Conor’s Bandon Blog

I woke up this morning to read about Brian Cowen’s “Innovation” Taskforce and have spent since then utterly enraged.

In a time of crisis when men/women of vision and ability need to quickly agree a strategy and execute it with confidence, Brian Cowen assembles 28 people (plus the heads of Enterprise Ireland, IDA Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland, the Higher Education Authority and representatives from the departments of Education and Science, Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and Finance).

Yes my jaw hit the floor too.

A 40+ person talk-shop and travel expenses generator. That’s what Cowen and Coughlan think this country needs?

Because it’s worked so well in the past? Does the word agile mean anything to these people?

40+ people and two of them are women?

What century is this?

When Sean Lemass and T.K. Whitaker dragged this country kicking and screaming out of a hellhole from 1959 onwards, did they spend months (or years) prattling on with anyone who had on opinion?

I actually have a pain in my stomach with anger over this. These are our leaders? I’m not talking about C&C, I mean the committee. Did anyone who was asked say “NO, get a clue”? Did anyone who was asked question the utter stupidity of assembling this joke? Did anyone who was asked, reply “ENOUGH TALKING”.

Is there any senior person in the Irish Civil Service or Quango-sector who is tearing their hair out this morning and screaming in frustration too?

Yes? Then maybe it’s time for an alternative.

We need (possibly anonymously):

• 1 Senior Civil Servant, non-EI
• 1 Senior Civil Servant, EI
• 1 head of an FDI company with a large Irish operation in non-manufacture
• 1 head of a globally successful indigenous company
• 1 head of a startup
• 1 politician with a business or financial background

2 months. 3 max.

Outcome – a disruptive plan to rebuild the Irish economy and the business environment in a sustainable way around the idea of Constructive Capitalism. And a marketing plan to go with it. If our leaders won’t lead then it’s time to subvert from the bottom-up.

This type of thinking:

Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 – Constructive Capitalism from Daytona Sessions on Vimeo.

and this:

Anyone? Anyone?

conor AT loudervoice DOT com

relies on an informed electorate.

Now you can be informed.

What John Handelaar has done over at kildarestreet.com with the help of some other great people is deeply important. Quite simply, the Dáil record is now properly accessible rather than just available. The site enables you to do the following:

• Read a dramatically-more-legible version of the Dáil Record going back to January 2004
• Search that record by speeches or written questions, or by speaker, or by date or date range
• Sign up for email alerts for when a search query you’re interested changes
• Sign up for email alerts whenever a TD of your choosing says something or asks a question which generated a written reply
• Subscribe to RSS feeds for individual TDs or for search queries

This isn’t just important for the content you find but also for the content that you don’t find. I will not be voting for any sitting TD in any future election unless I see continuous active engagement by them in the Dáil. If they don’t have anything to say, they shouldn’t be there.

The days of some gobshite getting elected because he got your daughter a job in the Civil Service or claims to be responsible for every penny spent in your constituency have to come to an end. kildarestreet.com will hopefully help usher the beginning of proper national politics involving those who care about our country and what it can become.

We all sat idly by as those running this country ran it into the ground. It’s time we started paying attention.

UPDATE:

I just used the site to check on our three TDs in Cork South-West. Summary as follows for the past year:

• Christy O’Sullivan (FF): Has spoken in 5 debates in the last year — well below average among TDs. Has received answers to 8 written questions in the last year — below average among TDs
• PJ Sheehan (FG): Has spoken in 81 debates in the last year — above average among TDs. Has received answers to 101 written questions in the last year — average among TDs.
• Jim O’Keeffe (FG): Has spoken in 51 debates in the last year — average among TDs. Has received answers to 173 written questions in the last year — above average among TDs.

After seeing this, I take back any ageist comments I made in the last election about PJ Sheehan and I’m disappointed to see my predictions about Christy O’Sullivan have proven true.

Many of you have seen this video on YouTube where investment expert Peter Schiff is shown many times on US TV in 2006-2007 explaining why the US was in a property bubble and why it was all going to collapse. If you haven’t seen it, it’s hilarious and depressing at the same time.

I don’t claim to know much about investing but when we were moving from Dublin to Cork in 2003 and saw that our house had increased in value more than 400% in 9 years, we took the money and ran. Even in 2003 the valuations seemed idiotic. By 2007 they were in the realms of fantasy land. Of course many people told us we were stupid and if we’d rented the house out in Dublin we’d have made another €200k minimum when we went to sell. But when would we have sold? 2005? 2006? Or, gawd ‘elp us, 2008? Did I mention we sold our Eircom shares after 2 weeks? Maybe we do know what we are doing!

Then today I listened to this podcast of Peter Schiff speaking at the 2009 Austrian Scholar’s Conference. It’s long but utterly riveting. You think the worst is over? You think G20 is going to sort it all out? Listen to this and be afraid, be very afraid.

I’ve ordered mine, have you?

Fianna Fail may be able to censor RTE and turn it into a toothless Soviet-era Pravda but luckily we have the internet to enable democracy and freedom of speech and expression.

Here is the original RTE piece on the Cowen nudes that they removed from their site and then apologised for mentioning. Thanks to Mr Mulley.

“Against us are… all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty… We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils..”

BBC online reported an earthquake in Greece. They felt the need to locate it.

Our start-up LouderVoice got a nice mention in the Irish-language daily newspaper Lá. We were at an un-conference called BarCamp Ireland South-East in Waterford and Conn Ó Muíneacháin did a nice write up about it. Due to my desperately rusty Irish, I had to make use of this online dictionary to translate some of the words. Whilst it is a great resource, it seems to be lacking a huge number of words and also only seems to handle the roots of of words (or whatever it is called i.e it’ll find léirmheastóir but not léirmheastóireachta).

So the thought struck me this morning that a dictionary is the ideal target for a community effort, like Wikipedia is for encyclopedias. In fact, some sort of custom wiki might be ideal as a base for generating such a dictionary.

It could start very simply with one page per letter of the alphabet and as it grows, new pages are generated to sub-divide it. A wiki is very simply a web-site with pages that anyone can edit. The idea being that if you went to the wiki-dictionary to find the translation of a word and you spotted other ones that were missing, in a few simple clicks you could add them.

Of course it would need an agreed style of entry so it looked consistent but I’m sure there are plenty of language experts who could come up with a few simple rules for that. It would also need moderators to keep it clean and delete spam etc. And the search function would have to be very good.

For the laugh, I’ve just created a sample of what that might look like over at pbWiki. It took all of ten minutes to do and is called focloir.pbwiki.com. When Google makes JotSpot free, that might be the ideal location for such a resource since Jotspot is much easier to use than most wikis.

So what do people think? A bit too techie? A bit too idealistic? No need?

Technorati Tags: foclóir, dictionary, wiki, Irish, Gaeilge, community, UGC, jotspot

It appears the opposition parties have started their campaign to lose the next general election with their latest himbo/bimbo scheme which they picked up from the UK. They want traffic lights on food to indicate the levels of salt, sugar and fat. Not only are the stuck in the 1980′s with the fat obsession, but they show such a basic mis-understanding of human nature that the scheme was obviously devised by a marxist.

If I want to buy fat-laden, carb-laden, salt-laden Tayto, I bloody will and they chances of me looking at some insulting graphics are zero. When I smoked, you could have put pictures of sliced open cancerous lungs on the box and I’d happily have puffed away.

Information is only useful to those seeking it. If we want nutrition information then we’ll use the amazing human ability to read to find out what is in the box. “oh but people don’t know what a safe level of salt is, so our traffic light system will enable them to figure this out without actually ever having to think”. “Next year, we’ll be bringing in a system which does an instant analysis of your blood and won’t let you buy anything with too much salt or sugar”.

I was pleasantly surprised that FF told the opposition to get a clue and that they would not be bringing in such a scheme.

The first political party which starts a campaign to destroy the ever growing nanny state gets my vote.

You want people to eat properly? Then make Home Economics, Social & Scientific, Cooking compulsory in schools for both boys and girls starting around age 7. Hell, you could do a double whammy and teach it through Irish.

Technorati Tags: Traffic+Lights, Food, Labour, Fine+Gael, Marxism, Nanny+State, Nutrition, Intelligence, Cop+On, Information, Knowledge, Cooking, Tayto

Cork->Rosslare, Rosslare->Cork on a Bank Holiday Weekend. Number of cops encountered? Big fat zero. Number of hard-of-thinking suicidal cretins encountered? 4.

Oh but they did arrest over 100 drunk drivers today. Keep that up for 365 days a year and maybe it’ll be something other than a reflection of their day-to-day incompetence as they waste taxpayers money snaring people doing 45 in 40 zones on bypasses across the country.

Technorati Tags: roadsafetyblog, efficiency, resources, resource+managment, competence, quotas, lip+service

I have 4 kids (soon to be 5), 3 boys and 1 girl. Sibéal gives as good as she gets as far as fight are concerned. She has a very non-girly mother and only a slightly girly Dad. Yet this is what she spent all day yesterday in whilst chasing her cousin Rachel (similarly attired).

Technorati Tags: Kids, High Heels, Jimmy Choos