If I walk to Dublin

Just spent a rather nice few days in the company of Arjedre, she of Tales of the Have' fame, who tagged on a three day sojourn in Ireland to the end of of week of classical Greek workshops in London. One of our good friends from our time in the US, we have managed to see her at least once a year since we moved back to Dublin, and it always feels like no time has passed, surely the mark of a really good friendship.

On Saturday we ventured in to Merrion Square and spent the afternoon and early evening at the Street Performance World Championship. This was everything that the taste of Dublin should have been, but wasn't - free, inclusive, entertaining and a proper use of city resources for something that was accessible by all the people of Dublin. To see the streets in front of the Dail closed off so that a Brooklyn B-boy crew could do their thing was just the antidote to the Celtic Tiger-aftertaste left over from last week. Amazing!

Sunday evening saw us break out of the pressure-cooker humidity and overcast skies and head out to Whiterock beach, off Vico Road in Killiney. Although we drove it's near enough to Killiney Dart station, as of course is Killiney beach itself, but still hidden away that it never seems to get too crowded. The fact that, like most of the South Dublin/North Wicklow coast it is a rocky, rather than sandy beach, also contributed to its relative emptiness, but on a calm tranquil night you just can't beat it for sitting back and watching the stars come out, with the gentle breaking of the waves around you.

Monday saw a day trip to Glendalough, with a continuation of the crazy humidity providing the perfect conditions for a ridiculous number of flying biting things to try and make me their dinner, and the evening saw us end up at the Blue Light Pub high above the city with hands-down the best views of Dublin bar none. A perfect end to a great three days.

As always all it takes to rekindle my love of the city is for me to see it through the eyes of a stranger.

The revolution will be no reTweet brothers

It is always interesting to follow US media coverage of the political process abroad, both for the rarity of it and for the amusing way in which it always has to be seen through a lens of direct relevancy to an American audience. It isn't enough for there to be elections in Lebanon, the only question anyone is really interested in is how Obama has effected the results (easy answer, he hasn't). Similarly the amazing events occurring daily in Iran are of interest to the US media not because of the intrinsic value of mass demonstrations of direct action by the people, for the people, but because the whole event can be portrayed as having at its heart a good old fashioned American web start-up.

The Revolution may not be televised, but by god will it be Twittered.

Fresh from its debut as Time Magazine's cover star, Twitter is the current glittery object that the media magpies just can't seem to let go. Its easy enough for them to understand, many of them have tried it themselves, and it suits the mass media's approach to communication as essentially a one-way process.

While other micro-blogging services, such as Jaiku, have the concept of a conversation at their core, the very structure of Twitter prevents you from following replies in a threaded, logical fashion, and thus by design you are encouraged to throw you comments out into the wind with no regard for how and where they land. Twitter is radio, Twitter is television, Twitter is communication by post-it notes left randomly on a fridge. Twitter encourages a passive audience of followers and inhibits true dialogue, and that perhaps is why it succeeded in the US and Jaiku, despite the backing of almighty Google, failed.

When I left the world of Web 2.0 over a year ago, my initial plan was to return to academia and look at the use of Web 2.0 tools by social and justice movements. At the time we had just seen the clamp down by China on Tibetan protesters, who still managed to smuggle footage out of Tibet and get it uploaded onto YouTube. During the protests in San Francisco over the Olympic torch relay, Twitter had been used to broadcast details of route changes as they happened allowing demonstrators to move rapidly and block off the new route as it unfolded, in effect creating the first high-profile flash mob peace protests. As a veteran of alter-globalization protests at the turn of the millennium I understood how important access to information was during any confrontation, and saw the potential for online social media as method of empowerment and a tool for change. Alas my path took me away from academia (for now), but it amazes me to think about how topical my thesis would have been right about now.

What annoys me about the media coverage of Twitter though is that in the absence of any visible leaders at the Iranian protests, Twitter has been seized on as the personification of the movement. The US media cannot cope with autonomous collective action, they need a figurehead to interview, to wrap a story around, to deify or to hang. The concept of a non-hierarchical spontaneous movement is alien to a Capitalist culture, which cannot understand how a group might function without clearly defined roles of leaders and followers.

And into the void fits Twitter so very neatly, a tool designed to enable leaders to broadcast to followers, that engenders strict hierarchies and encourages collective passivity. Turning your icon green will not support change in Iran. Tweeting others to twitition Google to Google-Doodle for freedom or update images of Tehran on Google Earth will not save a single life. The only way to effect change is to get off your backside, away from your computer, and go out there and do something.

The revolution will be no reTweet brothers;
The revolution will be live.

A boring post on ads in Blogger

Looks like Google are trying to squeeze every last penny out of their platforms, with ads now appearing within the control panels of Blogger, as shown above. Its not appearing every time I publish a post, so looks like I got randomly included in a limited test. The control panel normally looks like this:

This is a bad thing. Its obviously not targeted, as there is no content on the control panel that it could be effectively targeted on/to, so it is a pretty poor user experience for me as none of the ads can be in any way relevant. It also has to be a poor experience for the advertiser as their ads are displaying in a location that cannot produce any significant click-through or ROI.

Just one further sign of how badly Google has been affected by the crumbling economy.

Of our elaborate plans, the end

Got an email this week from the Green Party central office:

"The Green Party National Executive Committee on Saturday decided to call a Members' Conference for mid to late July in order to consult members about the review of the Programme for Government. We will notify members as soon as a date and venue have been decided. In the meantime, members of the Parliamentary Party have offered to attend Constituency Group meetings around the country as we are notified of them."

Short and sweet, very much a "we know there's a problem, let's all take a deep breath and come back in a while to deal with it" message.

In hindsight the government was never in any danger of collapsing in the wake of the election. A number of RTE reports and newspaper articles have all highlighted the fact that if an election were to happen anytime soon almost all the Green TDs would lose their seats. The party now needs to focus on wringing more concessions from Fianna Fail as it renegotiates the program for Government in the hope that when an election finally does happen it can go to the country with a string of high profile and visible wins that can be attributed directly to their actions in government, and not just to their implementation of legislation already agreed at a European level. This will not be easy, given the failure of the "50% of new jobs are green jobs" message during the local and EU campaigns.

The election was very disappointing for the Greens, but the real disappointment is not at the national level, but at the local level with the loss of almost every single Green city and county councilor. The international green message has always been one of "think global and act local", and it has been at a local level that the Greens have historically been most effective, able to tap into the strong feeling of community activism that has steadily been on the rise in this country over the last twenty years. It has been on the basis of this strong local community profile that national election success occurred - all current Green TDs had extensive careers as local councilors before entering national politics, most of them topping the polls at their last local election before entering national politics.

Dan Boyle
Cork City Council 1991 - 2002, TD 2002 - 2007, Senator 2007 to present
Ciaran Cuffe
Dublin City Council 1991 - 2002, TD 2002 to present
Deirdre De Burca
Wicklow County Council 1999 - 2007, Senator 2007 to present
Paul Gogharty
South Dublin County Council 1999 - 2002, TD 2002 to present
John Gormley
Dublin City Council 1991 - 1997, TD 1997 to present
Eamon Ryan
Dublin City Council 1998 - 2002, TD 2002 to present
Trevor Sargent
Fingal County Council 1991 - 1992, TD 1992 to present
Mary White
Carlow County Council 1999 - 2007, TD 2007 to present

While some like Sergent had a high profile before the County Council, and served only a relatively short apprenticeship at local level, the average time spent at local level for the current Green front bench is six and a half years, or at least two local election cycles, before their local support base was strong enough to help them make the leap to a national level.

This local support base is now gone.

Local elections are held every five years, meaning that barring co-option onto a given council there will be only three local Green politicians until 2014. Given that five of the current six Green TDs served their apprenticeship on Dublin city or county councils, the lack of any Green representation at local level in Dublin has even graver consequences than the national picture.

If a national election were to be held within the next twelve months and, as predicted, the Greens lost all their current seats, they would in all likelihood also loose their two Seanead seats. With no local elections until 2014 the entire current front bench would have no opportunity to stay within the political sphere as elected representatives. If an election did occur early next year then the average time between elections since 1981 would be about 3.6 years, with Rainbow Coalitions lasting a shorter amount of time than Fianna Fail-lead ones. Three and a half years is a long time for the current Green front bench to try and stay in the public eye as unelected figures with no public mandate.

Beyond the fate of the current leaders, what of the party itself? Given the average length of Governments since the 80's, in the scenario above a subsequent national election would most likely happen before the 2014 local elections, so not only do the Greens stand to be eliminated in any immediate national election, they also do not have enough time to build up a local base of support to return to form in a subsequent national election, with only three current Green councilors nationally. If the Greens do manage to rebuild their local support by the next local elections, history suggests that it will be 2020 before any of the candidates newly elected at local level in 2014 are able to convert that support into a large enough local base to be elected to the Dail.

And by 2020 will there be in the public's mind any need for a separate Green Party, given the adoption and mainstreaming of traditional green platforms by the larger political parties?

The only hope for the long-term future of the party is to refocus its attention on involvement in and partnering with local and community level issues and groups. Its abandonment of support for community campaigns such as Shell to Sea, the Tara bypass and the Ringsend incinerator cost it local support that could have helped to overcome the public apathy towards the Greens' record at a national level in Government, and enabled the many hardworking local councilors to retain their positions, thus nurturing the seeds of the next generation of Green representatives at a national and international level.

In the immediate aftermath of his reelection in 2007, Ciaran Cuffe wrote "Let's be clear. A deal with Fianna Fáil would be a deal with the devil. We would be spat out after 5 years, and decimated as a Party".

It is more than a little sad to see how prescient he was.

Cause I think we've seen that movie too

Ah, yet again I have managed to drag The Very Understanding Girlfriend off to a seriously poo film, for which (yet again) she will never forgive me. In my defense this time she actually wanted to go, and expressed an interest in doing so at multiple occasions throughout the last week.

The film? 'Terminator: Salvation'.

If you miss only one film this year, let it be this one*. Apart from the poo script, poo acting, poo editing and painfully poo direction, the whole lack of a discernible plot was exacerbated significantly by the presence of Christian Bale. How does this guy keep getting work? I blame "Reign of Fire" for all of this, because on set Bale must have struck up a life long friendship with Matthew McConaughey and has turned to him for acting tips and advice ever since when stuck for inspiration - "Listen Chris, when you are faced with some on-screen trauma, you should scowl, grunt and spit and then everyone will marvel at your angsty performance of a man wrestling with the trauma of his own humanity".

This film was almost worse than I Am Legend.

On that subject, as the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I walked home along the Luas tracks from Dundrum at 1am last night (we missed the last Luas because of this film and couldn't stomach throwing any more money away on the night by getting a taxi), we started to throw out film titles for the inevitable sequel** to I am Legend. The ones I remember are:

I am Legender
I'm still Legend
I'm Too Legend
Oh Legend, Where art thou?

Anyway, if you do feel like going to the cinema, please try and catch Werner Herzog's 'Encounters at the End of the World', out on DVD in the US and still in some cinemas here now.



Herzog and a cameraman went to Antarctica to film the lives of the various people who work there and came back with some fantastic interviews, spectacular images, no Christian penguins, and more than a few moments that really blew my mind, such as the clip above of the incredible sounds made by seals underwater - when the recordings first started I assumed it was ambient electronica playing on the soundtrack, and I ended up listening to the sequence over and over again when I realised it was actually the unprocessed natural clicks and calls of Waddell seals - simply incredible.

Why couldn't I have taken The Very Understanding Girlfriend to see that instead? Oh well, maybe I can make it up to her in a few weeks with Transformers 2.

* You really don't need to see this film, check out the abridged script here (thanks 8den)

** Apparently they are now making a prequel, thanks again for the info 8den. Still doesn't make up for 'Reign of Fire' though, for which I will always blame you.

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade

Working my way through Felix Guattari's "The Three Ecologies" at the moment. I find many contemporary French philosophers quite challenging to read, not because of the concepts they are conveying but rather because of the language used to convey those concepts.

Je suis nul en Francais, and thus am forced to rely on translations, and while I have a healthy skepticism for working from anything other than primary sources, with Guattari (as with Baudrillard and, to a lesser extent, Gorz) I have a feeling that the text is as obtuse at times as in the original. Thus it is more accurate to say that I am working my way through "The Three Ecologies", slowly.

And what are the Three Ecologies? Why they are the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity, of course. Guattari argues that any ecological movement that focuses purely on the natural environment (as most Green movements do) without also addressing society and the mind is worthless. A lot of my reading lately has been focused on the area of social ecology (I picked up a few books on and by Murray Bookchin in Edinburgh recently), as I have become increasingly disillusioned with the self-centered and selfish nature of Irish society and find myself steering dangerously close to 'move-to-a-cabin-in-the-woods-and-shoot-at-anyone-who-comes-close' territory, prevented only by a) the inability to get a decent cappuccino in the middle of most forests and b) the almost complete lack of any actual forests in Ireland thanks to our former colonial masters and the current lack of a long-term cohesive forestry strategy by Coillte.

This weekend almost pushed me over the edge though, and I had to be metaphorically restrained by the Very Understanding Girlfriend in order to prevent what the Six-One News would no doubt refer to as an "incident" from occurring. The cause of my apoplectic existential rage?

The 'Taste of Dublin' Festival.

Billed as a "four-day celebration of fine food and drink. Set in the beautiful surroundings of Dublin's Iveagh Gardens, twenty of the capital's most prestigious restaurants and celebrated chefs will be serving sample-sized signature dished to our sophisticated foodies this summer. Bringing unparalleled culinary experience to over 30,000 visitors, the very best in speciality food and drink companies will also showcase alongside these outstanding restaurants", the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I thought we would pop along as the weather was nice. Realising the event would no doubt be popular, we decided to book tickets online, for the 'bargain' price of €25 each. Plus €3.50 booking fee, each. No, this was not through Ticketmaster, rather it was through the festival site itself. Tickets on the door were €28.50, with no booking fee. Grrrrrrrrr.

And what exactly did our €28.50 each get us? Entry into the festival, and nothing else. In order to actually sample any of the food inside, you had to buy vouchers that were used like cash inside. A minimum of €20 worth of vouchers. Each.

The participating restaurants inside were each selling three dishes, slightly smaller than a starter, with prices averaging €7 per dish, and it goes without saying that the vegetarian options were few and far between. A glass of wine or a beer seemed to be around €5, so for your book of twenty vouchers you would get two starters and a drink. In other words €48.50 for two starters and a drink.

And the place was packed.

This was obviously the society event of the month, as despite the fact it was held in a public park it had the atmosphere of Ladies' Day at the Galway Races, with ridiculous hats and over-sized sunglasses matched only in their contribution to a sense of pythonesque farce by the sight of people trying to walk across grass in six-inch stiletto heels. The champagne was flowing like water as attendees watched celebrity chefs demonstrate saucy-little concoctions for that cheeky bit of left-over quail you never know quite what to do with from the comfort of their Brown Thomas VIP enclosure, and then suddenly I realsied what your €28.50 got you.

Your €28.50 bought you a brief respite and protection from the unwashed masses, from the dirty little people who are an annoying reminder that your ill-gotten wealth has been at the expense of the remaining 99% of the population of this country. It afforded protection from the misery of the bank collapses, the property crash, the financial meltdown and the responsibility for all of the above that hangs squarely upon the shoulders of you and your ilk.

I was literally witnessing the "Masque of The Red Death", Edger Allan Poe's tale of a group of wealthy nobles who lock themselves away inside a mansion to escape the ravages of a plague in the city outside, holding an elaborate costumed ball to distract their troubled minds. I imagined myself as Death stalking each of them in turn, forcing them to confront their misdeeds, accept blame and seek restitution before collapsing judged and executed upon the green summer's lawn.

Alas, before I could carry out my cleansing mission as the Angel of Death of the Common Man, I was cunningly distracted by the Very Understanding Girlfriend with a selection of Lemongrass infused liquid Salted Caramels from Artisan du Chocolat of London. Yum, yum, yum, something seriously amazing, little balls of salty chocolate goodness, on offer at less than half price at €4.50 per pack, and also available in Sage and Thyme flavour. You think it would never work, but it so does! Yum, yum, yum.

Ire dampened somewhat by the sudden ingestion of salt and sugar, I resolved to seek a rebirth of Dublin society, rather than its mere destruction, and upon my return home my attention turned once more to Guattari and Bookchin, and their quest for an egalitarian social ecology.

But one day the chocolate salty balls will run out, my wrath will be absolute, and Darkness and Decay and the Red Death will hold illimitable dominion over all.

Bwah-hah-hah!

Links
The Masque of the Red Death
Taste of Dublin
Artisan du Chocolat, yum, yum, yum!
Guattari - 'The Three Ecologies'
Bookchin - 'Social Ecology and Communalism'

His brow is deeply lined with thought

My grandfather finally came out of hospital on Wednesday, tired from his ten day stay, but basically given a clean bill of health. The last few days have been strange for me, spending so much time with my grandparents has forced me to confront old age, a concept/reality that at times actually terrifies me.

On my fathers side my grandmother lived until her early nineties, though suffered from at least two forms of cancer. My grandfather lived until his mid-nineties and was playing nine holes of golf every day until his last year; On my mother's side my great-grandmother lived to her late-eighties before suffering a fatal fall, and both my grandparents are still alive in their mid-eighties.

My grandmother reads voraciously, visiting the library once a week and going though about three books between each visit, as well as doing the Irish Times Simplex crossword every morning. My grandfather follows the Irish, US and UK political scene religiously, and between television and the radio absorbs at least three hours of news coverage over the course of the day.

I have never smoked, am an occasional drinker, have a reasonably healthy BMI, and apart from a manageable genetic predisposition to high-cholesterol there is very little that my doctor has ever been concerned about. Barring the unforeseen health risks from near constant exposure to mobile phone radiation and wifi networks that will no doubt be the "asbestos/nicotine/mercury" scares for our generation, I have always assumed that I will enjoy a similar longevity.

I am not sure though if "enjoy" is the correct word to use. What shocked me over the last few days is the sheer amount of medication required to allow my grandparents to continue functioning, a pharmacological cornucopia of stimulants and depressants, controllers and regulators that operate in a fine balance, with changes to any single part of their regime capable of drastically altering their alertness, cognition, and even their entire personality. My grandfather was supposed to leave the hospital on Monday, however as he had been proscribed an iron supplement, they had to keep him in longer than expected as they had to slowly readjust the levels of all the other medication he was on to accommodate this new element being thrown into the mix.

I was present for a number of visits by the specialists who were treating him, each visit lasting no more than 2-3 minutes, and again was shocked by lack of information he received about what course of treatment he was receiving, and why that particular course of action was being proscribed. Little detail was given on the numerous procedures that had been performed on him, and there was no attempt at offering after-care advice on what he should do when he got home, such as life-style or dietary changes. The only outcome of his ten days in hospital seems to have been a longer list of prescription medications to be taken throughout the day, every day, for the rest of his life.

My grandparents' house, the house that I grew up in, is perched on top of hill. It took my grandfather ten minutes to walk up the garden path, with numerous stops at each corner of the steeply inclined path. Their bedroom is at the top of a double flight of stairs, the bathroom halfway up, with more stairs between the kitchen and drawing room. And yet they manage it all as they have done so every day for the last fifty years that they have lived there. But the question in all of our minds is how long can they continue to do so.

The simple fact is that humans are not designed to live as long as we currently do, and the sheer technological, pharmaceutical and environmental effort required to support this increased longevity at times terrifies me. So much effort each day is spent on just ensuing that you get to the next day, to begin the process all over again that I wonder when (and if) I reach an age that such an effort is required, will there be enough joy and happiness in my life to justify that effort?

Pictured above is one of our family cats, born two years before I started my Leaving Certificate exams. That makes him twenty years old this year, or approximately 96 in human years. Although he sleeps more than he used to and is a bit thinner, he still runs, purrs and hops up onto chairs, following me about throughout the house in the hope that I will throw him a bit of food when no-one else is looking. He seems happy and content, has no regime of pills or tablets, an still manages to convey the same sense of scorn and sarcasm as he did aged two.

When I am old, I think I want to be a cat.

Unkie Dave is frakkin' great!

So say we all!

(a huge thank you to my amazing sister in London and her fiance for the most awesomest present ever - my family are really something special!)

Something for the weekend

Thanks to the amazing generosity of my sister, who took Friday off and traveled up to Dublin to look after my grandmother, I had the weekend off to catch up with some friends and unwind a bit after the intensity of the past week. My grandfather is doing well, has received a very good bill of health from his doctors, and I am off out to pick him up from the hospital this afternoon and take him home.

Friday was the launch party for Love Rhino's new album 'Tumatakuru' upstairs in Anseo. The night started with a fantastic and unexpectedly dance-y live set from Ebauche, and finished up with a great guitar and loops set from Halodarkly, but the highlight of the evening was naturally enough the main event itself with a live set from Love Rhino (on guitar and laptop) accompanied by Rude Doc on drums and laptop. I'm a huge fan of anyone who takes electronica beyond the laptop and knob twiddling and has an energetic and engaging live presence, and Mr Rhino was clearly enjoying himself with a surprisingly jazzy guitar performance over some really smart and snappy loops. The album itself has a very diverse range of tracks, encompassing a wide variety of styles that Mr Rhino effortlessly carries off and the production quality is superb. I am constantly put to shame by the talent of my friends, but Mr Rhino has really excelled himself with this release.

Saturday saw an afternoon's worth of paintballing in torrential rain out in Wicklow, and a night of food and frolics to celebrate the impending marriage of a good friend to an equally good friend. Despite taking a shot directly to the face I survived the afternoon, and a cunning decision early on to abstain from alcohol for the night ensured I survived the evening and following morning as well.

I arrived home sore and still damp, but the election victory of Joe Higgins in the early hours of this morning was all the boost that I needed to set me up for the week ahead. While the rest of Europe has lurched to the right, Ireland has shifted dramatically to the left, and all it took was the catastrophic meltdown of of entire economic system - who could have guessed?

Links
Love Rhino
Photos from the album launch

Picking up the pieces

Well, this little bit of street art seen near our polling station neatly sums up this election.

Fianna Fail has been severely punished at both local and European level, and the Greens almost entirely wiped out as a force in local politics, reduced to around three council seats across the entire country, and disappearing entirely from Dublin, loosing all ten of their Dublin city and County Council seats. In the European Elections some good news for them in that Senator De Burca did receive slightly more first preferences than Patricia McKenna, but not enough to recoup her election costs and so a full recount is under way to see if she can pick up another few hundred votes and bring her some small relief at the end of a disappointing campaign.

While across Europe there has been a swing to the centre and far-right, here in Ireland the left has seen a substantial increase in support, with Nessa Childers looking likely for a historic election win in the East Euro constituency for Labour ( their first there in thirty years), Pronsious De Rossa on target for Dublin, and most encouraging of all Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party looking likely to pick up the third Dublin seat on the basis of Patrica McKenna's transfers.

While the Greens have been dealt the most devastating blow of all, if anything this will further cement their ties to the Fianna Fail lead government even tighter, as with the exception of former party leader Trevor Sergeant all the other sitting Green TDs would likely loose their seats were a national election called in the next few weeks. While the current party leadership will argue that Fianna Fail is now, more than ever, dependent upon their support and the time is ripe to renegotiate the Program for Government, they are still unlikely to be able to win significant concessions from Biffo on areas outside their ministerial portfolios, such as education, or see any movement on areas ruled out of bounds for discussion by Bertie Ahern in the original program negotiations, such as the Corrib pipeline, Shannon refueling, Tara bypass, Ringsend incinerator, etc, etc, even if John Gormley and Eamon Ryan were still interested in fighting for these issues.

With the resignation earlier this year of Patricia McKenna, Bronwen Maher and Chris O’Leary, the main voices of dissent within the Greens have been silenced, and I worry that there are now few internally who can voice the concerns of the electorate and help the party save itself from going the way of the PDs. The days ahead will be interesting indeed for a party in genuine danger of extinction.

Thoughts on Election's Eve

Its a bit quiet here this week because I've been spending most of my time away from the house and out with my grandparents. My grandfather is in hospital this weekend so my mother and I are looking after my grandmother at the family homestead in shifts.

Actually I'm doing an early afternoon shift in the hospital with my grandfather and then am out for the rest of the day and night in Howth, which is one of the few situations that have made me see why some folks in this city might actually own a car. Luckily there's a bus that goes pretty much from directly outside my door out to the hospital (about 30 minutes), then I get a bus back into the city centre (20 minutes), then a bus out to the homestead (40 minutes), and finally the last bus back into town (30 minutes, he's really in a hurry to get home), consequently I am getting a lot of reading done this week (just about to finish up "Wednesday is Indigo Blue", a pretty interesting Oliver Sacks-esque compilation of synesthesia case studies).

I grew up in my grandparents' house, and although I moved out almost as soon as I went to college I still dream about being there more often than I dream about being in my own house. Parts of it have changed over the last 18 years, but other things remain the same and can be quite jarring when you walk into a room and suddenly are twelve years old again.

The toughest thing so far though has been seeing my grandfather in hospital. He's doing very well for his age, and the procedures he's undergoing (at this stage) are pretty minor. He's in good form and still has the energy to slag off the Greens every time I visit, but as I sit and talk with him I'm very conscious of the fact that he's in his 80's, and for the first time in my relationship with him he no longer seems immortal.

My grandfather was a military man for most of his life, leaving a farming life behind at eighteen to join the army as an officer cadet, and serving until he retired in his sixties. Over the course of his career he was a champion showjumper, a military diplomat, and served abroad with the UN where he was wounded by a machine-gunner in Cyprus. He dined with Presidents and Emperors unafraid to speak his mind to either, attended the funerals of Soviet leaders where he stood (albeit very reluctantly) side-by-side with Fidel Castro and watched as clods of earth were thrown on the bodies of dead tyrants, and yet seemed to have the respect and admiration of all who served with him for never forgetting who he was or where he came from. He was, and continues to be, a giant in my eyes.

Talking with him yesterday his biggest annoyance was not that he was sick, but that his stay in hospital would cause him to miss the elections tomorrow, for he has voted in every single local, national, European or Referendum election since 1942. Although we rarely see eye to eye on individual candidates or parties (he remains a product of the civil war with an almost religious devotion to The Big Fella), I inherited both my obsession with politics and my "anybody but Fianna Fail" mentality from him. Always fond of a good political argument, in the absence of anyone else in the house willing to spar with him his major past-time now seems to be watching Fox news at night, just to raise his blood pressure; he said "why would I want to listen to someone that I agree with, where is the interest in that?".

I talked with my sister about sneaking him out of the hospital tomorrow, but he's recovering from an operation and it just isn't feasible. He said yesterday, "sure what difference will my one vote make anyway?", and I think that hurt most of all to hear, for I know he doesn't believe it for a single second and its cutting him up to be trapped inside and unable to make it down to the polling station.

I'm off to see him now, with a few printed pages from IrishElection.com to keep him going through today's mainstream media blackout. I only hope that in fifty years time I'm still as passionate about our democratic processes as he is today; with his blood flowing in my veins I seriously doubt I'll have any choice in the matter.

MS Chanandler Bong

I, no doubt like many of you out there, have been trying out Microsoft's new search engine Bing over the last day or so. I am not the most techie of my friends, far from it, but do find myself using different competing online services in different situations, rather than adopting a "one size fits all" approach.

My choice of web-browsers is a good example. On my MacBook Pro I tend to use Camino due to its low processor consumption, whereas on my significantly more powerful iMac I am happy to use Firefox 3. On my iPhone I am forced to use mobile Safari, but now that I've been trying out the Nokia e75 in advance of the release of the N97 I've been using (and loving) Opera Mini. My webdesigner mates swear by Google Chrome, and if Mountain View ever gets off its backside and releases a usable version for the Mac I'll probably give that a go as well.

Search engines are a bit different though. While I am not a fan of all-powerful monopolies in any industry, it has to be said that Google search just works, and I rarely find myself using anything else. However the thought has arisen on occasion that perhaps Google is not actually that good, rather that I have been conditioned by many years of using Google to search for information in such a way that is compatible with their technology.

Much has been made recently of Google's difficulty in providing real-time search results, and many comparisons have been made with Twitter live trend and search info, though I must admit to still being on the fence over the intrinsic value of crowd-sourced information. While the media jumped on the usage of Twitter to inform the world about the Hudson plane crash, a quick look through most days Twitter trending topics is more likely to produce a feeling of nausea after having to wade through a million 'OMG Susan Boyle woz robbed' tweets to find the one nugget of actual news. Similarly while Wikipedia may boast over 2,900,000 articles, 2,800,000 of them are about the X-Men. The Wisdom of Crowds is not worth that much when the crowds you are sourcing are idiots.

Live Search is important for Google because if they were able to pull actual breaking news from other sites and include it in their results they would keep more people on their site and thus generate more revenue from ads. This is the motivation behind last weeks other big launch, Google Wave, whereby Google seeks to change their users behavior and draw them into a single service that would replace email, chat, twitter updates, social network pages and forums, and is an interesting about-face for a company that traditionally has espoused stickiness, seeking to direct users away from its home page as quickly as possible; it is ironic that just as Yahoo, Google's former nursemaid and sometime rival, seems doomed to slide ever further into obscurity Google now is firmly embracing the concept of the web portal through both Wave and its personalised homepage service, iGoogle.

With all this in mind I spent the weekend using Microsoft's Bing and on the whole found it not to be a major improvement. The expanding snippets at the side of the results seem more of a gimmick than a feature, and overall the web search doesn't do that much to distinguish itself from Yahoo or Google. The Image search is interesting, with a good layout, nice thumbnail view options, and search filters including searching for photos, illustrations, or even just headshots.

All of these are interesting, but what really lets the service down is its core feature, the value of its search results, it simply doesn't index as many pages as either Google or Yahoo. While I am the first to admit that I rarely look beyond the first page of results, without that indexing the value of the results returned have to be questioned. A simple search for "Booming Back" in all three engines is shown above; Google and Yahoo (quite rightly) list my blog as the first result, followed by the other domain I own (boomingback.com) before they get into the usual Junkie XL album info. While Bing does display my .com page, they seem not to have indexed my blog at all, I looked through about twenty pages of results and didn't see my blog at all.

A similar search for 'Unkie Dave' on Google produces 1) my blog, 2) my twitter stream, 3) more twitter, 4) my sound cloud profile etc, on Yahoo it returns 1) my Jaiku profile, 2) my blog, 3) my twitter and 4) my SoundCloud page. So far, so good. Things go slightly awry on Bing, however, returning 1) some 47 year old guy's myspace page (not me), 2) my SoundCloud page, 3) my boomingback.com page, and then further down the page my name listed in the contacts page of a few folks on Jaiku. Nowhere does my actual blog appear, let alone appear as the main returned result.

It is possible that there is some conflict between Blogger and Bing's spiders, but other .blogspot blogs seem to be showing up. My only conclusion is that somebody in Microsoft doesn't like my blog, and doing a quick look through the last month's traffic I see that indeed one single person from Redmond looked at my blog in the last month, sticking around for about three minutes before exiting.

Very suspicious.

So my overall verdict on Bing is nice try, but not enough to distinguish it from my service of choice, and missing certain crucial elements that leads to a disappointing service for this particular user.