demand for new TVs. Like the transition from Vinyl to CDs, and from VHS to DVD and now Blu-ray; capitalism’s greatest achievement is its ability to persuade people to buy something that they’ve already got.

Digital TV and High Definition TV are not the same thing. High Definition Digital TV has far superior picture quality to what viewers are used to. But not all digital TV is HDTV. Common or garden digital TV is not better that what viewers have now and for some viewers it may be worse.

Many households in the Republic of Ireland can receive analog signals from Northern Ireland or from Wales for free. The transition to digital and the subsequent analog switch-off will mean that these households will soon have to pay for what they now get for free.

Digital signals may not travel as far and as easily as analog signals. Digital TV signals do not degrade gracefully. So homes with poor but acceptable analog signals might not receive a watchable digital signal. So it is not a simple matter of upgrading every transmission site in the state. It is likely that some new transmission sites will be required.

An important motivation for making the transition from analog TV to digital has nothing at all to do with providing consumers with more choice. Analog TV is very inefficient and uses many more radio frequencies (spectrum) to send TV signals that would be required by digital TV. The amount of available radio spectrum is quite limited. Switching off analog TV signals will free up spectrum for other uses. In most markets in the developed world this spectrum is very valuable. Mobile phone companies and other telecommunications businesses are prepared to pay dearly for this spectrum and this has helped top up the public purse in many countries.
Ireland is different however. Successive Irish governments have failed to extract any real value from radio spectrum, preferring the beauty pageant approach to the auctions common in many states. This may be sensible however, since the terrain and human geography of Ireland can make universal service difficult. Simply selling spectrum to the highest bidder would leave the winers largely free to do as they wish and would likely result in a plethora of innovative services available to residents of the larger cities, and nothing elsewhere. At least beauty pageant contestants can trade off universal coverage commitments against high license fees. But even then t can be difficult to make money in geographies such as Ireland´s. One winner of a 3G mobile phone license gave it back because it couldn’t figure out how to make money.
So it seems that spectrum in the Republic of Ireland is not very valuable. But if there is little money to be made for the state and little benefit to consumers then why should Ireland bother at all?

The EU has decided that all member states must switch off their analog TV signals by 2012. It makes sense that the EU should get involved. The value that could be generated from selling spectrum in the Netherlands and Germany, for example, would be small if Belgium continued to pollute the airwaves with analog TV signals. So it is clearly and all or nothing proposition. However the geography of some parts of the EU limits the damage they could cause. Analog TV could continue to be used in most of Ireland without causing interference elsewhere. The same could be said of other regions at the edge of the EU, northern Scandinavia, for example.

While the EU specified an analog shut off date it did not mandate any particular technology nor did it insist on any encryption standards or rules. This was a mistake I believe. The US, Europe, and Japan/Korea all have large audio visual technology industries. They also have large industries based on software and other technologies. These industries could become world beaters if the right conditions were in place and give European tech firms a huge lead. Much of the technology of digital TV was developed in Europe. But now Europe risks falling behind. The standardization of the US market will allow for innovative products and services to be rolled out across the entire continent. This economy of scale and access to a large market will allow innovators to take more risks. In Europe the technologies used will vary from country to country. It is possible that the UK and Ireland will have different standards. This is a huge step backwards. A product or service developed for the UK market might need to be redesigned to work with Irish or French systems. This is a lost opportunity to create a single large market for products an services. The importance of standardization is best illustrated by the example of mobile phone technology. Because Europe settled early on the GSM standard it was able to make huge advances. The US, on the other hand, allowed a free-for-all with various phone networks opting for different technologies and standards. This standardization ensured that for almost a decade mobile telephony was the one area of technology where Europe kicked US butt.

Irish viewers will be able to watch the four stations that are currently free to air (FTA), on the multiplex awarded to BCI to the national broadcaster (RTE). However it is not clear how FTA will work in regions that have traditionally had signal spill-over. So viewers in Aachen, for example, who have long enjoyed free to air TV from the Netherlands might find technological locks in place to prevent them watching Dutch TV even if they have a strong signal and compatible systems. The EU could have required that all FTA transmissions be unencrypted, for example.

I have concerns about who will pay for the infrastructure that needs to be put in place for digital TV. The company awarded the three available multiplexes will not be erecting any transmission facilities. The actual transmission of the signals will be handled by RTE the national broadcaster. I am concerned that the use of this public resource by a private enterprise will not be on a commercial basis and that the taxpayer will end up subsidizing the private sector. When a second mobile telephone license was awarded to ESAT Digifone some years ago the company circumvented the many planning problems it was facing when erecting transmission towers, by using transmission towers in Garda stations since the police service was exempt from planning regulations. This eventually made Denis O’Brien a very wealthy man and he in one of the main investors in the consortium awarded the multiplexes by BCI. It is interesting, that once again a license to use a resource of the state (spectrum) has been awarded to one enterprise, on the cheap, and that state owned transmission capability is to be used by this enterprise in pursuit if its commercial goals. In many countries there is much discussion about privatizing the public sector. In Ireland we need to start by privatizing the private sector!

BUPA wins Supreme Court Case

2008-07-16T19:04:00.002+01:00

I was delighted to read today that BUPA won its Supreme Court case taken against the government's interpretation and implementation of risk equalization. Minister Mary Harney was straying far from her free market anti-monopolistic roots when she forced BUPA to pay the VHI cash to compensate it for the fact that it had many more older customers on its books. As a long time supporter of the Progressive Democrats I always felt this decision was wrong.

In fact, I cannot understand Mary Harney's obsession with the VHI. Almost all that is wrong with the Irish health service can be traced back to, one way or another, the VHI. If there were no VHI at all or if customers who wanted to skip hospital queues had to pay real cost of their insurance, the health service would be in a much better state.

Hell has a new sound track

2008-06-23T20:33:00.002+01:00

RyanAir recently rolled out its new jingle. It is among the most annoying things you will ever here. It reminds me of an 80s hit agadoo-doo-doo with a twist of the Benny Hill theme tune thrown in. I wonder is it specifically designed to be annoying so that you get out of the plane quicker after landing.
RyanAir tries to make money by selling lots of extras. I'd pay extra if they would just stop annoying me with ads during the flight. Please shut up!

Spencer Tunick Post Instalation Get Together

2008-06-18T21:08:00.002+01:00

I went to the Spencer Tunick Post Installation Get Together this evening. I expected it to be some sort of event, but it was just an informal get together. Many people were talking to each other about their experiences of the photo shoots. Everyone was very positive. I wonder if I have been to harsh.

One woman told me about another shoot yesterday in a car park. It was for women only and involved some foam. That raised an interesting question in my mind. If Tunick's thesis is that nudity need not be indecent, it can be art, then why segregate men and women. If nudity is asexual, why are so many of his photographs sex-specific? I learned a valuable lesson from that woman, however. She was over the moon to have been involved. If she was happy, why should I be offended on her behalf? This put me in mind of the naked leprechauns, and I realised that I have no right to be offended on their behalf either. She asked me if I would do it all again given the chance. That was a useful question. I thought about it for a bit and said I would decide after I saw the pictures. If they were good, then I would.

Although the event was from 6-8, it was 7 before Spencer arrived. He spoke very briefly and thanked everyone for taking part. He said he looked forward to us seeing the work in a proper context and not just in newspapers. Many people had newspapers. Of course the newspapers showed only pictures taking by press photographers documenting the process. The finished product is, as far as we know, still in Spencer Tunick's hotel room waiting to be processed. Some news photographers used zoom lenses to take pictures that clearly identified participants. Their private parts were covered up by black bars or fig leaves added in photoshop. I was disappointed by these pictures. If the picture editors were so concerned about modesty why didn't they just crop the images above the participants' wastes. Are knees that interesting? Of course their intent was to make spectacles of them. Some women's breast and faces were clearly visible in detail. If I had turned up to be part of an art work, and was unwilling turned in to a page three girl, I'd be very annoyed. But like I say, it's not my place to be offend on behalf of other people.

While complaining about Tunick's view of Irish people I had fallen in to the same trap as many others. It is about the product and not the process. It is impossible to judge Tunick's work until I see the finished product. The artwork will be good or not good. It will stand or fall all by itself. How it came to be is not the point. Most importantly it will be not or not good irrespective of author's intent. EVEN IF Spencer Tunick sees Irish people only as leprechauns, the work will still be good or not good. I should reserve judgement until then.

Spencer Tunick in Blarney: Porn at the End of the Rainbow?

2008-06-17T15:16:00.006+01:00

Weeks before in the pub it seemed like a great idea. But as the deadline for American photographer Spencer Tunick's naked photo shoot approached my, buddies dropped out one by one. In the end I got a taxi to the grounds of Blarney Castle. The taxi driver pointed out two protesters in the distance. It's not that long ago in Ireland that they might well have been real protesters. But it was clear that they were just having a laugh. I was able to tell the driver what their placards said long before we could actually read them: Careful Now & Down With This Sort of Thing. I wondered if Spencer Tunick got the joke.

I arrived as instructed at 3am. It was night and it was cold. Photography, by its nature, doesn't generally happen at night so there was no reason for us all to be there so early. It was almost two hours before anything at all happened. While the weather in Ireland is variable, it's easy to look up when sunrise will happen. There was no good reason to have us all waiting (albiet clothed) for so long. Quite a lot of people were drunk. There was also a lot of pot. I know little of such things and had been unaware that there is such a wide variety of blends available.

Blarney Castle was a sensible choice. The grounds are lovely and it is easy to restrict access to the area. I was a bit disappointed by what I felt was a bit of an Ireland + Building = Blarney Castle cliché, since the building is of little historical, cultural, or social value to Cork people. Shandon or Patrick St. might have been more meaningful to locals, but they would have meant nothing to a global audience. Besides, part of the charm of Tunick's work is how he takes well know locations and shows them in a fresh light. The pictures are simultaneously familiar and strange. So the well known location is important.

When it came time to get naked I was surprised at how comfortable other people seemed to be. I knew I wouldn't be bothered by it myself, but I thought that made me a weirdo. I'm not, it turns out. Or if I am, at least I have company.

Anyone who participated in the hope of seeing lots of naked women would have been disappointed. Although there were plenty female participants, if you are one of a thousand naked people all facing the same way, all you are going to see is thousands of ass cheeks. I concluded years ago that I my dick is of modest proportions relative to the rest of the population. But I was not quite prepared for the onslaught of statistical data supporting my conclusion. While surrounded by hundreds of women and their lovely curves, all I could think of was may place on the curve.

The first sequence of shots was in front of the castle. First we faced the camera with the castle behind us. Then we turned our backs to the camera. Finally we bent over and made cobblestones of ourselves. The press was close by for these shots. When in the cobblestone position I was a bit uncomfortable. Unfortunately Spencer did not make it clear when he was taking pictures and when he was not. So, like others, I was uncomfortable for a lot longer than was necessary.

For the second sequence of shots we moved to another field. The castle didn't seem to feature in these shots. Each woman took a red rose and each man a white. We were initially instructed for form lines of men and lines of women, so that there would be bands of colour. But later we jumbled things around a bit. The instruction to "open your flower" was an unfortunate turn of phrase that raised a few chuckles. We first faced the camera looking though our flowers. Then we turned to the left and held them high. Finally we lay flat on our backs and held the roses aloft. I wondered if the flowers meant something. But I expect it was the colour that Tunick was interested in.

That concluded the main business. In all we had been naked for about an hour and it was a bit cold, but not nearly as cold as I had expected. Some people's clothes had been moved, perhaps to clear them from the shot, so they people wandered for a while looking for their clothes. One gentleman seemed so lost that I was tempted to strip off again and give him my underpants.

The next set of shots was for women only. They were taken up a hillside where they were photographed under some trees. From a distance we could see them as they undressed, but couldn't see the shoot itself.

While I was waiting around I reflected on the morning's events. Spencer was very focused on getting the pictures just right. He stressed on several occasions that it wasn't all about being naked. It was about making Art. However this didn't sit well with the TV news cameras, radio reporters, and other press. Surely if the main focus was the end product then Tunick need have only sent some JPEGs to the TV stations and newspapers. If it was purely about the art, he need not have invited them to report on the process of making it. And while I myself find photography fascinating, I have to concede that it doesn't make for great radio. The popular press is not that interested in Art. It is interested in spectacle. How often does Art make the front page of Irish newspapers?

So why were they there? Therein lies some insight in to Tunick's work. It is as much about the process as it is the product. Perhaps even more so. He is as much phenomenon as photographer. Some of his pictures are not even that interesting to look at. It is the mere fact of there existence that it is interesting. How they were made is what engages the viewer. The fact that a thousand people met in a field and got naked to make art is the point. The finished product is secondary, perhaps irrelevant. If identical images were produced in Photoshop or by rendering 3-d models they would not be engaging. No one would buy them. The media were invited because Tunick's work has become about the hype, about his celebrity, about the interviews, and about the public's response. He would achieve much the same outcome if took no pictures at all. Although he would have nothing to sell.

When the women's shoot was over, it was clear from the whoops and hollers that they had enjoyed themselves. They felt good about themselves. Some of them were full of energy and one larger woman got her groove on for the distant crowd of on-lookers and started to strut her stuff. I love that Irish women are so comfortable with their bodies.

Although all of the women were asked to be in the women only shoot, exactly 100 men were required for the photo shoot in the river. When I arrived that morning I had decided that I was going to be down the back keeping a low profile. Being one of a thousand naked bodies was fine. Being one of 100 naked men would have made me a bit more identifiable. But I decided I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. I had brought a cheap and cheerful tea-towel with me in anticipation of being rained on, so I'd even be able to dry myself after my dip in the river.

Exactly 100 men were required because each was going to have one of 100 gold coins. I wondered what was the deal with the gold coins. Was it a statement about materialism? Was the river going to be cleansing us? Was it going to wash away our worldly possessions? Was it a commentary on modern Ireland? Once we were poor, but now Ireland is one of the richest countries in the western world. But if you take away the Hilfiger and the Armani underpants are we still the same people underneath?

Of the 700 or so men that had taken part in the main shoots only about 150 remained. As we gathered around, Spencer selected men from the group. I found this surprising. Much has been made of how Tunick's work celebrates the human form in all its shapes and sizes. Hand picking participants for the close up shoots seemed to run contrary to that philosophy. I guess in any work of art the hand of the auteur is always present. But when Duchamp, without whom none of this would be possible, elevated everyday objects to art he deliberately chose mundane, even unattractive, objects. I was ready to be a ready-made! But Spencer said he was looking for men he would like to find at the end of his rainbow. Bizarrely for a happily married man, in those few moments I desperately wanted to be at the end of Spencer's rainbow. I was always last to be picked at school. I was that useless boy in goal. This I could do well. I could be naked in the cold for as long as it took to make me art. Alas it was not to be. I was not one of the beautiful people. And I wondered to myself if it was better for my ego to be rejected while naked or while dressed.

In case we accidentally appeared in the background of the shot, us rejects had to leave. That was a pity because I would have found it interesting to see the shoot. Also I imagined that the instruction that this sequence was only for those without tattoos and tan-lines was another of the many things that had been poorly communicated. If one of those beautiful people was found to have a tattoo after he'd stripped off, I wouldn't be there to take his place. I couldn't even be a beautiful people understudy.

As I walked away dejected I started to but two and two together: Blarney, gold coins, rainbow. The men only shoot was not a critique of consumerism in modern Ireland. In Tunick's world Ireland + Man = Leprechaun! While I am prepared to forgive the Ireland + Building = Blarney cliché, the leprechaun stereotype is too much. Ireland has changed from a priest governed miserable backward country in the 1960s to one where a thousand adults can comfortably get naked together in a field. But Tunick still sees Ireland though the eyes of a 1960s tartan clad yank. While the event illustrated how open-minded the Irish have become over the years, Tunick and his company of naked leprechauns illustrate how backward the artist's own thinking is. The participants may have learned a lot about themselves from their interaction with the artist, but I expect that Tunick has learned little about the country, its people, culture, and economy. Despite Tunick's protestations that his work is Art and not pornography, he has managed, none-the-less, to degrade his subjects. I wouldn't be surprised to see the pictures published in the St. Patty's Day special of some nudey mag in the U.S.

As I binned my rubbish and tucked my dry tea-towel into my coat pocket I thought a bigger man would donate his towel to a naked and wet BP in need. But I'm not a big man.