Crazy driving in the fog

The last 36 hours have been a fog filled void in most of Ireland and even in the UK too. Radio broadcasters have urged caution on the roads as visibility dropped down to a few yards in places.

It was into this mess that I drove this morning. Thick fog, the sun just peeping over the hills and visibility down to less than 10 yards. My drive from Blarney this morning was along a very straight country road that follows the contours of the surrounding hills up and down, blocking the view of oncoming traffic until the hill rises at the end of the straight stretch. It’s also a 60km/h road.

In deep fog I’m driving carefully and I spot headlights getting bigger and bigger in my mirror until the car behind is tailgating me at no more than a few feet. I could sense the frustration of the driver behind but hey, it’s foggy, I’m driving at the speed limit. There’s no way I’ll be bullied into driving faster in those conditions. Eventually he overtook me of course but we caught up with him at the junction sitting on the top of the hill, so here you go. To the driver of 98-D-455, “You’re a crazy driver! Was it worth risking all our lives to be ahead of me at the junction?”

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Update! Driving along the same road back to Blarney this afternoon a Garda (Irish police force) car appeared and drove at speed until it was right behind me. It overtook me later in the 50km/h part of the road and sped off. Meanwhile a few seconds later another Garda car passed the other way speeding too. Why the hell do I stick to the speed limit if the police force don’t?

What song defines Christmas for you?

Which of the following songs says “Christmas” to you? Which song makes you think of Christmas as soon as you hear it? Ian Dempsey on Today FM this morning asked this question and the result surprised me.

Silent Night
Fairytale of New York

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Linkbaiter of the year 2006

Funnily enough, I bought an issue of Time magazine today in which someone is complaining about the white covers of recent issues and expressing the hope that the person of the year cover would have a little more impact.

Little did they know that Time would become linkbaiter of the year by naming everyone on the Internet as person of the year for 2006! More on Techmeme, Copyblogger and lots of others.

Time still has a white cover however!

Time

Chosen To Suffer

A mentally ill and severely depressed patient walks from morning mass at a convalescence home. She has been living here for many months because her elderly parents cannot cope with her at home.

She stops the priest who has just offered up the body and blood of Christ in holy mass and asks him, “why am I suffering?” His reply both startles her and frightens her, “You are chosen to suffer for everybody else on this earth”.
She asks him if she will get better and his reply is a short and terse, “I don’t know”.

Where is God? Where is hope?

“You are chosen to suffer for everybody else on this earth”.

Langerland do the Nativity

Langerland bring their latest creation, a Christmas story, The Nativity to the big screen with all your favourite characters. Even if you don’t recognise the names there’s something in this story for everyone!

It goes without saying that if you have strong feelings about Christianity you probably don’t want to watch this! (via)

And just in case you missed it, their music through the ages will have you cringing, but at least they let Mary have the last err, word.

Bupa to leave Irish market

I can just imagine the cheers and celebration going on at VHI HQ this afternoon as it was announced that Bupa, the second largest health insurer (with 22% of the market) is going to pull out of the Irish market because of risk-equalisation.

Two things really annoy me about this decision:

  • When they set up shop in the first place they knew that risk equalisation was inevitable. It’s a side effect of how the Irish health insurance market works. Everyone pays the same premium, the incumbant VHI has older and more costly members and risk equalisation meant compensating VHI. They should have planned realistically for it although how one can plan to compensate another company a sum of money larger than one’s own entire profits is beyond me.
  • Why couldn’t they have come up with a more imaginative solution. If VHI had simply given Bupa a percentage of their elderly members to even out the age spread of their memberships then VHI wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on and risk equalisation wouldn’t be an issue.

I’m a Bupa member as is my wife. A friend of mine works for Bupa in Fermoy. We’re all sorely disappointed at the decision today. There’s still Vivas Health but I wonder what their plan is to cope with the huge payouts VHI will want off them in a couple of years.

The company is blaming the move on a scheme known as risk equalisation – which it says compels it to pay €1 million every week to compensate other insurance providers for covering older consumers.

The company claimed the move would force it to hand over €161m to its rival over three years, even though its profits for the period would be just €64m.

Michele linked to a newsletter written by Martin O’Rourke, the boss of Bupa Ireland. As I expect the Bupa website will disappear sooner rather than later and this message with it, I’ll copy/paste it here after the jump as a record of what evils a monopoly does to an industry.

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Britney and Donncha's underwear scandal

Donncha O Callaghan Over the past week Britney Spear’s escapades while out on the town have made headlines all over the Internet but here in Ireland, sports fans have been witness to another underwear malfunction in the form of Donncha O’Callaghan’s superman attire at a recent rugby match! Ladies in the crowd were suitably impressed although the referee did tell Donncha to put his pants on before play could continue. Much to the relief of male supporters and the chagrin of the ladies I’m sure!

Yes, tv cameras were there and the coverage below (via) is just too shocking to show so click “more” to view the clip!

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Moved home last night

This blog moved home that is, I’m still tucked up in Blarney!

I moved to a slightly more beefy linode 200 VPS at linode.com and thanks to Michele at Blacknight the dns changeover took place quietly and unobtrusively last night around 1am. Hopefully you’ll see a slight improvement in page download speed which should improve over the next few days as I tweak settings and give MySQL more memory.

Conference Hijacked by French Politics

It hasn’t been a good time for the organisers of Le Web 3 in Paris, France. First of all their WiFi was down or sketchy and while that’s simply an annoyance and is a terrible reflection on the WiFi provider surely things couldn’t get worse?

They did. In place of the advertised speakers, two French presidential candidates spoke. Wasn’t this conference supposed to be about web technology? I can’t wait to see what they do next! How will they better today’s fiasco? I would certainly be looking for a refund, especially if I had travelled from abroad.

Worse than that, at a conference where the majority of the delegates were not French, the two political candidates addressed the audience in French (and Sarkozy didn’t even take questions).

Worried about the NCT?

Two years have passed really quickly and it’s time for my car to be tested again as part of the National Car Test (NCT). Registration was simple through their website and hopefully the test will be as uneventful.

My car has been serviced recently but there’s still that nagging doubt in the back of my head. Conventional wisdom says that it’s easier to have the car fail the test, get the car fixed and then retake the test but I’ve heard stories about people whose cars failed the test for different reasons on the second go! Oh the stress!

Things to watch out for are listed on the NCT inspection checklist and include brakes, exhaust and tyres. They’re fairly thorough.

Do you have any NCT horror stories? I don’t want to hear them until after 3pm today!

Bad news! The front left tire is too worn to pass, but as Mel said in a comment below, the visual retest is free. Must ring the local garage and bring the car down to them tomorrow.