Ronan’s Blog

I finally sold my old car last weekend and this week bough my new car … And She’s a beauty !

2003 BMW 320i Sports Coupé, 22,500miles, 2200cc Engine, M-Tec Trim, the works.

€7500 VRT when I brought it down from Northern Ireland, got my new Irish Plates fitted today and Tax paid … All-in-all I probably saved about €3000 by buying outside Ireland and Importing.

Picasa Web Albums - Ronan - New Car

29th May 2007 - Eircom announces €240m group operating profit

30th May 2007 - Eircom announces the cutting of 900 Jobs

A report in today ’s Newspaper has claimed that the amount of natural resources off the west coast of Ireland could rival some of the world’s largest oil production locations. An estimate €450billion in Oil alone is thought to be there.

If and when these Oil fields begin yielding and profits are paying tax at the 25% margin, this will be an enormous boost to the Irish Economy. Reduced National debt, improved infrastructure and health services will probably be the expected investments for these new taxes. Then who knows what will happen in the future, Kerry to become the next Dubai ?!

Lets just hope Ireland never gets accused of having WMD’s !

Ireland on the verge of an oil and gas bonanza - Independent.ie

The SSIA scheme (Irish Government Savings Scheme, toping up savings with an extra 25% over 5 years) has hit maturity right on time to coincide with the announcement of the General Election (Surprising, Huh?) and over a half a million accounts are maturing today, releasing over €7.5 billion to Irish Savers.
SSIA’s mature today releasing €7.5bn to savers

Now the property market has slowed down at the minute, because of the uncertainty over the future of Stamp Duty, which is expected to be resolved directly after the election. I wonder will these pay-outs kick-start it again? Will people actually start spending their SSIA’s immediately?
Personally, I’ve had my SSIA since the start of January and since then I’ve been suffering from Post-SSIA depression. Not because the free money giveaway has finished, but rather because I have this big lump sum sitting in my account with no idea what to do with it. Originally I thought that I would pay-off my car loan, sell my car, and buy a newer one with some of the cash (No luck selling my current car though) and then I would know €10,000 off my Mortgage (but my Bank Manager/Dad was not really able to tell me if that was a good idea or not). So right now I still have the lump sum sitting there with no idea what to do with it.

I came across this article today where Wired News editor Michael Calore uses only Google Applications for day-to-day tasks. It sounds interesting and heavily reliant on an fast and reliable Internet connection. I can’t really see this becoming commonplace, since the speed of desktop applications will always be faster than anything online.

I’ll just stay tuned for the Desktop versions of/shortcuts to the Google Office tools
Livin’ la Vida Google: A Month-Long Dive Into Web-Based Apps -

I just downloaded and installed the Spyware Doctor Application from PC Tools, which comes as part of the Google Pack software suite. The Google pack suite now downloads as an excellent updater tool to which you can add additional software and automatically update other applications too. Interesting the Updater has Pause and Resume download functionality, which makes me think that Google already has the makings of a good download manager application (like GetRight).

Anyway, whenever I see free Anti-Spyware or online Anti-Virus Scans I usually run them on a whim to see what they turn up and usually I just get tracking cookies and the like. My PC is obviously patched right up to date too. So I feel my PC is pretty secure and I’m happy to use it for online banking and other private work.

Not this time. Running the Sypware Doctor I found 2 Key Loggers (Registry), and one Backdoor entry application on my PC !!! This really surprised me, since I have always had either ZoneAlarm or Kerio Sunbelt firewall running as well as AVG Resident Shield and I regularly run the Lavasoft Anti-Spyware tool. I can’t believe these serious spyware items were on my PC.

Spyware Doctor comes with a running active shield too, which I will be leaving on from now on.

EDIT: I’ve just run the same software on my work PC (behind a corporate firewall) and found 314 Infections, some of which are very serious!

OK, this is getting a bit annoying.
With the new Microsoft approach of delivering urgent and high priority updates ahead of its monthly patch releases the constant need to re-start machines is really annoying. Especially if (like me) you have two office PC’s left on all the time, with multiple application constantly open.

When Windows 2000 was released were we not promise fewer restarts? This promise/selling point was continued with windows XP (See here), but now seems to have been totally disguarded. Surely an Update Engine inside Windows can restart only the service or component necessary!

…. which makes me officially old !

Damn.

Interesting Marketing by Microsoft

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=160496&site=cvg

But then again …. Fosters is muck, so I might even be tempted to go for the single bottle of Becks !

So I’ve got myself a BETA testing account for Joost (http://www.Joost.com) and I gotta say that I’m really impressed with the technology. Its runs taking up 40KB/s –> 70 KB/s of my broadband connection, but here’s the thing … The clarity is perfect, there’s not glitchy jumpy video that we’re used to from Youtube, it really looks well, and the User Interface is also a thing of beauty. Another brilliant feature is that it just starts playing when you select your desired channel, with no “Buffering…” like we’re used to from other sites/services.

I’ve used a lot of P2P TV (Sopcast, PPLive, PPMate & TVants) all of which were very jumpy and took 60KB/s and above.

Joost really could be the breakthrough that Internet TV has been waiting for, but ultimately it depends on what content is put up for viewing. However, I firmly believe that this can be the platform by which the Movie and TV industry can publish their content online.
I think that Zedo from Azeures should learn from this, and adopt a prioritised piece downloading system where it will download consecutive pieces and play while actually downloading (if this has not already bee implemented)