Colin Manning

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 covers 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...

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 t...

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.

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 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 str...

 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 t...

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 an 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.