Found this great iPad app for those times when you can’t think of what film you’d like to watch. It’s on the App store as Discovr Movies. Recommended.

“Oh, but it was only the €6 the last time I posted this. Has the price gone gone up?”

Cue explanation that the parcel was above 1kg in weight and it would therefore cost €7.50. The counter assistant offered the explanation that “maybe there is more paper wrapping which has pushed the weight up” and then the staggering line “you’re better off paying the extra anyway – the country needs all the money it can get at the moment”.

I can only presume the parcel was a teeny tiny bit over the 1kg weight, but I guess An Post employees/franchise holders(?) aren’t given any discretion when these situations occur.

In response to the continued questions about the difference in postal price, the counter assistant put the item on the scales again. “Oh, it’s below 1kg now.. Hmm. Let me try that again. Hmm. Now it’s over 1kg”.

Another post office guys goes over to look at the scales and notices a pile of papers stacked behind the scales which must have been causing the innacurate reading. The parcel was accurately weighed at under 1kg saving an overcharge of €1.50. Counter assistant then says to her colleague: “I’ve had some parcels today over 2kg, if only I’d known.”

Made me wonder how many people had been overcharged and might continue to be overcharged if the stray bits of paper find their way back behind the scales again.

I had 2 similar incidents where a parcel I was posting was judged to a packet rather than a large envelope. Only when I pointed out that it was within thickness guidelines did I get the proper postal rate, thereby ensuring I was not overcharged by €1.95.

Check your postal rates here BEFORE going to the post office. Measure and weigh your item so that some dodgy scales or other variable doesn’t leave your pocket lighter than it should be.

Makes me wonder if the NSAI should be checking An Post equipment to ensure customers aren’t overcharged.

It brings to mind another article on the Independent.ie website in April 2011 which was brought to my attention after some kneejerk reactions on Twitter along the lines of “what a waste of money”.

Ian O’Doherty reported that Fás were spending:

“nearly 80 grand on a course — that teaches people from the Roma community about Irish Travellers.”

O’Doherty spouts on for a couple of paragraphs and finishes off his piece :

“Also, you might be forgiven for wondering if the money would be better spent buying one-way tickets back to Romania and Bulgaria for those Roma who have never worked here and are claiming social welfare.

OK — all complaints for the above sentiment can be sent to the Press Council. “

After reading it and some of the Twitter reaction, I contacted Fás to get information on the course. Here is the course O’Doherty wrote about.

The course is “to provide participants, representatives of the local travelling community, with a forum for understanding and learning, with a view to integrating marginalised members of the community more fully into local life and with the skills to access further training and or employment opportunities.”

That’s very different from what O’Doherty riled up his readers about. Don’t know about you, but anything which helps marginalised members of a community with a voice and an opportunity for further training with a view to getting a job is a good thing. Certainly not something to misrepresent in such a deliberate way and he has no excuse of there being anything “lost in translation”.

It’s called ‘The Line King’ and it sets out to solve a problem for accountancy and business students in Ireland (and presumably further afield as well).

Here it is :

It’s a stencil that a student can use to turn any standard lined page into an accountancy record book, thereby saving money that would otherwise be spent on buying pre lined accountancy books. I know from my school days that I would spend ages ruling pages with a standard ruler and making a bit of mess of it in the process. All a student has to do now is take the Line King stencil, place it on the page, and run a pen through the lines to create their accounting book page. I’d say it would take all of 10 seconds to line the perfect page like the one below.

There are 3 different stencils available, one for each of the accounting record books. I would LOVE to have had something like this back in the day. It’s one of those ideas that make you wonder why no one has thought of it before. Great to see students coming up with ideas like this and I hope it sells well for them.

Links

The Line King Facebook page

@accountingking (The Line King Twitter)

You’d want to have your head stuck in a bucket of treacle not to have heard about the TV Series ‘Downton Abbey’.

It’s been wildly successful since it first hit the screen back in September 2010. According to the well known online encyclopedia website ‘Wikipedia’, in 2011 :

‘it entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the “most critically acclaimed English-language television show” for the year, becoming the first British show to be so recognised’

It’s not the sort of programme I’d watch normally, but my chance to see what the fuss was about came via DVD recently.

I didn’t want to like it. I tried not to like it. I picked holes in the very first episode. “This isn’t how aristocrats behaved back then. They were complete and utter bastards and wouldn’t be so friendly with the servants. People are watching this & getting a distorted view of history.” I was told to cop on, and that it’s just a drama – no on thinks this was how life was back then. I’m not convinced of that but secretly I couldn’t wait for the next episode.

Roll forward 2 weeks and 15 episodes later and it’s safe to say that I think it’s a well crafted series and very enjoyable to watch. I don’t think Series 2 was quite as good as the first one (for a variety of reasons), but still very watchable all the same.

Series 3 is due in September and it will be interesting to see how the storyline will develop and whether or not the viewing public will suffer from Downton fatigue.

I do know that if I watch it on broadcast TV this time, I won’t be Twitter hashtagging my way through it using the #dowton tag. I saw a huge amount of this hashtag on Sunday evenings (during my non Downton watching days) and thought to myself it’s an odd thing to do.

I can understand hashtagging a light entertainment show like X Factor or the Late Late, but a drama series? Surely the point of a programme like this is for pure escapism & relaxation. It doesn’t require any brain power. It’s an hour of putting your feet up at the end of the week and shutting out the world for a little while and going back in time to the imaginary world of benevolent aristocracy that Downton portrays so well.

If you’re sitting there constantly tweeting during a show like this, I think a Twitter intervention is needed. It’s impossible to really enjoy it with one eye on a computer screen. I’m quite sure the Countess wouldn’t approve. Although I reckon she’d be a great one for the Twitter if it was around back then.

Once upon a time in Ireland (1962 to be exact), it was the theft of Christmas trees that made headlines. In the Ireland of 2011, it’s the theft of a baby Jesus statue that grabs our attention.

Love this old video, especially halfway through when the Sergeant says “element of surprise”…

Here are the Personalised Christmas Card designs you can choose from if you should be the winner.

Update : 21st December 2011. The app is now available. Search for RTE Player in the App store. Worth the wait.

I rarely watch TV programmes at their scheduled broadcast time. I guess most people are the same. Sky+ , web catchup services and iPad/iPhone/Android apps have totally changed the broadcasting landscape. As an Apple device owner, I miss the ability of being able to catch up on RTE programmes due to the lack of Adobe Flash support on the device.

To a collective “hurray” from iPad and iPhone owners, RTE today announced they will launch a Player app for Apple devices “before Christmas”. An Android version is also planned.

One really nice feature of the app (as explained in the video above) is an Amazon Kindle like feature of syncing what you are watching between devices. Start watching an episode of Mad Men on your iPhone on the way home from work, you can pick up where you left off on your laptop when you get home. Some other nice features for sharing content are discussed in the video as well and it will be interesting to see how they work.

This made me laugh

Thanks JamesR!

The ridiculously over the top “outrage” about RTE wanting to deprive bloggers of revenue annoyed me. So I set up an Irish Fashion and Beauty aggregator to show how ridiculous the whole thing is/was.

Note the little extract of blog posts that appear on the page. Can anyone, hand on heart, say that this would stop a visitor from clicking through. The beaut.ie accusation was that RTE wanted to rip off content.

Read more about it on the about page of Yeronlymassive