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!
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 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.
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:
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
It’s all Mark’s fault. He mentioned Codemasters, then Dizzy, then he posted this movie of Magicland Dizzy completed in super-fast time. I had to search for more.
The following post contains several Youtube videos so click more if you want to see Gyroscope, Ghosts and Goblins, Barbarian and other Commodore 64 classics brought to life again!
It’s hard to believe, but despite the really bad uptake of broadband services, or perhaps because of it, Ireland leads the way in WiFi hotspots!
Last week I had the pleasure of using the free WiFi services in Douglas shopping center to make a post on the Mallow Camera Club site. I had half an hour to kill so I popped into O’Brien’s, bought a coffee and a biscuit and settled down. I wasn’t the only one taking advantage of this generous gift. I spotted three others seated at various points around the library tapping away on their laptops. It’s something I never imagined I’d see! Yes, yes, yes. If you’ve enjoyed the use of free WiFi in your city this won’t be anything new, but this is in the “Celtic Tiger” economy where nothing is free and everything is over-priced.
So, next time your significant other is popping down to the shops, tag along. They might have free WiFi and it’ll do you the world of good to get out from behind that desk! I’m waiting for retailers and restaurant owners in Blarney to realise that free access to the Internet would draw all the self-employed Internet geeks out of their homes and into their establishments. I wonder how hard would it be to drop that hint …