Me Blog!

As illnesses go the flu is a nasty bugger. I haven’t had it myself in years as I used to get regular vaccinations at work. So for the first time in years and for exactly a week now I have been freezing cold one minute, roasting the next. I’ve been shaking, coughing and wheezing. Unable to stay awake, unable to to go to sleep and finally one entire week later I’m starting to feel a little bit better.

I haven’t left the house in that length of time either. I wonder if much has changed?

Anyway back to the flu. I have no idea if it was swine flu or not as I didn’t bother with any doctors or health professionals because I simply cannot afford them. A visit to the G.P. and a prescription would cost me in and around €100 which is half what I have to spend per week. Ironically of course I haven’t spent anything in the past week anyway other than getting someone to buy me the odd packet of cigarettes so I might have as well got myself checked out.

I’ve already mentioned alternating between being roasting hot and freezing cold, so what else can you expect? Absolutely aching bones and joints for a start. My hips were so sore I could barely walk at times. This started to fade after about the fourth day. Another thing is the dizziness. At times while sitting it was like the whole room was spinning around. Close your eyes and it felt like being in a washing machine. A week later and I’m still having dizzy spells and pounding headaches although not as frequently thankfully. I’ve discovered that lying down on my right hand side seems to stop the dizziness for some reason. It doesn’t work if you lie on your left

Oddly one thing that hasn’t been affected is my appetite. On the contrary I have been constantly hungry and no amount of food is satisfying. There must be some truth in that “feed a cold, starve a fever” adage.

The worst thing (apart from the suffering of course) is the boredom. Any of you following me on twitter may have read recently about the television falling off the wall, well the second T.V. is constantly tied up by my mother recording bloody soap operas so that ruled that out. Staring too long at a computer screen resulted in a few dizzy spells so that ruled that out as too it ruled out reading for the same reason. Still I’m on the mend at last so time to get through some of the bills and other letters that have been piling up while I’ve been laid up.

I see from a cursory glance that college are looking for €1,500 that I don’t have for a registration fee so I guess I will be finishing up there next week and my NCT is due as well.  I guess I should have stayed in bed.

The end of October is almost here but despite the evenings getting cooler and the nights closing in, our garden is still in bloom. This afternoon Lucas was pointing at something on the floor and it turned out to be a Ladybird. I picked it up and he was fascinated watching it crawl around my hand. I decided to return it to the garden and took the following shot:

Click for Bigger

I was absolutely delighted with the colours. But regular readers may know that this is not the first time I have been playing with macro photographs in the garden. I have also taken this bumblebee and another macro of water drops on a flower.

Photo of Lucas in the garden yesterday. I asked him to smile but I think he overdid it a bit!

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Edit – I’ve made a complete and utter balls up of this post. Lucas is on the bottom left of the photo. And the ship is the MS Julia not M.V.

Was up in the city today. While herself was off shopping, myself and Lucas were left to our own devices to wander about the place. Ever since it docked I have been meaning to go up and have a look at the M.V. Julia which will soon be sailing on the Cork – Swansea route.

The quality of this picture isn’t great as I took it using my N73 but you can see Lucas in his buggy on the bottom left corner for scale! Incidentally it is one of the largest ships I have seen in the city centre. Donncha has plenty of photos on his photoblog from which you can appreciate the size of it that little better.

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I’ve been meaning to take a photo of this boat that is tied up at Harvey’s Dock here in Youghal.

Anyone notice anything odd? Click for bigger.

I’ve been obsessively poring over my log files again. I always find it interesting to see what combinations of operating systems and web browsers visitors to my sites are using. I’ve recently resurrected Sawmill to analyse reports from my reverse proxy which gives me a nice overview of all visitors to all my hosted sites.

So from the 17th August to today here are some interesting (I think) stats:

30.3% of visitors are running Windows XP
12.2% are using Windows Vista
10.2% are using a Linux Distribution
6.7% are using MacOS

The web browser stats are probably more interesting:

40.2% are using a version of Firefox
25.1% are using a version of Internet Explorer
8.2% are using Safari (Google Chrome is included as Safari)
2.2% are using Opera

I have my reverse proxy configured to reject libwww-perl as it is only ever used for something dodgy but from the logs it shows that there were 1,399 rejected libwww-perl useragents making up 0.8% of all browsers.

Next up are spiders. Again I have some of these blocked either by useragent or by IP. For example I have all of Amazons EC2 netblocks dropped on my firewall because again nothing good ever comes from there. However the ones I have not blocked by IP will still appear in my logs albeit having been served a 403. As expected the busiest crawler is Googlebot:

42.8% of spider traffic is from Googlebot
27.4% is from MSNbot
26.3% is Yahoo!’s Slurp

While on the subject of search engines:

98.9% of search engine traffic to my sites came from Google.
1.0% from Yahoo!
1 single solitary visitor came from AOL search!

I already mentioned dishing out 403s based on useragents, well 1.9% of all server responses were 403 with a total of 641 unique IP addresses.

The last time I posted about visitor stats was back in November 2007. Back then as expected the vast majority of visitors were using Windows XP and the most popular browser was Firefox for visitors to my wiki and Internet Explorer on my blog. Windows Vista has also been released by then and was only making up between 5 and 7% of all visits. This time around it is interesting to see that Windows 7 despite being a release candidate and not officially launched yet accounted for almost 3% of visitors.

It’s going to be interesting to watch the uptake of Windows 7.

The lads from Lagos must be hard up. They aren’t even making a decent effort at scamming us decedent Westerners anymore. At least if this gem is anything to go by:

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.

By now we all know the gritty details of how much NAMA is going to pay out for these so called ‘toxic’ debts. €54bn is an awful lot of money isn’t it? Yet we are told that it is essential for the survival of our economy. No doubt you have perhaps read much about it elsewhere so I’m not going to delve into it in detail but if anything it has put a massive strain on relations between Fianna Fáil and The Green Party. A lot of people I have been talking to have been quite pleased about this because it is building up their hopes that there might be a general election sooner rather than later.

Most people understand that the upcoming budget will hit everyone in some way or another but at least Minister Lenihan has said that he is ruling out tax hikes. However before you celebrate, no tax hikes does not mean no new taxes and a new tax that will almost certainly be introduced if the Green Party get their way is a carbon tax. Figures have already been thrown out and about such as an 8c per litre hike in the cost of petrol and 5c per litre of diesel. So called ‘dirty fuels’ such as peat and coal will face significant increases. With regards to petrol and diesel, 70% of what we pay per litre already goes on tax.

The common line that I have been hearing is that people are screaming out for a reprieve on more swinging cuts to their pay cheques (if they are lucky enough to still draw one) and getting Fianna Fáil and the Green Party out of government before the budget is seen as a means to an end in that respect.

The growing public hatred of Fianna Fáil and by proxy the Green Party, helped enormously by the irrevocable fiasco of John O’Donoghue’s expenses, has all the main political parties in a spin when it comes to the upcoming second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. The fear is that the people of Ireland will use their vote to punish Fianna Fáil and the Greens by voting no.

If you are curious then you can read this post from January 2008 where I correctly predicted a re-run of the Lisbon Treaty referendum if we were to vote no. In that post (which was a rant about the Green Party) I also predicted the demise of the Green Party for going into coalition with Fianna Fáil to begin with. Having just read over it again I mentioned in it that the Green Party in a member vote needed a 66% majority to decide if the party was going to support the Lisbon Treaty however only 63% of them agreed. It is interesting to see that this time around they appear to be whole heartedly in support. Their assimilation into Fianna Fáil seems to be nearing completion.

When it came to supporting the NAMA legislation, once again the Green Party put it to their members to vote if they should support it or not. Their members decided to support it but only if certain changes to the legislation were put into effect. One of these changes much trumpeted by Minister Eamonn Ryan was that the banks were going to take a share in the risk that the NAMA proposal could possibly bring about. I would have loved to been a fly on the wall when he was told that this risk sharing was only going to be a pathetic 5%. Yet another example of Fianna Fáil throwing the boot into their junior coalition partners letting them know just who is the boss.

What this serves to point out is that the Green Party are in a curious place. They are a coalition member of government in power for their first (and almost certainly last) time. As the governments majority in the Dáil is very small indeed the Green Party should be in a position to dicate terms and conditions to Fianna Fáil. They could (and should) threaten to pull out of the coalition if they don’t get their way. They should have Fianna Fáil over a barrel but they seem completely unable to use the strategic political position. Considering they only have six TDs they should still have the upper hand on their senior coalition partners. But perhaps that is the catch 22. Perhaps the Green Party need Fianna Fáil just as much as Fianna Fáil needs them.

As I said already this leaves them in a curious place. John Gormley has gone on record as saying that the Green Party are not ready to leave government yet as they still have many objectives to achieve. But one has to wonder that with their wholesale annihilation in the recent local and European elections, would it be better for the Green Party to bow out of government now and regroup? Salvage what remaining shred of credibility they have left and focus on the future.

I’m sure that if the Green Party were to issue a statement saying that they were leaving the coalition it would actually boost their credibility significantly. If anything else, collapsing the government would allow the people of Ireland to choose those who they deem most suitable for getting is out of this economic mess that Fianna Fáil are largely responsible for.

Finally, regarding the Lisbon Treaty I would like to take this opportunity to urge people not to use the referendum to punish the government no matter how much they deserve it. Make an informed decision and vote with this information in mind. The referendum is about Irelands future not about the future of the Green Party and Fianna Fáil.