I was in our HQ in Stockholm all week (I am back in Dun Laoghaire now). The part of the office where I work has 21 desks. There were 3 people there. Me, and Australian, and a Swede who got married earlier this year, and used up his holidays on his honeymoon. Where was everyone else? Off in the Swedish countryside, out in the archipeligo, at their summer houses…

This article gives a good idea why the poor things don’t manage to spend too mcuh time at work.

It is like this every summer with them. Still it keeps those of us in Ireland in jobs, as someone has to cover for them.

I have no idea what the answer to the question above it. But I salute Barry Smyth from UCD who decided to take a grown up approach to checking this out. He wrote some scripts to check prices in IKEA shops across 12 countries and 1093 products. You can look at his site for the results.

What is more important though is that this is a far better way of checking out whether IKEA are overcharging people here than to just cherry pick a few examples to support a preconceived idea. So Prof Smyth gets a pat on the back for contributing a bit of rational analysis to the question. A case of more light than heat.

Say no more, I will buy my ticket now.

Threshold, the housing rights organisation, has called for the PRTB to become the holder of tenants deposits instead of the landlord. The idea is that the PRTB will be a more neutral agency, and this will make things fairer for tenants who may be hard done by when landlords decide to hold on to their deposits.

Now I am a landlord myself, and I can tell you this is the dumbest fucking idea I have heard in a long time. I would strongly object to it, not necessarily because of how it takes me out of some power/control loop over the tenant, but because in all my dealings with them the PRTB are the slowest, most bureaucratic government organisation I have ever had to deal with. They live up to all the cliches of inefficient civil service culture.

As a good landlord I register my tenants with the PRTB as soon as they move in. It can take about 3 months to get an acknowledgement of that form being sent in, and another few months for the formal registration number to come back. Last year I had to get involved in a dispute which was referred to the PRTB for adjudication. It took over 7 months for us to get a hearing date. That was heard in March and I am still waiting on the final decision (even though about a month later I was told that the adjudicator had already submitted their report). While you usually can get someone on the phone to talk about a case their promises to return calls are almost never met.

Now I know that the place is probably full of hard working staff. In fact they probably are pretty over worked. But the idea that we should dump even more work on them, by making them the holders of €195m worth of rental deposits is laughable. Can you imaging the chaos as tenants try to get their deposits back in order to move into a new place, only to be told that it could be 6 months or more while they wait for their cheque? You could argue that more resources would have to be allocated to the PRTB to handle this function, but in the current economic climate (TM) that ain’t going to happen.

The current system may not be perfect, I am sure some landlords do abuse tenants and take their deposits without justification, but they are a small minority. And that is a far smaller problem than you will have if you put an over worked organisation in as a major speed bump to the current system.

BTW, my dispute was about trying to get compensation back from tenants where damage that was done only became apparent after they had left and they had been returned their deposit. In this case, it was me the landlord that was diddled. I am still waiting to hear will I get satisfaction.

With all my travel over the last two months I have added 3 new countries (Bahrain, South Africa, Mexico) to my list of places visited. My global map looks like this now:

That makes 35 countries with 188 left to go. As I am averaging about 1 per year, I really need to up my work rate if I am to see the world before I shuffle off it.

Just a quick reminder from a regular traveller to Sweden on how to pronounce “IKEA”.

Are we clear?

This year my Sci-Fi film fixes came from The Watchmen and Moon. I had hardly finished watching them when I heard that the Tron sequel – Tron Legacy, will actually be out this time next year. Excellent. They have officially released the teaser trailer (eh, Disney, why are you not allowing ebmbedding?) that confirmed something was in the air last year.

*** Update *** Now with the embedded trailer:

Filming has already finished, but there is a year of post-production to go. In the mean time we just have the two teaser sites to entertain us.

• Flynn Lives
• Home of Tron

The geekarati will start queueing for this one soon.

Very interestingly, Duncan Jones has said that he wants Moon to be the first film of a trilogy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. If he keeps the bar at the level of his debut then I will be first in the queue each time!

I am guessing they held back it’s release in this part of the world to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the moon landings. Who cares. Go see Moon while you can. This is excellent sci-fi. Limited special effects, character driven, and unlike some high-brow sci-fi you can actually understand the plot.

Great references of classic sci-fi films like bladerunner, 2001 and solaris. This is thoughtful, brilliant stuff. I may even go see it again (before I get the DVD).

Right now, I am off to get some Lunar Industries Limited merchandise.

**** Spoiler **** Highlight to read

I liked how Gerty has atoned the sins of Hal in 2001. Too often in Western cinema machines are portrayed as malevolent or opposed to humans. Without being cringe worthy like the “droids” in star wars, cinema has given us a sympathetic computer character.

**** Spoiler ****