Big Brother Hopefuls

Big Brother is in town looking so bring out your freaks, nut jobs, misfits and deluded. Highlights from the story on BreakingNews.ie include

• “I’m hyperactive and have ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), so as soon as I drink cola or coffee I go mental.”

• The 24-year-old truck driver was hoping a striptease would win the judges.

• “I will miss my little girl if I get in, but it’s a chance for me to get started in a career,”
  

And my personal favorite:

• Dubliner Catherine Mahon claimed she got the day off work for the audition by pretending she had a hospital appointment.
  

If your bunking off work it's usually a good idea to not give interviews to journalists. I'm guessing she works for the public service.

I wonder if its too late to build a fence around the RDS and trap them all there for the good of the nations gene pool.

Poverty UCD style

I love this, it sums up exactly why I think the public sector pay deals that give automatic increases to everyone in the public sector, regardless of merit, are a joke. If you are going to have a protest about pay you should probably tell your fellow protesters to go shopping in Brown Thomas AFTER the protest is over and the journalists leave.

Perhaps the next time the UCD staff decide to hold a protest they will go to the students union to get hints and tips on how to do it properly.

[via Blogarrah]

Bed Bugs

There is a story on Boing Boing today about a bed bug plague in New York that reminded me about a not so nice side to backpacking in Australia. They were almost eradicated in the 1950s but have come back with a vengence in the last few years. Experts are theorising that international travel is to blame with bed bugs being carried back in luggage.

I fucking hate bed bugs. The east coast of Australia seemed to be crawling with them. All the way up the coast people were talking about where they had gotten bitten and how bad it was or wasn't. Some people, girls especially, were completely freaked out by the idea of them. Hygiene is an issue but some of the cleanest and most expensive hostels had beds with bed bugs, big hostels and small, cities and small towns, even some boats on the Whitsundays. It's all down to idiots bringing and using their own sleeping bags. The bed bugs get into the sleeping bags and then get carried from hostel to hostel. They also get into people backpacks when they leave them on beds. Most hostels ban sleeping bags and that helps but you still get people that insist on using their own sleeping bags instead of paying a deposit for linen.

Unfortunately for me it turned out I was allergic to the little bastards. I got bitten in Brisbane, ironically not in bed but after falling asleep in an arm chair in a TV room. Nothing I could do, except have anti-histamines handy, which cured any bites quickly and make sure I regularly used a clothes drier on high heat to kill any that made it into my stuff. Another handy tip from an Oz guide was to put backpacks into a black bin liner bag and leave it out in the sun to fry the little bastards.
[via Boing Boing]

Top Gear is BACK

Brilliant! After Richard Hammonds accident it looked like the show could be on indefinite break. They did a big show of welcoming back Hammond and will be showing footage of the near fatal accident later. Have to stop writing my Australia posts now (yes, I was trying to get the last few written in one go and post them together to get them done once and for all).

Update: They just showed the footage, and the crowd reacted with stunned silence. The right tire blew at 288mph and in .4 of a second the car was upside down and digging into the grass. It's a tribute to the engineering that the car didn't fly to pieces but it is still a miracle that just a few months later that Hammond is back on the show.

Update 2: Here is the video from YouTube.

On a side note I wonder why the BBC and other public service broadcasters like RTE don't adopt a similar YouTube style service on their own site? They don't have to put up the whole show, just highlights like this. The BBC do have streaming versions of many shows using Realplayer and Windows Media, but I find YouTube much handier. With YouTube about to pay contributors a share of advertising revenue on popular videos I'm sure they could come up with some revenue deal that would be good for everyone.

Leinster Vs Llanelli

Just back in the office after the Leinster Vs Llanelli Scarlets rugby game in Donnybrook. Bloody freezing. I'm sitting at my desk still shivering.

It was a scrappy game, I got there early-ish and grabbed a spot just behind the goal posts in the terraces. Leinster were brutal for all of the first half and 5 minutes of the second. Llanelli seemed to just run through them for fun. The crowd around me was pretty quiet as well. At one stage I was the only one in my area shouting for Leinster and I was standing there in a bright red Munster jersey. Bit unfortunate as well since the Llanelli jerseys were red so at first glance I looked like the only Llanelli fan in the terrace.

Leinster were 10-20 down 5 minutes into the second half but they suddenly got a try and Llanelli completely collapsed. For about 20 minutes Leinster got a some of easy scores and the Welsh seemed to have lost all interest in the game. Hopefully they do the same when they meet Munster in the Heineken Cup. They steadied themselves then and suddenly put pressure back on Leinster, though at that stage Leinster knew they had the game won and didn't work too hard. In the end the score was Leinster 44-34 Llanelli.

The match officials were having a bad night as well. The referee seemed to have never heard of the offside rule. The crowd scored one conversion despite the ball clearly going wide by applauding so the linesman just put up his flag. Next came a try which was just short of the line but the crowd started cheering and the ref, who was on the other side of the ruck, gave the score. Finally apparently at the other end of the pitch the ref completely missed a high tackle but called the game back based solely on the chants of the crowd.

I must go to the next game on February 16th. The nice thing about the Magners League is that it is still easy to get tickets and the games are held in Donnybrook which is across the road from my office.

Happy Australia Day

Happy Australia Day to all the backpackers and locals I met while there.

26 January 1788 was the date on which the First Fleet, under Captain Arthur Phillip arrived at Sydney Cove and set up the Colony of New South Wales. By 1808 the day that the Rum Corps arrested Governor Bligh, it was being celebrated as 'First Landing' or 'Foundation Day'. In 1818 (the 30th anniversary) Governor Macquarie had a 30-gun salute at Dawes Point and gave government workers a holiday[1] - a tradition that was soon followed by banks and other public offices.

I presume some of you are still sober enough to read this?

iPod Index

An Australian Bank, CommSec, has done an interesting twist on the old Big Mac index. The idea is to compare the price of a standard item across several countries to get a light hearted view on exchange rates called the CommSec iPod Index. For years it has been the Big Mac, now CommSec has done the same for the 2 GB iPod nano.

Out of 26 countries Brazil is the most expensive, Canada is the cheapest, and Ireland is the 8th most expensive, but not the most expensive in the Euro zone.

Brazil $327.71
India $222.27
Sweden $213.03
Denmark $208.25
Belgium $205.81
France $205.80
Finland $205.80
Ireland $205.79
UK $195.04
Austria $192.86
Netherlands $192.86
Spain $192.86
Italy $192.86
Germany $192.46
China $179.84
Korea $176.17
Switzerland $175.59
NZ $172.53
Australia $172.36
Taiwan $164.88
Singapore $161.25
Mexico $154.46
US $149.00
Japan $147.63
Hong Kong $147.63
Canada $144.20
Source: CommSec, Apple

In the long term the iPod may be a difficult thing to measure against since technology moves on and in a couple of years low spec iPods could well be pitched at a much cheaper price bracket, or alternatively scrapped altogether with the emphasis on more expensive multi-funtion gadgets. You can pick another item, but it removes a certain amount of consistency from the survey that the Big Mac provides.

But I'm just being a bit picky. I like this way of measuring things. It may be light hearted but I think it good to see countries ranked based on things people aspire to own instead of a generic basket of goods the government tells us is cheap. In fact I'd like to see another equation done based buying power and how long it takes to earn the money to buy an iPod, similar to what is also done for the Big Mac. For example, in Ireland it takes 15 minutes on average to earn enough money to buy a Big Mac.

[via SlashDot]

Bill Bryson

I went to see Bill Bryson in UCD tonight. I got there a little late and while he was not on stage yet the lecture theater was full. Fortunately when Bryson arrived they allowed a couple more people in and I got the last seat. Bryson spoke for two or three minutes and then took questions. In total he spoke for about 25 minutes which was a little disappointing, especially since what he did say was entertaining. I got the impression that public speaking was not high on his list of ways to pass an evening.

People kept asking him about parts of his books and interestingly he frequently could not remember those parts, as he said when you write several books you begin to forget things. Afterwards he did stay to sign copies of books that people had brought, unfortunately I didn't have one with me. I must read more of his books, at the moment I'm reading David Stevensons 1914-1918 The History of World War I and while interesting is kind of short on laughs :-)

Photographing Australia Day

Both Google and Microsoft have announced that they will be doing photography flyovers of Sydney on Australia Day. These flights will get new high res photographs of the city which in Googles case will then be used on Google Maps. The resolution will be good enough to see individual people so anyone in Sydney should go out and draw a message to the world on the ground.

The planes will fly over Centennial and Moore parks at 9am, from where they will head out to Bronte Beach before making their way to the inner east, city, harbour, and lower North Shore.

The flight will end at about 2:15pm.

The quality of the images will be good enough to make out individual people on the street, and like Microsoft, Google is encouraging people to get creative and make themselves visible.

So girls, unless you want to end up like this girl in The Hague and achieve international geek fame, keep your bikini tops on that day. You never know who is watching.

[via Gizmodo]

Update: Turns out the Google plane didn't make it over Sydney, but the Microsoft one did.

English cricket, how bad can it get

Poor England. They just cant play cricket anymore. After getting their arses handed to them in the recent Ashes whitewash now they are loosing in the CB Series to New Zealand. But to rub salt in the wound *Englands* best player today was Ed Joyce who scored 47 runs.

Joyce is Irish, having been born in Ireland, went to school in Wicklow, went to university in Trinity College Dublin and played for the cricket for the Irish team. He declared for England in 2005 having qualified based on residency.

Watching highlights of todays cricket from Adelaide on BBC makes me miss Australia. The weather there looks wonderful, even better than when I was there and certainly a lot better than it is here in Ireland at the moment. Roll on the summer, brrr.