zen.org Communal Weblog

This is what I got to say at Patrick’s primary school today, introducing the President of Ireland before she gave her remarks in front of the kids and staff at the school:

Today is a very special day for the Dalkey School Project. As Chairperson of the Board of Management, it gives me great pleasure to welcome President McAleese to the school. The last time she visited the school was for the 25th birthday celebrations.

However, for many people here, this is their first time experiencing a Presidential visit; we look forward to hearing the President’s address. It is an honor for me to invite the President to speak.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese.

A friend did a skydive at the end of May in an effort to raise funds for our kids’ primary school. In terms of ways to help children, the bar has been raised pretty high: a few thousand feet, in fact.
It was a really great success.

To scribble down electronically what’s scribbled in pencil on a piece of scrap paper on my desk:

To change the length of time my Nokia N95-8GB spends ringing for an incoming call with Vodafone, I enter

**61*0875xxxyyyy**sec#

then press the green Call button. In this, xxx and yyyy are your mobile phone number, and sec is the number of seconds (divisible by 5) ranging from a minimum of 5 to a maximum of 30 seconds. So 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, or 30.

Paper recycled.

My Irish passport expires in a few months. I figure we’ve no plans to go anywhere for the remainder of the year, probably, so why not look into getting it renewed? I visited the Official Site to get the scoop.

If you pay An Post for Passport Express, you’ll get it in 10 days.

If you don’t, and want to be frugal since there’s no rush, you can do it via regular post—accepting it will take “at least 4-6 weeks” to get it back. Which instills the fear in the reader that something may come up in the next two months which would make you need it, and you’d of course be screwed without it. So I’d guess most people go via An Post.

I wonder: what’s the functional difference between the Passport Express delivery box and the Stupid Shit Regular Post box? I expect they sit side-by-side in the same building, and the Regular Post box also serves as a great place to rest bags full of those completed-and-barely-shredded Passport Express applications awaiting recycling.

For the longest time I’ve been sticking with having to only ever visit www.ros.ie using W1ndow$ on my laptop. Being self-employed, every two months I have to give some tax to The Man.

This time, I decided to look again to see if anyone has discovered a way to do this without that other OS. Luckily, I found some notes by Andrew S. Townley explaining exactly how. He’s found the link into the ros.ie site to get at the actual KCrypto Java applet that it uses (and claims fails to start).

As described, I put it into /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/lib/ext and restarted Firefox. Now the login page on the site worked fine, and I could get in. Yay!

P.S. I’m doing this under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).

A new community weblog is starting up in Ireland: For Nine Pounds. (And in 2008 retired, only to rise out of the ashes in its new form of The Blog Pound.) The content in its first few days has been plentiful and entertaining. I’ve started to try doing the Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox to get RSS atom feeds of weblogs to help you spend more time reading and less time clicking.

Anyway, it’s pretty good so far.

Election results are flying around in Ireland from yesterday’s election. I figure I’ll look at the RTE pages about the results … and it’s a bit slow. Why? Eircom’s sending RTE’s traffic over thru London?!? And whois says tiscali.net is an Italian company.

traceroute to www.rte.ie (89.207.56.94), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 dsl.network.home (192.168.20.1) 0.362 ms 0.586 ms 0.505 ms
2 b-ras1.bbh.dublin.eircom.net (159.134.155.19) 134.579 ms 136.391 ms 135.432 ms
3 pos10-0.coreb.cwm.dublin.eircom.net (83.71.112.77) 44.852 ms 46.362 ms 40.098 ms
4 pos0-0.corea.thn.london.eircom.net (83.71.113.102) 55.073 ms 56.998 ms 56.655 ms
5 sl-gw22-lon-2-3.sprintlink.net (213.206.156.209) 55.808 ms 57.405 ms 55.701 ms
6 sl-bb22-lon-9-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.128.104) 55.889 ms 57.106 ms 58.087 ms
7 sl-bb21-lon-3-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.129.152) 60.690 ms 59.539 ms 57.905 ms
8 sl-gw11-lon-15-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.128.59) 51.129 ms 53.126 ms 53.428 ms
9 sle-tisca-3-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.159.98) 51.896 ms 50.280 ms 50.700 ms
10 so-0-0-0.dub10.ip.tiscali.net (213.200.82.74) 62.665 ms 62.589 ms 61.977 ms
11 rte-dub1.ip.tiscali.net (213.200.67.50) 63.408 ms 64.028 ms 61.799 ms
12 89.207.56.94 (89.207.56.94)(H!) 66.711 ms (H!) 69.544 ms (H!) 70.821 ms


Hidden on the upper floor of the Blackrock Shopping Centre, it blends so perfectly you might never notice. An innocent kiosk, as plain and ordinary as any other. Not many people seem to use these Internet-on-wheels setups, but still they’re dropped into public shopping areas and airports. There’s an unknown truth in this box in Blackrock. You’d be so distracted by the shoes you need to buy that you wouldn’t think it odd. You just need to look at the Eircom broadband kiosk, look in its heart…

Across town in the basement of a church…
The team of Dell systems finished their turn. It was time.

“Hi, my name is Eircom.” Take a deep breath, he thought. He continued, his gaze looking down at the tiles on the floor. “And I’m a free Linux user.”

Many voices responded with compassion: “Hi, Eircom.” He looked up and glanced over at the Unison.ie Web server, who offered a kind smile.

Nervously, he gulped some coffee from his paper cup and began with barely a whisper. “This is the first time I’ve come to a Windows Anonymous meeting…”

We brought back a loaf to our local Centra (like the 7-11 in the US) because it just weirded us out. No, it wasn’t moldy or anything. There was just something not quite right about it.

Can you see what’s was wrong in the picture?

I just discovered that I can listen to Howard Stern all the time, even from Ireland. Yay!! Finally Sirius has made it possible to subscribe to listen to their stuff via online streaming without requiring you to buy one of their physical radios.

I started listening to Howard about 18 years ago when he was broadcast in Philadelphia, then when he was airing on KOME in San Jose, California. When we moved to Ireland, I had to give up the habit.

In 2004 Howard moved to Sirius, so it seemed like a step closer—but still, no easy way to listen without paying for the silly radio.

Until now.