Colin Manning

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...

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 ov...

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 th...

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 seriousl...

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 is 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 moti...

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 abo...

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...