It’s not as easy as it sounds.

It is said that Irish people will happily tell you the most intimate personal and medical details, but wouldn’t give you a hint of a sniff of their finances. So this post may be a ground breaker.

As of a few hours ago I cleared my credit card debt for the first time in a few years. This is pretty significant for me. I used to be very sloppy about where I was charging work expenses, between my personal and work credit card. And then I was less than rigorous about where I put the money the company reimbursed me. The result was that my total debt on the two cards was high and stubbornly refusing to go down.

On the basis that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” I put in place a system to track my spending last June. Even better, I stuck to it. For the first time I actually figured out how much money I was spending on me, and how much for work. The totals are scary. Between my two credit cards I am spending about €25,000 per year. The vast majority is for work. But by not staying closely on top of this I was letting it get on top of me.

Now though my personal card has a balance of €0, and I am totally in control of my work card.

I think I shall celebrate by going out and ordering a load of stuff from Amazon, getting a new iPod touch, a GPS unit for the boat, a laptop, and a new PC, and…..

This has been picked up in a few other places. But I wanted to have it here as well.

Props to my skpetical homie the Bad Astronomer.

The lyrics have been sussed leaving you in no doubt that this is both pro-science, and very clever

You see, this battle’s been ragin’ since Zeus was on the bottle,
between Science like Democritus and Faith like Aristotle,
who said the mover wasn’t movin’ like some magic trick but
that’s no good logic, my posse is far too quick for this
religious sthick.

Right, I think all the move and upgrade has gone successfully. But it any of you spot something odd can you let me know.

Thanks

Seamus

As you may have seen I have been experiencing some difficulties with getting my site back up and running.

About 3 days of this was from my old ISP being down. I guess they were sulking when I told them I was off.

All that remains now is to upgrade to WordPress 2.5 and to get my themes back.

My last post before rebuilding the site:

My hosting contract is up for renewal. I have no complaints with my providers (fatcow.com). They have served me (and sliabh.net) well for the last few years. But I can save some money by moving this site onto the same server that Laura uses over at Hosting365. So I am going to move sliabh.net tonight.

This shouldn’t make any difference to you, the URL will be the same. There might be a short loss of service though as the DNS servers update, (and I try to rebuild the site on a new box). Unless of course after I tear the whole lot down I have no idea how to put it all back up. Then I may be off line all weekend.

But then who is going to be attached to the Interweb over a four day weekend? If you were planning to be the one person doing so I am telling you to unplug. Go out into “The Real World” for a spell. The resolution, AI, physics engine, level of interactivity, and open ended scope for play there is amazing.

Sod, I just heard Arthur C. Clarke has died.

A few of his quotes:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars… A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.

I know I was one of them. Thanks for the sense of wonder you gave us.

A post from Telco 2/0 on the problems of broadband speeds.

Bloody hell, Mobile Broadband continues to storm ahead in Ireland. If the figures are to be believed 14% of all broadband users in Ireland are now getting their interweb fix through HSPA. Subscriber numbers are up 39,000 or 44% in 3 months!

People I talk to in our MBB sales team in Stockholm were saying that Ireland was in the top 3-4 globally for this, back when we were at 8% of broadband market share. Of course you don’t need to be a telecoms consultant to know that one of the reasons for the big uptake is the sorry state of DSL availability in Ireland. The irony now is that Eircom, who sat on their hands for so long must be dreading each new quarterly report on broadband market share. Every three months they get to see MBB take another chunk of the market they took for granted. These people were crying out for DSL, it never came so they are taking the HSPA alternative.

I have to be realistic here. HSPA is not as good as DSL. Speeds are generally going to be slower (and certainly not what is advertised). And with a data cap you need to be careful how much you download. But all the usual market factors should drive prices down and caps up. These are the things the operators can change relatively easily. Getting higher speeds will be a bigger challenge at least until LTE (4G) becomes widely available. It is nice to see that 3G finally has it’s killer application, after the embarrassment that was video calling. It is good for my employers as well as Vodafone, O2 an Three have to invest in improved radio networks and backhaul to support all this data.

For the Irish public there are two big upsides to all of this. First people are finally getting their pent up demand for broadband met. Secondly as Ireland races ahead of the rest of the world here we have a chance to be the leaders and test bed for this technology. In the next few years watch for bundled lap top offers, and interesting new services being pitched at us.