My poor son. He’s only 2 years and 4 months old but in another 60 years he will still be paying for Fianna Fáil’s failed policy of throwing cash at problems in the hopes that a solution may present itself. No doubt by now you are all fed up of hearing about NAMA, “going forward ™” and all the other cliches being thrown around but have you ever for a moment tried to imagine just how much money is involved?

For example when you see it written or hear it being mentioned you might not think that there is much of a difference between a million or a billion. What I mean is that both words just slip off the tongue. We know that they are both large numbers especially if money is being referred to, but I think most people just don’t realise how large it actually is. For instance the media will alway say “11bn” or “11 billion” . If you happen to read a newspaper then you may read about someone being fined “€10,000″. If like me you look at the 10,000 written in numbers then it seems to be a large amount. So how about a million? We all know there are six zeros in a million. There are 9 zeros in a billion so written out numerically a million = 1,000,000 and a billion is 1,000,000,000.

11 billion = 11,000,000,000

All of a sudden it looks much more significant! So let’s apply it to what is going on in our unfair isle, all the below in euro:

196 – Amount a single person gets in unemployment benefit/assistance per week.
10,192 – The amount the above receives in a year
30,000 – The average industrial wage.
100,191 – The basic salary of a T.D.
213,183 – Average price of a house in Ireland December 2009
311,078 – Average price of a house in Ireland February 2007
11,000,000,000 – The amount paid out by the government to Anglo Irish, AIB and BoI to date.
77,000,000,000 – The book value of assets that will be taken over by NAMA.
397,557,000,000 – Net loan book value of Irish financial institutions covered under the guarantee scheme.

It looks quite a lot more forboding now doesn’t it? Just to give you another example, How long would it take a single person on the dole donating every cent that they get to repay some of the above?

3 years to earn the minimum wage
10 years to earn the same as a T.D.
21 years to buy a house
1,079,277 years to match the amount paid out to the big three already.
7,554,945 years to match NAMA’s assets book value.
39,006,770 years to match the net loan book value of the guaranteed financial institutions.

Yep, over 39 million years! Now if you are bored by the numbers how about what Anglo Irish Banks losses would look like in €100 notes? Head on over to thestory.ie to have your mind blown.

I got a call the other day from my friend’s wife who was having problems receiving mail from her eircom.net account when using POP to retreive it. Sometimes she would get some mail and other times none. Using the webmail interface to her account she could see her mail there. All this started she claimed around two weeks ago.

Strange thought I, but then she mentioned that she had gotten a few spam reports in her mail.

Even stranger thought I, so I asked her to forward one of them on to me and here’s what I saw:

This mail was generated automatically from Endian Firewall, which runs on
efw1-oceantelecom.localdomain.(none) for scanning all mails for spam and viruses.

In a mail sent to you a virus has been found.

Virus name: Suspect.Bredozip-zippwd-2
Sender of the email:  “DHL Manager Felipe Dove” <shipping@dhl.com>
Subject: DHL delivery problem number 25130.
Connection date: POP3 from 149.5.34.3:11778 to 159.134.198.135:110
Message File: Per instruction, the message has been deleted.

Instead of the infected email this message has been sent to you.

Regardless of the fact that it was a virus, it was the very fact that it had been intercepted before it got to her PC was annoying her. Her POP session to eircom’s mail server was intercepted by her ISP. Her ISP acted as a POP proxy without her permisison. Therefore her ISP is effectively snooping on her mail. You can see clear as day in the report above that their firewall intercepted her connection to eircom’s POP3 server.

As you can imagine this really, really annoyed her so she rang ComReg (Ireland’s Communications Regulator) to find out if OceanTelecom were allowed to do this. ComReg said it was a grey area and advised her to contact the office of the Data Protection Commissioner which she duly did. The advice she received from the DPC was that they should not be snooping on her mail as her mail is not being hosted by her ISP.

With this information in hand, she rang OceanTelecom to compain and promptly received torrents of abuse from the owner! Ranting and raving about how he is protecting his network, etc, etc and if she didn’t like it she could cancel her account! How about that for customer service?

But when she informed him that she had already contacted ComReg and the DPC he terminated the call! He hung up a call from a loyal customer of over two years!

She rang me yesterday to tell me what had happened and that that she was naturally going to change her ISP which is only right IMHO.

So, for anyone looking to choose an ISP keep this information in mind. An ISP is an internet service provider. Their only obligation should at it’s most basic level to provide you with access to the internet and nothing else. Everything else should be optional. How you use your internet connection should be of no interest to your ISP once you keep within the terms of your contract, the laws of the land and adhere to their fair use policy. You can view eircom’s policy here.  Some choice quotes from their policy are:

eircom net will use its reasonable endeavours to prevent unauthorised access to the Service by third parties, but shall have no liability to the Customer for any unauthorised access to the Customer’s computer system. The Customer is responsible for selecting and properly using any security procedures made available by eircom net as well as other procedures and measures necessary to safeguard and back-up the Customer’s files, data and programs or any other form of information

and

You acknowledge that eircom net has no control over the information which can be accessed by using eircom net services and that we do not examine the use to which you or other users put the Services or the nature of the information you or they are sending or uploading. We therefore exclude all liability of any kind for the transmission or reception or such information of whatever nature.

Pretty much common sense. The onus is on the customer to remain secure, eircom as an ISP only provide a service which is more than can be said for OceanTelecom.

However I understand that OceanTelecom is a privately owned business and ultimately it is their network and they can pretty much do what they want but I would not have expected that to include interfering with clients  e-mail that is hosted elsewhere. I certainly wouldn’t like my ISP reading my mail before me. Some serious privacy implications there.

If you are an OceanTelecom customer or are considering becoming one, based on the above I would suggest you avoid them or terminate your subscription. If anything the shocking and abusive customer service alone should be good enough reason.

Dear Friend i verry happy to inform you about my success in getting those

funds transferred under the cooperation of  your help in UNITED KINDOM in our

last business and i hope i am contating the write person.Presently I signed a

cheque of ($850.000.00.USD) which i kept for your compensation for all the

past efforts and the  attempts you render me in this matter. I realy

appreciated your efforts at that time very much.

finally remember that I had forwarded instruction to the DHL OFFICE on your

behalf to contact you on how to  receive your cheque containg the funds i

kept for you, so you are to get in touch with DHL OFFICE with your full name

and contact address on their email on how to send you the parcell

Email claims_dhldiliverydepartment@hotmail.com

Phone +2348032185491

My Regards To Your Family
Mrs.Brenda Howell

Oh dear, dreadful spelling, probably as a result of being a non-native English speaker. Why DHL would have a hotmail address is anyones guess.

419 rating – 2 out of 10.

I would have given it 1 out of 10 but that phone number is genuine Nigeria so I give it an extra point for being a genuine 419 and not some cheap knock off from Ghana.

Or at least it was free back in November when I last used it.

I parked, met  my mother (who was already after walking up to the car park) and tried to validate my parking ticket where I almost fainted when the damned machine insisted that I needed to pay €2.50! I was parked for 3 goddamed minutes at the most! A quick check on their website when I got home confirmed that this is now the case since January this year.

The dirty rotten thieving bastards! It’s not enough that they have built possibly one of the worst airport terminals that it is possible to build but now they expect those of us merely collecting someone to pay for the debt ridden white elephant.

So my advice to anyone dropping someone off is to drive slowly along the front of the terminal and get them to jump out of the car with their luggage. You know, like someone jumping off a train in a western?

As for collecting somone, I’m going to drive slowly with the boot open and they can throw their luggage in. I will circle around again and they can jump in in case they didn’t make it the first time.

• The Financial Regulator is getting plush new offices to the tune in €8m paid for out of government funds. By the same government who said that there was not enough money to spend €10m on a cervical cancer vaccine! (Thanks to Grandad for pointing that one out.)
• Civil Servants are told not to use Wikipedia to help them decide on asylum claims!
• TD’s constituency office workers are exempt from the pensions levy. Given most of them are family members makes each TD’s pay cut seem a little hollow. I’d personally be interested to know how much the Lenihan and O’Rourke families are stealing from us.
• Our transport minister compares the countries bankers to Oliver Cromwell, this is the same minister who thought electronic voting was a good thing! While on the subject of comparisons I would dare to say that our Taoiseach is like Worzel Gummidge, he changes heads to suit a particular situation and leaves a big mess for everyone else to clean up.
• A government sponsered study points out the obvious declaring that ‘Ireland suffers from high levels of lawful corruption‘

There is lots more but I couldn’t be arsed looking for them. I’m depressed enough already.

It’s almost out of my system now. I’ve finished Red Alert and almost there with RA2.

A bit if trivia for you. I ended up in hospital in 1997 after playing Red Alert.

I was on my own in the apartment I shared in Cork City for an entire weekend and my ex was a nurse on night duty at the time so I had feck all to do except play Red Alert. As the game progressed, each level would take longer and longer to complete so after one almost two hour stint I had finally had to go to the toilet. So I stood up, opened my bedroom door and led out with my right foot which was completely dead from the knee down.

I was fortunate that  I didn’t break  my ankle but I did tear ligaments and earned myself two weeks off work that I used to finally finish the game

Speaking of Command & Conquer, Red Alert 3 has been available since October but sadly I will probably never get to play it because it comes bundled with that SecuROM DRM shite. Yet another major disappointment having spent so long waiting for it to be released just like Grand Theft Auto 4.

Curiously, because of SecuROM, EA games alone have lost out on approximately €180 from me that I would have otherwise used to buy the games legitimately in 2008. If you include GTA IV which is published by Rockstar Games it now becomes €240 that I have saved myself. Of course that is but a drop in the ocean but surely I’m not the only person who refuses to buy games with such draconian licensing measures?  If just 1000 people refused to buy a single game that retails for €60 it adds up to €60,000 which is not an inconsiderable sum.

For some odd reason just as I’m about to come down with a cold, I smoke like there is going to be no tomorrow. I reckon it must be my body telling me to “store some nicotine buddy ’cause they way you will be feeling in a few hours you won’t be able for much.”

About 12 hours later I was feeling rather hot and clammy, I couldn’t concentrate and my head was spinning and that has been pretty much they way I have been since Thursday morning. I’m feeling much better now though. Or at least I was until Sylwia’s cousin drove over my right foot.

Actually that is a bit of a misnomer. The car wasn’t actually running at the time and her cousin and I were pushing it out of the garage with his wife steering. Actually now that I think about it I better try to explain this properly.

Andrew’s car has a dodgy starter motor. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and obviously this time around it didn’t. So as it was parked in an underground garage it had to be pushed out backwards out onto the street so I could hook it up to my car for towing. Anyway there was wind, rain and more rain and more wind howling at us from the quay side and next thing I knew my right foot was stuck on something. I looked down and it was underneath the bloody tyre. So we pushed the car (Ford Mondeo) backwards some more to release my foot.

I couldn’t feel much as I was soaking wet (outside at this stage obviously!) hooking up the tow rope. After getting his car started I pulled over and then the life (and pain) started coming into my foot. I now have a lovely tyre print on my shoe!

I’ve just checked my foot and it is a little red. Doesn’t appear that anything is broken so it isn’t all that bad although I did end up soaking wet so a relapse of  man-flu will probably rear its head over the next couple of days. And this is increasingly likely as I’m starting to smoke lots again

Being the good citizen that I am I turned my car around and pulled up behind it with my hazard lights on in such a way that anyone coming around the corner would see my car well in advance rather than ploughing blind after the corner  into the back of the BMW.

Anyway, after that I rang the Gardai and told them about it and they said they were going to send a car and a tow truck to get it. While I was waiting I decided to have a gander and take a few photos.

Now back to it being a female driver – I made this deduction assuming it wasn’t stolen as they had locked the car when they fled. Inside on the passenger seat was an empty bottle of wine and in the passenger footwell was an unopened bottle of wine. Between the driver and passenger seats were the fragments of a broken wine glass and strewn about the place was some lipstick, eyeliner, face power and a bottle of perfume. While in the back seat was a duvet and two pink pillows!

Unfortunately the photo I took of the inside didn’t turn out great because my reflection is in the window but you get an idea. Click a photo for 1024×768 goodness.