Are you startin' or wha'?

If you're new in town and you want to have a little look around Skangerland then this is the place to start. A few old favourites:

Da Bertie Code	Garda Reserve	The Irish Sopranos
Behave	Mary Harney Decides	Liffey Driving

Now check out a few more pages and we hope you see something you like. You'll find a mixture of the serious and the frivolous, but that's life and we make no apologies for it. Jaysus knows we could all do with a laugh the odd time.

Gravity pwns drunk guy

Elevenses on a Tuesday morning? Time for more beer.


Worst Shopping Run Ever - Watch more Funny Videos

Visualizing the bail outs

Eircom security and international copyright law

The Irish Times reports that "Apple software allows unauthorised access to Eircom broadband networks". In fact, it's the legacy of Eircom stupidity that allows access to Ericom broadband networks. You don't need Apple software to do it. There are plenty of websites and other apps that will pull off the same trick. (Indeed, if you were so inclined you could do it with a pencil and a bit of squared paper, just for that old-skool feel.)

This seems like a bit of a jolly, and a good excuse to laugh at Eircom. However, as it pointed out here, it has wider implications.

It means that at some time in the future when the retarded music industry and its bevy of overpaid government lobbyists get their way and people accused of file-sharing one too many times get “kicked off of the internetz” you’ll see a tidal wave of users parking up outside your Mum’s house to use her inadequately secured WiFi connection to go get their music....

(Hint to the lawmen - this measure is punitive, ineffective, and will cause innocent people to be punished for other people’s ‘crimes’).

The punitive and ineffective measures being proposed are summarized here. It's interesting to note that in deciding to listen to the music and film industries and pursue illegal file-sharers, Lord Mandelson is going against the wishes of the UK police and intelligence services. They fear that his measures will lead more people to encrypt their internet access, which will actually make it much more difficult to track all sorts of online criminal activity.

You know you're a geek when...

Macworld UK's review of an application called Check Off includes this:

This preamble goes some way towards explaining why we like Check Off so much. The other reason is that the name sounds a bit like Chekov, the Russian helmsman from Star Trek.

Yeah, you know you're a geek when "Chekov" brings to mind Star Trek rather then Russian literature.

(If it also brings Stargate SG-1 to mind then you have gone beyond geek into dork...)

Consequences of gay marriage

(as seen on urban cartography)

Rolling stops

Now that Dublin has a pubic bicycle rental scheme it would be nice to see more sensible legislation for cyclists. The Minister for Transport has undertaken to do away before the end of 2009 with the foolish and dangerous statutory requirement (thanks so much for that, PDs, I'm glad your party failed before you could top that piece of idiocy) to use cycle tracks where they are provided and regardless of how badly designed, constructed or maintained they might be. Here's another suggestion for you, Minister, and while you're at it, why not allow bicycles making a left turn treat a red light as a Stop sign?

Skanger Clanger

(with thanks to TV3 News)

Premiership 2009-2010 Calendars for download

A handy site for anyone interested in English Premiership fixtures that will work with Outlook, Thunderbird, Google Calendar, iCal, etc.

You can set up your own calendar here and save it as csv, ics, or pdf:
http://www.thismonkey.com/cgi-bin/football-fixture.pl

You can subscribe to or download pre-set calendars (ics only) here:
http://offsite.thismonkey.com/fixtures/football/int/2009/calendars/England/

The site covers not just English Premiership but Championship and League fixtures, too, along with a host of other international leagues.

TG4 Tour de France 2009 Online

Watch the Tour online.

TG4 will be streaming their live coverage of the 2009 Tour de France. The commentary will be in Irish, but whether or not access will be geo-restricted to Ireland I don't know - still it's worth checking out.

www.tg4.tv

Failing that, try here:

www.cyclingfans.com

or here (for any Aussies out there):

sbs.com.au

Check out our downloadable Tour calendar, too.