Whether there’s an “economic downturn” or not you’ll always find people who simply don’t “get” the concept of paying for stuff.

I mentioned this issue on Twitter earlier today and a couple of people sent me links to these absolutely hilarious videos. Apologies if the display is a bit odd – width may be a problem:

Of course if someone owes you money they really need to pay you .. Stewie’s take on this is .. well .. em .. violent?

And the followup …

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First of all a big heartfelt thanks to everyone who posted comments both here and on Twitter when I asked for assistance in choosing a digital camcorder.

Earlier today it arrived:

I took a couple of more shots of it once I’d unboxed it. What really impressed me was how small it is:

I played around with it a bit once the battery had charged and it seems pretty easy to use. Obviously it’s got loads of fancy options that I don’t fully understand yet, though if I spent some time with the user manual it might help!

The display is nice and clear and the touchscreen commands seem easy to manage.

I’ll hopefully get a chance to play with it properly over the next few days and will be able to take it to Rome next week …

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I’m heading over to Rome next week to attend a friend’s wedding, but being a small bit disorganised I only got round to organising the trip in the last couple of days.

Rome is the capital of Italy. Dublin is the capital of Ireland. You would think that in 2009 the cost of getting between two capital cities wouldn’t be horrendous and that you’d have a reasonable number of “sane” options open to you.

Unfortunately that isn’t really the case, so I’ve ended up extending my trip to Rome in order to justify it. There’s no point going to one of the most important cities in Europe if you’re not going to get a chance to see anything and Irish wedding aren’t exactly renowned for being “dry” affairs!

So timetable wise …

There are several airlines that handle the route from Dublin to Rome. Unless you want to take a rather circuitous route, that won’t actually save you much money, your options are a bit limited. It’s basically down to Ryanair and Aer Lingus. The other airlines, such as Alitalia, Air France, KLM and Swissair aren’t really viable (I don’t really fancy being stuck in Zurich for four hours!)

So I opted for Aer Lingus.

Flight price, including taxes supposedly saved me 13.50 (not sure where they got that figure from). However it actually cost me a lot more …

The charming little stealth charges kick in…

First off there’s an extra 30 euro to check a bag. So unless you’re only flying with a carry on bag that 13.50 saving is already gone…

Now I don’t know about you, but I would have thought that a plane ticket gave me the right to sit down for the duration of the flight. Seemingly not .. When you go to choose your seat you’re then hit with another charge – 5 euro each way!

So I pay an extra 40 euro for the ability to carry clean clothes and sit down?

Presumably I’ve also been charged extra for credit card fees as well…

And if you don’t pay attention they’ll also charge you for travel insurance that you never asked for as well!

Lovely!

PS: Seemingly you can avoid the seating fee if you don’t choose your seat during booking, but that’s not made clear at all

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Yes. I am a tshirt fan.
I won’t apologise.
Kudos to Niall for finding this one:

Retweet Me by BrentOzar
Make a Custom T-Shirt on Zazzle.com

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The recent publication of the Ryan report on child abuse has revealed a side to Ireland that makes me ashamed to hold an Irish passport.

The following clip from an Irish current affairs show is very disturbing and shows a very brave abuse victim going into some detail of what he went through.

To whoever put this up on Youtube – thank you!

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I’ll be heading off to Dublin later today…

Tonight Eurid are holding their first registrar dinner in Dublin (they’ve held several others across Europe) while tomorrow I’ll be at the IIA Congress while the evening will be the IIA Net Visionary

If anyone wants to grab a coffee / beer let me know

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As you can probably guess my Sunday morning browsing involved catching up on XKCD’s strips .. I would apologise, but they’re too damn funny!

Here’s their take on the entire swine flu thing and Twitter …

Original here

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Marketers just love knowing what we all spend our money on, so that they can formulate better ways of getting us to part with our cash. Some people find this disturbing. Personally I don’t really mind. My buying patterns have always been a bit odd anyway, though I’m unlikely to to end up on any watchlists:

XKCD – sheer genius! Pity that there aren’t that many (if any) ebay sellers willing to ship to Ireland for free…

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At some time in the last couple of months an Irish website got hacked and its member database was stolen. The database contained email addresses and the associated passwords to login to the website.

The list of email addresses and these passwords was published on a website which has since been taken offline (though you could find it in Google’s cache as recently as 48 hours ago).

While some of the email addresses and password combinations could give you access to a lot of things this would only happen where the person used the same password for everything.

The list was NOT a list of email account passwords ie. if you could actually use the password to access the person’s email account it was purely coincidental.

How do I know this?

My email address is on the list, as I was informed by someone a couple of days ago.

Though even the person who informed me was doubtful that I’d have opted for such a stupidly weak password for something as important as my email. They’d be right. I hadn’t! I had used a weak password on several websites – in some cases semi-intentionally

Unfortunately some people seem to like scaring people and also have zero respect for privacy and zero understanding of security or anything else, so you’ll find the list of email addresses published on at least one Irish website. (I’m not going to link to them, since they don’t deserve a link if they’re going to be that careless with other people’s data, but I do hope that someone flags their idiocy with the data privacy people)

On the plus side, hopefully some people will realise that having a password policy wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all ….

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I have odd ideas during the middle of the night…

The other night while chatting with a couple of people about social media “experts” and other snake oil types I went checking domains … SocialMediaExpert.ie was available (as were a few other extensions), so I grabbed it.

James from Forbairt Media did a wonderful job on the design and layout (if you don’t like it blame my taste, not his skills!)

And the first couple of posts went up yesterday.

What’s it all about?

My first post explains some of it

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