Colin Manning

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 commen...

[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 ...