The DOBlog

Author: Daragh

  • Free Fees (with every packet of cornflakes)

    So Batty O’Keefe is flying kites in the run up to the Leaving Cert results. Nice one centurion. He has proposed the reintroduction of college fees for students from families where people are earning an “excellent” salary. He defines this as being somewhere to the north of “anybody on €100,000” and “millionaires”. Mr O’Keefe seems to be living in Vague City here, flying an amorphous kite in what appears to be a painfully non-fictional episode of Yes Minister.

    Is it proposed that this will be the joint household income or the income of each earner in the family? What about a project manager in a utility company who is married to a civil servant at HEO level? Combined salaries here could encroach on the €100,000 level . These are not exactly high flying jobs however, particularly if you factor in costs related to commuting etc on top of normal day to day family costs.

    What happens if you have a windfall in a given year (like old uncle Davy popping his clogs and leaving you his prize collection of original Beano comics)? Would such unforseen windfalls be included in the calculations?

    What would the cost to the Exchequer be of administering the ‘Santa List’ of people who are Naughty (earn too much in Mr O’Keefe’s view) and Nice (earn what Mr O’Keefe thinks to be a reasonable salary)?

    Would Universities be required to gather information on parents earnings before awarding students places (so they know who to charge what and when)? How would the costs of capturing, analysing and securely storing this information be met? (Yes, I know.. from fees).

    Would families be able to earn full tax relief on the college fees paid (and if so, what would that cost the Exchequer and how would those costs be offset in the tax take)?

    Would there be exemptions of a household had more than one child at 3rd level at any given time? In a household of 3 students, with fees costing approximately €5k per year (based on the current costs of Masters degrees) would the family pay a flat €5k for the 3, €7500, €10,000 or the full €15k? Would the minister be suggesting a “buy 2 get 1 free” for degrees?

    When would this come into effect? Would families with students who started 3rd level last year or starting this year find themselves having to find a few grand more in the kitty in 2009 or 2010?

    What exactly is the Minister expressing here (other than expressing a need to have his name in the headlines during a dull August and a need to be seen to be doing things?)

    What Minister? What?

    Yes, 3rd level education requires more funding. I know, I teach there from time to time, and I was taught there from time to time. I was one of the ‘transition’ students who started their college career paying fees back in the early 1990s and were then set free.

    I’ll admit was skeptical about the Labour Party plan to bring in free fees and heartily opposed it as a student during debates in UCD – which lead to a few ‘discussions’ with my more left-wing friends. I felt at the time that there was bound to be a more equitable format which would not squeeze University funding unduly while still allowing for social equity and more open access to 3rd level for families from disadvantaged backgrounds.

    But the human face of free fees for me was my brother. He was 2 years behind me and, but for free fees, would have had to face the choice of deferring his 3rd level education for 2 years until I had finished my degree. And if I’d gone on to post-graduate study, his chance to shine as a student might perhaps have been put off longer. Free fees meant my mother was able to send her two eldest sons to University at the same time, paving the way for el guapo (the Third) to follow a few years after.

    Batt O’Keefe’s proposals (and it is worth noting that the Green Party are making it clear that this is NOT a government proposal, Mary Hanafin has likewise come out against it, as has the leader of the Progressive Democrats, Ciarán Cannon) have some merit if you look at the argument that those who can afford to spend thousands per year on private education at second level for their children might well be asked to foot the bill at 3rd level. However, one must as the question – why do people opt to send their children to fee paying private schools when there is competition for places at 3rd level? Might the apparent availability of better resources, teacher and student supports and other factors (like working toilets and roofs that don’t leak) when compared with state funded schools be a factor? Will the Minister’s proposals address those root causes?

    If the logic for bringing back in fees is to extract funding from people on “excellent salaries” (and we are I must remind you that we are living in Vague City with that term) why not just levy a tax on high earners to create an “Education Fund” to support 3rd level and state funded 2nd Level and Primary sectors? This tax could be levied on all earners of “excellent salaries”, not just those who have children of University going age. The amount levied per year could be smaller (as the pool affected would be larger and over an indefinite period). However, the taxes so collected MUST be ringfenced for education spending only at each level – and not on vanity projects for Ministers but on fundamental tools and resources such as flushing toilets that don’t double as class rooms, and funding research on broad issues rather than focussed industry sponsored research projects.

    The collection of this tax could be done through the normal taxation system (no additional costs). Exemptions could easily be given on grounds of social need through the existing system. Fees could be kept free; the 2008 equivalent of me and my brother would dodge the bullet and the guilt of one having to forego their place just because of costs.

    Ultimately, this would be more equitable as all “millionaires” in the country would be asked to chip in to fund education and learning – the very education and learning that helped develop the economy which allowed them to make their money. Millionaires would not be discriminated against simply because of they have kid or two with delusions of ‘edumication and learning’.

    Fairer for all, and certainly more structured than the vague and amporphous kite-like citizen of Vague City that Batt O’Keefe has floated on the rain-sodden air.

    Ultimately – investment in the training, development and intellectual capital of our country is a key element in developing future productivity and capability. That has to start at Primary level, be continued to Secondary level and then capped off at 3rd level. Minister O’Keefe has an opportunity to take a considered and courageous stand on funding for education in a way that is of benefit to most rather than punitive to many.

    Or he might bring down the government… either way a positive contribution.

  • What is the average airspeed of a laden swallow?

    …or “Why the f*ck can’t I get a decent broadband service in Wexford for love or money?”.

    So, following from my last post (and btw the saga continues off-blog in a reality far far away), I’ve been looking at my other options for getting zippy fast communications that might allow me to work more productively from home for my day job (and, heaven forfend, perhaps form the basis of a revenue creation and job creation buzz here in fair Wexford. After all I can’t commute the monster commute every week for the rest of my life).

    I’ve signed up to 3’s service which proudly announced on their coverage map that they had service in my area… and zip-tasticly not slow it would be as well. Eh… it’s not. It’s painfully slow. Think of how it would feel to have your skin whipped from your bones by a slug who’d just smoked an entire University campus worth of cannabis and was more concerned with what flavour mars bar he’d like to eat and you get an idea of how slow the service is. If that doesn’t work, here’s a picture of a GOOD result…
    speedtest.net results for 3 broadband in Wexford

    However, 3’s customer service are quite good, helpful, polite, and professional, with all my details to their finger tips. They have eventually told me there is an issue in Wexford town and its environs that has been known about for some time in 3’s engineering section who are working on it with no ETA for a solution. So why is the coverage map showing lots’ of deep blue around Wexford? Is it perhaps some form of marketing ploy that might possible be easily confused with lying (which it simply isn’t.. that would be wrong).

    I’m giving it a week. Then I return it and get my money back if it isn’t working above 1MB at least. Anything less isn’t broadband speed.

    I am depressed reading the Government’s Broadband strategy. It’s a joke. They don’t have one. They are clutching at straws. There is a vast amount of ‘dark fibre’ network in the country. CIE has some, and wouldn’t it be a nice way to keep rail travel costs down if they could lease that dark fibre to companies who might help service the needs of teleworkers (who might then use the train to travel to meetings when they had to).

    Counting people who have access to broadband in work in their stats for people who have access to broadband is a bit of a cop-out. Are the DCENR seriously proposing that it is OK for people to use company-provided broadband services (which are usually accessed via controlled and firewalled office networks) to do personal business?

    Boss: McMurphy… where’s my audit report?
    McMurphy: I don’t have it done yet boss, I was just uploading photos of my kids to facebook, myspace, bebo, flickr while chatting on GChat with Mike from accounts who left to go to Australia
    Boss: McMurphy… you’re fired (for a documented breach of the company’s acceptable internet use policies).

    My needs are simple… a reliable broadband connection, with a download speed faster than running and an upload speed faster than walking (2MB down, 1 – 2 MB up would do, but I’d like more). I’d like the service to be not prone to sudden and inexplicable outages. I’d like my wife to be able to rely on it so she can video chat with me when I’m travelling for work… usually to Dublin where I’ve broadband a-plenty. I’d like to be able to use VPN tunnelling to access my work servers securely, rather than poxy bloody PSTN dial-up that takes forever to open the tools I use to do my job. I’d like to be able to use that broadband connection to give me choices about my work life balance, future career path, lifestyle etc.

    I’d like to live in the 21st Century, not the 1980s. I’d like to feel that my ability to work with the interweb and adopt a lifestyle that let me blend my work and homelife through telework tools had actually moved on since I first got on-line in 1993 and started reading about the telework studies that they did in Puget Sound in the US and thought “that’s what I’d like to do” (at the time I was trying to run a business out of my bedroom… shortest commute I’ve ever had).

    Right now it doesn’t feel that way. Right now I am painfully personally aware of the ‘digital divide’. This is more than just a pursuit of a Giffen Good (in economic terms). This is a quest for an enabling technology, a commodity not a luxury. Will “access to broadband” join “near a road”, “close to a river” etc. as critieria for discussion in junior cert geography or business studies when the students are asked to site a factory or school or government department in an exam question?

    This ‘enabling technology’ is on a par with rural electrification in the 1940s (a project which didn’t end until the 1970s) , which significantly changed the nature and outlook of life in rural Ireland. One commentator describes the situation pre-rural electrification thus:

    At that time, few towns in Ireland, outside of the major cities, had a local electricity supply. For example, Kilkenny had no electricity supply while others like Carlow had a local supply

    Sounds very like our Broadband situation.

    So, in the absence of a Broadband equivalent of Rural Electrification (which the Government’s broadband strategy definitely isn’t and which the National Broadband Scheme fails to be), or a reliable local provider of reliable local broadband (“all the bits and bytes are made local boss”) I’m pondering training pigeons to deliver messages for me through the medium of interpretive dance.

    Failing that, a note nailed to their ankles will have to do.

  • How not to handle a customer (part 2)…

    This post is an update to the previous post today…
    I definitely think I’ll have to consider the Data Protection request as one of the top dogs in this company I’ve been dealing with has just emailed me to say that they only had an email address for me from today. Despite the fact that

    1. When I signed up for their service I had to give an email address
    2. I included an email address in my letter of complaint
    3. One of their Customer Service people had emailed me to the email address I had given on my complaint letter not 4 weeks ago

    Basically this senior person, sent me an email (and I won’t do a ‘Mulley’ on it and publish the email.. YET) which basically reads like “it’s your fault we couldn’t contact you because you didn’t answer your phone”, despite the fact that I have no voicemails (no answer, pissed customer, leave a voicemail to say you tried to contact them… common sense) or missed calls in my missed call log from this company in the past month.

    Not a whiff of mea culpa about it at all… Which is just plain stupid from a Customer Service perspective.

    Years ago I started my career in a call centre. We had an excellent external training consultant for a team leader course I did. He gave one piece of advice (and only one) about dealing with customer complaints… the customer may not always be right, but it’s suicide to try to make them feel they are wrong. I’ve tried to follow that mantra when dealing with customers in my day job (internal customers, project stakeholders, information consumers, managers, co-workers).

    Apparently making people feel they are wrong just gets them peeved and then they go and write blog posts about their experiences that might get linked to your company.

    And as for the Data Protection implication… they captured information about me and either had no use for it or have failed to ensure it is stored safely and securely as per their obligations as data controllers. Even if it is on paper in a filing cabinet it is governed by the Data Protection Act.

    Read the original post to put this in more context…

  • How not to handle a customer…

    So, I’ve been having problems with my broadband. Problems significant enough that I would suggest that the Dept of Comms actually think through the potential reliance on Fixed Wireless solutions for Ireland’s broadband deficit. More on that another time.

    What annoys me in the immediate sense is the level of customer service that people seem to think is OK. I had my FWA antenna removed from my house today. I found out about it when I looked out the window and saw the van from my provider in the drive way and the legs of a ladder going up the side of the house. I expected a binglybong on the door bell to let me know what was happening, but nowt. I was working so I couldn’t rush out to talk to the man. By the time I’d finished the work stuff he’d vanned away again.

    I’d complained to my provider in writing back in May about some issues. I got a nice email addressing part of my complaint and bugger all else. After this morning’s visitation I emailed them to find out what was going on.

    Apparently they’ve tried to contact me “numberous” [sic] times over the past month to talk to me about the problems I was having.

    Checked email… nowt.
    Checked spam filter… nowt.
    Checked missed calls on phone… nowt.
    Checked the drawer in the kitchen where all the things that look like bills get hidden… nowt.

    I know I had no voicemails from them on the phone as I would have remembered it (and I would have downloaded the voicemail from the webmail service provided by my mobile service provider -betcha didn’t know you could do that did you, unified messaging almost – and put it in the folder of documents/evidence I am compiling to go with my inevitable ComReg complaint).

    Apparently the only contact information they have for me is my mobile number. Apart from the fact they’ve sent me emails to my email address and a man-in-a-van could find my house, where letters also go. And I included all of that information again on my complaint letter.

    So the lack of a follow up email, or a letter responding to my complaint or a friendly binglybong on the doorbell from the man in the van to fill me in on things were all beyond them, because they didn’t have the information. Which they, errmmmm, had, for the reasons mentioned above.

    So that thing about only having a mobile number to contact me is a… [mistake] [lie] [cop out] [failure of internal processes to properly manage customer information]… (select one or more options as appropriate).

    It would seem it’s all my fault I didn’t know what was going on. I should have felt the disturbance in The Force, as if a small call centre of people suddenly cried out as one and then suddenly felll silent. Curse my failing and fading Jedi skills.

    At least that’s how I’d feel if I wasn’t so peeved at the whole thing. I think that once I’ve updated ComReg with the nonsense I’m dealing with I’ll send my ex-provider a request for all personal information they hold about me (electronic and paper file, and ip and traffic logs etc. ) under the terms of the Data Protection Act. ‘Coz I am fond of my regulatory frameworks and codes of practice etc.

    Notice that I’ve not named the service provider or discussed the specific issues here. That would be unfair to my (it would seem former – at their initiative) Broadband Provider. However, they are exactly the type of organisation that DCENR seems to be pinning the Great Broadband Hope on.

    The good news is that the Vodafone broadband dongle I have for using while commuting and which has been my main tool for getting on line at home recently – even though it is just 2G around these parts, picked up a 3 3G network last night. Couldn’t connect to it but knew it was there. So that’s got me thinking….

  • An IQ Trainwreck…

    From Don Carlson, one of my IAIDQ cronies in the US comes this YouTube vid from Informatica (a data quality software tool vendor) that sums up a lot of why Information Quality matters.

    Of course, I could get snooty and ask what gave them the idea to juxtapose Information Quality and Trainwrecks…. gosh, I’d swear I’ve seen that somewhere before…

  • The Electoral Register Hokey-Cokey

    When I was a small child, my grandmother used to entertain me and my siblings by getting us to sing and dance the hokey cokey, a playful little song and dance routine if ever there was one.

    This dance was brought to mind yesterday when Fergal of the Tuppenceworth bloggers emailed me to let me know that he appears to have been taken off the Electoral Register in his home county. Again.

    You put your right to self-determination and election of a government by proportional representation as mandated by the constititution of the Irish Republic in.
    You put your right to self-determination and election of a government by proportional representation as mandated by the constititution of the Irish Republic out.
    In. Out. In. Out.
    And you shake it all about.

    It would seem that Fergal had been taken off the Register during the Great Clean up of 2006. He then had his ballot reinstated. The other day, in a fit of electoral existentialism he decided to try and find himself on the Electoral Register website www.checktheregister.ie

    Zen like, he found himself encountering the concept of nothing as a search for his name at his address revealed nothing. Oh Hokey Cokey Cokey indeed.

    So what may have gone wrong here?

    • Is Fergal’s name transposed on the Register (surname first, firstname last)?
    • Is the address registered against Fergal on the Register different to his address?
    • Does the search function on the Electoral Register require an exact character match on names/addresses? Is “Fergal” interpreted as a different name to “Fearghal” (both Fergals in my book)?
    • If Fergal has indeed been deleted from the Register (again), what triggered the Hokey Cokey here? Was an old copy of the Register loaded to the website?
    • Is the version you search on-line up to date with the version you might find in your library or Garda Station? Might Fergal be on the Register, but just not on the Register that is searched? Might it work in the contrary… Might people be listed as ‘on the register’ in an on-line search but be off the Register in the ‘paper’ world (ie the version that counts on polling day)?

    The list of potential root causes is (especially as I am speculating a bit) quite long. However this is further evidence that the processes for the management of the Electoral Register are a bit knackered. This has been accepted by the Government and the Oireachtas Committee on the Electoral Register recently published a series of recommendations which eerily echoed comments and recommendations made on this blog over 2 years ago.

    However, while there is an urgent need to have as accurate an electoral register as possible (1 Referendum in our immediate future and Local Elections in the not to distant future), care must be taken to ensure we solve the problems of tomorrow as well as the problems of today.

    But in the words of Tom Jones – “I think I’m gonna dance now”…

    “Oh, hokey cokey cokey…. Oh hokey cokey cokey…..”

  • Telephone numbers and Information Quality – the risk of assumption

    There is an old saying that the word “Assume” makes an “Ass” out of “You” and “Me”.

    Yet we see (and make) assumptions every day when it comes to assessing the quality (or otherwise) of information. Anglo-Saxon biassed peoples (US, English speaking Europe etc) often assume that names are structured Firstname Surname. “Daragh” = First Name, “O Brien” = Surname. The cultural bias here is well documented by people like Graham Rhind (who advises the use of “Given Name/Family Name” constructs on web forms etc. to improve cross-cultural usability.

    But what if you see “George Michael” written down (without the context of labels for each name part) with a reference to “singer”? Would this relate to the pop singer George Michael, or the bass baritone singer Michael George?

    One of the common ‘rules of thumb’ with telephone numbers is that, when you are trying to create the full ‘internationalised’ version of a telephone number (+[international access code] [local area code] [local number]) you take the number as written ‘locally’ and drop the leading zero. Of course, like most conventional wisdom a little scrutiny causes this rule of thumb to fall apart.

    For example, in the Czech Republic there is no ‘leading zero’ as it is actually part of the international access code (which actually makes more sense to me…). One might assume that Europe, with the standardisation ethos of the European Union would all have plumped for “0” as a leading digit on local area codes. Not so, as Portugal doesn’t use any leading digit on their area codes. Some countries that used to be part of the USSR (like Russia, Belarus and Azerbijan) use 8 instead of 0.

    You might not be safe in assuming that you just need to consider the first digit of the local area code. Hungary has a 2-digit prefix (06), so you would need to parse in 2 characters in the string to remove the correct digits. Just stripping the leading zero will result in a totally embuggered piece of information.

    Also, everyone assumes that a telephone number will consist only of numbers. However, there are a few instances where the code required to dial out from a country (the International Direct Dial code) is actually alphanumeric in that it contains either the * (star) or # (hash key/pound key). Our buddies in Belarus are an example of this, where to dial out from Belarus you need to dial “8**10” (which even more confusingly is often written “8~10”.
    So what does this mean for people who are assessing or seeking to improve the quality of telephone number data in their systems?

    Well, first off it means you need to have some context to understand the correct business rules to apply. For example, the rules I would apply to assessing the quality (and likely defects) in a telephone number from Ireland would be different to what I’d need to apply to telephone numbers relating to Belarus. In an Irish telephone number it would be correct to strip out instances of “**” and then validate the rest of the string based on its length (if stripping the ** made it too short to be a telephone number then we would need to tag it as duff data and remove it). With data relating to Belarus it might simply be that the person filling in the form (the source of the data) got confused about what codes to use.

    Secondly, it means you need to put some thought into the design of information capture processes to reduce the chances of errors occuring. Defining a structure with seperate fields, linking the international access code to a country drop down (and a library of business rules for how to interpret and ‘standardize’ subsequent inputs) would not be too difficult – it would just require investment of effort in researching the rules and maintaining them once deployed. Here’s a link to a useful resource I’ve found (note that I can’t vouch for the frequency of updates to this site, but I’ve found it a fun way to figure out what the rules might be for various countries). Also, Wikipedia has a good piece on Telephone number plans. Graham Rhind also has some good links to references for telephone number format rules
    Looking at the data of a telephone number in isolation will most likely result in you screwing up some of the data (if you have international telephone number). Having the country information for that data (is the number in France or Belarus) allows you to construct appropriate rules and make your assumptions in the appropriate context to reduce your risks of error.

    Ultimately, blundering in with a crude rule of thumb and simply stripping any leading zeros you find because that is the assumption you’ve made will result in you making an ass out of you and your data.

    Which raises an interesting question…

    Imagine you have been given a spreadsheet of telephone numbers that you have been told are international numbers in the ‘local’ formats for the respective countries. You open the spreadsheet and there are no leading zeros (because Excel -and most other spreadsheets- assumes that numbers don’t begin with zero and strip it out). What to you do to get the data back to a format that you can actually use?

    Answers on a post card (or in the comments) please.

  • Cripes, the blog has been name-checked by my publisher…

    TwentyMajor isn’t the only blogger in the pay of a publisher (I’m conveniently ignoring Grandad and the others as Irish bloggers are too darned fond of publishing these days. If you want to know who all the Irish bloggers with publishers are then Damien Mulley probably has a list)!

    I recently wrote an industry report for a UK publisher on Information Quality strategy. The publisher then swapped all my references to Information Quality to references to Data Quality as that was their ‘brand’ on the publication. I prefer the term Information Quality for a variety of reasons.

    As this runs to over 100 pages of A4 it has a lot of words in it. My fingers were tired after typing it. Unlike Twenty’s book, I’ve got pictures in mine (not those kind of pictures, unfortunately, but nice diagrams of concepts related to strategy and Information Quality. If you want the other kind of pictures, you’ll need to go here.)

    In the marketing blurb and bumph that I put together for the publisher I mentioned this blog and the IQTrainwrecks.com blog. Imagine my surprise when I opened a sales email from the publisher today (yes, they included me on the sales mailing list… the irony is not lost on me… information quality, author, not likely to buy my own report when I’ve got the four drafts of it on the lappytop here).

    So, for the next few weeks I’ll have to look all serious and proper in a ‘knowing what I’m talking about’ kind of way to encourage people to by my report. (I had toyed with some variation on booky-wook but it just doesn’t work – reporty-wort… no thanks, I don’t want warts).

    So things I’ll have to refrain from doing include:

    1. Engaging in pointless satirical attacks on the government or businesses just for a laugh, unless I can find an Information Quality angle
    2. Talking too loudly about politics
    3. Giving out about rural/urban digital divides in Ireland
    4. Parsing and reformatting the arguments of leading Irish opinion writers to expose the absence of logic or argument therein.
    5. Engaging in socio-economic analysis of the fate of highstreet purveyors of dirty water parading as coffee.
    6. Swearing

    That last one is a f***ing pain in the a**.

    If any of you are interested in buying my ‘umble little report, it is available for sale from Ark Group via this link.. . This link will make them think you got the email they sent to me, and you can get a discount, getting the yoke for £202.50 including postage and packing (normally £345+£7.50p&p. (Or click here to avoid the email campaign software…)

    And if any of you would like to see the content that I’d have preferred the link in the sales person’s to send you to (coz it highlights the need for good quality management of your information quality) then just click away here to go to IQTrainwrecks.com

    Thanks to Larry, Tom, Danette, the wifey for their support while I was writing the report and Stephanie and Vanessa at Ark Group for their encouragement to get it finished by the deadline.

  • Stuff wot does work

    Regular visitors to this blog will know that I always appreciate stuff wot does work. Be it the excellent OnlineMeetingRooms to a humble bluetooth keyboard, I am a ferverent champion of kit that humbly bows its head and goes about doing what it sez on the tin in a competent and reliable manner.

    I was faced this week with the god-awful challenge of upgrading the first of my wordpress installations. I f*cking hate wordpress because of the complexity of its upgrade (let’s be honest -it’s a full monty reinstall) process, so I usually hold off for as long as possible. 2.3 passed me by. 2.5 made me sit up and ponder that perhaps I should bite the bullet. The announcement of 2.5.1 made me realise that soon I’d be spurned by the masses for being a lazy barsteward who didn’t bother to update his install.

    Also 2.5.x has some nice improvements in structure, layout and design of wordpress that I was hoping to to try out (I am, they are nice).

    But the pox-bottle dilemma of the upgrade had me frankly underwhelmed as my WP install was not broke so there was no urgent need to fix it. So I was quite happy when I came across the appropriately titled “WordPress Automatic Upgrade“. This spiffy little plug-in takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of doing a wordpress upgrade.

    It is not perfect but it allowed me to upgrade the DoBlog to 2.5.1 in a matter of moments with relative comfort that all was going well. Being a tad paranoid about these things I’d already taken my own backups of the DB and filesystem, but WAU did it automagically for me as well. All I need to know was an FTP login and FTP path for my host (which as I run the shebang meself I do).

    Some minor hiccups with things not quite happening in the order the screen messages said they would but other than that a spiffy simple tool that did what it said on the tin.

    I’ll miss Ultimate Tag Warrior (specifically being able to select from existing tags) but look forward to using the improved tagging support promised in WordPress.

  • Economic meltdown for Starbucks

    The Irish Times website is carrying a story today that Starbucks has experienced a downturn in coffee sales in the US in recent months and is not as economically bulletproof as they may have previously thought.

    This makes perfect sense to me. When your negative equity hell kicks in and leaves a sour and bitter taste in your mouth and curdles your stomach, the absolute last thing you need to drink is a cup of overpriced shit coffee that will only add to your intenstinal woes.

    And for the record, I’m a big coffee drinker. I gave it up for Lent once. The children of Bolivia apparently had no new shoes for Easter Mass. It’s just that what American’s call coffee I, erm… um… don’t.