The DOBlog

Tag: Other Thoughts

  • DoBlog is 1 year old this month

    Last night I was doing some housekeeping on the site and I noticed that the year-ometer on the DoBlog is about to turn over. The first post on www.obriend.com (as it was then) was on 18th April 2006. It was about the Electoral Register.

    With an Election looming in the next few weeks it is worth revisiting where we are on that particular issue.

    • The Electoral Register issues are still not resolved
    • There does not appear to have been any substantive analysis of the actual root causes (apart from some work I did off my own bat as a concerned citizen)
    • The work that was done to ‘correct’ the Register was managed inconsistently between Local Authority areas, which means that we may not have improve the accuracy all that much.
    • That work was completed a while ago… the Register will have degraded in quality again since
    • It seems that entire housing estates (even in the Minister’s own constituency) may have been dropped off the Register

    Over on McGarr Solicitors site I paraphrased Paul Simon to describe the state of the Register -“Still broken after all these years”. It is. The scrap and rework was botched and it wasn’t even the right thing to do.

    With most elections or polls in Ireland now being decided by the narrowest of margins it is more important than ever that everyone of us who can vote in the forthcoming General Election does vote. It was once said that in a democracy you don’t always get the government you want, you get the government you deserve.

    So vote. Vote diligently.

  • In rememberance of those who have gone before us

    A disturbing thing happened to me this evening.

    I was out for a few drinks with an associate and his wife (who suffered through an evening of nerdvana as we discussed data quality and Dr Who). Nothing too disturbing there.

     However, at one point in the night I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror of the bar we were in. What I saw was a round and smiling head perched atop a suit, a shirt and tie and a v-neck jumper. But what pushed my mental gears into over-drive was the tell-tale clip of a Parker pen in my suit jacket pocket.

    All men fear that one day they will turn into their fathers. I seem to have bypassed that by turning into my grandfather.

     And, much like Marcel Proust’s madeleine cakes, it was the little detail of the Parker pen that gave me that “oh shit” moment.

    For all that he gave me, and all that I should have taken while I had the chance, I thank my parental grandfather.

    For the rest… I thank god that I only inherited a genetic dress code from my paternal side, and that my love of music and playing music I can still share with my maternal grandfather.

    Have any of you dear readers had similar moments of “o jaysus I’ve turned into… “?