Posts by Cian Duffy 53 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jun 2007
My EvilSuperGlobalMegaCorp employer has a mileage rate for bicycles, which I have actually claimed - along with my city cycle hire membership as I don't actually own my own bike currently. Both willingly paid as it lets them greenwash other activities
They also require you to reclaim bribes given at customs / to police in dodgy countries (we do trade in a few) as bribes; and will pay them.
My regular box shifter can't get me anything at all, 70m+ turnover and now basically adrift with nothing *to* shift.
Remembered our satellite office in a smaller city (with a citywide ego issue, so they'll probably detect I've called them small and arrive to murder me...) used a small local B2B place for all their stuff and he was set up as a supplier with accounts. He actually had stock at hand and while the laptops he had were a grade or two lower than I wanted it wasn't entry level. Still had decent HP desktop PCs (also in severe short supply in Ireland) on Friday as well as all the various accessories that are running out everywhere.
Monitors, keyboards, mice, laptop bags, headsets are all stripped bare in normal consumer outlets now.
I was asked to figure out why a point to point link between two sites of a medical centre - roughly 150m down and across a city street - were dropping out a few times an hour with "no discernible pattern".
After sitting on the roof beside the link for some time waiting to see what happened, I found that the person seeing no pattern was either comparing hour to hour or not applying any level of fuzzing to what could be seen day to day. There was a railway overbridge between the two sites, and the drops were when a train got in the way. Trains run a bit off timetable all the time so there would be slight variance in times.
Raising the masts permanently would have needed planning permission; but we did it temporarily while ordering cable internet to both sites
My previous employer suddenly decided that using "Engineer" for titles where it clearly wasn't appropriate had to stop, and changed everyones job title overnight to "Analyst", even when it made it sound ridiculous or inaccurate
Including for those of us with recognised engineering degrees. So it stopped the school kids on the phones being "Level 1 Engineers" and the printer service techs from being "Field Engineers" but it also stopped the senior, actual engineers, from using it.
Way back when a former employer started enforcing field engineering timesheets "to the minute" they started finding a good hour+ a day logged as overtime for "filling timesheets"
Strangely enough they decided that the former system of trusting the engineers was actually perfectly OK.
We've actual legislation in Ireland to ban them on petrol pumps but not diesel due to the lower ignition risk. However, its rare to find a station that hasn't removed them on all but nearly all will tolerate the filler cap being wedged in when filling a van tank as a result.
I've contributed to both the Nokia 1110 and Samsung E1100 sales figures a number of times - as burn phones (media work), grabbing a PAYG handset I recognised at the lowest price point in a foreign country or when a phone has been in for warranty repair. Whereas I had one 3310. Actually still have a working E1100 here but its locked to TalkTalk and I could buy an unlocked landfill Android for the cost of an unlock code.
Somehow doubt its statistically significant compared to the actual emerging market sales of each though!
This venues wifi falls over for a 2000 attendee political conference - cue me getting called by every journo in the station unable to file copy. How anyone even vaguely aligned to the media or tech world in the country didn't know this astounds me as it's the main venue for Big conferences - the much better Convention Centre being a tad small.
Last big party conference there was ample 4G capacity but I expect that as time and device support marches on, it won't do either.
While I've not read every single Poirot book, I'm not sure there are that many loose ends to tie up - Christie herself did a decent enough job with Curtain - originally intended to be released after her death but eventually released before it.
I've a sneaking suspicion they want to get a few more novels out to get made for TV as Suchet is still able to deliver...
If you can convince the courts here (Ireland) that you were a consumer and not a business, yes - either full or pro-rata depending on age up to 6 years old. A firmware fix would be very much admitting a manufacturing fault as defined in Irish law. Doesn't apply in the same way to B2B transactions, but Proliant servers do get sold to consumers from time to time.
We're in the middle of transitioning from white-box PCs, Acer laptops and Dell servers to HP across the board - may be worth hauling back before it's too late; was already a concern over similar priced servers having either 1 or generally 3 years warranty compared to 5 with Dell.
I'm now stuck with four email addresses in the one permanent workplace - surnameinitial@mainbusiness, firstname.surname@secondarybusiness, firstname@tertiarybusiness and first.surname@parentcompany
Add to that the monstrous number I collected when every ISP close to forced you to use theirs (blocking SMTP to other servers, old ISP restricting SMTP to their network) and I can probably beat 40.
I'd say it could easily be 10% or more here (Ireland) from what I've seen out in public. Even high end Symbian devices held on here for a long time so there's some brand loyalty element to it.
In work, our network (O2) provides a 520 as the 'free' phone for any new contract or upgrade which means its probably 30-40% in the office though - only engineering staff and management get dearer phones funded.
"The easiest way to get out of the UK without a passport would be to take the ferry to Northern Ireland and then walk across the border into Eire. When Scotland leaves the UK it'll be even easier ;-)"
Or just fly here. Or take the ferry here.
There is absolutely no requirement for a passport to go between Ireland and the UK on any mode of transport. The second largest airline serving routes between the two requires one, but the first and third downwards don't, just photo ID of any description. Work door passes are enough.
UKBA don't check on the way out, GNIB do really prefer photo ID but will take your boarding pass on the way in. When you're going back, assuming you fly to an airport with sufficient segregation (e.g. Birmingham) you won't show a thing on the way in; if its not segregated the boarding pass will do (Gatwick).
On the ferry there's no checks of any description at all for car drivers, not done foot in an extremely long time to confirm that.
"Though, it's a bit annoying because Windows 7 x64 doesn't seem to support the drivers for the printer (32-bit version works fine). "
Have you tried a generic PCL driver (not from a manufacturer but from a similar era PC - e.g. drive it with a HP Laserjet 4 driver)? This is what we do in work to get the various archaic Samsung and Brother printers that customers have and that will not die to work on x64 Windows.
Apple's existing directly-operated manufacturing facility was in Ireland, albeit actually in a large council estate, but still not a particularly low-cost economy.
Believe all its churning out recently are Mac Pro's but it has previously made the larger iMacs and the server line, when they had one.
Going back further it manufactured practically everything, but that was when Wales churned out most of the TVs for this part of the world and Scotland had a thriving semiconductor industry!
"Gay at Facebook" (well, Facebook Europe realistically - I doubt the social group had the cash) was the title sponsor of Dublin Pride this year, it having been Google for a number of years beforehand. Microsoft also had involvement as per usual. There definitely seems to be a tech industry gay-off in the offing.
Now, if only I could find a firm that pays a premium for staff who'll never want paternity leave...
I had an emboss taken at a (small regional branch, admittedly) global car hire firm as recently as January; in a location that definitely had internet and phones available - an airport.
Have a feeling they may have taken the emboss away and run it through a terminal as the payment came through very quickly, not the days to weeks it took when they were common place.
The user profile of these devices in the (IT) firm I work in would probably corroborate this - the more technical people who'd be stereotypically getting less anyway would be the main Android users, and the blondes in accounts and "morkeshing" all use iPhones...
Clearwire is pricey - 50 euros a month for 2Mbits with an effectively unenforced cap (no specification of what they do if you go over it at that), but it does work virtually anywhere in the city and a fair few of the suburbs. Pity the AP (an ethernet bridge) is a wee bit massive, there's a PCMCIA version from the makers though
Ennis won a competition to be Telecom Eireann's "Information Age Town" some time in the 90s. Basically, there was IE£15M of cheap/free computers and ISDN access given out like sweets at a parade there in 1997/8, and as a result, there's people who think they "know computers" and know how not to make an idiot of themselves on the net who, by rights, probably shouldn't even have a computer. I'd lay money on him still using the Telecom Eireann computer, actually.
When they say ITV1, are they neglecting the non-ITV1 covered ITV regions? Theres Scotland, Northern Ireland (which is carried in all of Ireland pretty much, so about 6M audience) and the Channel Islands (where I doubt the ad revenue amounts to much...) owned by independent contractors still.
I'm listening to an mp3 encoded with the current LAME VBR defaults (not even the paranoid, slow-down-encode-to-hell ones) on a 300 quid sound card attached to 100 quid Sennheisers, and I can't notice the difference either. Its averaging about 160kbps - rather a lot less than FLAC would take.
Probably because there isn't actually any that anyone can actually notice - unless you're the kind of person who can be convinced that a 400 quid HDMI lead is better than a 20 quid one....
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