Brian Cowen’s astonishing statistics

For anyone who doesn’t follow Irish politics, our Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern last week resigned/was forced from office as a result of a litany of accusations of financial irregularities in the past. He’s being investigated by a tribunal for suspicion of taking bribes in the distant past and has spun a most unlikely web of explanations which have made less and less sense in recent months.

(Most notably, this politician held the office of minister for finance for several years, during which time he claims not to have operated a bank account. He took his wage cheques and cashed them. Seriously, this was in the 1990s, not the 1950s.)

Anyway, the king is dead, long live the king. Ahern’s replacement Brian Cowan has just been elected leader of the dominant political party in Ireland, Fianna Fail, and in four weeks time will be sworn in as the new Taoiseach.

Much as I detest Fianna Fail and the anti-liberal-cute-hoor-anything-is-okay-as-long-as-you-get-away-it mentality that goes with it, I think Cowen will probably be an improvement in the short term.

However, it remains a fact that in the last general election in Ireland held in 2007, Brian Cowen was elected to his seat in the Dail (house of parliament) with 19,000 votes.

That means that this guy is now the leader of a country with a population of over 4.5 million people, as a result of just 19,000 votes. If my maths is correct, that means he was voted for by around .41 per cent, or less than half of one percent, of the population. Is that correct? If anyone thinks I’ve miscalculated, let me know.

Otherwise, I’m astonished.

Guns are cool, mkay?

I was lucky enough to be in California before Christmas - been doing a lot of travelling lately - and got a chance to call into the LAX gun range to shoot some handguns - .22 calibre revolvers and Glock and Sig Sauer 9 mm semi-automatic handguns to be exact.

(You’d never guess I spent most of my teenage years playing DOOM, would you?)

It might seem weird to be a card carrying leftie - a tree-hugging pseudo-hippie with distinctly pinko leanings - yet also be into guns. However, I’ve no problem seperating the political ideology that goes with gun culture (particularly in the US) from the enjoyment of practicing the technical skill of firing them accurately. To me there is no difference between a handgun and a bow and arrow, or a cross bow, other than the fact that one can be more rapidly deployed as a weapon. However, that said, I find gun culture mostly repugnant.

Because these are dangerous objects, I’m perfectly happy that access to them is restricted in the country I live in. In LA, I thorougly enjoyed the time I spent shooting - if you get a chance, go for it, it’s a blast - but it was also slightly scarey to realise that in Ireland, the odds of you having a gun pointed at you are extremely remote unless you’re involved in the drugs trade or organised crime. In personal crime - muggings and handbag thefts - guns aren’t for the most part used, but in LA, it’s much more likely that a street mugger will be carrying a gun. The police have to make a whole series of different presumptions regarding the level of threat suspects present to them.

I think the society I live in is much richer for the restrictions we have here. The price of these restrictions mean that I can’t own or keep an automatic handgun in my home, but I’m also glad that I don’t feel like I need to. Shooting paper targets is really fun though.

It’s Trek Jim, but not as we know it!

So I’m wandering around the web this afternoon, and a friend directs me to Star Trek New Voyages

What the . . . ? “These are the new voyages of the Star Ship Enterprise, boldly going yada yada.”

This is an incredibly complex web-only fan created TV series, set in the original Star Trek universe with amateur actors playing Kirk, Scotty, Uhuru and the others. Bizarre!

My first thought was how were they able to do this without having 17 different kinds of hell reigned down on them from Universal’s legal department! However, it seems to be a web only thing, and presumably because of it, doesn’t infringe copyright (That sounds increasingly unlikely as I type this . . . Anyone out there know the deal?)

They’ve got some of the original Trek actors to reprise their roles in the early episodes, so it’s obviously got some industry goodwill behind it. The effects are good – easily on a par with anything from The Next Generation series, and the space scenes are spot on. Some very nice CGI work has gone into this. In addition, the sets look fairly well made – replicas of those from the original series abound, and the whole thing is surprisingly convincing.

However, the acting is just awful. Bad actors, with ill fitting costumes, dodgy wigs and lighting that’s just . . . off somehow, contribute to making it look like what it is, a fan-created facsimile of the original with a tiny fraction of the budget. The few real actors that appear in it show up the bad acting shockingly. (It makes you realise how much of the acting we all watch on TV every day is actually quite good. If it wasn’t, you’d notice!)

However, do you know what? I actually really enjoyed it. Let’s face it, the acting in the original Trek series was pretty ropey to begin with, so it’s not liking they’re charting brave new waters with this one. The stories seem to be mostly well written, and there is obviously a LOT of passion in this. For all it’s faults, I realised after about ten minutes, I was watching an incarnation of Trek. Not as polished as the big budget versions, but the spark is there.

Very cool (in a highly nerdish uncool kind of way.) Check it out.

Dumbledore is what now?

Apparantly Dumbledore is gay. Seriously.

JK Rowling “. . . made her revelation to a packed house in New York’s Carnegie Hall on Friday, as part of her US book tour.

She took audience questions and was asked if Dumbledore found “true love”. “Dumbledore is gay,” she said, adding he was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, who he beat in a battle between good and bad wizards long ago.

Well, call me old fashioned, but I think if it’s not in the book, it’s not in the story. Did anyone think Dumbledore was ‘playing for the other team’ when they read the books? No, didn’t think so. So, can an author radically revise aspects of a published story by adding verbally later on key information?

Well, they can - and Rowling has - but I think that’s a king-sized cop out. If it’s in black ink on white paper, it’s in the story. If it’s not, it’s not.

As to the nature of the information - that Dumbledore is gay - I suppose it doesn’t mean anything really. It’s a fact of life that a certain percentage of the population is gay. Anyone living in the real world knows that. Unless I missed something in the books, at no point are we told there are no gay people in Harry’s world, so why would we presume otherwise?

Some critics have given Rowling a hard time because this aspect of the character didn’t come out more prominently (or at all) in the books and films - I’d guess they would have liked Dumbledore to have a gay lover ensconced at Hogwarts, to make a point. But isn’t this a children’s story, albeit one that appeals to adults as well? Did Rowling wuss out of showing Dumbledore being gay? No, I don’t think she did. I think it was totally irrelevant to the story, and it would have been fairly offensive tokenism to concoct such a subplot merely to be politically correct. Don’t you think?

Faulty cameras and dodgy MP3s

Two experiences in the last week have left me feeling less than enamored with the customer focus of two different international companies.

Firstly, and bear with me on this as there is a point here somewhere, I recently picked up a funky new stereo for my car. It’s a Sony and I’m thrilled with it. I bought it because it has a bluetooth receiver in it and so any cell phone with bluetooth can connect to it. I review phones sometimes so I tend to change handsets every month or so and obviously car kits are expensive and inconvenient to fit every time you change phone.

Anyway, this gripe has nothing to do with phones so we’ll move on. The stereo also plays MP3 CDs, allowing me to record 15 or so albums worth of MP3 tracks onto a single CD. This is an excellent extra, particularly as I didn’t notice it had this functionality until after I’d bought it. Sweet.

I tried this out this week and was very happy, except for one thing. Like most people, I now buy music either online or when I do buy a CD I rip it to my hard disk almost immediately. in the past I used Windows Media Player, but because I got an ipod some time ago, I moved over to Apple’s ITunes. I’ve been mostly happy enough with it until now, when I discovered that while ITunes will let you record an audio CD and while it will let you record an MP3 audio CD, it won’t let you record an MP3 CD of any audio that you have ripped using ITunes or bought online using the ITunes music store.

What? I have legally paid for music so that I can listen to it in my car. I don’t want to sell the disc or give it to my friends, just listen to it, but apparently Apple has decided I can’t. I’m actually not sure this is legal (although I presume it must be or I would have heard about it) but I was under the impression that when you buy a CD of music or software, you are buying a license to use the content and as such are entitled to make backup copies as long as they are for your own use and aren’t sold, passed on or otherwise used to infringe the copyright of the intellectual property holder.

I can’t see how making a CD to play in the car is any different than making a back up, or for that matter transferring audio from a PC to an IPod. This strikes me as a case of rights erosion.

Anyway, the stereo in question plays Windows Media Files, but I have to re-import all my bought CDs into Windows Media in order to burn the discs. Whose interests is all this in I wonder. I don’t think it’s mine somehow. Apple 0 Microsoft 1. Faceless corporations 1 consumers 0

So I mentioned there was a second act to my Monday morning consumer electronics rant, so here it is. I picked up a Canon digital camera in Tokyo last year and was very happy with it. An excellent camera that produced great pictures. All went swimmingly with it for months and months and months until the warranty ran out. I managed to drop it while out taking pictures. (In fact the picture in the masthead of this blog was the last picture it took.) I dropped it onto a grassy surface from around 3 feet off the ground - so it didn’t fall hard or far or onto a surface like concrete. Nevertheless the lens wouldn’t retract and an ominous E18 appeared in the display screen just before it turned itself off.

I googled the error message to see if other people had experienced the same fault and A LOT OF responses came up. It turns out that Canon cameras of the same class as mine are plagued with such problems, and the company charges around €150 to repair the problem.

So why do I feel short changed by this experience? After all, I dropped the camera, didn’t I? I did the damage, after all.

Well, yes I did. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for an item of consumer electronics like a digital camera to be able to withstand reasonable wear and tear. As I said, I didn’t drop it on concrete or drive over it or anything - it fell a short distance onto a soft surface. However, the real nature of my grip is this.

I brought the camera to a repair place and they took it in for repair. I heard nothing back from them for several weeks so called in to ask how the repair was going the other day to be told that Canon has stopped repairing cameras with this fault. It has also said it won’t repair a camera purchased in another geographical area. This is because I paid less for my camera in Tokyo than they are charging for it here and Canon seems to want to discourage people from undercutting the market price for its technology in their customer’s home countries by buying when on holiday.

(Coincidentally, it seems that there is a class action law suit being prepared in the US to argue the point that the flaw is a design flaw inherent in the design of the camera. If this is found to be the case, Canon will have to accept that it can’t charge people to repair the damage. This will cost it a lot of money, so I’d guess they’ll argue strongly that it’s not true. And it may not be, I don’t know.)

Canon 1 Me 0. Faceless corporations 2 consumers 0

Online fraud is still fraud

Did you know the word ‘gullible’ doesn’t appear in the dictionary? And if you fell for that ancient line, I have some magic beans to sell you.

I had occasion today to use Western Union to send some money to the US for something I am doing at the moment and I noticed on the company’s website that it had some Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) prominently displayed in a panel on the right hand side of the screen. Most of these were the kind of thing you’d expect, but in amongst them were the following:

Q: Are you sending money to claim lottery or prize winnings?

Q: Are you sending money because you were “guaranteed” a credit card or loan?

Q: Are you responding to an Internet or phone offer that you aren’t sure is honest?

Q: Are you sending money to someone you don’t know well or whose identity you can’t verify?

Now, I’m amazed by this. Are there really people out there naive enough to do any of the above? Presumably there are, or Western Union wouldn’t feel the need to highlight these as problems. When it comes to Internet scams, the country that’s become synonymous with the problem is Nigeria. Why I don’t know, but the so called Nigerian 419 scam has become incredibly common. This scam is named after section 419 of the Nigerian penal code and usually takes the form of a poorly written letter from the wife of a recently deceased government minister or banker who has $200 million to shift who wants to borrow your bank account and is willing to pay up a couple of million to you for the privilege.

They’re usually badly written and formulaic and so transparent, they’re funny.

I think I’ve received at least 20 of them in the last year alone, and like all spam, you have to presume the people that send them out wouldn’t bother if they didn’t occasionally bag a victim. I can’t help but imagine it’s the elderly or mentally infirm that fall for it, but it can be extremely sinister. Check this out, taken from http://www.scambusters.org/NigerianFee.html

Be careful. This scam can be physically dangerous as well as dangerous to your finances. Victims are almost always requested to travel to Nigeria or a border country to complete a transaction. Victims are often told that a visa will not be necessary to enter the country. The Nigerian scam artists may then bribe airport officials to pass the victims through Immigration and Customs. Because it is a serious offense in Nigeria to enter without a valid visa, the victim’s illegal entry may be used by the scam artists as leverage to coerce the victims into releasing funds. Violence and threats of physical harm may be employed to further pressure victims. In June of 1995, an American was murdered in Lagos, Nigeria, while pursuing a 4-1-9 scam, and numerous other foreign nationals have been reported as missing.

If you’re of a cynical nature with a sick sense of humour, you may be interested to know about the wonderful world of 419 scam baiters. These guys deliberatly reply to these scam e-mails with the express intention of seeing how long they can string the scammer along for. Why? Well, in their own words at the website http://www.419eater.com/:

What is scambaiting? Well, put simply, you enter into a dialogue with scammers, simply to waste their time and resources. Whilst you are doing this, you will be helping to keep the scammers away from real potential victims and screwing around with the minds of deserving thieves.

It doesn’t matter if you are new to this sport or a hardened veteran; if you are wasting the time of a scammer, or frustrating them in any way well that’s good enough for us, and we would welcome you to join with our now very large community.

If you’ve got some time to spare, go look through some of the websites that list the exploits of scam baiters - some of them are very very funny. Particularly the ones in which the baiters manage to persuade the criminals behind these frauds to send pictures of themselves holding up pieces of card with key phrases written on them, in order to ‘prove’ their bone fides. Some of them are very funny. You would almost feel sorry for them if they weren’t engaging in shamelessly exploitative behaviour.

Wow - mention the word gun and the world tunes in

Well, it may not be the world, but a lot of people have visited this blog in the last two days. Exponentially more than ever have before.

A few days ago I wrote a blog entry about the Virginia Tech shootings, offering some thoughts on the nature of gun control. Normally, I get 20 or 30 readers a day dropping by, but sometimes it’s far less. I’m not that disciplined about blogging, so days and the odd week can go by without an entry.

However, 335 people have visited this blog in the last 36 hours, all on the back of search terms that have mentioned the word gun. Here’s the list of search terms that drew people here yesterday. (I’m writing this at 8.30 am on a Monday morning, and already another 109 people have swung past since midnight last night.*)

gun 192
Gun 13
GUN 6
pics OF A GUN 2
gun control 2
virginia guns 2
virginia kill 1
how to make guns 1
dead guns 1
gun picture 1

Check out the search terms third from the bottom. ‘How to make guns’??? Okay. Yeah, that’s what’s wrong with the Internet in one single sentence.

Anyway, this is interesting, because it shows that lots of people are turning to blogs to find out what general opinions are regarding day-to-day news items showing on TV, in the press or on the Web. None of these visitors left comments and I don’t know how long they remained on the page - in other words I don’t know if they actually read anything or quickly clicked on - but either way, it’s interesting.

If you have a blog and want to inflate traffic to it, start using the word gun. Or better yet, post a blog entry entitled ‘how to make guns’

(* UPDATE: It’s now 3.4opm in the afternoon where I am, and the total number of people to view this blog in the last 24 hours is 455)

(* FINAL UPDATE: It’s now 11am two days after I first posted this and as of now, the total number of people to view this blog has been 676)

Gun control and 32 dead.

Wow. 32 people dead.

Guns don’t kill people, people do. That is true, but they do make it easier - it’s a lot harder to run amok with a kitchen knife or a baseball bat than it is with an automatic machine gun.

I don’t think I will ever understand the argument put forward by the anti-gun control lobby in the US that says that the solution to crimes like that which occured in Virginia is to arm everybody. The head of the local branch of the pro-gun association in Virgina was interviewed on Irish news radio this morning and he actually said that the reason this tragedy happened was that this state (Virginia) is trying to ban concealed carry permits. He argued that if students and teachers were carrying concealed firearms, they could have taken the gunman down.

What do you say to somebody that chronically stupid? Seriously. Sure they may have been able to shoot the guy, but is that really an answer? I understand that the US has a different gun culture than the place I’m from, and I’m not arrogant enough to presume that just because the culture I come from is different that somehow it’s superior. But get with the program guys - it’s not the 1870s anymore and times have changed. We now live in the 21st century and there is no good reason to make military style automatic weapons and semi automatic handguns available to the general public. If you think that everyone should have the right to bear arms, why stop with guns. Should people have the right to own atomic weapons or maintain private armies?

If not, what’s the difference?

For me, here’s the argument: If students and teachers had been armed then they MAY have been able to stop the gunman. However, if guns were illegal, then this almost certainly wouldn’t have happened at all.

It’s possible to argue that making guns illegal doesn’t mean they won’t be used, but rather that only criminals will have them, and to a point that’s true. In Ireland, guns are used all the time by criminal gangs, even though here firearms are illegal and the police are not routinely armed. The difference though is that guns are almost never used in personal crime. You will never be mugged at gun point. Drug gangs whack each other and occasionally guns are used in bank robberies and the like, but they are not routinely carried by petty criminals.

The kind of people that go on gun rampages in the US are by definition unhinged - they aren’t typical criminals of the gun-toting type that uses firearms in other countries.. Yet these disturbed people are able to lay their hands not just on a rusty old farming shotgun but on automatic weaponry designed for military use. The result is 32 people dead that really didn’t need to die. Is it really more important for a minority of people to feel . . what? More secure? More prepared in case the federal government comes for them in the night?

Growing up is sometimes uncomfortable, and what we are seeing here is a young country experiencing the growing pains of leaving adolesence. Sometimes, doing the right thing means swallowing your pride.

Wireless theft . . .

In the words of Malcom McClaren, “ever had the feeling you’ve been had?”

I’m currently road testing a Nokia business mobile phone that features wireless internet – it’s quite a cool gadget, if a little clunky to use. Anyway, the interesting thing about this phone is that it allows you to wander around and it flashes up on the screen when there’s a wireless network near by.

This makes taking the dog for a walk quite interesting, as you can scout for unprotected wifi zones very easily. You could wander around with a laptop open but the fact that this device fits in your hand makes it practical to go fishing for wifi.

Anyway, I have a wireless network in my house and so was lounging on the sofa the other night when I thought I’d do an e-mail check using the phone rather than getting my lazy arse up to walk the 15 feet into the office where there is a PC. So I scanned for a network and found mine, as well as one other. Hmm, that’s interesting.

My network wasn’t security protected, as I didn’t think there was anyone else around my area using wireless. Turns out I was wrong. Lots of people were using wireless. My wireless to be exact!

How do I know this? Well, I set up some security protection on my wireless router on the main PC and idly clicked the button marked “DHCP Client list” which shows the MAC address of machines connected to my network. There should have been three – my desktop PC, my laptop and the wireless internet phone. Instead, there were another nine or so mystery surfers. Check it out.

(I’ve blurred out my details, but theirs are visible.)

Wankers! It turns out that probably every 14 year old boy in my area has been downloading full length movies on my connection. (I dread to think just what exactly has come down my pipe. Probably best not thought about actually.) No wonder it seemed a little sluggish. Having set up security so that my connection can’t be piggybacked, I then went for a walk with the phone to see how many wireless networks there are nearby and it turns out there’s one in every second house near me. I counted 10 in a 15 minute walk around the block with the dog.

Anyway, enough about that – back to work for me. I’ve overdue on a feature for the Irish Independent, so I should really typing that, not this.

Ever bought a second hand car?

Ever bought a second hand car? I sold my car this week and bought a ‘new’ one – new in the sense of new to me, but obviously not brand new. Foreign readers of this blog would probably fall off their seats if they knew how expensive cars are in Ireland.

For a start, we pay more for our vehicles because of a tax known as Vehicle Registration Tax which adds 25 per cent to the cost of a car and on top of that we pay around €1.10 a litre of petrol. It costs me €55 to €60 to fill my tank with petrol and in my old car, I got around 320 miles for that. So motoring is an expensive business.

I’ve owned three cars to date, so this newly acquired one is the fourth. So I’ve sold three in the past, but I learned something new this week. The car I was selling was not a bad one, and I guessed it was worth a certain figure. However, I had the good fortune to bump into a friend of a friend who works in a garage buying and selling cars, so I asked him what it was worth. I expected him to put his hands in his pockets, look off in the distance and pull a figure out of his head, based on his exhaustive knowledge of the second hand motor business.

But he didn’t. Instead he pulled a small book out of his pocket and showed me the cover in a conspiratorial manner – nod nod, wink wink, say no more, say no more – and it was a guide produced for garages listing thousands of types of second hand cars and their values. The cover had ‘confidential’ written on it and the salesman told me it is issued every month and salesmen are told not to show it to punters under any circumstances.

I was slightly shocked. He told me the true value of my car and said he’d give me that price on a trade-in if I wanted to sell it on. Sadly he didn’t have the make or model I was looking for, so I didn’t but I was extremely grateful for his honesty. His tip also meant that when I found the car I did want from another garage I was able to see clearly through the salesman’s patter.

I was able to say, “Listen mate, this is what I want for it, take it or leave it,” knowing that while he tried to get me to accept less for it, I knew the figure he would take. And he did. Makes me think about the times I’ve had used car salesmen tell me the car I was selling wasn’t worth a fraction of what I thought it was. Hmm.