Joe’s Blog

Deputy Broughan said, “Minister Dempsey’s announcement this morning that the current 410,000 level of broadband subscribers has “smashed the target I set with several months to spare” is disingenuous in the extreme.

“The Minister’s original target in his Department’s 2004 broadband policy directive was for 500,000 subscribers by mid-2005 and 600,000 plus subscribers by the end of 2006. When it was increasingly clear that this target would not be reached, instead of establishing a more effective policy, the Minister simply decided to change the target and downgraded his broadband goal to reaching 400,000 by the end of 2006.

Brought to my attention by: IrishElection
The cheek of FF
Labour shows us the trick

Lesson: doubt every single word from the government!

Friday as promised, 8 of us in our apartment got together to make a huge meal. The first course was apple curry soup, followed by filled breadrolls, then salad, then lasagne topped off with pancakes and ice-cream….pictures to follow soon.

Afterwards we played “Activity 2″ - a cross between charades and pictionary but with a board and 3 difficulty levels. As it was in
german, it was a little more challenging for the foreigners. We won the first match and for the second match we only used pantomime cos
it’s funnier and we won again. Twas great fun, we got to know each other better and twas even educational!

Speaking of winning - I was delighted to see Kerry win the football on Sunday. I went to the Irish Harp Pub at 4.10 (20 mins before match) but it was closed so I had to find another one rather quickly! I made it with 5 mins to spare before the start to the Irish Pub in the Europa Centre. I actually felt sorry for Mayo after 10mins, got worried at half-time but when they were so rough with Cooper I didn’t want Kerry to hold back at all!

Jack!

Which “Lost” character are you?

A blog on interesting things in Berlin in english.

This is quite amusing for anyone who has been to college…or not: the show with zefrank. It’s a few megs i guess but it gets funnier towards the middle.

Cats can do amazing things: www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5r5f8ekDxQ

An online Etymology dictionary

and finally, is this amusing or has the world gone mad?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgbalancesrocks/239195904/ (you need to read the story, not just look at the picture)

My place in Germany is fine, I’m just a little worried about the houses at home!

THE National Roads Authority have admitted “questions need to be answered” after a cottage was mistakenly demolished this week without the knowledge of its owners.

see Irish Independent, The Limerick Leader and The Nenagh Guardian

I’ve started reading Damien Mulley’s blog, and Ireland Offline campaigner and topical blogger. But it led to a worrying thought - is ComReg both a shield and PR group for the government? They told a Dail committee that line failure rates were “are broadly in line with our experience” but it couldn’t be much further from the truth. Failure rates in NI are around 1% and 12% here!
The Sunday Times has an article here

Broughan said he was concerned by ComReg’s tendency to hype positive results and leave out negative ones. “It trumpets the fact that we have reached over 320,000 broadband users in the first quarter of this year but overall the position is bad,” the Labour TD said. “ComReg needs to be reformed and the minister needs to give it real teeth.”

Tom Butler, a spokesman for ComReg, said it stood by the information provided. He said the reason BT’s failure rate appeared much lower than Eircom’s was because of differing approaches to reporting line failure.

indeed….I’m sure eircom would have used that trick if it could too.

I have indeed been working hard and I’m very happy in my new role. The weekend was again a time for socialising with friends - this time we went for Becks on Friday - twice.

The following day involved relaxing, some light cooking and shopping for front and rear lights for my bicycle. They are now mounted on the bike nicely - 10 lux a the front and 3 LEDs at the back in 3 directions.
Saturday night we had a great conversation with the housemates and dug into sparkling wine, pineapple and cake. Afterwards we went to a club till 5 in the morning.

Sunday - very german - it was my turn to clean the worktop in preparation for the cleaning lady to disinfect it on Monday morning. I even washed all the dishs, pots and pans and left them to dry while I went for a cycle through the park, past the government buildings, Reichstag, Hauptbahnhof (new mail railway station) and on to Alexanderplatz. The Palast der Republik (East-German Parliament) is being torn down at the moment and I’m not sure if it should be. On the other hand they are hoping to rebuild the former palace. It’s kind of like erasing a bad memory.

The building is unusual in that it the walls are mostly copper. Here are my pics from 2002
Before (in the background):

and from Wikipedia: Before

Now:

On Monday, back to work but I’ve also enrolled in a german class at an adult education centre. Now I know that I can speak german with most people - underdstanding and expressing myself well with other people. This is to improve my grammar, language style and perhaps most importantly, have evidence of my proficiency. I’ve been placed in a course to prepare for the Kleines Deutsches Sprachdiplom, the second highest level for German - the highest is the Großes Deutches Sprachdiplom.I sat in on the end of Monday’s class and it was very good - I learned a few things and I even got homework to do! We’ll have classes Mondays and Thursdays - 6hrs each week for 16 weeks although I missed the first 2.5 weeks.

Tommorrow night we are arranging a meal together (6/7 housemates). It’s very german - we have an A4 page with a table dividing the meal into soup, starter, destert etc, a column for whoever volunteers to do that section, a column for their suggestion and a second column for counter-suggestions if you don’t like the first one! The costs will also be divided evenly afterwards too - I’m looking forward to it

Well quite a few momentous events have occurred - Steve Irwin was involved in an accident with a Stingray. It’s a terrible thing to have happened. A certain amount of danger is involved in dealing with animals and fish but it was a freak accident from the information I’ve gotten.

Mary Harney has stepped down as leader of the PDs - definitely a surprise and she was a good leader. On the other hand, she is not retiring and she is still a minister for the rest of this term. This might even give the PDs an electoral boost.

Tony Blair has also announced that he’ll step down within a year. Nothing too exciting there except that a change of leader can lead to a change in relations i.e Ireland/UK and UK/USA. It’ll be interesting to watch.

But what really concerns me is what happened in Limerick this week - from RTE:

The two children, four-year-old Gary and six-year-old Philomena. known as ‘Milly’, were operated on today after receiving severe burns in the fire on Sunday.

They were in the back of the parked car at Pineview Gardens in Moyross when the blaze started.

The youngsters are being treated at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin in Dublin.

Niall McNamara, the father of the children, has said that someone poured petrol into the back of the car and set it alight

Disturbing.

After that mad weekend all I did was move into a new apartment (for 1 month) and find another for the following 5-6 months, visited an old-berlin pub in Neukölln, an area known as little Istanbul and not lovingly so…we got out safe and well anyways without even a hint of trouble and went to another bar. Twas an early end to the night - around 2.30am and 2 new types of beer tried: Schulteiss and Krombacher (with a dash of grendadine!). Take note everyone who think Erdinger is the drink of choice. Well, Becks is cool amongst the younger crowd I’m told.
Saturday I did mere mortal things like sleep, go shopping and watch football Germany 1 - 0 Ireland…as expected.
But Sunday I was up bright and early for IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung), the largest consumer electronics trade fair.
It really was huge. I was there from 11:00 till 18:00 and I still didn’t get to see a few halls and breezed through others. The main offer was flatscreen TVs - bigger, brighter, higher definition (1080p) and better filtering of standard TV signals. But when I look back, it’s probably the two 3D TVs that I’ll probably remember if they catch on. I took many photos and a couple of videos:
Getaway on Playstation 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjJO9FhAYNE
Singer at Hitachi stand (think of the asian rock star in the OC!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZPFswMZ2XQ
ATI’s dancing girls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bideBjUP5qM
Nintendo/Grundig Breakdancers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs5w7uraywM
or their website:www.darookies.de
This poor girl had the job of showing us the multimedia bathroom

lots of switches (tom, you’d love this)

LG had some cool DVB-H (mobile TV) phones

The 3D monitor

LG and many other companies had wireless speakers

There was case-modding

GIGA TV was on air live and I was seen in the audience…

So was ZDF although not live at least at that time

But seriously, there were many, many flatscreens there

And this is supposedly the worlds biggest full LCD HDTV - 1080p and 100″

Across from it there was a 102″ Plasma…

There were also many cars: