Irish Racism? or just culture.

Tir Na Ri
Originally uploaded by netdance

I don't get too topical or political most of the time but my interest has been piqued by the recent view of Kevin Myers on immigration and racism in Ireland into Ireland over the past 5 years Ireland is experiencing huge immigration with new cultures living side by side with the existing one. Some people don't like this and it not uncommon for names to be thrown about. However the call of racism may not be entirely accurate. Long before Ireland became a country people wanted to immigrate into it was pretty much full of just Irish people, there were some exceptions, God Bless Phil Lynott usually credited as Ireland first black man.

Back then, and even now it was not enough to just be Irish. As a Cork/Dublin hybrid I have experienced the Irish life style of the "Eternal Blow In", I'm not bitter mind but it did give me some perspective on the country that loves to make a lot out of people's difference, even if it is just your accent. I have done a fair bit of travelling, a few years in the states and currently residing in Sydney, Australia. In that time I have met many travelling or resident Paddies. Guaranteed, every time, less than 5 minutes into the first introductory conversation with an Irish person the question comes up : "Where are you from?" and it is always to place you, to put you in some county related box, or if your are from the same county what part of it. It is never enough to just be Irish and be done with it. I know/knew an Irish girl that made assumption about you based on how well your county was doing the either the gaelic football or the hurling. After travelling for years my accent has been cleaned up (some times kicking and screaming), I no longer say "Turty Fuhve" after been ribbed too much it has become "Thirty Five" which is even more source for the title of "Eternal Blow-In" any time I return home. Even comedians get great mileage out of making fun of people from different parts of the country, Tommy Tiernans assessment of Cork people while funny isn't too far of the mark as covered in this segment from his Cracked DVD:



I have made the observation amongst friends that you only really become Irish once you leave Ireland until then you better have picked a place to be from. A lot has been made of the Irish being very friendly and a land of a Hundred Thousand welcomes (Céad míle fáilte). While working with a french co-op student in Ireland 8 years ago he pointed out to me that people he worked with were very friendly when out for a few jars in the pub but the next day they would barely talk to him.

So now here we are almost one complete decade into the 21st Century, the Ireland of today is not the one I grew up with 30 years ago. Back then it was the Dubs against the Culchies, north side versus south side, Kerry versus Cork, Munster versus Leinster etc. on and on. Face it, we (the Irish) were just looking for difference so that we could break away into little Travis Bickle tribes and hate "Them" for being different. So now into this incestuous maelstrom walk immigrants that actual are different, they speak different, they look different, they have different religion, different culture. They don't stand a chance against the old guard. They don't have to work hard to find a difference so that they can make fun or, heaven forbid, hate "Them".

To see how far we have come or have yet to go I would direct the reader (any left?) to the first episode of the third season of Father Ted, "Are You Right There, Father Ted" . Part of the hilarity was that there is a Chinatown section on Craggy Island. Now it doesn't seem to too far off base.

iPod touch

iPod touch
Originally uploaded by peter.ca

True Magnum, nuff said!

No Surprises - A day in the Apple

are you a phoner or a podder?
Originally uploaded by nobihaya

Apple have introduced their new line of 'pods. The high points are a red iPod shuffle (cool), a fatter but shorter iPod nano (smaller?), a stripped down iPhone that is now being called iPod touch with the iPod classic pulling up the rear.

What is interesting, but expected, is the deployment of iPods with WiFi capabilities, with some of the patents that were floating around this is no suprise, but now that it is is moving into the wild it will be very interesting to see what happens next.

As an addendum to the Apple announcement/release I have been running a WiFi enabled phone for 2 months, and war driving like crazy. I live is a fair sized city, Sydney, Australia, WiFi spots, free and paid are few and far between. San Fran may be a different beast in the geeky nerd world but the may be a hole in deployment possibilities on the WiFi front.

TV = ADD

iPod Video
Originally uploaded by Alexandre Van de Sande

Apparently science has caught up with me. At last there is a study that connects attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder in teenagers with watching too much TV as a child. I think this is crap, I watched tonnes of TV as a kid and it never ... Oh look a squirrel.. hee hee hee!

spock - Strike 1

I have been keeping an eye on the people search website spock for a while. It being part of the new wave of web 2.0 projects that is trying to tie down peoples online identities with there real life carbon based fat asses. Their goal is to index people from various source on the Internet including LinkedIn, XING, Myspace, Friendster and Wikipedia.

While they have said they are committed to the privacy of their users, I was surprised to receive an e-mail from them this morning, one of the first I have received since I signed up at their website. This is the body of the e-mail :

Hi,

As one of Spock's newest users, I wanted to let you know about a cool search on Spock.

You can find out who Spock users think should be the top results for fun searches like Arrested for Drunk Driving.

Log onto Spock and check it out!

Have Fun!
The Spock Team

Now am I the only person that think it strange the one of the first communiques highlights such an invasion of privacy, drink driving while frowned upon is probably something that people would like to keep to them selves. While this search may be possible, for an emergent company like spock I would have thought they would stick with the warm and fuzzy functionality that is possible. A bit like the way bitTorrent is always sold as having legitimate applications (which it does, I downloaded Ubuntu 7.04 using it) the bulk of the applications would be considered illegitimate (That is an argument for the courts and the ISPs).

spock isn't the only website getting in on the web 2.0 ability to connect with the real world. Another website to keep an eye on includes the sexual relationship database :

In an effort to better understand society's interconnected nature, this database was created to serve as a repository for information regarding the sexual histories of individuals, across the world and throughout time.

which allows people to assign former sexual partners to any name they can find, though I am convinced that this is a hoax, though the company behind the website, world health optimization management or W.H.O.M. (?), only returns 4 hits on google... If it isn't a hoax it will more than likely get spammed out of existence by warring teenagers making up who had sex with who (even though none of them are).

And finally polar rose, which I have covered before, that is developing facial image search technology so that individuals can be found all over the Internet. They however have been quite for a while and I'm still waiting to see the bulk of their work.

BitTorrent is evil - Obviously, I saw it in FF4

I have never been a great fan of the Fantastic Four, the recent movies haven't been great entries into the super hero genre, but were at least successful enough to spawn one sequel.

As a movie property 20th Century Fox and Marvel have obviously lost billions through people downloading the movies using bitTorrent. Just this week the most recent movie in the franchise, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, has entered the top ten of Most Popular DVDrips on Bit-Torrent. So to stem this evil it has fallen to the comic book to present a social commentary on the perils and possible uses of such a vile technology as bitTorrent.

The picture to the right is taken from Fantastic Four Issue #549. In ways even I can't understand evil master mind, the Wizard, managed to clone bad guy Klaw using an audio file that he downloaded from bitTorrent. I may not be up on my super hero world view any more, but it does prove, incontrovertibly, that bitTorrent is evil. Here endth the heavy handed lesson kids, stay in school.

What is unclear is what did all those other people who were downloading the same file that gave the Wizard such a fantastic upload speed.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for posting this.

Wikipedia trust coloring demo

I love wikipedia, it is a comfortable hole that I fall into a lot and find it very hard to get back out of. In many way like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, I seem to inexorably coming back to pages dealing with Star Trek or Nazi Germany, maybe that says more about the user rather than wikipedia.

Most of the time when reading pages I don't feel there is any reason to doubt what I am reading (I have proof-read some Star Trek articles for quality and have yet to find an error). However there are some pages, politicians, Scientology etc. that you just know you cannot believe by faith alone. It is a problem and I have covered the issue of wikipedia reputation before. It is good to know that other people are working on solving this problem.

The tack that they have taken is similar to the idea that I proposed (even though it is probably self evident) which is to give a user a rating based on the work contributed, but also what survives edits. As a result words on a specific page are color coded based on the user who added it and their reputation. I like their color coding, it is a lot more subtle than I thought could be done and I think it works. If nothing else it is a very good way of highlighting what is contention and bringing eyes to bare to at least help resolve it. I can't wait to see this deployed.