Quick post to explain the lack of posting here. It still (somehow) generates a ludicrous amount of traffic – and for that I’m very thankful. However, I’ve moved to greener pastures that are less ‘exposing’ and I’m going to repurpose this domain soon enough.

So pop on over to iamkev.in to read more of my waffle!

Don’t expect much here anytime soon

Facebook has been around a few years now, and has grown to be the undisputed king of social networks. However, with that they draw a lot of fire – particularly around their decidedly odd decisions around privacy, and their reactions to anyone who questions these decisions.

You like it because they tell you to. Or because it's BEWBS

Any new features they release are “opt-out” features, rather then features you can go and turn on later. Something that is much to the chagrin of a large, vocal group of users of the site. I would imagine the growth of Facebook is not because people love it, but more that everyone is on it, and it is still the best we have in terms of social networking. However, most would admit if anything better came along, a mass exodus would occur.

Other then being a medium in which social media guru’s can preach good-PR doctrine to their disciples, Facebook is a means in which most users (presumably) connect and chat with friends and family distant enough/not convenient enough to talk to face-to-face. It’s also a means to keep friends and family updated on activities you’re up to, or to share things you’re interested in. All rather innocent and innocuous activities in themselves. However Facebook manages to make sharing your weekend trip away’s photos seedy by culling them to use in publicly viewed ads, or to allow a 6-degrees of separation rule to who gets to see photos. If I’m tagged in a photo of someone else, anyone connected to me (but not the person who uploaded the original photo) can look through this strangers photo catalogue.

One big part of social media that has exploded in 2010 is the ability to ‘tag’ your location. This is thanks to the proliferation of GPS-enabled phones that so many people have. Gowalla and FourSquare are the big names in this field. Gowalla is a nice, well designed implementation but FourSquare wins because it’s userbase is far more active, while Gowalla’s is more passive. 4sq turns its service into a social game, where check-ins give you points. The more times you check into a place, the better your chance of being the locations “mayor”, thus brandishing a slightly larger e-penis to all who follow you. Some companies (namely Starbucks) give offers and deals to mayors of their stores, and companies can create special offers to people who check-in with some caveat (check in on your birthday and get a free pint, etc.).

This has been huge, and largely fed off the spiraling community around Twitter. Twitter itself is not interested in implementing its own system. Facebook, though, derives its revenue from an ad-based model, which needs to keep up with these systems in order to stay relevant and earn cashola. No problem there. So begins a new system (still being rolled out) called Places. It’s the same idea as FourSquare or Gowalla, or the countless other clones (SCVNGR, etc.) but embedded into the Facebook experience.

4places

I can’t tell you if it’s lovely or not because I can’t use it, as a dirty European. But I can say what Facebook is doing with it is a little… odd. Users can tag anyone they want in a status update, to make it relevant to their friends/family. No worries there, in fact it’s a great idea which gives some status updates more context by giving a link to another user being referenced. However, Places also lets you tag users. Even if they’re not there. So, if you’re my friend, I can tag you as being in a brothel, causing a bit of trouble if all of your friends read your status updates seeing what seedy underground S&M clubs you attend regularly.

Furthermore, like so much of Facebook, this is an “opt-out” system, so everyone is involved. Yep, even the younger users of Facebook. So you can tag a 13 year old as being in the cinema, getting him into trouble with his mum when he should have been in school. There are so many ways to exploit this system, it’s amazing it wasn’t obvious to the engineers that this should be an “opt-in” service that works more like FourSquare then Facebook. I say engineers, but the chances are these odd decisions are coming from the top. Undoubtedly the Facebook engineers are quite talented individuals (hire me!).

It’s a shame, because I want to like Facebook. I really do. I use it more then any social network of its kind (excluding twitter) but their series of miss-steps are going to kill it when someone does it better. Someone, like Google (hire me!) perhaps? Alex Albrecht off Diggnation gave the perfect quote about this system – “it’s like they implemented it out of their best interests, not mine.” It rings true across the board. A lot of decisions from Facebook lately appear to be self-centered and driven by potential revenue. Not user experience. And it’s a shame, because clearly engineers are thinking of this stuff, but the top brass just don’t ‘get it’. And they keep growing, so they think they’re doing a stellar job, perhaps not knowing that a sleeping giant is waiting to sucker-punch them. The sleeping giant is likely to come from Google, or even Apple (who are building a $1billion data center in the US… that kind of money doesn’t get spent on email systems or music storage).

We’ll see what happens when it properly rolls out, but they won’t change their stance on settings (of which there are far too many these days) and opting in/out, but being able to corrupt other user check-ins is a low blow to their community, even for the company who so blatantly use their users’ information for advertising or search indexing.

About two months ago now myself and the ladyfriend packed up the car and took ourselves to Waterford for a cheap break away in a city I hadn’t been to since I was a child.

The journey down to our hotel in the seaside town Tramore was tumultuous to say the least. Using an out-of-date Sat Nav takes up more time and effort then using road signs. The journey was made more difficult then it needed to be by the fact that we ended up going completely off-road to make a pit stop thanks to the sat nav, which took us back on our way, but not back onto the main motorway that went right into Waterford.

After a good hour of driving around the back arse of nowhere we eventually found our way and decided to ditch the sat nav. Using Google Maps on the iPhone to get us back on track, we followed the road signs into the city center and again used the phone to find Tramore, and the hotel.

First impressions of the hotel were great. Driving into a picturesque seaside down with arcades, take aways and a fun fair is great, but noticing your hotel is atop a hill looking down on all of it really seals the deal. At this point it was late, so after a stroll around the town we hit the hay. Or at least, tried to…

The hotel appears to be some sort of safe haven for party revelers. Which is odd given the hotel has the decor of an elderly woman and the staff hardly promote the wild nights that go on. No less then three stag and hen parties were on our floor alone, all up drinking to silly hours in the night. We didn’t sleep well that night, and got moved to a smaller, smellier room thereafter. Our new room swapped the view of the ocean for a view of the side of a shop. Not ideal, to say the least.

One of the biggest tourest attractions is obviously the newly refurbished Waterford Crystal tour, which was brand new and had all the bells & whistles of a big tourest spot. It was still being revamped and the staff were clearly new to the “tour giving” industry, but it was pleasant. If I hadn’t have only paid concession prices (student card, baby!) I would have been a bit disappointed in the short time it took to do the tour. In fact, most of it was spent standing there gawking at employees making crystal ornaments like you would zoo animals.

Another huge tourism center is on the corner of the street where Waterford Crystal lies – a monument to the walls that once held Waterford in, away from invaders during the viking era. The round-tower has an interesting story. It started life as a defense post and moved on to become a place where coins were made. The video displays on the top floor were mind numbing. With old, desperately in need of replacing, plasma in the TV – colours were washed out. A boring voice talked about walls for 15 minutes. I’m not even making a joke here… there literally was a 15 minute video about walls, and how Waterford is one of the worlds most prestigious cities in the “walled cities” group of cities.

We went to a nice Indian restaurant on the waterfront on our final night in the city, which was a genius idea because they let you bring your own wine. So, loaded with Aldi wine, we enjoyed probably one of the nicest Indian meals I’ve ever had – and I’ve had a lot of them. It was on the way here that we learned why there were stag nights in the hotel. The taxi driver informed us that the hotel waive the drinking laws for large groups. They lower the cost of the rooms considerably because they’ll make the money back in the residents’ bar. The hotel was advertised as a quaint, but polished place in an ideal location. At this point we were in a noisy red light district type place with a view of the side of a shop. All we were missing was a neon sign outside our window.

We then went for a few pints in the hotspot of Waterford – which encompasses a crossroads section of town where four bars lay on each corner. All slightly different, but all owned by the same person. Why? Because then he can control the cost of booze. It didn’t seem expensive by Dublin standards, but you would expect to pay less and for your money to go further in a place like Waterford. The clubs are only going to suit 18 year olds looking to feel up each other to be honest – and the one decent pub of the four was too full to get into (it had a live band). The vibe in the area reminded me of being in Turkey more then Temple Bar. Lots of kids milling about, too drunk to handle themselves and the creeping sensation that at any second a greasy tanned man was going to offer me “free shots” to go into his bar.

As you can probably see from the pictures I’ve embedded into the post, it was gloriously sunny for the entire time we were there. It’s the one time during the summer I had a chance to relax and take a few photos – but not too many.

We wined and dined and enjoyed our short stay in the city, but we did comment that outside of Dublin & Cork, Waterford is probably the only other city I’ve been to in Ireland that I thought I wouldn’t mind living in.

Digg was one of those companies that arrived a few years ago at the right time. Before “social media gurus”, twitter and all the other shit that populates the internet’s desperate modern attempt to become more and more irrelevant with each passing business-web seminar.

The point of Digg was to be a socially powered platform that lets user submit and vote on news stories. At the beginning, it was exclusively tech based but as the site grew, CEO Jay Adelson turned the company around and made it focus on news of all types. Tech, gaming, sport, politics and even celebrity. Their algorithm changes all the time to decide how stories make it to the “front page”, and with V3 the front page of Digg became far more honed for users. So things that appeared on my front page were catered to me. This was, in the main, good. It got the right content to the right people but also removed the “digg factor”. This was a phenomenon whereby sites would get to the front page of digg and then their servers would crash because so much traffic would arrive.

V3 brought terrible things, too. For one, digg is as slow as a pig on muscle relaxants. “Digging” (voting) stories up is a pain because all of these silly scripts run to make it happen and to have a fluid animation. Even a beefy PC or Mac struggles to render all the stuff going on. Even worse is the digg bar, which is a bar that appears at the top of every page, creating a frame below it for the content. So instead of going to a link out of digg, it tries to emulate the StumbleUpon bar to let you navigate around stories on digg. Like the founder and current CEO Kevin Rose said, this bar sucks. It has no interaction with the content below it, it slows things down and is utterly irrelevant.

Welcome, indeed

V4 aims to improve things a lot. A new socially orientated focus brings digg back to its roots. We used to have ‘shouts’, where friends on digg would send messages about stories they liked on the site. Now, in a twitter manner, you can follow users to check out what they like. The front page algorithm is then turned into something that involves seeing what your friends that you follow are up to.

The layout is far more “web 2.0″. Big, rounded fonts, nice big logo’s and tags that the most challenged of web user can understand.

Following friends is easy but doesn't work

There are still plenty of bugs to speak of but this is an alpha build of the site. It’s to be expected. With the new social focus it is odd that one of the bugs is following friends from facebook and twitter. It doesn’t work for some reason. So I’m stuck following the few people I was “friends” with on the original site.

#fail

Furthermore, adding stories to digg is much easier. Now, a lot like the facebook status updater, submitting content is a mere click away. It’ll auto-fill content for you so videos and images are fetched for you, rather then having to submit things as video itself. It’s all much more fluid and intuitive.

Recommended followers could be a good thing when it's properly in place

It also makes use of HTML5, so no more awful slowness caused by tonnes of jQuery, JavaScript and other mucky muck that causes browsers to slow down to a crawl. At least Apple will be delighted with it – no flash!

How it works

Overall this is an improvement. How it impacts stories is another thing. I don’t want to follow people per se, just get content the algorithm chooses for me. I take a very small pool of content from digg these days, so if they can improve how I get content then they’ll have me visiting more often. Regardless, they needed a change – bad.

The new digg

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

A few years ago I went for a job interview with a certain computer, personal media device, phone and software company. I had a hugely successful pre-interview with the HR girl, who talked me into wanting to chop off my own arm for this job. The interview was going to be the in UK with some big wigs that I had already met through my, at the time, current job. The day before I was to have my real interview, the whole thing was cancelled because the HR company was dropped from the job, and said computer company never got back to me and hired someone else directly.

One of the interesting points the HR manager made with me was that I was open, honest and confident in my abilities. She said whittling down the people to go for an interview was difficult because the company were very picky. So much so that one individual who she thought was a shoe-in previously didn’t get the job because during a presentation (part of the hiring process) he was sweating… a huge negative for this particular client of the HR girl. If Mark Zuckerberg (26 year old CEO & founder of Facebook) had interviewed for this position, based on the interview he gave to AllThingsD last week, he would be fruitfully unemployed.

He was sweating so much so that, for the first time ever, he removed his trademark facebook-branded hoodie in order to cool down while being pursued quite vigorously on privacy issues. His sweating, nervous gesturing, quivering lip and overall miss-handling of the scenario was not that of a CEO in charge of an internet empire, but rather a kid who’s being scolded in school. Some of his answers, when you strip away the quivering, sweat and nervousness were quite good. And often he hit the nail on the head… but because his ability to speak in public is so profoundly weak it all comes across as a bit of a hazy mess that makes me want to join the thousands leaving Facebook daily.

For sure, I agree with Tom Foremski when he says Zuckerberg needs adult supervision in the same way that the founders of Google did, hence former Sun Microsystems man Eric Schmidt leading their company to glory. Larry and Sergei still get to do their thing, and so would Zuckerberg, but having a proper adult who knows what they’re doing means you’re not reckless with decisions.

The other thing about Zuckerberg is, according to one twitter friend of mine, is that he reminds people (or perhaps this one friend alone) of an early Bill Gates. I tend not to agree, in that I don’t think he’s nearly as clever as Bill Gates. Gates dreamed up a way of interacting with your personal computer through a GUI… Zuckerberg dreams of everyone sharing information with each other (or perhaps with the wider web) on one service. Sure, there are apps and connectivity involved with Facebook and its future, but when your number one app is farmville, and Facebook connect allows some developers to pull my private profile information out, I can’t see it as anything but destructive to itself, rather then a stroke of genius a-la Windows in the 90s.

I’ve had this discussion a few times with people, and a fair point has been raised. Am I having a go at Zuckerberg because, like the job interview I mentioned at the top, I didn’t get to work in Facebook when they opened in Dublin? No, not at all. Given the chance I’d probably still work for Facebook. It seems like a good company with a real future, if they stop letting their CEO go out making brash statements and quickly changing very big things with the service, without warning, and to the detriment of its users. Maybe I am a little bitter at not having wonderful chefs make me pizza everyday for lunch in a subsidised canteen. I have a wonderful job now, thankfully.

I see where Facebook is going. Perhaps moreso then others. My background is computer science, and my final year project was/is a search engine that draws data from social media outlets (i.e. user submitted content) rather then web crawled links, like Google. Facebook, in my eyes, is clearly going after this idea. Slowly gathering user data to make it searchable, and ousting Google as the top dog in search. Even my own search engine shows more relevant data then Google when it comes down to popular, recent and relevant topics. Instead of going out to the web to look for information, the information is coming right to the service itself. Searchable, media-rich information. So a link to NYT about Gaza becomes a series of status updates from people in Gaza, with pictures, audio, video etc. all from their phone, in real time. Suddenly, Facebook’s millions of users are far more valuable then first perceived. No longer is it a social media place where people play terrible flash games (not on iPad!) and “Like” things related to celebrities. Now it’s a full on media company, powered by people.

The Google guys

And this is why Zuckerberg needs a CEO to help steer the ship, and not sweat all over himself while stuttering when asked about serious issues relating to your own users. Someone needs to guide the company through the next few years, just like Schmidt did with Larry & Sergey at Google. They still got to do their mad-hatter things, buying random companies and starting services that Google probably shouldn’t have, but Schmidt kept them in check, ensuring they didn’t go wild and run the company into the ground. Facebook could be much bigger then it is now. It’s the only social media outlet to have a real shot at the big time, even moreso then Twitter. But the way they’re going, things are going to go from bad to worse, and before it gets better it’ll lose that part of the userbase with real information to contribute to its future.

I’ve harked on a lot on this blog about Apple, their products I enjoy and a bit of speculation here & there. I’ve also not updated this site in some time, for various reasons but the primary one being laziness in a time of hectic changes in the life I attempt to lead fruitfully.

So, a month ago I caved like a wet cardboard box and bought an iPad. A month later, and I finally had it. That’s a tale in its own right. I purchased from a guy who is of Irish descent (real Irish descent, none of this pseudo-Irish American bull) in New York city. He posted an ad on a site where people do such things, and I responded. He said he would ship one over to me. All good. Except Apple went ahead and sold a million of these things very quickly, making it difficult to acquire a unit. Eventually I gave up and a twitter cohort alerted me to his friend in Cork having one to sell – at retail price. So, a week of wrangling with bank money transfers and UPS arrangements I had a shiny new 64GB Apple iPad.

I went wifi because I don’t want to be tied down to a 3G contract. If I really want to use it on-the-go, I’ll get a mifi box (a utility that allows mobile phones to syphon their 3G signal and broadcast a wifi signal). The iPad, as I’ll explain later, has not been a “mobile device” for me, per se.

So, first thing’s first, to answer Apple’s own commercial question: What is iPad? For you it could be anything. It fits into so many roles for so many different people that it’s hard to nail down. One thing’s for sure, it’s not a “giant iPod touch”, nor is it a “weak Macbook”. It’s neither. Like the keynote that launched the product said, the iPad is an in-between device. It’s not mobile like an iPhone or iPod touch. It’s like a laptop for times when you don’t need the power of a laptop. I, myself, have a Macbook Pro and iMac. My iMac has always been a bit of a media centre at home, a device to browse the internet and watch movies while eating dinners or lazing about, while the Macbook Pro is a workhorse for college because it can be brought into college/work.

Tweetdeck: A nice but broken experience

Now, instead of needing to bring a somewhat hefty Macbook Pro into work or college for times when I merely want to jot notes down or browse the web on lunch, I can bring my decisively lighter iPad which can do all of the things I need it to do fast, efficiently and with a beautiful UI.

I’ve primarily used it as a web device, probably as intended. More and more I’m less reliant on Safari as apps get more sophisticated. Just today I acquired Pulse News Reader, an RSS reader with a stunning interface. This removes the need to visit all those sites on Safari. Rather, I can pull plain text articles from my favourite news sources (mostly tech stuff, mind you). For “real” news, BBC, New York Times and various others have provided stunning news and article apps. No, I haven’t delved into the world of comic books, books or even magazines (e.g. Wired) yet. Partially because I’m not a huge fan of comics and magazines, but also because the price isn’t right yet. €5 for a magazine is a bit steep when it really is a glorified PDF. No one has “nailed” eMagazine design yet. When it happens, I’ll be all over it though.

iBooks are a more intriguing prospect. As someone waiting for the iPad to solve that itch for an eReader, I’ve yet to be entirely convinced. Sure, it’s beautiful. Sure, it’s functional. And sure, the selection is good (if you use a US-based iTunes account) but reading on a backlit LED can do nothing good for ones eyes… particularly my eyes, which are already reduced to 50% HP (nerd joke for the gamers among us). I do want to buy a book to “test drive” iBooks, but I’m not sure what yet. I still love the feeling of reading a real book, and do so regularly unlike, it seems, my peers. One remarkable thing about iBooks is it could save the publishing industry before eReaders have a chance to create mass piracy issues and the DRM problems the music industry still wrestles with. By the time iTunes came along, the music industry was already crying at the hands of pirates, apparently. Now, though, we have a viable option to bail out publishers before things go from slightly murky to down right horrific.

Pulse news reader is a truly incredible app

Games, as expected, are beautiful on iPad. So beautiful it’ll make you throw up at the tosh you’ve put up with before. Remember Snake on Nokia phones? Compared to the iPhone it makes me want to throw up thinking of the time wasted on Nokia’s terribly slow, chunky and laborious gaming effort. Introducing iPad to the mix would make anyone want to burn anything they own, not just from Nokia, but from Finland generally, just in case someone from Nokia had a hand in creating it.

Some games are wonderful experiences from iPhone upgrades. Flight Control is a perfect example of this. It really takes advantage of the visual real estate provided. Some, like Angry Birds HD are just higher resolution versions of the same thing – but at almost ten times the price, which is a disgrace. Hopefully the market shifts the prices downward, as a lot of apps generally (not just games) are priced far above their realistic price for admission. It makes app buying more of a decision, whereas the iPhone 79c typical price for apps makes it a throw-away decision. If the app sucks, oh well. At €10, the decision is far more decisive and involves more consideration as this is a lunch or early bird dinner. Hell, this is two pints in Dublin (or 5 if you’re in a reasonable country).

Flight Control HD is one of the few great upgraded apps to rebuy

Video is beautiful. But we’ve all heard about video. Yes, it’s crisp. Yes, it’s HD. And so on… what is really remarkable is the fact that the speaker on the bottom of it is mind blowingly crisp, clear and audibly superior to anything on the market in terms of mobile devices. This stands up to most laptops, let alone netbooks on the market. Combined with the lush display and this really becomes a brilliant media device. Furthermore, iTunes is really useful here. I don’t use iTunes on the iPhone because I find the experience clunky. On Mac it’s great (PC, not so much)… but on iPad the team behind iTunes really nailed it on the head. The UI is perfect. Other music apps like Pandora take a lot of inspiration from iTunes which is great, too. A bit of uniform UI is not a bad thing in apps on the same platform.

What have I been using it for, though? Well, to recap what I said earlier, this device is an in-between internet and media device. It plays games well for when I’m bored, it does the twitter, browsing and email experience better then anything on the market (computers included) and impresses everyone around me. I don’t need a 3G version because all of my web-based stuff is done at home, in my girlfriends’ home, in work or in college. I can’t see myself using this on the bus. Not yet, anyway.

Daft Punk in the Star Wars Adidas World Cup ad.. in HD!

The only downside to it is that it’s too good. I genuinely mean that. My iPhone 3G, by comparison, feels slow, unresponsive (especially when typing) and cheap. It’s too light compared to the rugged design of the iPad. No doubt all of this leads to a more robust, fast and durable experience with a new iPhone, perhaps being announced next week at WWDC. All in all, it’ll be another expensive year as an Apple consumer in 2010!

Strap on your sympathy hats folks, I’ve a sob story to tell. No, nothing dire, awful or significantly traumatic per se. I’m sitting here in a cool room in a reclined chair sipping a warm mug of tea while contemplating the last week.

Anyone who regularly keeps tabs on me from my Garda Pulse system records or twitter will know that I recently bribed and slept my way into a new high powered job inside Ireland’s only Apple Premium Reseller as a tech nerd. Such a job involves jetsetting off to the UK for training. I needed to become Apple certified in order to be allowed to use Apple resources when repairing Mac units. This is the same type of training Apple Genius bar people do in America. Except while they have weeks to do this training, we have 4 days. This could be our collective brain power being greater then of the average American, or it’s Europeans figured out you can cram the course (or 2 courses, as it was essentially) into 4 days and do it cheaper. Darwin will look after the weaklings.

This training involved an intensive 3 day hardware course. Included was what tools to use, what issues to fix and how to diagnose a sick Mac. All very useful and relevant. Then an exam. Multiple choice questions that are designed to catch out the weary and non-attentive made it a difficult exam, but only getting 2 or 3 questions wrong was a good achievement. This exam was taken on Thursday evening last week.

The online exam is run through a system Apple design. However, while that tab was being used to answer questions in the allotted time slot of two grueling hours, another tab was open with a live feed of news coming about this horrific mass of Icelandic glass-like ash looming over Europe like some sort of evil overseer that was determined to keep the airline industry in debt. I will say this, though, twitter came into its own for the first time ever. The cleverly-titled hashtag #ashtag was not spammed, misused or filled with useless natter. Instead real, relevant information came through to people like me, people who needed this information. I commend twitter users for getting their act together when required and not talking about Justin Bieber – whoever he is.

Royal Mail: Probably not working too well without planes. This was my hotel room view

I had discovered, through the news, that my final day (Friday) may not end as whimsically as I had thought. Indeed, as I followed the press releases and news fodder through to 2.30AM on Friday morning, it was ever-apparent that I would not be flying home. The company were kind enough to pay for me to stay the extra night in the hotel while I tried frantically to find a way home. Which I did.

Saturday. A 6AM start isn’t the best idea after a stressful day of cramming 250 odd pages of software troubleshooting and in-depth looks at OS X before another exam, but so be it. I discovered the best (and only) option for me was to book rail & sail tickets. Fine, except the UK appears to be utterly inept with its use of the internet. Rather then book the tickets and collect them from a machine in the station, they post these tickets to you. Tickets which cannot be purchased if you live in Ireland. So I only used the rail & sail sites to check the timetables to make sure my separate-entity purchases would align in such a way as to get me home.

Fog, or Ash, at 6.30AM on the morning I left

My 7AM private-hire cab arrived as expected and whisked me off to Euston station. While I had booked the cab and ferry online, the Virgin Trains site would not accept my credit card because I did not have a valid UK address that matched my card, despite me trying to tell the system I wasn’t English and was staying in a hotel. It’s incredible that they did not acknowledge us filthy fenians would be trying to get home with their wretched service. The cab driver was lovely, chatty and very London-ish. The hour-long journey didn’t seem so bad as he nipped around short cuts and routes that skipped and hopped past traffic. He told me that his company has 3000 drivers who normally drive business people around to/from airports but currently he was the only one who had work in the last 2 days. The economy, it appears, is buggered.

Euston was a train station. There’s not much to say. It had more platforms then Irish stations but the idea is the same. Stand in the lobby and wait for the big departures signage to tell you which platform to go to for your journey. Holyhead sat on the board for 30 minutes before getting a platform assigned to it. The buzzing people running around, waiting, making calls and generally moping about the wide open area in Euston was a true testament to urban living. Us city-dwellers are like bees. An un-announced negation on how to pass through our grouped expanses shone in the organised chaos of Euston. However, when the platform number came up for Holyhead, it was very apparent that everyone was Irish as the huge crowd suddenly moved to platform 2. Nearly everyone cleared the space within seconds to grab a seat.

Departures board in Euston station, central London

Once we got to the second stop on the train journey the train manager announced the journey was de-classified. This means first class cabins were open for business for anyone to sit in because so many were standing. They apologised over and over again for the fact that so many were using the service as an alternative to flying. Surely they could have anticipated this? It’s a direct train from London to Holyhead port, for god sake. So not only did Virgin trains fail to allow Irish people to use their website, they also stank in terms of organising a train that could carry all the extra passengers. If not for customer service sake, they could have put extra measures in place to make more money. On top of this, the food carriage on the train closed half way through the journey. My senses and ability to focus my brain stopped very quickly, and there was nothing I could do. A huge sense of helplessness overtook as the journey dragged on. I wanted to punch the old woman who was hogging an extra seat for her bag across from me as people stood around her. To top things off, Virgin decided today was the day to have a mid-journey engine change. This added a 15 minute delay to the proceedings. On any other day this would be fine, but on a day when people were scrambling home in a transport disaster, what the hell were Virgin thinking?

The experience on this train shows exactly why Ireland should never privatise anything. These companies didn’t give a shit about their passengers, given the circumstances. Like I said, even ignoring customer service, they could have made extra money by adding more space with a bigger train and running a 5-hour food service for people. Keep in mind the train left Euston at 8:50AM, meaning it’s prime time for people to get some lunch by the time the train finished the journey.

Arriving on a now-packed train that reminded me of Indian trains, Holyhead was a nice break. Getting into Holyhead involves passing beautiful vistas in Wales. And on a sunny day it made for stunning viewing that made me instantly regret not bringing my camera. Once you disembark from the train it’s a mere 5 minute walk from the platform to the ferry check-in. Those of us who managed to pre-book rambled through, but the queues for tickets were so long it was evident there would be disappointment and anger today.

Irish sea was busy with stranded airline passengers

The ferry had a bizarre way of getting foot passengers onto the boat. Rather then have us walk on, we had to get a coach onto the boat. A 2 minute coach journey. And yes, we couldn’t merely walk off either. We had to get on the same coach to get off the boat and get to land when we arrived in Dublin. No explanation why. We were just herded around.

The boating experience was nice because it had nice oceanic views. However, the staff were terrible and the boat appeared unsafely full. Hundreds of tired, grumpy, cranky and confused people were occupying the boat, yet somehow Stena thought it would be good practice to send one of their staff around with a fake ferret to play practical jokes on people. Some laughed it off, but there was a clear sense of contempt for this moron as he floated around from table to table. He also picked the start of the journey to do this. You know, the part where people who’ve been on a train for 5 hours were trying to get some food into their system.

On top of this eejit running around, the small cafeteria had one of the most disinterested, fat bitches I’ve ever seen manning a customer-facing job in my life. She had literally no interest in serving the ever-expanding queue of people seeking refuge from the prick with the ferret. She even managed to scowl openly at the rather wealthy man who gave her a tip. She gave me a dirty look when I asked if I could pay in sterling for my coffee and crisps (which would save me from collapse at that point – I couldn’t even see my money at this point with the disorientation). Why? I have no idea.

Stuffed people trying to get home, finally

The experience of land-based transport is a prime example of why these companies are in tatters. In extraordinary circumstances they failed to step up to the plate and show why people should use them in future. But no, their terrible plans, terrible staff and horrid prices are a keen reminder as to why air travel is still the great white hope of humanities ability to traverse the globe. Keep in mind in times of diaster airlines are scumbags, but they’ve never raised their prices when people really needed their help. Eurostar has raised ticket prices from around €60 to €200 since this. No reason why. They’re just profiteering scumbags.

Finally back home from my odyssey, it feels good. Though I’m a little annoyed that KLM’s findings that it’s safe to fly aren’t being published in the news that prominently. It appears the American idea of news reporting has taken hold here. If it’s not horrifically bad news, it’s not news.

Getting into my house I was greeted with one bit of news. I won the mug from the blacknight competition for my blog post “The Mug.“. Unfortunately the mug arrived smashed up, as per below. Such a shame, though the kind guys at Blacknight reckon they can get a new one out to me. Those folks are good peoples – but stuff from them

Ironic I won this for writing about a mug I had smash on me!

I started in the CompuB outlet today, running around like a normal “expert” since there’s nothing to fix and the work area I’ll have is still being built, it was nice to get going. The store is lovely and a good example of how retail should be done. The Apple methodologies really work here. The colleagues are good people too, which helps. I’m looking forward to working there. Hell, if a company hires you and then pays to send you off on an expensive certification course, you’ve got to be happy, right? Especially in this economy. It’s good to have a job, but a good one? That’s golden.

A new challenge for the month of April is being posed to the citizens of earth, especially the ones using twitter, it seems. 30 days of biking is an initative through the month that begins today.

The rules are simple – ride your bike at least once a day. Those who commute will find the challenge quite easy! If not, then start easy. Just go on a quick cycle around the local area, around the block or to the shops. You don’t have to be a bucket of sweat – take it easy. Plus, with the nice weather due (hopefully!) we should have fine cycling weather. There’s nothing more amazing then going on a brisk cycle along the coast!

The challenge ends on April 30th, but I would encourage anyone who takes it up to actually continue cycling. Dublin cycling figures are up, and continuing. One report called us the new Amsterdam – lets show the Dutch how we do it!

If you’re on twitter, use the hashtag #30daysofbiking when discussing your endeavour. Already it’s a busy hashtag with lots of people taking up the challenge!

For some reason, whenever I proudly announce to a room that I’m a Bayern Munich fan I get groans and disbelief. The groans are the typical “oh god, not another football fan” kind of bemoaning you expect from civilised people. The disbelief comes from football fans. Why? Because as a born-and-bred Dubliner, I’m supposed to support an English team.

I don’t not-support an English team out of any kind of national pride or a deliberate attempt to not support something from those bastards who took control of our precious land for 800 years. No, I’ve no such national pride, and quite enjoy the company of English people. In fact, they can have the land back. It’s not worth much, just ask NAMA.

Rather, having some semblance of family in Germany I’ve always grown up aware of the country, and always liked it. I wanted to learn German in school but was forced to learn the ever-romantic tongue that is French. As lovely as it is to know French, I’ll never try to live in France. I would gladly live in Germany, though. On top of that, German football is the regimented, play-by-play kind of football style that I enjoy. Where a few players stand out because they play with class or style, and get away with it. Premier league teams can’t have that for the most part, because class and style is punished by hard tackling and nasty gameplay.

Liking Bayern is great because they’re a team people know. I don’t have to ‘explain’ why I like them as much as someone who might like Werder Bremen or Leverkusen. But somehow, it still requires more explanation then if I liked Manchester United or Liverpool. Though, my support of a “foreign” team does have its charms. For one, the jerseys are always a little nicer… in part due to the fact that Adidas has quite a large share of Bayern Munich, Inc. Second, I don’t get tied up in the silly bickering between children who fight the cause between “United versus Liverpool” discussions. Third, the Allianz arena is a true marvel of engineering. Something that is somewhat replicated with the new Landsdowne road (or “Aviva Stadium” as it’s now called).

The final thing that is always nice about being a Bayern fan is that Premier League fans consistently under-estimate my team. A team I follow with shocking attention to detail. So much so that I do believe I could manage any team. In fact, the only other team I follow with some obsession is Barcelona. My reasons there are that my lovely other half lived there for some time a few years ago, and has an affinity with the city. That, and the fact that Barcelona is a Spanish team with class, unlike their greasy, monarchy-funded, scumbag counter-parts. And, of course, Messi-ah. Though if it comes down to the Bundesliga or La Liga teams together, Munich will always be the favoured side.

And so we come to tonight, where in the first leg of the champions league double-whammy against Manchester United (a long-heralded fixture of torment for both sides) Bayern disposed of the English side with a relative sense of ease and passion with a second-rate team on the pitch, given their superstars Robben and Schweinsteiger were out due to injury and suspension (respectively). The typical twitter chatter came through, and someone did a quick snap of their timeline, a timeline mainly populated with Irish and English tweeters. When Olic skillfully robbed the United defense of their possession and hammered home a goal to bring the score to 2-1, most twitter users went crazy, lamenting the poor performance of their team (after a rather strong start), and then there was me.

Spot the Bayern fan

See you next week, football fans

A recent development in my life is absolute poverty while studying. This is, in no small part, due to the fact that I have not managed to maintain a proper, full time position in the last few months. Largely due to my lack of interest in such a position. I’ve made enough money through various bits and pieces (particularly with web design and the like) to see myself through. I do not require a lavish lifestyle to get through the day.

I have done interviews for various positions but as picky as I am in where I send my CV, companies appear to be just as picky about the staff they hire. Development places like me but not the fact that I don’t graduate until the end of this year and other places don’t like me because I am still in college (thus rendering their locations at risk of hiring me on a short-term basis). All of this despite my reassurances that I’m not hitching a short ride to bleed a company dry of its cash.

However, in recession Ireland, post-Christmas it’s been rough seas to say the least. Job interviews have come and gone and, despite feeling good about positions, I’ve not had much luck with getting proper full-time work that will accomodate my part-time evening study – which, frankly, takes precedence over any job I may have at any given time. On more then one occasion I’ve been politely fed the line “…but I really look forward to being able to work with you sometime in the future”. Sorry folks, but when I’m declined a job because I dare pursue my education or other such “trivial” matters, I won’t be back to you anytime soon. Regardless of how crap the economy is.

Lucky for me, though, something perfect is on the horizon. No, it has nothing to do with college, development, or software engineering type work at all. Instead, this is a great chance to work in what is likely to be Dublins’ only Apple retail outlet for some time. The plan is to be the “expert” (which Apple’s own stores affectionately title “Genius”) in the store, to help patrons with all manner of issues relating to their Apple hardware, and software. On top of that, the plan is for the company to train me in various areas to then go on and give classes to customers. Such classes would be in products like Final Cut Pro, etc. Sure, it’s not exactly on the same line of thinking as a Computer Science qualification, but it’s a springboard into something later on, and a good CV stocking-filler.

My history with retail work is somewhat sparce, with a part-time job years ago in one of Ireland’s most terrifyingly awful companies: Xtra-Vision. I was a part time sales assistant in my local outlet, and when people weren’t shouting at you for giving them scratched discs and thus ruining their lives, they were trying to rob the place or rob me of any dignity I could muster up in the place. I did make lifelong friends in there, and indeed met my ladyfriend in that hell hole – but never again will I willingly be a customer of theirs, and I will always recommend people avoid getting employment there. Potentially, it is one of the most amazingly badly run companies in the world, with layer upon layer of tosser running the show from store level to executive level. I’ve never seen staff so mal-treated in my entire life. Some time after that I was a sales guy in Currys, which earned me a decent enough wage and a chance to use my knowledge of computers on customers. This made me the top sales guy in our branch months on end, an honour that all Indian and Polish sales people would kill to have. After only a few months of active selling I was promoted into another hell hole, as an assistant manager in their sister-company, PC World.

This, in terms of corporate structure and incompetence, overshadows Xtra-Vision. Not because the people at the top are worse, but because they truly, deeply believe they are the best of the best. Some of them are, though. The directors I worked with for a little bit of time were amazing. The managing director was good when he wanted to be, but the team under them for the most part were utterly awful to deal with – all the way down to the girl who barely spoke English. These are the people who set prices for Irish people to scoff at and drive up north. However bad they may have been (and they weren’t all bad, just enough of them for me to brandish everyone with the same stick) by far the worst group of people involved were the store managers. Scarily, these were the biggest idiots ever created by man. No business sense, no leadership skills and brandishing their managerial roles in stores like it was some sort of societal medal of honour. I’ve never been forced into depressive lack of motivation so quick in my life. Never before do I want to go into work to be given a list of orders by a manager who has never lifted a finger – nor do I want to go into work to remotivate 30 colleagues after being told they’ll be sacked if they keep under-performing. Never again do I want a manager to tell me I should “give up that college stuff, as it’ll do you no good”. And never again do I want to feel helplessly lost at the whim of an awful corporate structure that leaves assistant managers, supervisors and staff without a proper voice – and with horrifically low wages in comparison to their managers.

With that in mind, it might be mad to go back into retail. This time it’s different. They’re delighted I’m in college. They’re delighted I want to work for them… and they’re a smaller company (Dublin will only be store number 3). It also seems they’re spending a lot of time to assemble a proper team of people to run the show and get things moving. The designs for the store are ripped right from the manual of Apple stores (and is, in fact, being approved by Apple, etc.). It is as close to an Apple store without being an Apple store… a dream for nerds like me who own everything Apple make.

And so I come to the crux of this post, 1075 words in. I went for training with this particular outfit in their main store in Limerick, on O’Connell street specifically. To document my vast journey across the rail network of Ireland I brought along my brothers’ Lumix camera… because I wasn’t hauling a 50D on the two-day tour de force.

Heuston Station, see if you can spot the pigeon...

The journey began at 8AM on a bus to town, after which I got the LUAS to Heuston to collect my pre-paid €10 internet ticket. A ticket that otherwise would cost €50. Granted the company was paying, but there’s no need to be an asshole about such things. Of course, the return leg tickets could not be purchased from the store because the Irish Rail website decided to go AWOL when we wanted to book, so the poor company got stiffed with a hefty cost for sending us home. Unnecessarily hefty.

High speed, ish!

The train from Heuston was quick. Very quick. From Heuston to Cork was the full journey, but us poor unfortunates going to Limerick, a city I had not been in since childhood, had to get a connecting train somewhere along the line. Incidentally I had purchased the wrong ticket unknowingly online, from Heuston to Limerick Junction, which is a good hour away from Limerick. Luckily the disgruntled ticket man in Heuston extended my ticket for free.

Metro 2033 - a great read si far

Accompanying me on my journey was a book I have been awaiting the release of for months. Metro 2033 tells the story of a post-apocalyptic community living in the desolate area of the metro underground system in Moscow. It’s one of Russia’s biggest selling modern books, and the English release was delayed several times over to meet the release of the video-game of the same story (that I refuse to play until I have completed all 458 pages). The train journey gave me a chance to get 4 chapters into the gripping story. And my bottle of water helped me through, too. A bottled I purchased not for the contents, but to get 30c change to use the toilets in Heuston.

It is quite ironic that I was reading a post-apocalyptic tale from Russia, as the change-over at Limerick Junction from the speedy, comfortable and modern InterCity train to the Limerick city Commuter train is stark, at the very least. Not only is the train basically a DART (Dublin’s local rail system that covers a tiny bit of the city because our planners are as incompetent as PC World managers), the tracks feel somewhat uneven, so the train jolts around like a dune buggy for most of the hour-long journey. In accordance to the book, it’s also apt that the surrounding area of Limerick Junction is a desolate wasteland. It appears that there is no possibility of this area sustaining life of any form. Chernobyl has more plantlife then this place. It’s no coincidence that the entire journey was kissed by sunshine down, until we reached Limerick Junction.

The 5-star B&B

Eventually we got to Limerick, and I donned my stab-proof vest (the joke being that murders in Limerick, while plentiful, are always carried out with a knife rather then a gun) to make the 5minute walk, accompanied by my iPhone and the Google Maps app, to O’Connell street and to the store where I began my 2 days work.

The training was fun and easy-going. The store was absolutely dead for the most part, with a few queries here and there, some phone calls and some low-cost sales. For the most part it was a chance for us (as I was later joined by a colleague who will also be starting in Dublin when the store opens) to learn the software being used in the stores.

At the end of the first day we went off to our B&B, on the same street, only 10 minutes walk from the store. The B&B was nice, but despite the owner saying there was “wifi… or broadband, whatever it’s called” I couldn’t get a signal. Luckily I could leech from a nearby Eircom users’ connection by using an app to get their WEP key. I then downloaded the second episode of “The Pacific”. The room was nice, had a shower and what not. More hotel-ish then B&Bish. The breakfast was lovely – but I didn’t have it because I woke up at an ungodly early hour and began working on my dissertation. At some point, earphones in my ear, I fell back asleep; waking only with the time to be able to get dressed, have a quick glass of juice and get to work.

In your city, stealing your wifi!

The view from the window

Overall my experience with the job was great. It’s the exact opposite of my previous experiences with retailing. It’s exactly what you’d expect an “Apple” style company to be like. Nonchalant, not trying to pressure people, and in turn, not trying to blame people with things go wrong. Instead they’re just running an honest operation and trying their best to get the best possible staff on board with them.

Limerick was as expected – a giant Tallaght (a notoriously bad area in Dublin). I’m sure it has lovely parts as well as horrific parts, just like Dublin – but if their main street is anything to go by, things are as I suspected in Limerick; barren. Even the store manager commented that the city has been hit hard by the recession. It’s a city I wouldn’t live in. It’s also a city with nothing to visit either. No real drive to push tourism, or business it seems. It’s a perfect poster-boy for decentralisation (where the government departments move to locations other then Dublin to help drive the local economy). It’s no wonder most people live in Dublin, and if they don’t, they live in Cork or Galway instead.

O'Connell Street, in all her glory

It doesn’t help that everyone wears tracksuits, and people the same age of me have a scowling face whenever they came in contact with “proper” people. You know, heathens with nice clothes. Having said that, the majority of customers were lovely and local. It also seems the staff in the shop had developed a fantastic relationship with their customers. Though this is something that I doubt will translate into Dublin, as I would expect that to be a complete madhouse with a huge turnover of customers in and out the door.

This is the only monument we saw

The homeward leg was a bit more entertaining. It felt a little like a holiday as, in the station, we spent the last of our change as if we weren’t going to need euro back in Dublin. All in aid of a horrible coffee and sandwich.

Even the timetable for Limerick station was desolate

Minutes before departure and our train was nowhere to be seen

Limerick station wasn't exactly on a par with Heuston

..and here comes the train, from the bright outside world to the murky depths of Limerick station

The high speed train at Limerick junction was late arriving here, and late into Dublin. Characteristically Irish journey, so...