I was meant to be getting a flight tomorrow morning to Brussels, but it has been cancelled due to a strike.

Fortunately I was able to rebook myself on a flight to Paris (CDG) where I’ll be able to pickup a TGV to Brussels.

More than a little annoying and it means I’ve had to cancel my lunch plans for tomorrow.

On the upside I get to spend a couple of hours on French soil, though CDG wouldn’t have been my location of preference…

Hopefully the rest of my trip won’t be eventful .. Fingers crossed .. Tempting fate …

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Over the last few months there has been a lot of “talk” about building a knowledge economy and promoting Irish jobs etc etc.

So this lunchtime I thought I’d have a quick look at what the main Irish political parties are actually doing ie. are they walking the walk?

The methodology I used was pretty simple – I used the DNS for their main site ie. www.partyname.tld (most of them use .ie). In some cases the DNS resolved to an IP address, whereas in others it was a CNAME or pointer.

I only looked at the main political parties and their main websites. I did not look at secondary sites, local sites, individual politicians sites or where their email was routed.

Using a bit of dns lookups I was able to quickly ascertain that the only big Irish political party to host in Ireland at the moment is Fine Gael.

Fianna Fail host their website in the US. They used to host in Ireland but switched to the US “temporarily” over 18 months ago. They obviously haven’t switched back.

Labour‘s site is hosted in the UK.

The Green Party‘s site is with a Norwegian host in the UK.

Sinn Fein host in the US.

A lot of the smaller parties, such as The Socialist Workers Party, host in Ireland. The Pirate Party host in France.

If they were to host their websites in Ireland it wouldn’t create hundreds of jobs. But it would show that they at least were going to lead by example and “walk the walk”.

(and I obviously do have a vested interest, but that’s hardly the point.. )

UPDATE: Green Party’s site is in the UK with a Norwegian host.

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Since I rejigged my travel plans for later this month / beginning of next month, I will now be spending a few days in Prague.

I’ve never been to Prague, though I almost went about 17 years ago. That time I had a choice between going east and going south and since it was cold I opted to head south to Palermo.

So what would people recommend I see?

Any tips would be welcome!

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One of the things that I’ve been getting a bit of a kick out of over the last few months is coming up with new and slightly off the wall ways to push various products.

Let’s face it – domains and hosting aren’t that exciting.

It’s not as if we are selling race cars or working in Hollywood ..

But there’s no reason why we can’t have a little bit of fun with something and try to play around with it.

So we now have a new site for pushing personal .me domains. Check it out and let us know what you think – we really do want to know!

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I was planning on spending a couple of days in Brussels at the end of the month, as I have to attend a Eurid Registrar Advisory Board meeting.

I was also planning on going to Prague for DomainFest..

I hadn’t been planning on attending the CENTR meeting in Brussels.

All that has changed.

Now I’m speaking on a panel at the CENTR meeting, am spending a few days in Prague being a tourist and still going to DomainFest. Unfortunately I won’t get to shoot guns

So I’ll be doing Carlow > Dublin > Brussels > Prague > Brussels > Dublin > Carlow.

I’ve never been to Prague, so I’m really looking forward to exploring the city!

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I was brought up in a household that cherished books and reading. It’s something that I’m very thankful for.

Unfortunately I tend to read in bursts.

I can easily go for several weeks without reading a book, though I am constantly reading periodicals and online content.

When I’m travelling I find myself reading in my hotel room quite a bit, as it’s a nice way to wind down after a day of meetings. I used to read on planes, but I’ve been doing less and less of that over the last couple of years, as I tend to sleep instead.

At the moment I’m about to start the latest Kathy Reichs novel, while I’ve also got a few “work” books lined up.

So what’s on my “shelf”? (More like, dumped beside my bed, or on the armchair)

• Spider Bones – the latest Kathy Reichs novel featuring her heroine Temperance Brennan.
• Social Media Metrics – I’ve no idea how good or bad this book is, but the subject matter interests me
• UnMarketing – this hasn’t arrived yet, but a few people I know have been making positive comments, so I grabbed a copy
• The Social Media Manifesto – another one of those titles that sort of grabbed my attention.

I’m also trying to make my way through “The Current State of Domain Name Regulation: Domain Names as Second Class Citizens in a Mark-dominated World” by Konstantinos Komaitis. The title is a bit of a mouthful, but I know the author and the subject matter fascinates me. It’s not “light” reading material, which is why I also have the Kathy Reichs plus a few more Cussler and Lee Child novels on order from Amazon ..

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Image via Wikipedia

Just over 4 years ago I was given access to the beta of SixApart’s Vox blogging service.

Today I got an email informing me that the service is being shutdown at the end of the month.

No explanation has been forthcoming as to why they’re closing down the service, though I’m sure there are plenty of plausible reasons why they’re doing it.

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I spotted this while browsing ThinkGeek earlier:

Nothing like a little bit of FourSquare humour on a Friday !

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I don’t like lazy marketing.

I’ve never given the Golden Spiders permission to email me or my business, yet again today they did.

Annoying.

However it’s also quite amusing ..

One of the emails landed in our helpdesk which stripped out ALL the HTML .. what was left over wasn’t exactly um .. intelligible..

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