Posts from — January 2008

This one’s for all the techies and journos out there – Paddy’s Valley-type networkers and anyone with an ounce of IT knowledge. Pass this on, and act on it, to buy your way into heaven (or at least stall your descent to hell).

Before I sold my soul by getting into journalism (and sold it further by once contributing to the Irish Daily Mail), I spent a year studying development studies in UCD. I was at the soft-palmed end of the spectrum. Sinead had served in Peshawar and could speak Urdu. Several of the class were from Zimbabwe, Iran, Zambia and Mozambique. My few months in Tanzania counted for little in comparison, but the outcome was worthwhile.

We were a bunch of aspiring, hope-filled sandal-wearers, for the most part. Cormac (pictured, in drag*) was something of an enigma, however.  On day one he said that he used to be ‘in finance’, had the harried look of a executive at times, and the more we found out about him, the more we wondered why a person in the middle of building a large seafront house in an expensive suburb for his family was, all of a sudden, diving head-first into the muesli.

His biog lists his hugely impressive credentials, including a stint as chief executive of NIKoil, a medium-sized Russian Investment Bank.  He worked rigs in the North Sea. The legends surrounding Cormac included tales of him working at such an intense pace in Russia (commuting frequently back to Ireland) that two interpeters had to work in shifts to keep up with him. One, working alone, would have burnt out. Despite his MBA and high-flying financial past, the oft-unshaven Cormac rode a scrambler to college, sitting in class in a t-shirt and motorbike pants. And he was a nice guy. A really nice guy. Aren’t executives meant to be cutthroat, uncaring bastards?

We debated fiercely, the tone always being set left of centre, and Cormac’s grasp of economics and political realism meant that we were frequently at odds. But his grittey realism and business acumen has stood him in good stead, and benefited hundreds of others.

After finishing in UCD, Cormac waded straight in, waist-deep, starting his own charity, Camara.

Starting in Ethiopia, where Cormac based his MA (as far as I remember), Camara now sends reconditioned computers, kitted out with open-source Linux software, to its labs in Ethiopia, Lesotho, Kenya, Uganda and Zambia. It sends people, too, trained volunteers who pass on basic computing skills to the recipients.  It’s a huge success.

Small charities can struggle with communications, but obviously being an IT NGO means they have been fairly savvy in terms of how to get things done with minimum fuss and expense. Their blog is nicely patched in, with flickr and Skype utilities, RSS feeds (Some of Ireland’s big NGOs could learn a lot from this), Paypal features, etc.

Another thing small charities struggle with is getting the right volunteers. Camara is always looking for people to help out, either those with IT skills, or just enthusiastic volunteers. Click here for details.

They also need computers. LOTS of computers. And publicity. So, techies, roll up your sleeves, or mention this to your IT and PR staff before you chuck out a load of CPUs to upgrade. Journalists, call Cormac. His story is a glorious feelgood feature just waiting to be written, with angles to fit IT, business, lifestyle, travel sections. And he’s a nice guy to boot. And bloggers – linky link to Camara, please.
*The drag queen look was for the Ladies’ mini-marathon. It’s not a regular thing. Pic stolen from Camara’s flickr site. Camara are also looking for a fundraising/marketing manager – job link here.

Expanding on yesterday’s post, wherein I spoke of my back yard’s contempt for human life, here’s Dylan Moran (my boss’s cousin), who ventured south with kids in tow to find a former jail-island teeming with hostility. He makes one point hat I can truly identify with:

“It’s a totally inhospitable place, you shouldn’t be here. The sun – you live about three-quarters of a mile from it.”

The heat here is oppressive. You don’t sweat, pieces of your body liquefy and slide off your body into a cancerous pool at your feet. And this summer is a chilly one. Gawd.

On the plus side, I’m sitting in work in flip-flops and a pink flowery shirt, which I wouldn’t get away with at home. However, I assume John Waters does the very same, changing into a morose black turtleneck and trenchcoat before trudging out the door.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZY17y1MVl4]

Out the back in the line-up, beyond where the waves break, it’s hard to head the regular announcements that the lifeguards make over the tannoy. Usually it’s something to do with rips and currents on the beach, thieves operating in the area (“They’re very intelligent – don’t leave your belongings unattended”) or other announcements designed to save the idiots that populate the beach from their own lack of common sense.

Surfers use the rips to get out past the whitewater, and you’d have to be a shrewd and desperate pickpocket to try and nick a wax comb from someone sitting on a board. Therefore, they don’t usually worry about the announcements. They, we, ignore them.

Luckily, I was on shore having lunch when this announcement was made yesterday.

‘The shark alarm sounded about 1pm after a local surfer spotted the shark, believed to be about 6ft. It was seen about 200m from the shore near the stormwater pipe on North Steyne Beach’

The stormwater pipe emerges from the beach just by my house. If the shark is 200 metres from the shore, it’s 500 metres from my couch. That’s too close. The reckoning is that it was probably a hammerhead, but there was a great white spotted about 20 minutes up the coast a month back, and last March a Bull Shark was caught off North head, 500 metres south of our bay. Throw in a tiger shark, and you’ve got the four major attack-dogs of the shark world.

Fin-tastic.

And if that wasn’t enough, apparently the second most venomous sea creature in Australia, the blue-ringed octopus, is also a resident in our local waters. From the Tele:

“It’s only a matter of time before someone dies,” marine biologist David Baxter said yesterday.
“It’s the second most poisonous sea creature after the box jellyfish, but we co-exist with it.”
Despite their small size and colours, a bite from a blue-ringed octopus quickly paralyses a person to a point where they fall unconscious and can’t breathe.

Great. Anyone fancy a dip? The water’s only deadly.

In the inbox today – a message from Conor Rowan (pictured), part of a three-man team who are cycling from Dublin to Beijing in time for the Olympics. After reaching Turkey by Christmas (how apt) the lads have crossed into Iran, and despite scaremongering warnings to the contrary, have found the Iranian people to be incredibly friendly.

The customs officers didn’t root through our bags as we expected and instead chatted in broken english about the Ireland-Iran world cup qualifier in Tehran all those years ago.

Meanwhile, as Paul was outside minding the bikes and being mobbed by locals, his first conversation in Iran went something like this :

“Hellohello where from?

“Ireland.”

“You like Iran?

“Eh, we’ve only been here 30 minutes.

“Ah you like Iran, very friendly people, very friendy, no terrorists here.  You go Iraq, Afghanistan: terrorists. America lie, no terrorists here. Bye bye”

Beside our hotel on the border there was this crippled guy who had a small bike shop and thankfully had spare nipples and fixed my broken spoke.

Seasoned bloggers will be well aware of ye olde blog blather.net, to which Dave Walsh (right) is still attached. Dave, for those of you who don’t know, is currently involved in the high-profile pursuit of Japanese whaling ships in the Southern Ocean.

He’s the serious-looking communications manager on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza (blog here), which, while it’s not actively boarding the Japanese ships like the more aggressive Sea Shepherd folk, is doing its bit to chase them out of the hunting grounds. His flickr page is worth a look, too. It’s here. He’s also blogging the trip on blather.net, which, if you haven’t checked it out in a while, is worth a look.

Expect drawn pistols at high noon in the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre.

Said Derek O’Connor, he of Chancer fame:

“Dubliner publisher Trevor ‘Awight’ White thinks that The Chancer is obsessed with The Dubliner. He’s wrong. We’re obsessed with him. Grrrrr!”

Trevor hits back:

“You have a neck like a jockey’s bollocks. And for that, I suppose, we must be grateful, for you certainly are amusing, and Ireland needs a worthy satirist. I dare you to try to be that man.”

Oh, throw a punch already, you pair of little girls.

Note to Chancer: Sorry for nicking the pic.

Note to Trevor: It’s Chancer.ie

I used to work for a freesheet, so I was well versed on the litter-versus-personal-responsibility debate that surrounds the papers. I still feel the product is strong and has a good niche, but you can’t argue the environmental aspect. There’s a lotta paper left over every day.

This idea tickles me, so. An artist in London is making a house out of leftover freesheets. The size of the house is dependant on how many people show up with papers.

It did get me thinking, however, about corporate tie-ins where everyone’s a winner, environmentally speaking.

Surely these guys, Warmcel, who turn newspapers into loft and wall insulation material, have thought of fronting the cost for collection bins for Metro/HeraldAM etc, and scooping the tonnes of discarded papers for raw materials? More than nine tonnes are left on the London Tube alone every day.

If Warmcell could get their hands on the freesheets, the papers’ consciences are assuaged, in that not only are their papers going to be recycled, they are further aiding the planet by adding to energy efficiency. Would that not insulate freesheets from bad press?

It’s amazing how two people can say effectively the same thing about th’internet, yet say it so differently.

One sounds like a simple Luddite cretin, the other a hesitant sceptic, yet to be convinced but fully aware if its potential.

Twenty currently has John Waters tacked to his dartboard for his execrable comments on blogosphere standards. Listen and read it all here.  Bloggers listen to the radio, too, John. And they’re going to be ALL OVER johnwaters.ie when it kicks off. All over it, baby.

AC Grayling, on the other hand, makes his comments, aptly, via the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog, here. Nothing new here, but it’s reasonably well put. As quoted by Slugger:

“The downside is the volume of rubbish, the anonymous viciousness and sneering, the ad hominem attacks, the paragraph-long pretensions to authoritativeness, the degrading of debate it freely permits, making it what I’ve before now called the biggest toilet wall in history.”

To which the immediate response comes in the comments:

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, some of your blogs are OK”

By the way, AC, great hair.

Irish Times journo Shane Hegarty has been posting about the dos an don’ts of interviewing recently (here and here) and unwittingly highlighted a blog post I wasn’t all that happy to inspire.

I interviewed author John Connolly for the Irish Echo in late July, during his promotional tour for The Unquiet. Walking out the doors, all seemed to have gone well. I was happy with the gathered quotes, my dictaphone had worked perfectly, I already had the framework for the piece bubbling away in my head.

Then, this.

A phrase from Connolly’s interview rang loudly in my ears at this point.

“The best piece of advice I ever got was in the context of an interview I did with James Lee Burke – who for me is one of the great crime writers – he once said: ‘You have to learn to ignore both the catcalls and the applause’, and he’s right.”

Not having read his book was not a catcall, but I simply didn’t have time. As the main journo in a small paper, my job covers all areas. Last week, for example, I wrote about business visa issues, plastic bag taxes, covered a rape case, a case of serious assault, television reviews, interviewed a double amputee, wrote about two separate Antarctic adventures, Irish pubs, Ireland’s top female triathlete, the Sydney-Hobart, and grilled two comedians on how to start a career in stand-up for a large feature, and then sifted the wires for several pages of Irish news, which I subbed into the pages I laid out, before running in corrections and proofing several sports pages.

Objectively speaking, Connolly isn’t my cup of tea. I struggled to last past three chapters of the first Charlie Parker novel I read, but loved dipping in and out of Nocturnes, his collection of umbral and unnerving short stories. The Book of Lost Things, which he clearly regards as his personal opus, is on my ‘must read’ list, purely out of curiosity.

So, feeling slightly niggled and realising that he wasn’t one to take the advice he dispensed, I had a childish stab at him through the resulting feature, which you can read in full below the fold. I won’t lie to you. It felt good.

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The first book I bought this year was a Bible, believe it or not, inspired by David Plotz of Slate magazine, who read and blogged the bible (here) and unearthed some amazing stories that I was certainly never told in RE class in CBC Monkstown. Infanticide, incest, mass murder. It’s all there. So I’ve added reading the bible to my short list of New Year’s resolutions. I even got one with a ludicrous rainbow/dove combo on the front so I can look like a proper loony while reading it on the ferry to work. I may start wearing hemp, grow my hair long again, and walk the isles, reading it aloud to myself to see if I can get a reaction from the torpid commuters.

However, now I notice the Guardian has taken up the challenge of blogging the Qur’an, with Ziauddin Sardar and Madeleine Bunting divvying up the task between them. This will be an exercise in diplomacy, as the Qur’an has a tendency to inflame passions at a much greater rate than does the Bible. Already, the intro post has ended up in a lengthy Q & A section, and the month that Sardar recommends you set aside for reading the holy book of Islam could stretch out into several more, and dealing with the various interpretations of its provisions could, in my humble opinion, be a matter of putting out fires left and right. Can you say Fatwa?

Definitely a blog to keep an eye on, particularly if, like me, you hope to read the book at some stage.