The DOBlog

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  • A plug for the bruvver

    Thought I’d take a quick time-out to plug the brother’s blog over at http://anothercryingshame.blogspot.com.

    I particularly liked his post on the Electoral Consitutencies issue, especially his description of Dick Roche as the late lamented Government’s top crisis manager… which I quote here…

    …that man is the greatest crisis manager the FF/PD’s have. So great are his skills of crisis management that he has been known to leave entirely solvable problems alone for years until they become the sort of crises that have citizens of the state doubled over with the shitty squits, just so he can flex his crisis solving muscles.

    As he is younger and less mature, he can get away with things that a more mature mind would hesitate over (and then quote anyway). Some elements of accuracy may be lacking in that description, but Turlough is right – there has been a Zapp Brannigan-esque approach to managing things.

  • You cannot change the laws of physics.

    So, the Dail has dissolved. The Mahon Tribunal has been frozen. The franchise of students and commuters has been all but evaporated. The Constitution appears to have been transformed into just an insubstantial vapour.

    My understanding of the physics of matter moving between states (from frozen to disolved for example) suggests to me that it is inevitable that we’ll have some leaks in the near future.

  • Dis Dissolution is catching…

    RTE radio have just announced that the Mahon Tribunal is (as suspected) postponing the next phase of its hearings until after the election. What a fortuitous coincidence. It does recommence right after the election – when the haggling will be going on about who will be in the Government.

    Also, the brother has rowed in with his euro’s worth on the timing of the election. I am sure that if I hadn’t beaten him to the punch he would have out-pendatried me as he is, to borrow PJ O’Rourke’s description, ‘the political nut who lives around here’.

    I’m just a commuter whose opinion appears not to matter to a Taoiseach who seems to be out of touch with the realities of Celtic Tiger life.

  • Dissolve this for headaches…

    And so it is done

    This morning our noble leader, el Bertie, got our President to dissolve the Dáil (parliament) so we could have an election on the 24th of May. This is one of those rare occasions when something gets dissolved in order to create a headache.

    For a start, the Constitutional challenge to our Electoral Boundaries is still be be heard. One can only assume that a roll of the dice is being taken here on the assumption that the High Court (and possibly the Supreme Court) would view, on balance (yada yada) that the disenfranchising of consitutents who are currently under-represented in our Parliament is slightly less embarassing and legally problematic then not actually having a government to run the country. This sheer arrogance in the face of our Constitution and the rights of citizens to be represented in proportion to the population in their area is gonad numbing in its scale.

    Students and Commuters – Who needs ’em!

    From time to time I lecture 3rd level students. Not so long ago I was one myself. Now I’m a commuter. Calling the election for the 24th of May (right in the middle of university exams) disenfranchises students. Given that on the 24th of May I’m scheduled to be working 3 counties away from where I live, I’ll have to take a day of work to exercise my franchise. So will a lot of other commuters… you can’t exactly pop home on your lunch break if it takes you 2 hours to travel there and back. If my gonads weren’t already numbed by the nose-thumbing that the Constitution has received, I’d have numb ones now.

    Dear My Boss,
    I will be unable to report for work on the 24th of May due to an increased numbing of my gonads caused by the arrogance of political leaders who choose to disenfranchise me by calling elections in the middle of the week.

    My GP informs me that if I can restore my Number 1 preference to its correct order I might be back in work by June.

    Yours

    Me

    I really hope that a large number of students and commuters make the effort to vote that day – but to vote the arrogant and insular leaders that we currently have out of office.

    Could it be that the Commuters can see on a daily basis the failure of our infrastructure planning and the total failure to connect dots and provide for people’s quality of life might have been seen as issues that would put them in the ‘anti-incumbent’ camp?

    The Taoiseach’s timetable

    The media coverage has been peppered with references over the past few weeks to the fact that the whole decision rested with one man – El Bertie. So he has made a decision on the basis of his personal timetable. I wonder what his drivers were? Maximising the numbers of voters who might be able to turn out obviously wasn’t one of them. What could it have been I wonder?

    Certainly not the investigation into his alleged involvements in planning corruption that is to be conducted by the Mahon Tribunal over the coming weeks … oh, hang on… the Tribunal will shut up shop on that part of their investigation for the duration of the election.

    What a coincidence.

    Constitutional Challenge

    However, the Constitutional Challenge trundles on with a trial date likely next Thursday. At that stage we’ll know just how many other voters will not have their voices heard, or at least not heard as loudly as they should be.

    That rumbling you hear are the dice rolling…

    … Mr McGarr over at McGarrSolicitors has his thought also.

  • Little victories..(?)

    The good news

    The Minister for the Environment today announced the establishment of a Commission to review the electoral constituencies. This is exactly what he said couldn’t be done a few weeks ago, before the constitutional challenge to the current state of the constituencies was launched as the ‘final census figures weren’t in’.

    The figures that were available were good enough though to form the basis of funding allocations under the Local Government Fund.

    So after weeks of denying there was a problem that needed to be sorted out, Minister Roche as convened a commission to sort out the problem. I wonder if he will have to “bash some heads together” like he did when he went to Galway to part the waters?

    The even better news

    The even better news is that there could now be a full 6 months for Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats to club together and push through all those reforms they had promised as part of their election manifestos policy statements about things that might be important in an election. They’ve costed them all and were just looking for a fresh mandate to do them.

    Sure, hasn’t the constitution given them a few more months to deliver the goods.

    53 promises from Bertie equates to about 10 a month. I wonder if they’ll start with the promises in FF’s Economic policy manifesto document ? Or will the PDs get their way and tinker with stamp duty?

    Will they put something in place in the next 6 months to address the flaws in the processes underpinning the Electoral Register (look for posts earlier than 18th April on this one!)? After all, Minister Roche seems to be getting into his problem solving, head-bashing stride.

    Come on gang… a lot done, more to do.

    …or will they still leap lemming -like into the arms of the Electorate before the end of June?

  • For the avoidance of doubt…

    The first bit of doubt

    Various Dell representatives have explained to me my problem as being one of how my graphics card uses hypermemory. However that doesn’t resolve the issue that I the option I selected when building my machine was for a card with 256MB dedicated video RAM – the fact that it could use hypermemory to extend that further was irrelevant.

    Screenshot of my graphics card properties.

    For the avoidance of doubt I’ve uploaded a screenshot of the properties of the graphics card from the ATI administration utility. Maybe I’m reading it wrong but it sure looks like a 128MB graphics card to me, hypermemory or no hypermemory.

    The other bit of doubt

    As some of you may know, I do the odd bit of teaching and guest lecturing at a university in Dublin City (rearrange the words to figure out which one). There’s another member of staff there who, lucky person that he is, shares a variant of my name. By variant I mean that the name is phonetically and aurally identical but there are a few small differences.

    • Dr. Darragh O’Brien uses his title (hard earned and well deserved) which is a title I don’t have (I’m just a pretender at this whole ‘knowing academic things’ it would seem).
    • Dr. Darragh spells his name with 2 ‘r’s. I don’t.
    • He uses an apostrophe in his surname (O‘Brien) where as I don’t)

    This is important as Dell just emailed him and phoned him trying to get in contact with me. The waves of surrealism are lapping harshly on the shores of my patience at this stage. Thankfully Dr. D (as I will refer to him to avoid confusion) forwarded me the email he got which I’ve responded to. He’s used to it – the Admin team in the particular faculty had him listed to teach my class for a while on the on-line course tools.

    I’m am heartily impressed that Dell went to the trouble of going to the university website and looking up contact details for me… I mean him… I mean me… …. drat, now even I’m confused. Particularly as they already had my personal email address in the email correspondence I’ve had and associated with my order and the support cases I’ve raised.

    All of which made me decide to dig out an old slide I use in presentations on Information Quality that shows why I got interested in the issue in the first place.
    Why i got into information quality

    For those of you who can’t use the powerpoint viewer here, I’ve converted the slide to a gif for your viewing pleasure.
    Why I got into IQ slide gif

    Dr. D — If you’re reading this thanks for the email forward and I hope you find my slide ‘amusing’.

  • Better late then never..

    RTE today have a story about the changing demographics revealed by the Census.

    This story mentions specifically the possible need for an additional TD in Dublin West as a result of the 8000 population growth in the area that the Census shows.

    RTE have, unfortunately, failed to point out the other constituencies that are under represented and the half-dozen or so that are over represented. They do, however, make the point that the cities in Ireland (of which there are only 5) have lost population share to other areas…

    Of course this information was available in the public domain since the 29th of March and forms the basis of the Constitutional challenge to the Electoral constituency boundaries (or rather the failure of the Government to rework those boundaries in light of the census data).

  • Electoral Constituencies…

    Interesting developments (well developments at least) over in the Hight Court…

    The Constitutional challenge to the Electoral boundaries will be heard next week. This isn’t really news to those of us who have been keeping an eye on mcgarrsolicitors over the past few weeks.

    What does it mean? Well it means that any chance of calling an election this side of the middle of May is shot to hell – rumours of emergency legislation not with standing.

    I wonder what Noel Whelan of Irish Times fame makes of this attempt by citizens to exercise not just their right of free speech but also their right to have a proportionally representative election? As a barrister, political pundit and a former political organiser with Fianna Fail (see his biog at this LINK) I’m sure he’d have an opinion to express.

  • What the Dell… an actual response… from a human!!

    What are the odds?

    In the week that scientists tell us they have discovered a planet that might support alien life, I got a response from a live person in Dell. And not in their off-shored outsourced Call Centre neither… this one was from ‘Dell Central’. Rick (for that is his name) reached out to me from Round Rock Texas as that is his job – he is part of an Internet Outreach team. I’m impressed – it took 3 days for Rick to respond to me but I’m still waiting for Samuel (the phone support supervisor I eventually got to speak to last week) to get back to me after a week.

    They never write, they never call… don’t they love me anymore? 🙁

    Also, there is the small matter that Dell have not responded to my “Unresolved Issue” report (via Dell Support on-line) which was raised on the 13th of April – that’s 13 elapsed days… If I hadn’t heard from Rick I’d have started to think they just didn’t care, that they had my money and that was all that mattered. But Rick has, thus far, restored my faith somewhat. At least he was proactive in reaching out to me.

    Dell Wars Part IV – A New Hope (?)

    I’ve taken Rick up on his invitation to contact him about my issues. Hopefully he’ll have read the various blog posts here under Dell Hell and will be up to speed on the issues I’m having. I’ll keep my readers posted on how this Soap Opera plays out… of course, a soap opera is usually a work of fiction – this is a painful case of fact.

  • Election in the offing…

    There is an election in the offing here in Ireland. However there are (or rather should be) some concerns still about the quality of the electoral register.

    Over on the IQ Network site there is a short article about the importance of timeliness of information as a measure of its quality and accuracy..

    An important aspect of Information Quality – Timeliness
    IQ Network – the IAIDQ CoP in Ireland – Wednesday, 25 April 2007

    Also, on the Labour Party website there is a piece about issues uncovered in the door to door scrap and rework cleanup that was done late last year on the Electoral register…

    All in all I have an uneasy feeling, particularly as the fundamental root causes don’t seem to have been addressed.