Yeah yeah. That Waider.

Wow. There's so much stuff on youtube. I've just been punching in random song titles from the late 80s - early 90s (when it was de rigeur to have either "House" or "Jack" in your song title, and your chart position was seemingly based on how many samples you could cram into 3 minutes) and I've found a match for every single one. I may have to create a playlist to illustrate my point, if I can be bothered...

Well, kinda. In that I made some barbeque sauce, marinaded two pork chops in it, then grilled them and served one (to myself) with some fried potato slices. It did feature some of the best parts of a barbeque, though:

• Somewhat inclement weather, albeit outdoors
• Meat not cooked at the same time as non-meat
• Meat slightly burnt on the outside (although I did manage to avoid the corresponding raw-on-the-inside feature)
• Makings of salad, to balance out the unhealthiness, left to one side

Although no names are given, I worked for the proprietors of the amusement arcade mentioned here one summer. They moved a few years ago from the location I worked in so they could sell it for property redevelopment.

Data Commission subject of security breach, trumpets RTÉ news. Wow, that'd be embarrassing. Except all that happened was that yesterday, someone fished out a URL for a report due to be released today. OH NO3S ALL OUR PRESS RELEASE ARE BELONG TO IDIOTS.

Given the very real privacy leaks that have occurred recently (HELLO BANK OF IRELAND), it's completely crass of the alleged news media (and also some blogging types who Should Know Better) to declare this a security breach.

• Independant review of drug classification in the UK says, "leave cannabis as a Class C drug"
• The Labour party (the incumbents), having recently had a fairly dramatic loss in support in both polls and local elections, ignore the review and reclassify it as Class B.
• The Tory party (the opposition with the best chance of being the incumbents at some point in the future) say that it shouldn't have been declassified, or reclassified from B to C in the first place.
• And the Lib Dems, who will never have any power worth talking about, say something or other in support of either the Class C ranking, or possibly complete decriminalisation. It doesn't really matter, as noone votes for them anyway.

And, you know, amid all this speculation about the possible but unproven side-effects of THC, both alcohol and nicotine remain freely available, non-criminalised drugs despite the mountains of proof that they cause personal health problems, social problems, and financial burdens for already beleaguered health services.¹

Just as well I live in a more enlightened country... oh, wait. Never mind.

[1] Not saying I necessarily support the criminalisation of drink and smokes. Just that the continued hypocrisy annoys me no end.

As noted on the other diary, I've signed up my iPod to the TED talks feed, and have been working my way through the backlog of about 200 video clips - mainly on my commute to work. Some of them seem, at a glance, to be less interesting to me than others, but I've got the sort of nerd checkbox mentality that won't let me skip one. Which is why I found myself watching Ben Saunders talking about walking solo to the North Pole, and instead of the somewhat dry I AM EXPLORER talk I was expecting, I found a very funny, emotionally moving description of one man's crazy trek across the top of the planet.

I really like today's Scary-Go-Round strip.

In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger. (link)

And a lovely quote, too.

My website and email are currently offline due, as best I can tell, to some sort of upstream routing issue at the ISP. From the pattern of failure - existing connections remain functional, new connections can't establish - I'm guessing someone's poked about on a router and messed up the ACLs. Or maybe a router is in the process of dying horribly. I'd call the tech support/customer care line, but they only operate from 8 to 8 on normal working days, and today's a bank holiday. THANK YOU ESAT BT.

update: service restored at approx 5:39pm

update to update: and then my webserver spontaneously rebooted.

The Health Service Executive has said it does not know how many confidential medical files have been dumped in fields Co Cork, or how they got there.(link)

I was treated in one of the mentioned hospitals for a broken arm in 1979.

A few months back, I went to a doctor I hadn't been to before. In his surgery, I noticed that he had a Macintosh Cube, something I'd never actually seen in real life in the brief period they were available. And so I commented on it, and he remarked that he was actually thinking of replacing it with an iMac, but he was quite aware of the (admittedly nerdy) cachet of owning such a piece of hardware.
( what happened next... )

Last week, the bank said that medical records, bank account details, names, addresses and dates of birth of 10,000 customers were on the laptops.
In an update, Bank of Ireland said an assessment had concluded that the risk of fraud arising from the thefts was 'very low', as the data on the laptops did not include bank account passwords, PINs or copies of signatures. (link)

This is so pig-headedly wrong I can't come up with a suitable comment. You have someone's date of birth, bank account details, name, and address? You can get some pretty funky fraud going right there, with a little ingenuity and some social engineering to grease the wheels of the process.

I got an IM this morning from someone I've not talked to in a long time. It was a url for what appears to be a photo-sharing site. I say "appears to be" as the first thing it wanted me to do was give it my MSN username and password to log in, and it's not a Microsoft site, so I declined and opted to read their T's & C's instead.

Which explains why I got the IM in the first place:

We may temporarily access your MSN account to do a combination of the following:
1. Send Instant Messages to your friends promoting this site.
2. Introduce new entertaining sites to your friends via Instant Messages.

I am very much NOT going to link to the site, I will just point out that it's "myfriendz.info" and leave you explore if you see fit. Don't log in, though.

Problem of the day: speed of light insufficiently fast.

"Bank of Ireland apologises to customers and is committed to moving as quickly as possible to allay the concerns of affected customers," the company said in a statement last night. (link)

Indeed. Moving as quickly as possible by not saying anything for months (the laptops were stolen over a period between June and October last year).

The opposition parties are, as expected, getting their mouths in on the act: Labour deputy leader Joan Burton said "I am calling on the Financial Regulator and on the Information Commissioner to make a clear statement on the implications of these security breaches,", because, no doubt, a clear statement is more important than, say, some action. Somewhat more usefully, Fine Gael’s communications spokesman Simon Coveney called for "...the mandatory encryption of all sensitive personal data carried portably; and for the strengthening of the Data Commissioner’s powers to investigate and enforce regulations, even where a complaint has not been made." - both measures I agree with, although I suspect the latter can only practically be accomplished by random checks since we don't yet have the ability to confer psychic powers on the Commissioner; the former is loosely specified in the existing legislation under the requirement to "adequately secure" data on a sliding scale based on its importance, impact of its disclosure, etc.

Bank of Ireland - my bank - have lost 4 laptops containing information on 10,000 customers. No, that's not right. They lost the laptops last year and only reported the loss on Friday. A cursory glance at the Data Protection Commissioner's website doesn't reveal any requirements for disclosing this sort of breach, mind you.

Over the weekend, my phone suddenly decided that it could no longer register on Vodafone's network. Thinking that this might be a continuation of the other hardware failures my phone has had, I figured I'd try the SIM in another phone. I tried two different phones, and both refused to even unlock the SIM, from which I concluded that the problem was with the SIM itself. I called Vodafone at about 9:30 this morning, and the customer service line rang out, which was on par with my expectations; I tried again later on, and this time got through to a customer service rep, who in a very short space of time confirmed that I could get a new SIM by going to my nearest Vodafone shop and telling them I needed one. He didn't have a useful explanation as to why the old SIM had died, but I wasn't expecting one anyway. And so I visited the local Vodafone store, and five minutes later I was connected to Vodafone's network once more. No charge, no hassle. Frankly, I'm quite stunned.

Since one Justin Mason inadvertently brought my attention to another Irish DVDs-by-email company (MovieStar), I had a poke at their website; it's interesting to compare MovieStar with my own suppliers, ScreenClick:

• both have a big-image splash pages, although the MovieStar one comes with some useful links (including, er, two to the page you're on)
• both advertise €7.99 starter packages (MovieStar claims it's "the cheapest place in Ireland to rent DVDs" despite this)
• "movie rentals to your door" vs "DVDs to your door"
• both have a two-week free trial
• both have near-identical four-step "how it works" diagrams
• both have near-identical product offerings (same prices and restrictions; only ScreenClick offers the four-disc-per-month version, however)

The reason Justin mentioned MovieStar is that they've announced that they're going to be offering movies to download from May 1. Aside from the comments he's already made on his blog about this, I find it surprising that there's no mention of it on their website - their "Media Center" section is full of advertising, and there's no press releases section. Seems like if you're identical to your competitor in pretty much all respects, and you've come up with a differentiator, you should maybe plug it a little harder, right?

Actually, I can't claim to have originated this. Somewhere along the line I picked up the word "fishslap", as in whacking someone across the face with a fish, a notional punishment applied via IM or other online chat for bad jokes, etc. When I wrote the office IRC bot for the company I worked for before my current employment, I included the following in its configuration:

   # the classics
   [ '^%b: slap\s+(.+)', '/me slaps %1 with a fish.' ],

Which, translated from my hacky Perl to english, says "if someone says, "bot: slap waider", display a message reading, "bot slaps waider with a fish". (%b was replaced with the bot's name, allowing you to have a bot named whatever you liked; the rest is just a combination of Perl-like back-references to identify the target, and IRC shorthand to denote an action performed rather than a statement made.)

The reason I mention this is that I recently saw a hotmail email which ended with the following:

Get fish-slapping on Messenger

Jurys Inn, Limerick, guarantees me that their website's price is the lowest.

We guarantee that for any hotel reservation made on jurysinns.com, you will not find a lower room rate publicly available on the Internet for that same room type in the same Jurys Inn on the same date requested!
If, having made a booking on a Jurys Inns branded website, you should find a lower publicay available price, for the same room at the same hotel, elsewhere on the internet within 24 hours of booking, we will honour that rate. (link)

The terms and conditions are interesting, but I am amused by this gem:

The availability of the competing rate must be proved by an acceptable form of evidence.  An "acceptable" form of evidence will be the forwarding to us of an official print screen or email confirming a reservation... (my emphasis)

What's an official print screen? That aside, if I'm reading this right, it seems I need to book through the Jurys Inns website, then book through the competing website as well.

Oh yeah. It also tells me how to "challange" the Jurys Inns Price Guarantees. I found a better way to "challange" it: look up cheaper hotels on Booking.com. Booyah.