At 11:00 I was having lunch. Tuna in mayonnaise with sweetcorn on brown bread. The bread was home-made by a company that pretends to be a little old lady. The rest was away-made by fish, fowl and farmers.

It was gorgeous. So much so it made me feel guilty. You know. All the starving children. In the crèche in the village. They don’t get lunch until 12:30 the poor little mites.

Ah yes. The kiddies. The Irish Times was fretting about them too. Its Education Today section was in Tuesday’s edition. The Noticeboard carried information about upcoming events of interest to those about to leave school - an open day at the Racing Academy and Centre of Education for anyone thinking of a career in horse racing. There was even a URL for the RACE website. Fair play to the IT - it is not so long ago the same piece would have read something like more details available on the RACE website, with no link. Find it if you can.

Such a pity though these kids can’t access the Education Today section without paying a subscription fee.

The IT seems caught in a Lanigan’s Ball loop of stepping out then stepping back in again when it comes to technology.

At times, it meets new challenges with foresight and vigour, as it did many years ago when they it became the first Irish newspaper to launch an online presence. Then it shoots itself in that same foot that it struck out so confidently, as it did when it began charging for its online content.

Recently the IT admitted its website is struggling to break even. Surprise, surprise.

Madam

If you provide content for free the advertisers will be lining up in droves to give you their money. Even if you only open the archives you’ll make a killing.

Yours etc.

The Sneeze

The IT never seems to realise the commercial value of the Internet. Perhaps they fear the Internet. Or they simply don’t understand it.

On the one hand, it has some of the best technology writers in Karlin Lillington, Danny O’Brien and Mike Butcher. On the other, it has Colin Murphy saying things that many bloggers like to share their thoughts on politics, the media, popular culture and their toilet habits.

The Irish Times’ editorial policy on, and understanding of, blogging is confusing to say the least. Wednesday’s edition carried an opinion piece on Taoiseach Brian Cowen’s Irish language policy, written by none other than the blogger An Spailpín Fánach. The Education Section on Tuesday had some Leaving Cert related snippets entitled Blog tales which had quotes from leaving-cert.net (a blog authored by three eloquent school-goers), walsho.net (an equally eloquent one-manstudent blog) and, get this, boards.ie. Yes! boards.ie! boards.ie! Since when are message boards blogs? Is an IM an email? Is a magazine a newspaper? No. They might share a certain traits but they are not the same.

To further confuse matters, the IT hosts very popular blogs by three of its own journalists: Jim Carroll’s On the Record, Shane Hegarty’s Present Tense and Conor Pope’s Price Watch. Yet Conor’s column in the print edition invites readers to offer feedback, with options like phone, post, email or blog it! * So leaving a comment on Conor’s blog makes one a blogger? Eh, no. If that were the case then writing a letter to the editor would make one a journalist.

I cannot help but suspect that The Irish Times is deliberately muddying the waters in order to distract the non-tech-savvy from blogs. Who do they think they are fooling? I don’t care if the little old lady who makes my bread is actually a company if it tastes good - though it would be nice if they admitted it. I don’t care if the IT source a quote from a message board if it’s worth reading - though it would be nice if they didn’t call the source a blog.

Why are they bothering anyway? The bread complements the tuna perfectly. Neither are as good on their own.

* That could be blog on.

A mail burst into my inbox on Tuesday bubbling over excitedly with the news that the County Kildare Community Network website, kildare.ie, run by Kildare County Council, won a LAMA award for “Best Use of External Communications”. You can read it here. Ah, don’t bother - I’ll give you the main points.

LAMA = Local Authority Members Association. Llama = a useful animal.

The award was presented by RTE presenter Sharon Ni Bheolain and John Gormley. For overseas readers, the former is just a teeny weeny bit less hot (about 1cal or 4.1868J) than Jolene Blalock, her name is actually Ní Bheoláin not Ni Bheolain and she works for RTÉ not RTE. The latter is a Green who sold his soul to Fianna Fáil for a ministerial post.

kildare.ie was recently redesigned. Adherence to web standards and improved accessibility & usability are an integral part of the new design. Ah yes, I remember them doing that. I couldn’t view a damn thing on the site for days unless I buried my pride and switched to Internet Explorer. Months later and their online planning system still only supports IE. If your browser of preference is Firefox or Safari you can use their LiteView version. So much for usability.

Here’s an interesting little exercise: Go to the World Wide Web Consortium’s markup validation service and plug in http://kildare.ie/. 23 errors! So much for adherence to web standards.

Go to the Council’s home page. Like the tiny text in light grey font with the white background? Pretty isn’t it? If your eyes aren’t the best it isn’t pretty at all. Oh, hold on, I apologise. I’m being far too harsh - on the right, toward the bottom there is a tiny link for Larger Font. Have you found it yet? Ok, I’ll give you another ten minutes.

*Puts kettle on. Makes nice mug of coffee*

Ok, you found it. Good. So now the font a readable size, even if it is light grey. See the Help/Accessibility link in the same section? Let’s go there and see what it says. Oh no! The font has gone back to the default size! Very accessible indeed.

Ok, well we’ll just have to struggle on. Let’s see what they have in the Publications section. Oh, look, the Development Plan for 2005-2011 is there. This will be interesting. I wonder what they have in store for my area? Now which is my area? I can’t tell because it’s all laid out in gobbledygook map references - I’ll just have to work my way through all the PDF files all until I find it. At least it’s usable.

Now I understand: They got the LAMA award, not for accessibility & usability, but for improved accessibility & usability. Believe me when I tell you most downloadable documents on the site used be in MS Word format - at least I can open PDF.

Personally I think the county would be better off with a few llamas.

As the year comes to an end we all like to sit back in front of a blazing fire with a nice glass of wine and reminisce on the utter bollix we made of the last 12 months.

Last night, sitting forward (my chair’s broken) over a warm laptop (the fire went out) with a big mug of tea (the wine’s all gone), I began to think of all the folks who found this blog by making an utter bollix of searching the Internet. Some were genuine and just got messed up by Google’s incomprehensible indexing, but others, well what can I say except what the fek were they expecting to find?

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We had the great eircom share sell off not so long ago. What I remember most was the incessant propaganda from every angle all but telling us how stupid we would be if we didn’t buy. Leinster House told us how we would become stakeholders in the state’s greatest corporation. (Well they wanted to offload the company, didn’t they). The banks offered tailored loans. (Well they wanted the interest, didn’t they). The outcome: Thousands lost a fortune.

Then we had the Ryder Cup. Home owners clambered to put their houses up for rent on the Internet. Hundreds of websites on which to advertise your property sprung up over night lunch. (Site creators made a killing on fees, didn’t they). The outcome: One single house that I know of was rented.

We Irish seem to fall for the hype and propaganda all too readily. Or maybe there’s something in our psyche that activates the panic buying gene - a throwback to famine times. Oh look! There’s a spud. Grab it now, you don’t know where the next one will come from.

The latest round is personal .IE domain names. If I get one more email from a two-bit reseller telling me time is running out to pre-register my personal .IE name I’m going to personally (see, I’m keeping it personal) visit the sender’s premises late at night and pour a bucket of giraffe pee* onto the CEO’s new office carpet. I was going to pour scorn, but I think pouring pee would be more satisfying.

Look lads! Leave me alone! I’m a big ape now. I can make up my own mind whether I want a .IE domain. And stop trying to hoodwink me with your special offers. I know how much a .IE should cost. Don’t try make me think I actually have to have a website associated with this address. Don’t try make it sound like a once off payment secures the name for life. Lads, lads, lads! I buy these services all the time. I know this stuff. That’s what I do for a living. Well, that and importing giraffe pee.*

Don’t give me this crap about protecting my name on the Internet and preserving it for children or grandchildren. Think about it - Paddy Mangan in Ballagh gets paddymangan.ie. Will Paddy Mangan in Fethard give a bollix? Will any of the 7,348 Paddy Mangans around the country give a bollix? I doubt there will be many offerings of bollix. And anyway, Paddy Mangan in Ballagh’s grandchild is Sophie so paddymangan.ie won’t be worth squat to her. And your man in Fethard hasn’t a clue about the Internet - he thinks it’s somewhere in America.

But most of all, lads, don’t tell me I can be pre-registered. That’s just baloney Clonakilty black pudding. The IEDR will not be accepting a single application for a personal domain name until October 31. You guys are merely compiling a list and will squirt it at the IEDR on that date. Every reseller in the country will be doing the same - at 1millisecond past 0800 GMT. Mr. Mangan in Ballagh may have preregistered with domains4u 3 weeks ago, but may lose out to his namesake in Fethard who only signed up with domains4me today if the latter’s queue is processed first.

Will the IEDR servers cope? Will it cause the equivalent of a DOS attack? Will the whole system collapse? This remains to be seen. I would hope the IEDR are working closely with the resellers to gauge the load.

Who is being honest about this? Well a few are. I have to say fair play to the folks over at Blacknight - We cannot offer ANY guarantees (neither can anyone else). And to Hosting365 - We cannot make any guarantee that your name will be accepted, but are offering a full refund (or you can choose another name) if it fails. There are others but some are fudging it - By pre-registering now, you will have the best chance of securing your chosen domain name. … The rules of application are defined by the Irish Domain Registry and their decision in relation to an application is final. No mention of queues or what the rules/procedures are exactly.

Oh look. Another email. From ezdomains. Now where did I leave that bucket?

*I got 40litres on the Internet from Universal Urine Suppliers and another 2kg of concentrate from Wees of the World dot com.

No. Still no news. Not a stir despite Kathy trying to hurry things along by trying a variety of tricks from old wives tales. And some from new wives tales too, which are a heck of a lot more fun I’m told.

My being confined to barracks the long weekend and the one just gone hasn’t actually been a bad thing. It gave me a full five days to work uninterrupted on a couple of things.

The inspiration for my main project was when Annie wrote: If you’re still using Internet Explorer please do the world wide web a favour and download Firefox instead. It’s free and it will get you laid.

The folks at Mozilla will adopt this as their tag line as soon as they find out. It beats my one hands down: Internet Explorer is just a big girl’s browse.

I figured the time had come to rebrand my business website. I had already repositioned myself. Rebrand. Reposition. What consummate corporate crap.

By repositioning, I mean I moved the desk to the far side of the room - not ideal, but a little further from the noise of the builders. The real work was in rebranding. I redesigned my logo, developed a new CSS theme, recoded the site in PHP and added all new content.

The new logo happened by accident. The intention was to recreate the existing one but with a new tag line. A font selected by mistake looked ten times better than the old one. Not that I ever doubted Darwin, I am now sure he was right. In logo terms, this was survival of the slickest.

The theme evolved to suit the logo. It might sound like buying a house to suit your curtains, but it worked.

Recoding in PHP wasn’t as tricky as I thought. Switching from Perl was pretty painless. If only learning spoken languages could be as easy. I still prefer Perl, but some customers baulk at my using it - usually as they’ve read some magazine article in the waiting room of the STD clinic or wherever and it was about PHP not Perl.

Now the content. And this is where Annie really inspired me. Okay, her Firefox slogan may be funny, and if your read her post, made out of frustration. But it is so true that Firefox is better than IE. So is Opera. So is Safari. I could go on.

So I took a chance and used a tone of humorous honesty throughout. I included a page entitled Mad Stuff that lists some of the jobs I’ve been asked to do e.g. research a topic on the Internet for a time-starved journalist and mail them a 100 word summary.

This is a big gamble. Mad Stuff certainly does not have a professional ring to it, but I’m hoping it will attract clicks out of curiosity.

I’m taking an even bigger flyer with a short list of things I don’t do. Too many folks out there are still IT illiterate and will call the first company they find on Google and ask for someone to come fix their printer, even if it is a webdesign house they’ve contacted. Hopefully this too will pull clicks and clarify things without alienating business.

The new site will be going live mid-week. Wish me luck. If it works, then Annie, you are owed scoops. If it doesn’t, then I’ll hunt you down and stuff, or maybe just switch back to the old one.

The mast has broken. I am drifting aimlessly. There is no chance of rescue for another week at least. Supplies are running low. I am unable to send up flares. I fear for my life.

So the inevitable happened. The ISP I have been with for nearly 3 years now got into difficulties. I mentioned this before. One partner claims he put up most of the money for the business and did all of the work. He says the other attempted to sell the business behind his back while he was on holiday. The other asserts he skipped the country taking all the company funds. I know which to believe and the upcoming court case will be very intriguing, but that doesn’t help me right now.

On Thursday, the mast I receive my signal from, developed a fault. It will not be repaired. I have been without service since then.

Knowing that this would happen eventually, a neighbour and I requested line-of-sight tests from 3 other suppliers over a month ago. One responded. Just one. Well, two if you count the one who, after being badgered for a response, told my neighbour to “fuck off. You are just a small player. I have far bigger customers who are more important to me”. Customer service in Ireland is second to none.

The sole respondent has a 15 working day lead time advertised on their website. 20 days is what their automated phone line says. I called and explained my predicament on Friday. I pleaded to be pushed up the waiting list. They agreed and will be here on Friday morning.

Until then I am relying on friends and neighbours for Internet access. Not wishing to strain relations with any of them, I am limiting my visits to work related matters. After all, I have to put beer on the counter and will soon have a new ISP to feed. I’m afraid blogging is low on the priority list and will be restricted for the next while. I doubt I will even get to update Mo Rogha tomorrow. My apologies for not replying to comments and mail. Hopefully I will be back in cyberspace this time next week.

In other news, I burned my lip yesterday testing if the soup was hot. It looks ugly and hurts like hell. Life is far from good right now.