The DOBlog

Tag: Philosophical Musings

  • 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.

  • Laughter

    The mother of young man who I hope will be in a position to (legally) buy me a pint around the time of my 50th birthday has set up a nice blog called Tir na nÓg. It is full of nice musings on things maternal and political.

    The young man is called Oisin. He didn’t vote in the last election and will probably not care about elections, information quality or politics until around the next change of government (which given the Irish skill at these things could be further away than we’d like or closer than we think – all is vapour at the moment).

    Apparently he is a bit bigger now than he was when I saw him last – but not quite old enough to appreciate the world of blogging. Maybe in years to come he will be able to look at the very nice things that his mother has written about him and the things she got worked up about as a result of his arrival. Certainly he will probably have a nervous compulsion to leave his socks and shoes on when courting young ladies in years to come given the prominence his foot has had on this blog and elsewhere.

    That thought makes me consider for a moment what the dreaded ‘meeting of the parents’ will be like for the off-spring of the Web2.0/bebo/myspace/bloggerama generation. My parents had photographs and Super8 8mm silent movies of me. Arrgh. My wife loved them…. some scenes are still referred to the best part of a decade after she saw them first. However the meeting had to take place. The good plates had to come out. LOTS of wine had to be drunk. Thus it has happened since the dawn of time, since Ug brought Uggina to meet his parents and they dragged out the really embarrassing part of the cavewall to look at.

    Fast forward 20+ years.. Will Oisin’s mother and girlfriend simply swap Flickr links, the mother’s to Oisin’s antics pre-University, the girlfriends to his antics at University, in particular that drunken night when..?

    How will the poor lad run interference and filter the images that are presented to his significant other by his significant mother?

    In theory the digital image can last for next to infinity. In practice it is prone to the failure of hard-drives, the collapse of businesses, the destruction of servers etc. Will Oisin be tempted, around the age of 17, to unleash a virus to seek out and delete images and video of him from the world’s computers (a bit like Doctor Who did – a reference the lad’s parents will appreciate.)?

    Perhaps in some proactive and technology friendly homes this trend is already starting. Perhaps another of life’s embarrassing but necessary rituals is falling prey to the romance with technology?

    I commend Oisin’s parents for avoiding the bebo-holic rush to put the minutiae of their lives and the life of their child on-line. Such people worry me to the point of my wanting to have their access to any technology more advanced than a wax tablet and stylus severly curtailed. To paraphrase an Audi advert – Offspring, Dork, Technic.

    Yes, he may have his footprints (literally) all over the blogosphere before his first birthday but, much like any good superhero, nobody knows Oisin’s face.

  • What the…? – Irish Political coverage ignores the Elephant in the room

    I’m frankly baffled. We are in the run up to a General Election here in Ireland. All the media pundits are quoting 24th May as the date of the (as yet unannounced) election. This would require our parliament to be dissolved at the latest next week.

    Ireland runs a Proportional Representation/Single Transferable Vote system. It is built into our Consitution. There is a large body of legal opinion around the thresholds at which the ratio of elected representatives to number of people in a constituency breaches the Constitution. We are, it seems, at that point in 10 consituencies out of a total of 43. This has resulted in a Constitutional challenge in the High Court by two Independent TDs (Members of Parliament) to the holding of any election until the balance of Proportional Representation is restored through changes to the make up of Consituencies.

    The fact that key demographics had changed and there was a risk that the Electoral Constituency boundaries or numbers of representatives in each consituency might need to be altered was identified in September 2006 when the preliminary figures from our Census were published. There is no legal obligation on the Government to act or react to these however. The final Census figures were published on the 29th of March. These should be acted on or else there is the risk of any election being declared unconstitutional.

    The risk is that if the Dáil (our parliament) is dissolved prior to an election the running of which is declared unconstitutional until the parliament (the one that has been dissolved) addresses the issue of the Electoral contituencies then we could find ourselves with a bit of a governmental and Constitutional crisis.

    Yet the media continue to focus on the dog and pony show but ignore the Gorrilla in the room. The Executive arm of Government continues to barrel down the path to an election without any apparent appreciation of the risk that exists, both to the simple fact of an election and to the essence of our Constitution. Why has the existence of this Constitutional challenge not been publicised more? Why are the media giving the politicians sound-bite time to puff their agendas ahead of an election being called but they don’t ask the relevant politicians why we find ourselves at a juncture where the Constitutionality of our Electoral system is being challenged due a disproportionality in representation?

    The chronic lack of leadership and accountability on the part of the Government Minister charged with monitoring and managing how our Electoral Register and our Electoral Processes operate is shocking. However at least it is consistent with his lack of leadership and lack of willingness to be accountable for anything other than a soundbite on the news (he was going to ‘bash some heads together’ over the Galway water crisis apparently).

    To tie this back to my theme of Information Quality Management, Deming called on management to adopt a “constancy of purpose” and to wholeheartedly take on “the new philosophy” while breaking down barriers between people/organisations and driving out the fear that prevents the delivery of quality.

    Why does the relevant Minister seem to act in a manner that could only serve to drive in fear and increase the barriers that might exist that would prevent a good job being done? What is our incumbent Government’s purpose that they are constant to? What is the philosophy that they are pursuing?

    I’m off to Paddy Powers to place a bet that the Election won’t be called this side of June. Congratulations to Catherine Murphy and Finian McGrath for taking a stand on this issue.

  • 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… “?