IF EVER you needed a clear sign that the recession is here in full force then look no further than the new McDonalds burger joint in Ennis, County Clare.

During the so-called “Celtic Tiger“ period the clearest sign that our economy was on the upswing was the fact that all the services jobs went to foreign nationals. By that what I mean is most of the jobs in the service industry were being filled by non-Irish people who had migrated here because the economy was booming. Service jobs were suddenly not good enough for Irish people and they ditched them and moved on to bigger and better things.

Conversely the surest sign that our economy is in the shithouse is when the non nationals start leaving the country to head elsewhere and, most importantly, when Irish people start looking at the service industry again as a viable employment opportunity… usually becauuse there is nothing else for them to work with.

And so we come to the opening of yet another McDonalds burger joint, this time in Ennis, County Clare. When they recently advertised for staff, they became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of prospective employees hoping for a chance to join the extended Ronald McDonald family. The noteworthy item however is not just the volume of respondants (over 500), but more the fact that a huge percentage of them are well-qualified Irish professionals, including accountants, architects and bankers, all looking to sign up to serve burgers for a living. Apparently so many people responded to the adverts for the jobs that the opening has had to be put back 2 weeks in order to process all the applications. This tells us two things on the recession-o-meter:

1. There are already too many professionals out on their asses from recent job cuts and now they are looking to do any job possible to bring in a wage, even working at a McDonalds.
2. The fact that Irish are applying for these minimum wage jobs again in the service industry highlights the exodus of non-nationals to other countries.

It’s oficial folks; if you have a job do whatever you can to keep it. It’s going to be a rough 2 years for everyone.

I KNOW I haven’t been posting much at the site in the last month or two, but there has been a very good reason.

Ever sice around mid January I’ve been working insane hours, and by insane I mean 18 hours a day, seven days a week on average. I don’t do this out of choice, but out of necessity.

I’m not sure how bad things are where you live, but here in Ireland the recession has hit hard, and it’s going to get worse. I’ve been around long enough to recognise the signs and every day there are announcements of either job cuts or salary cuts. It’s a continuous onslaught of bad news, day by day, week by week at the moment.

Everyone is facing tax increases, income levies, pay cuts, job cuts and more, no matter which industry sector they work in. As usual us standard workers have to pay for the fuck ups of both our inept Government (and their appointed regulators) and of course the real architects of this recession, the property developers and bankers they are all in bed with.

So – right now I’m working my arse off and doing everything humanly possible to keep a job, just like everyone else in the country who knows what’s coming. It’s not pretty. It’s not fun, but it is a reality I just have to deal with for a while so my time has been limited here at Avalon5, but rest assured I’m still around and twill be more active going forward once things settle down a bit. Right now however here seems to be a lot of activity taking place on the forums in relation to the open source multi vendor multi site e-commerce discussion so I trust that will continue in my absence, and if there is anything else I can do to help facilitate that topic progression let me know.

So in summary – gone for now, but not forgotten… And if you’re in the same boat as me then I wish you good fortune because we all need a little good luck these days.

HOW DO YOU go about saving your entire nation from sinking into the sea?

Well, you don’t! At least that’s the view of recently elected Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed, President of the Maldives. Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that, but what a challenge to face into in a new presidency term.

The Maldives is an archipelago of almost 1,200 coral islands located south-southwest of India. Most of the islands lie just 4.9 feet (1.5 meters) above sea level. The problem is that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has forecast a rise in sea levels of at least 7.1 inches (18 cm) by the end of the century, and it’s only going to get worse from there.

The Maldives has had it’s fair share of disaster, suffering damages and a large death toll from the tsunami in 2004, but it’s global warming that is uppermost on the new president’s mind. While the rest of us worry about reducing our carbon emissions and trading in our cars for electric buggies and solar powered clothing, the people of the Maldives are facing into a more realistic and immediate side of effect of global warming; their homeland is literally going to sink into the Indian Ocean as water levels rise around the planet, and more importantly around them.

To compound the situation, the Maldives is dependent almost entirely on the tourist trade, due largely to its amazing beaches and crystal clear waters. Beaches which of course will vanish over time as the wonderfully clear water levels rise.  So – how do you deal with the threat of global warming which is destined to drown your entire nation?

Well – in this case you save up your tourist revenues while you still can and you buy some land. Somewhere else. Somewhere not likely be flooded and then you move your entire nation to the new home. In essence, you relocate your entire country to a new homeland. The alternative is to watch your people and your country end up as a floating set of refugees living in tents somewhere.

Likely candidates at the moment include Australia (which has lots of spare land to sell), India and Sri Lanka (which at least are closer). Discussions are underway and eventually a home, and a price will be settled upon and then a pretty large migration project will be born and some serious future planning will take place.

It’s an ambitious scheme to be sure, but what other choice do they have? Imagine someone telling you tomorrow that either you, your children or perhaps your grand children will have to abandon your homeland and migrate to a new location. It’s not a political thing, it’s not a religious thing, it’s just a by product of nature and global warming. How do you wrap your mind around something like that, especially when the chances of getting a similar environment are slim to none?

It remains to be seen how viable this plan is, but I’m guessing the new president of the Maldives will be receptive to any alternatives too, so answers on a postcard please…

AS INSANE as this might sound, it emerged today that an Irish air traffic controller managed to talk down text down a plane in distress into a safe landing at Cork airport when all computer systems onboard the plane had failed.

The incident in question happened last November (2007). The twin-engined Piper plane lost all onboard electrical power, communications and weather radar soon after take-off from Kerry airport on November 7th last and was in distress. The pilot, thinking quickly it has to be said, started phoning airports from his cell phone looking for someone to take him seriously and talk him down.

The only problem with this approach is that the reception on his cell phone was intermittent, and so when he eventually got put through to an air traffic controller in Cork the signal kept dropping and his call consequently kept crashing.

Still, that pilot’s karma must have been with him because the quick thinking controller in the tower in Cork airport realised what was happening and reverted to using SMS text messages to the pilot instead to talk him through approach and landing, using a direct radar fix on the plane and a visual confirmation of the ‘wheels down’ on a fly-by before finally giving the pilot the ‘go’ order to land.

Pretty impressive isn’t it?

To quote directly from the air accident investigator, John Hughes:

“In this incident the positive and proactive initiative of the ATC controller, who, on realising that mobile audio communication from the pilot was intermittent, quickly switched to texting his instructions instead. This contributed to the safe resolution of the incident and, for such, the controller should be commended for his actions.”

Fair play to the pilot for using his cell phone in the first place, but serious props to the air traffic controller in Cork for thinking on his feet and using SMS messages to get the pilot and his passengers down in one piece. I reckon that controller will be living on free pints for a few years on the back of this story!

I’M FINALLY BACK IN ACTION after a crazy few days. The technical issues that had plagued my PC have all been resolved and I’ve put a new backup solution in place to avoid the same happening to me again (hopefully), but it was a strange series of events that knocked me out of action to begin with.

After the dust settled it seems that the main issue which screwed my system was an onboard Raid controller on my Abit Fatality FP9 SLI motherboard which resulted in a corrupt C: partition which basically buggered my boot disk. Eventually I had to abandon all RAID options at all and install an additional 750MB disk to act as a local backup.

When the RAID was sorted my soundcard decided to bluescreen a lot, which then led to even more chaos and confusion. I replaced the soundcard and everything looked groovy. At that point I’d had to have my system partition rebuilt from scratch but then Saturday arrived and my lovely new 20mb Internet connection was installed.

Having the massive bandwidth to now avail of I set about updating/patching all my stuff on Saturday and just marvelled at the sheer black hole speed that the connection exhibited. Massive amounts of cumulative patching and updates was hoovered up in seconds and downloaded for installation… and that’s where I ran into trouble.

Of course I had my ZoneAlarm firewall and Anti-Virus up and running ASAP and was faithfully clicking on all the approvals as they arrived, but upon one patch / update I noticed a dodgy looking DDE request to the IEXPLORE.EXE program and although my brain twigged it as a problem, my mouse somehow went ahead and clicked ‘Yes’ and hey presto I had a freakin’ virus and had to rebuild the entire system from scratch again.

Fast forward to today; system is completely rebuilt and patched up to date (thanks to that 20mb connection) and I’ve just taken delivery of my (legit) copy of Norton’s Ghost backup/recovery software and started a regime of full/incremental backups which should prevent me getting in to this kind of trouble again.

So – it’s good to be back and expect the normal insanity to commence from tomorrow.

SORRY for the inactivity of the last few days folks, I’ve been trying to recover my computer from the depths of tech hell since it all went horribly wrong on Saturday afternoon last. I blame Nokia myself, but the long and short of it is that I’ve had to hand my PC in to be repaired.

It all began when I decided to download the latest Nokia PC suite of software to enable me to sync up my contacts from my nice new shiny Nokia mobile phone which I’d purchased last Friday. The install seemed to go ok, but then it froze at around 96% complete.

No amount of jiggery pokery could get that bastard off 96% and eventually I had to reboot my system, and of course that’s when it all went horribly wrong. The C: system partition seemed to have hit a corruption of some sort which prevented a full boot. The system kept trying to “chkdsk” the drive and repair faulty sectors but ultimately the whole process just failed on me and fragmented the drive to hell and back as a nice side effect.

Without the ability to boot into Windows XP I was pretty much screwed. I tried booting in ‘safe’ mode but the only one which worked was ‘console mode’, and that didn’t really help. I tried lots of other things but in the end I just had to call it quits and hand it in to the professionals, and they spent most of the day trying to recover the disks within the raid array and the data on the C: partition.

I get the full story tomorrow, and hopefully I get the PC back, but I’m thinking I’ll probably have to reinstall everything again because they will have reformatted and rebuilt my OS from scratch after all the other attempts failed, which means my registry entries will be blown away and although my data (on the other partitions) will be safe, I’ll have to reinstall all the apps that uses it.

Anyhoo – it might take me a few days (and nights) to get all my shit together again so please be patient while I get it all in order. During this period updates at the site might be a little ‘low and slow’, if you get my drift.

And yes – before you ask – I’ve told them to add in a sodding extra big fuckoff disk so I can do proper image copies to it going forward! I guess I’m just dealing the the cause and effect of one of life’s universal principles: Technology will always shit on you, it’s only a question of when.

Honestly IT people make the worst, well, IT users I guess :)

Update @ July 2nd: After three days of trial and error it looks like the issue is with my onboard raid controller (on the mobo). Unfortunately it seems I’ll have to reinstall everything again on my ‘system’ partition, but at least my data was saved. I’ve decided to add in a big-ass disk and get my hands on Norton’s Ghost backup/recovery tool to protect from similar issues going forward, but as usual it’s a case of too little, too late. Anyway – normal service should be resumed by the weekend as I get the box back in action, and more than that I’ve just ordered a 20mb internet connection which gets installed on Saturday… so the anticipation is killing me!!

THE IRISH BROADBAND market got a much needed shot in the arm today with the announcement that ComReg (the Commision for Communications Regulation) has directed Eircom to slash its LLU line share pricing by 65 percent, effectively droppng the wholesale price for LLU line share from €8.41 to €2.94 for other operators in the broadband market.

This is potentially great news for the Irish consumer as the price cuts will lead to more competition in the broadband market and hopefully cheaper prices along with more options for us punters as a result.

On the same day the news broke that Eircom would have to drop their LLU pricing UPC (a cable broadband provider in Ireland) announced it was launching a new series of packages from July 1st aimed at the residential market with significantly larger bandwidth for lower prices, touting a 20mb downstream bandwidth package for only €40 per month, which is dramatically cheaper than other offerings in the same space.

UPC is also improving their upstream speeds. For the 20Mbps product, upstream speeds will be 1.5Mbps. They will also be offering a 10Mbps product for €30 per month and a 3Mbps product for only €10 per month.

Personally I’m a DSL customer – I tried the cable varient but it never had the support, quality and speed I needed – however with these new speeds and pricing I’m beginning to think a move back to cable might now be a smart move.

Does anyone out there reading this have any experience of UPC in Ireland to date? How would you rate them?

 

 

BE WARNED, this is a bit gruesome, but apparently true. A number of severed feet have been washing up on the shores of western Canada in the past year. The fifth such severed foot just washed up this week. What the hell is going on over there?

Walkers apparently spotted the latest body part floating in water off the suburb of Westham Island in British Columbia on Monday. So far five severed feet have been found, both left and right limbs, and no one seems to have a clue what’s going on.

Local law enforcement are quick to point out that DNA testing takes a hell of a long time, unlike the popular CSI shows which seem to get their results in minutes, so the mystery continues to deepen and the body parts continue to pile up.

They don’t even know yet if the feet are connected (pardon the pun) or whether this is just some really really weird coincidence. The severed limbs have been turning up on shores since last August and of course speculation is flying. Local newspapers are trying to see if the missing persons list matches the amount of feet. Others are wondering if they have a serial psycho on the loose. Other theories include gangland retributions, organised crime and even natural disasters.

I’ve been to BC a few times in my murky past and enjoyed my visits each time. I’ve always thought Vancouver would have made a better capital than Ottowa… but I’m not sure I’d be keen to go anywhere near the shore lines over there at the mo folks.

Five severed feet washing up in the same area within a one year timeframe is a bit more than coincidence methinks…

ONE MINUTE you’re searching the ‘Net for a PC Game related website and some cheat codes and then before you know it you’re in court defending your actions in front of judge and trying to explain that you didn’t really intend to sign up as a hitman for hire at that website and that you thought it was all a bit of a joke really. No, really!

Unfortunately this is not a joke though, and as implausible as this sounds, it actually happened as was reported today in the Saturday edition of the Irish Times newspaper. An Irish Army Private (Brian Buckley) told the Central Criminal Court this week that he found the website concerned (I’m not going to reprint it here for obvious reasons) while searching for cheat codes for the PC game “Hitman”.

To quote from the article and in Private’s own words:

“I saw a cartoon animation of a man with a gun. He was wearing a hat, sunglasses and had a pistol. It was a cartoon drawing… Out of my own curiosity or my own stupidity I decided to fill out the [application] form”

Yup. You guessed it. He was contacted and asked for details. Now at this point you might be thinking that he’s not the sharpest tool in the toolshed, if you get my drift.. .but it gets better. He decided to complete the application form and return it, listing his capabilities and preferences. When listing his ‘skills’ he responded with the following list:-

• Handgun
• Rifle
• Submachine Gun
• Shotgun
• Sniper
• Heavy Gun
• Heavy Machine Gun
• Grenades
• Basic Booby Traps
• Limited Poisons

The owners of the website knew a good thing when they saw it, so they offered him a contract to take out “two males in Ireland and one in Spain”. The only problem with this? Well, you see our intrepid Army dude was only actually qualified on rifles and grenades… the rest was in his imagination. As was his ability to be a hitman.

I’m not sure stupid covers this one folks.

Needless to say he bottled out at that point and started ignoring communications from the hitman for hire website; I guess the recruitment standards in the Irish Army aren’t what they used to be.

Anyhoo, the intended targets in Ireland and the people behind the hit are actually the subject of the court case as you can imagine and the whole thing reads like the plot of some crazy indie film, and who knows, maybe it will end up on the big screen at some point with Colin Farrell playing the lead.

So remember kiddies, the next time you cruise by a website and get that feeling that all might not be as it seems just remember the basic rule:

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck… it’s probably a duck!

 

I KNOW the polling is not complete yet, but early indications are that despite huge pressure from the combined mainstream political parties for a ‘YES’ vote, the nation seems to have given them, and by association Europe, a big Fuck You! as far as the Lisbon Treaty is concerned.

I always suspected it would be a close run thing, but latest polling indicates a more decisive victory for the “No” campaign than I think anyone expected. I’ve been following the results as they are counted and confirmed in the various areas around the country and I’m very surprised by two things.

Firstly the turnout was pretty pathetic at an estimated 50% of those who were registered to vote. Secondly, the swing to the “No” campaign and the impending defeat for the Government and the Euro-planners is much higher than I – or anyone else -expected. In truth I assumed this treaty would pass without any serious challenges based upon a high turnout and the ‘no other option’ campaing being pushed by the Government.

So – two big questions remain. Why did only 50% of our voting population bother to vote? Maybe they were so confused by the issues that they simply decided to abstain, maybe they just counldn’t be arsed. Who knows. Whatever the reason it’s a big problem for future voting if we can’t get more people involved in the process.

Then of course there is the really big question.. what next for Europe? Where do they go from here?

As I write the official counting of the votes is still underway and (according to the RTE website which is tracking all this as it happens) the current national view is trending at 53.5% against the Treaty and 46.% for, but the final results are not expected in for a few hours. No doubt by the time you read this those stats will have altered, but follow that link above for the latest percentages.

Still – the trend is pretty obvious at this point. The Lisbon treaty is going down in flames in Ireland; the people have spoken and told the Government and Europe to go back to the drawing board.

Update: It’s official – Irish voters have rejected the Lisbon Treaty by 110,000 votes - a margin of 53.4% to 46.6%.