Congratulations to Rosaleen and Keith

I am off home for the weekend to attend the wedding of a long time friend, Keith who has finally managed to convince Rosaleen to make an honest man of him, at least on paper if not in politics.

Keith used to comment on this blog until the company he works for blocked access to comments on blogger at their firewall. He is one of the reasons I started blogging since I could never win a debate face to face against him. My chances of winning those heated discussions will not be increased when Rosaleen takes over speaking for him from tomorrow afternoon on ;-)

Best of luck to you both and I'll see you tomorrow, though I expect you have better things to be doing today than reading my blog.

TK Maxx credit card hotline

TK Maxx is once again in the news for a story about credit card numbers being stolen by hackers. This was on the internet back in January but the full details only came out today.

I guess these things happen and the fact that they were robbed wouldn't stop me shopping at their store, after all you wouldn't move your bank account just because the bank got robbed. Granted they should have had better security on their computer systems and will probably have learned their lessons by now so their systems will probably be the most secure on the high street.

However what may well stop me from shopping there ever again is the fact that their hotline for their Irish customers is an English toll free number, Irish customers would have to pay international rates to call it.

TK Maxx has eight stores in Ireland and the retail chain has advised Irish customers who are worried about possible theft of their credit or debit card details to call a special hotline on 00 44 800 779015.

Bad show TK Maxx, last thing you need to do right now is cost your customers more money. Perhaps you should just get a 1550 number and screw your Irish customers completely?

Ah those were the good old days

"A year ago my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my vice-president had shot someone..... Ah, those were the good ol' days."

Bush has a sense of humour, or his speech writer does, but his delivery to the correspondents dinner shows he can take the piss out of himself. We should get one of these press diners in Ireland. Imagine Bertie trying to be funny. :-)

Dust removal on cameras

Before going to Australia I bought a Fujifilm S9500 camera. It is not an SLR but it was perfect for what I wanted. One of the really good features of this camera when travelling around dusty Australia was the fact that the lens did not come off the camera. While this was less flexible than a sack full of lenses it meant that I would not have to worry about sand and dust getting into the camera and onto the sensor, at least not as much I'm still working Whitehaven sand out of the zoom ring. Also the odds were the lens attached already, 28-300, would cover the ranges I wanted in 99% of cases, which it did.

Despite the Fuji being a great little day to day camera I still have the idea of buying a proper D-SLR (what can I say, I'm a gadget freak) but dust on the CCD was still a concern so I was considering some of the newer models with built in sensor cleaning, mainly the Canon 400D and the Sony Alpha, while discounting the new Nikon D40 and D80 since they didnt have similar mechanical cleaning mechanisms and use a software system instead. Turns out I was completely wrong.

Pixinfo has done a review of the anti-dust systems on 4 cameras and returned a surprising verdict. The review has photographs taken with the cameras before dust was applied, after dusting, and then after cleaning up to 25 times. Then they simply used a blower to clean the cameras. The results are clean from the photographs.

1. Olympus: good
2. Canon: poor (we are disappointed)
3. Pentax and Sony: useless (we are very disappointed)

If you, like me, are considering buying a new D-SLR just as a hobby then this is required reading. For me it means I will be looking again at the Nikons and in fact I may even look at one of the old Canon 350Ds which were top notch cameras 6 months ago and are now on special offer. Though the chances are I'm going to wait longer and see if the technology improves to a point where it, you know, works.

[via Engadget]

Dublin Fog

Foggy morning today as I walked to work. I thought it was pretty, we don't see enough fog or snow, or sunshine in Ireland, but at the same time there were 28 people injured in a pile up in Kildare.

Someone should be fired

It is hard to believe the state this countries health system is in and still some muppets persist in stopping a new maternity hospital in Cork from opening. Now the HSE is threatening to not open the hospital this year. This is so messed up I cant help but wonder how long it will be until someone tries to sell the building to property developers to build apartments?

I don't know if it's management penny pinching or if its the trade unions trying to milk the system for more money. I don't particularly care. The labor court should look into the problem as an independent adjudicator and whom ever is found to be in the wrong should be fired and never allowed to work on publicly funded projects again. That would send a signal that this kind of messing cant be tolerated anymore if we are to stop Ireland from sinking further into a mire of unionized bureaucratic hell holes.

Too many accidents

The office I work in has a little car park out in front of it. This car park is narrow, crowded and the entrance opens onto a busy road with a bus lane. It seems as if every week there are accidents in and around this car park. Sometimes they involve cars pulling out of the car park, not getting up to speed and having another car bang into the back of them. Some times it is as simple as someone trying to manoeuvre into or out of a parking space and hitting cars parked at the other side of the car park. Sometimes it is more serious with cars pulling out into the bus lane and knocking unseen motorcyclists off their bikes.

Today was a prime example. Looking out the window I saw two cars blocking the entrance. It appeared one had been reversing out of a space and perhaps all the way into the bus lane when another cat must have swung into the car park and collided with them. No damage was visible on either car but the Gardai were called. Meanwhile a taxi was waiting in the car park for the entrance to be unblocked when an SUV reversed out of a spot and straight into the back of the taxi and right in front of the Garda who just continued taking notes for the first accident.

The strange thing is this is perfectly normal for this car park. It's obvious something needs to be done with it. Personally I'd take out the four spaces on the outside and widen the entrance, but in 5 years the council has done nothing beyond picking up pieces of cars and mopping up the odd petrol spill. I wonder how much money they make from those 4 pay and display spaces.

Queueing for fun

I was in town this evening and saw 3 people queuing outside Game on Dawson Street. The reason? The Playstation 3 launches tonight at midnight. I cant help but feel that the three of them will feel a little silly in the morning, especially when you consider that had they arrived a little earlier, before the store closed, they could have pre-booked the Playstation, gone to the pub and then just shown up again a 11:55pm to collect their new toy. Alternatively, odds are they could have just shown up at 11:50pm and been at the top of the queue.

St Patrick's Day Photos

I spend a couple of hours on Saturday freezing my ass off on Dame Street waiting for the Dublin St Patrick's Day Parade to come by. In the end it was worth it because I managed to get lots of photographs which are now up on Flickr. The Dublin Community Blog also has a posting and a flickr group with more photos from the parade.

I was on Dame Street opposite Dublin Castle which was pretty crowded and it took an hour for the parade to reach us. Next year I think I'll go back to Parnell Square where the parade starts so I don't have as long to wait and a friend of mine was up there and rang me to say there was loads of space along the barriers.

Playstation 3 in Dundrum

I got to play on a Playstation 3 today. There are two demo consoles up in Dundrum, one in Virgin and one in Game. I was playing Motorstorm. Graphics are very good and smooth but there was no sound and no rumble in the controllers making it feel a little flat and not a really true show case of the PS3. Rumble wont be in any controllers until later this year since there was a patent infringement case blocking Sony from using the rumble technology which was solved last week.

The game seemed a bit difficult for most people with the car blowing up randomly and spending most of its time flying off cliffs and it got boring after a couple of laps. It felt a bit like Star Wars Pod Racer without the Pods. The console itself looks cool, a very stylish looking box that girlfriends probably wont keep trying to hide behind the TV.

I still doubt I'll buy one any time soon, too expensive and I don't like buying the early versions of things like that. I'd rather let other people find all the bugs and problems :-)