So what is the Seanad for anyway?

The Government of Ireland is split into two houses. The first House is the Dail where politicians make important and not so important decisions and talk endlessly on matters of State. The second House is the Seanad. This is a little known and secretive group of people who are elected in a complicated election by a small subset of the Irish public.

Who can vote for the Seanad? If you went to University you can, so my wife Jacinta can. She filled in her ballot sheet this morning and while she was wondering who to give her No. 1 vote to I read the newspaper and came across Kathy Foley’s article in the Sunday Times, So what is the Seand for? It’s a very entertaining and cutting look at the Seanad and if you’ve wondered about them you should go read it in full. Here’s a taster for you on this Saturday afternoon:

What happens in the Seanad?
Very little. Senators sit about on comfy leather seats and engage in witty badinage. Unlike the upper houses of parliament in other countries, our senate cannot veto bills from the lower house. It can merely delay them a little. If the Dail passed a bill forcing all citizens to wear yellow hats and blue shoes, the Seanad could object in the strongest possible terms and put the whole plan off for a few weeks. That would give us just enough time to dye our hats and spray paint our shoes.
…..
Sometimes our senators go to America, where they are celebrated everywhere they go. This is because Americans confuse their sort of senators, who are very influential, with our sort, who aren’t.

So there you have it folks. Don’t feel too bad if you can’t vote, but do feel bad if you can’t get a nomination to stand for a €60,000 a year, 2 day a week job.

Why blogs are better #368

How else could I get on to Google Finance’s page on MSFT? It might be gone by the time you check it, but click the thumbnail for a screen capture. My boss at Tradesignals.com would have given his right arm for exposure like that!

Did I get many hits from there? Only 9 so far, but it was pretty cool to see that url pop up in my referrer stats!

Read Me Now!!! from Microsoft

Oh no! New bugs have been found in Windows XP! My Macbook must be vulnerable because this email said it is! I better run that exe file straight away.

Hello! Hackers discovered new bugs on Windows XP versions. Now, your computer is very vulnerable to this attacks,

that`s why Microsoft Corporation relased a new patch to protect your sistem!

If you do not install this patch, the hackers can attack your computer, break into your sistem and steal passwords

or secret informations. In USA over 11,000,000 computers were attacked! Those computers didn`t have installed

protection patch!

Please download the patch and install it on your computer now!

DOWNLOAD PATCH: => http://www.bemont.net/patch.exe

* * DO NOT IGNORE THIS MESSAGE * *

Thank you!

Phew. What would we do if Microsoft didn’t email everyone on the planet telling them about these bugs? You’d think they’d have some sort of Auto Update system in place instead of the fuddy duddy old email system. I’d be up the creek without a paddle if that email had been stopped by Spamassassin. It doesn’t bear thinking about what might have happened if I had missed this warning. Thanks guys!

Pillars of black smoke rise above the city

Yes, it’s bonfire night again. Driving past the Blackpool Shopping Centre I counted at least 3 thick plumes of black oily and dirty smoke rising from close by. I hope nobody lighting fires around the city objected to the incinerator in Ringaskiddy, those fires probably released more toxins and chemicals than a year of incineration.

Thankfully this year there wasn’t a fire locally. Last year’s bonfire was quite a spectacle but I’d hate to think of baby Adam breathing in all the crap released from burning tires and sofas. Anyway, the good people over at PROC are discussing the night and reminded me that I had researched the origin of the night a while back.

Driving down the Commons Road also proved to me the futility of yet another road safety campaign. At one end of the road a crashed car is displayed for all to see. It doesn’t seem to make a blind bit of difference to drivers as they speed along at 60 to 80kph in a 50kph zone. Granted, the road is long and straight and served by two lanes in either direction but that’s not the point. There are always some pedestrians walking along there. I do admit a certain amount of satisfaction when I inevitably catch up with the offenders at the numerous traffic lights. I bet this busy road will be the location of at least one speed camera when the 600 are introduced in the future.

I need to read and absorb 5 Powerful Reasons to Drive Slower, and How to Do It, driving with speeding maniacs on the road has never been a serene experience for me. (via Dave’s Picks)

Later .. Niall rants about the bad driving he sees on Irish roads. Crazy stuff!

How much of your Macbook's battery is gone for good?

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Rechargeable batteries start deteriorating from the moment they are manufactured. I’ve noticed my Canon 20D’s batteries don’t last quite as long as they did 2 years ago. AA and AAA batteries seem to be even worse. As I’m heading to San Francisco in July I’ll be doing a lot of flying so it’ll be important that my Apple Macbook laptop have a decent battery life.

There’s no quick fix for this as it’s not reversible but if you’re wondering how much life is left, then Coconut Battery is a must have. I installed it last night and it looks like my battery still has 85% of it’s capacity left after 11 months of use. That’s not bad. It’s not enough to get me across the Atlantic but I don’t know if I want to spend €139 on a second battery when I’ll only ever use it once a year.

I think it is possible to slow down the deterioration. Don’t unplug your laptop! The less you use the battery, the longer the battery will last.

The WordCamp 2007 schedule is now online

The schedule is up for your perusal now. It’s a two day event this year on the 21st and 22nd of July with the highlight being the bbq lun.. uh, I mean, it’s all great. I’m looking forward to attending as many talks as I can and meeting people. I’m sure Matt Cutts will have some interesting whitehat SEO tips for us too!

Meanwhile, a group of Irish people who are heading to Silicon Valley on December 2nd to, “try and build some long-term relationships and friendships with people over there which will be good for the Valley and good for the Paddys.” From the About page:

An ad-hoc group of Irish business people have decided to form their own delegation to tour Silicon Valley and create closer bonds with companies and people in the mecca of the computer world. The tour nicknamed “PaddysValley” will head off at the start of November, taking advantage of the new air routes from Aer Lingus.

There’s still plenty to do but if you’re in business in the Valley, and want to build up a relationship with business in Ireland, check out paddysvalley.org. A pity they’re not heading over in July. It’d be nice to have an Irish crowd at WordCamp!

Update! Matt says the registration page is now active. That Paypal IPN stuff is the business!

My flickering Macbook

I thought I had got off lucky with my Macbook. I had dodged the problems with sudden shutdowns that others experienced and I was happy with it. Unfortunately, for the last two days the screen on the laptop has flickered for about 30 seconds after coming out of sleep mode. It looks like someone is adjusting the brightness up and down a few notches really quickly. Here’s what it looks like:

Is there a fix for this? Not yet. There’s speculation that a firmware upgrade might fix it but I have my doubts. My laptop is still under warranty but I presume it has to be sent to Dublin for repair. I better read the warranty card.

I’m not the only one affected by this. Check out these other blogs and discussions:

It’s very disappointing.

In other news, I’m looking for a quiet PC to replace my noisy desktop machine. It’s possible to tell from anywhere in the house when the machine is off. It’s that noisy! My brother has a nice quiet Dell desktop, but I think he got lucky. I’m very seriously thinking of buying another laptop and hooking a proper keyboard, mouse and my LCD monitor to it. I can cope with having a relatively small harddrive in it. All my backups are now done to an external 500GB disk anyway.

The Thieving Duck on The News Of The world

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Do you read the UK Sunday newspaper, The News Of The World? A comment was left on my photoblog yesterday saying that newspaper used my Thieving Duck image in their magazine and I’m interested in seeing it for myself. If it’s true, they used the image without permission or attribution and that makes me just a little bit angry.

I’m posting this here because this blog has a lot more readers than my photoblog and I already mentioned it there and nobody responded. I emailed the newspaper yesterday but I’m not holding my breath waiting for a reply.

If you have last Sunday’s newspaper, I would really appreciate a photo of the page in question. I can be emailed at donncha @ ocaoimh.ie, thanks!

Update! In case you missed my comment below, I received an email from NotW offering me their standard rate which I’ve accepted. Hopefully I’ll hear back from them soon.

Dofollowing links in comments and trackbacks

I’ve just installed the Do Follow Trackback and Do Follow Comments plugins so now the links in your comments and trackbacks will be stalked followed by Google and any other search engine or service that know about the rel='nofollow' link attribute.

It’s not a completely free lunch though. Any spam comments will be deleted, legitimate comments with spammy urls will have their URLs mangled. Check out this comment and this one. Those _ characters in the urls make them pretty useless.

There are 7,457 comments on over 4,500 posts here. That’s a lot of URLs to get some PR loving.

The change is active here on Holy Shmoly! and In Photos dot org.