Blogged thoughts, is our web blog. Expect views, opinion, rants and tirades about everything and anything 

Has anyone seen shots of (or been in) any of the apartments in the new docklands development? From the ground this whole development looks stunning however it was only when on daft.ie the other day (I’m looking at renting options) that I actually got my first look inside this developments’ apartments. I have to admit that I was just blown away by some of the apartments, most notably though those in Hanover Quay. The contemporary style & decor is right down my street, unfortunately the prices are not. Judge for yourself, here’s some pictures (credit to daft.ie for these shots - I did not take them!). Click on the thumbnails to open fully sized pictures in new windows.

   
As you can see the main living room area has a contempory well lit design and is particularly impressive, as is the very large balcony area, whether or not it ever stops raining to use the balcony is another thing though. Hanover Quay (and the docklands development in general) certainly beats the socks of the new developments down my way (Santry) anyhow.              

If a certain someone up above could arrange for me to win the euromillions on friday I’d definitely snap one of these up straight away. One thing is for sure though, if I ever get to live in a place like that everyone will be leaving their shoes in the hall.

Recently the number of deaths on Irish roads so far this year has topped the 300 figure. It was a government target that the total amount of deaths this year would be less than 300, so not even halloween yet and already that figure is surpassed. What can be done about this then? Well the RSA (Road Safety Authority) is in the process of putting together it’s Road Safety Strategy for 2007 – 2011. It wants everyone including Joe Soaps to get involved and submit ideas and suggestions about what can be done to improve our roads.

Councillor Damien Blake of Letterkenny Town Council is taking a particularly proactive approach with his ‘Stop the Carnage’ campaign which attempts to use what’s known as the Irish Blogsphere (basically the Irish blogging community) to raise awareness of the problem in general and raise awareness of the fact that the RSA are listening and do want your views. He encourages blog owners to post their suggestions on their blogs and encourages others to leave their suggestions as comments on the various blogs which post about the campaign. Councillor Blake will then draw up a report based on the suggestions and forward it to the Minister for Transport, Taoiseach, Road Safety Authority, Insurance Federation and every member of the Oireachtas.

As far as my own suggestions are concerned, well I’m not a driver myself but some of my thoughts are outlined below.

Provisional Licenses. People who fail full driving tests should not be allowed to drive on their provisional licences without having tackled the reasons why they failed.

At the moment pretty much anyone can drive a car via the provisional license system, often people take their time and do 15-20 lessons before applying for this license, but other times only 3 or 4 lessons might have been conducted. This amount of lessons is not enough, I think before being allowed to apply for a provisional license a certified instructor will have to have signed off that MR. Smith (or whoever) has successfully conducted at least X amount of lessons. I would certainly make the theory test harder and possibly invest in some simulation systems to test peoples ability in various real driving scenarios.

Not sure if this is law already (think it is but it’s not enforced) but there should be a maximum amount of people allowed in the car of a provisional holder. A lot of young men get very ‘cocky’ when all their mates are in the car with them, it is this feeling of cockyness and the desire to ’show off’ that often results in a fatal road accident.

Again this might already be the case but I think provisional drivers should only need say 5 or 6 points on their licence to be taken off the road and not a whole 12 as is the case for full licence holders. This is the way it is in France and they have cut a third off their road death figure over the past four years, of course they have implemented lots of other ‘tactics’ too to reduce road deaths and thus this plays only a small part.

Insurance based rewards for good driving. If we really want people to slow down we have to give them an incentive to do it. Unfortunately the whole ’slow down and save lifes’ approach alone does not work. I recommend giving rewards in the form of lower insurance premiums to people who stay within speed limits and who drive safely and or people who make an effort to improve their driving skills. I believe the scheme run by Hibernian and promoted by ‘Duffer‘ called Ignition is an outstanding idea. It is mostly young people that get hit with huge insurance premiums and here is a scheme that promises to reduce premiums by at least 20% if one successfully passes a one day course designed to improve your driving skills, I really don’t understand why more insurance companies (possibly backed by the government) haven’t designed similar offerings.

Wasn’t there also talk of a speed monitor device being fitted to cars? This device would submit data back to some insurance company which can later analyse how many times the driver of the car was outside the allowed speed limit and raise or lower that drivers insurance premiums accordingly and thus drivers would be encouraged to stay within the speed limit as although they mightn’t think that it (it being death or paralyzation due to a car crash) would ever happen to them they will know that going over the limit will increase the likelihood that they will have to pay more for their insurance next year.

I think the goverments and of course the insurance companies should push for more speeding reduction schemes perhaps like the above because let’s not fool ourselfs here folks, IT IS SPEED WHICH KILLS, stray deer are not responsible for the over 300 deaths on our roads so far this year.

Drink Driving. Actually I think on this issue progress is being made particularly with the recent changes in the law which allow for random breath testing by the Guards. It has to continue though, there is no use in something being enforced for a couple of months only for things to then go back to the way they were.

Communication. I think a useful area of exploration which might enable better communication of safe driving practices to Ireland’s young people is to make use of the Internets many ‘cool’ sites such as Youtube, Bebo and MySpace. Young people respect these sites and are much more likely to listen to them than say the 6 o clock news which talks about the latest road safety guidelines.

OK enough jibber jabber from me, nearly time to sign off I think. In closing then I would like to ask you to please support Damien Blakes campaign and post your own suggestions for improved road safety either here or on his blog, alternatively if you own your own blog (Richard, Ken, Janine I’m looking at you) help spread the word by writing a small post about the subject, remember the more suggestions that come in the more likely the RSA will find one suggestion or indeed multiple suggestions that will really make a difference to the safety of Irish roads.

OK so we probably all know about AOLs recent boo-boo when they inadvertently released search data pertaining to over 650,000 users. Just how serious is this though? What potential problems or embarressments may it cause for any users which might have searched for their personal names, addresses, social security number or other private information which might cause them to be identified? TJ McIntyre is a lecturer in the School of Law in UCD (University College Dublin) and has authored three very interesting posts on this very high profile incident on his blog ‘IT Law in Ireland’ which is located at http://www.tjmcintyre.com/.

In one of his posts TJ refers to the NY Times which ran a story about 62 year old Thelma Arnold who was ‘traced’ because of her detailed search queries. “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life,” she said. “I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder.” Thelma Arnold though wasn’t searching for anything too strange, things like ‘60 single men’ and ‘dog that urinates on everything’ where among her somewhat embarrassing searches. If others are indentified their searches may not be so harmless as queries such as ‘how to secretly poison your ex’ and ‘how to kill a wife’ are to be found among the massive 2GB of data which was released.

A lot of people are extremely annoyed with AOL over this and thus calls for an AOL boycott are widespread. Anyhow check out these posts, I found them very interesting.

Yahoo UK & Ireland have launched another service which again has overlooked the Irish market. No matter who denies it the United Kingdom & the Republic of Ireland are extricably linked in culture, business, language, history etc. and therefore to ignore the Irish market is just plain idiocy. What makes it worse is that the site although on a co.uk is referred to as Yahoo UK & Ireland.

The service in particular is Yahoo local, have a look at the following sample search I performed on Yahoo local… says it all really. This information becomes particularly annoying when one combines it with the fact that Yahoo pay per click advertising is available for GEO targeting in 14 european countries but not Ireland, this dispite the fact that Yahoo have its european headquarters in Dublin. Is Ireland not a center of IT excellence? Do we not host major companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Dell, Intel and Oracle to name but a few? Have we not got Internet businesses to promote and market too? OK enough ranting from me.

Just read there on www.siliconrepublic.com (thank you very much Gordon Smith) that the team behind ebay.ie plans to integrate free PC to PC VOIP service Skype into their website to make communication between buyers and sellers much easier. The end idea for eBay Ireland (who recently celebrated their first birthday) of course would be an increase in transactions and thus an increase for them in transaction related fees which they charge the seller everytime he or she sells something. John McElligott, the Customer Development Head at eBay Ireland went as far as to say they expect it to dramatically increase both the number and values of sales so it seems to make great business sense.

I’ve used one or two Skype enabled services lately and I have to say that it did increase the experience substantially without increasing the cost of course so not only will the execs at eBay Ireland be happy but the estimated 200,000 registered users of their site will be happy too. It should allow Skype which has 39 million users worldwide (a figure that grows by 150,000 per day) to make further inroads into the Irish market. eBays move follows similar moves by sites like Bebo which also utilize Skype for improved communication between its users.  

Well the headline really says it all I think, but anyhow I got an email from the aerlingus.com guys earlier on about their current winter travel sale. I didn’t see advertisements about this sale on TV or hear them on radio (others maybe did though) so I decided to post a little message up here which hopefully will get picked up by the ‘Irish blogosphere’ perhaps via the excellent ‘IrishBlogs.ie‘ or the equally excellent ‘The Community At Large‘ and thus let more people know about this than otherwise would have.

The sale is for flights between the 7th of November and the 20th of December (inclusive) from Dublin, Cork and Shannon Airports (although most deals are from Dublin of course) to many of the major european airports which Aer Lingus services. Amazing prices as low as €1, €5 and €10 are being offered for one-way flights to places like London, Paris and Vienna respectively. The sale because it’s a 3 day sale only lasts for eh… 3 days so you have to convince yourself and all your buddies to go on that booze filled week to Prague and then of course book your tickets on www.aerlingus.com before midnight on thursday the 1st June. Seriously though, with so many different cities on offer you should be able to find something that takes your fancy.

As mentioned above, I got ‘word’ of this sale from an email Aer Lingus sent out to me, this of course was not spam, it was something I specifically signed-up for. I highly recommend you do the same, hit the www.aerlingus.com homepage and check out the ’sign-up for email offers’ box which is about halfway down the left hand side of the page.