For a (semi) Techie, I’m not that much into gadgets. Until now , there are only three that I’d class as ‘must haves’.

• Vodafone Broadband internet card - it means I can get the Internet on the train. Living in Drogheda with a lot of clients in Dublin, this means about 10 hours extra a week when I’m now connected.
• Hard Disk TV recorder - most of the good shows are on after 10pm. I’m up early most mornings and that is way past my bedtime.
• A Phil and Ted. You either know what this is , or you don’t , but if you have one you’ll swear by it.

Now I’m going to add a fourth : the Nokia 770 , bought solely on Damien’s recommendation. It’s not a phone , more of a big screen that you can add your existing phone (it connects pretty automatically via bluetooth, and will use any available wireless network). It solves the problem of using internet on your mobile ; before you had to choose between a normal-ish phone with a tiny internet screen, or a large screen but having to hold a brick to your ear to make calls. It’s almost small - about the size of 2 decks of playing cards.

I was getting a bit worried before it arrived as Elly has one and is cursing it, but it solves two problems for me:

1. If on the train / other location, and can’t use my laptop (e.g. I didn’t get a seat and I’m standing up), then I can still get (fairly decent) access to email and other online services (Google Maps, Del.icio.us bookmarks, LinkedIn Social Networking being the ones I’ve tried so far).
2. When I couldn’t be bothered getting out the laptop (e.g. 5 minutes before a meeting), it’s useful for a quick check.

So, it’s not perfect , but it does the job that I want it to do ; for a little over 100 Euro - Bargain. Yes , it could be quicker, but it does a fairly good job of showing most websites (including this blog, the main site and the wiki). It’s a pity it doesn’t have flash, nor play the BBC internet radio , but I’m sure I can get downloads for it. It does do GoogleTalk for free Voip calls and have other internet radio stations. And , if you’re bored you can use it as an MP3 player. Battery life (4hrs) isn’t great, but (a) the charger is very very light and (b) if I need internet that much I’ll use the laptop.

An added bonus is that I’ve been looking around for a simple ‘Contacts Management’ solution. The 770 has one built in , with more that you can download /access online. Not holding my breath that it will solve this problem as well for me (would never have considered a PDA before), but icing on the cake if it does.

As a personal quirk , I like the fact that it’s an open platform (it’s Linux based). What it means for normal people is that there are plenty of 3rd party downloads if there (I’ve added a PDA and a console to monitor web servers) without having to pay through the nose. While I’ve dabbled with development for mobile devices, that wasn’t the main reason for buying this thing.

It will be interesting to see how Conor, Niall , Walter and Gordon are getting on with theirs. And to answer Michele’s question, the email client is ok , but I’ll end up usign Gmail (they’re hosting Firstpartners email , no synch issues.)

Update: Ken also has a review, with real life pictures (give a better flavour of the size of the thing, even though the screen is much sharper in real-life.

Think of Libraries as an early version of the internet, with books instead of pdf’s and web pages. You would think that as places of study , they would encourage student’s to use modern technology as part of revising for their Leaving Cert. Wrong.

Our local library in Drogheda has banned people from using laptops in the library. The excuse is that they can’t find a practical way of charging for the electricity they use. And don’t even think of asking for free wireless access. And all the student was asking for was a quick charge of his MacBook so he could do a final study session before his exam.
Forget about Web 2. If we don’t get the basics right we’re doomed.

Update

The Drogheda Independent has just picked up on this story (almost word for word). More to follow.

Update 2.

O’Reilly Radar have a very interesting related story (If Libraries had shareholders) with detailed graphs showing how people are using libraries less and less for the books, and more and more for the internet

It’s a co-incidence of timing , but a reminder that there are many more meetups than just Barcamp (Dublin Event is on this Saturday).

Plato North West (Louth - Newry and Mourne) launched last night - thanks to Coca-Cola concentrates in Drogheda for hosting.

Plato is a self help group for small business owners. (’Hello , my name is Paul and I’m self-employed’). All the people involved are looking to grow their business. What Plato offers includes:

• A support group of other people in similar situations that will meet regularly over the next months.
• Networking opportunties , both within the group, cross border , and with other Plato groups (e.g Dublin, Cork and South East).
• Clusters of companies in related sectors that would benefit from linking.
• A struture to plan business expansion and a peer review to ensure you execute the plan.

Most of the details of the meetings are confidential , but I’m (happily) surprised at the cross section of companies involved. External companies can be invited in by consensus of the group.

Related posts: How to network , people not computers.

What you do if you weren’t doing your current job? While we all harbour dreams of running a magically profitable coffeeshop, working only 3 hours a day, what would you really do if you wanted a change of career?

If I wasn’t in IT , I’d be in Finance, on the basis of …

• My original degree is in Business (with French). Somehow I got seduced into IT (you don’t hear that very often).
• Both Finance and IT require their own set of knowledge and expertise. Once you’ve acquired that expertise, the work can be quite profitable, as not everybody can do it.
• Both are quite strong employment areas within Ireland, with the IFSC being one of the easiest parts of Dublin to get to from Drogheda (think Trains).

Sadly (but very sanely), neither Finance nor IT is considered ’sexy’. There again, you can’t have everything. They’re both quite hard to explain to your Mum - as far as she’s concerned , I work ‘in computers’. This is akin to lumping Salesmen , Mechanics, road sweepers and Michael Schumacher in a category ’something to do with cars’.

However , this lead-in does explain the contents of the ‘what’s Paul Reading?’ list. All links are to Amazon. I’d recommend all the books with the exception of the last one - it was written by a newspaper journalist and the slightly jingoistic style reflects this.

1. Economist : The City - a guide to London’s Global Financial Centre
2. Freakonomics
3. Java security
4. How the City Really works

I don’t slag people off on this blog. If I’m annoyed enough to talk about people in public, then I should at least talk to them privately first. Up until now, that’s been good enough to resolve most things.

So for Dolan and Company / CMR Accountants to get the honour of being critisied in public, they must have behaved pretty badly. Yes, they’re the ones located at the Steelworks in Foley Street Dublin (near Busaras, Connolly Train station). They’re now our Ex-Accountants, for reasons that will soon become clear.

Dolan and Co were our company accountants from Dec 03 until Mar 06. We’re not the biggest of companies. Our accounts could probably be done using Excel by somebody with a Leaving Certificate qualification. We prefer to subcontract rather than employ people, so that makes our accounts even easier.

So what have Dolan done to annoy us so much?

Overcharging. We had a set monthly fee for their services, paid by direct debit. Easy enough? Even if a mistake was made, it shouldn’t be too hard to sort out. Well no actually. During the last 15 months of our arrangement, I spent more time on the phone to Dolan / CMR about the fees than talking to them about the actual accounting service. While I wasn’t happy at the end, Dolan agreed to refund me a set figure in March last year and I moved to another accountants.

End of story, or so I thought. Not nice, but not enough reason to blog about it.

Ok, so how have they really annoyed you?

The basic reason to have an accountant is to file accounts with the Revenue Commisionars (Government Tax Department). These accounts / reports are (i) How much money you take as Salary from the business and (ii) How much VAT you owe the Government (based on your Sales).

Not surprisingly, the government takes a very dim view if you don’t file these accounts / reports on time. Fortunately , they’re easy enough, so long as you keep on top of them. For example, you can pay your Tax every month by Direct Debit. At the end of the year, you file a final report and pay any (small amount due).

Here’s the problem. For 2005 , Dolan / CMR set up a the Direct Debit but did not make the final report. This is despite assuring me that that the return had been made when we signed off the accounts at the end of the Year. (You know who you are). While I do not owe any tax (because we paid by DD monthly), the Revenue are entitled to fine me several thousand.

My new accountants say it will take them about 5 minutes to complete and post via the web (the ROS.ie website).

I will accept a large part of the blame for this - after all it is me , not the accountants, that they Revenue Commissionars will chase. But if you (a) are paying a professional service company to do work and (b) they tell you that this (basic) work has been carried out, would you not be annoyed to find out that it hadn’t?

I’ve left the comments section open for Dolan / CMR to reply if they see fit.

Thanks to Martin Boylan and Co (Drogheda) , our new Accountants, who are helping tidy up this mess.

I was on the train home this evening. Sitting opposite me was an elderly lady. I saw her give me funny looks as I worked away on the Laptop. Just before I got off the train at Drogheda, she turned and asked me (in the sort of low voice normally used when trying to purchase  hard drugs):

Tell me. Do ye skype?

That’s it. Voip is definately mainstream. And Grandad’s wife is probably on the lose.

That’s chip company as in ‘Silicon Chip’ , not the fish and chips that you’d normally associate with the town. John Collins has more details about Red Mere, who design chips to allow TV’s and other consumer gadgets to show High Definition TV and images.

Forget your Web 2.0 , Barcamp, Networking events. This is how it is done - exactly like it says on the Tin. It’s (nearly) Christmas. 12 Pubs . Drogheda. If you need any more information than that, check out the web site.

This Years Route:

1 Trinity Arms
2 Carlies
3 Clarkes
4 McPhails
5 McHughs
6 Sarsfields
7 Carburys
8 Mariner
9 Cellars Bar
10 Barocco
11 O’Sheas
12 Storm

RegisterToVote.ie Good idea, shame about the implementation. To check if you’re registered , you have to go the individual County Council website - that’s about 30 different chances of error.

Did Local Government really pay web designers to do the same work 30 times?

Anyway, try checking your ability to vote on the Louth website and you get the following error:

Electoral Registerindex.aspx?deptid=4&dpageid=0Register of ElectorsIndex.aspx?deptid=4&dpageid=0../XML/EREG/cntEreg0.xml

../XSLT/MainContent.xslt_parentOnline RegistrationeRegApp.aspx..

/XSLT/GenContent.xslt_parentOnline Enquiriesindex.aspx?deptid=4&dpageid=3_urlereg_parentFormsIndex.aspx

?deptid=4&dpageid=4_forms&secid=4../XSLT/FormDownloads.xslt_parent

If you’re planning to travel by Irish Rail, don’t trust the timetable information given out by it’s website. On a recent trip from Drogheda to Portadown, the actual outgoing and return times were between 5 and 10 minutes earlier, due to timetable changes made up to 6 months before. It’s all very well getting consultants to redesign your website , like CIE did recently , but if your organisation can’t keep it up to date , what’s the point?

There’s no excuse for giving out inaccurate information. Translink , the company that operates the northern half of the Dublin-Belfast Enterprise service, manages to display the correct train times. Incidentally , Translink is also publicly owned , so the ’shrug shoulders it’s just public service’ excuse isn’t valid either.

Get your act together , and display accurate times, or don’t give out any information at all. I made the train , but how many people have been caught out by this? Bluire has found more reasons to be angry with Irish Rail.

Update: Red Cardinal has shown that at least the ex-CIE group of companies are consistent, with Bus Eireann showing an appalling web design for their site.

Update 2: Ken reports about a recent webchat with Irish Rail. Interesting reading.

Update 3: And I thought I had problems. This is much worse.

Andrew Penrose (him of online Ordering Eats.ie) has threatened me with on overdose of Cold Pizza if I didn’t link to his site on this blogpost about the Web 2.0 presentation that we did..

So , if you’re around Dublin , or Ireland , and fancy ordering your choice of takeaway food online, then click on the link below

Wahey! Drogheda now official has two bloggers - the other being Spoilt Child Design that does both online and offline branding.

Is there anybody else out there in Drogheda? How can Ireland be at the forefront of the web revolution with only two bloggers in it’s largest town?!

Case study in how not to treat your customers:

Wandered into HMV in Scotch Hall (our brand new shopping centre in Drogheda) to buy a CD in the January sale - GoldFrapp as it turns out. Brought the CD home , ready to play it on my PC (where I listen to most of my music). CD doesn’t play , not until I register online and let them install software on my machine, neither of which I am keen on (see this BBC online article for one of the reasons why).

So here is the heart of the ‘bad customer experience’. While I think artists have the right to earn a living, and even lock their CD’s as much as they like (see related post here on Microsoft) I do expect to get what I pay for. Nowhere on the CD does it say ‘this will not work on your computer without registration/ software install’. What it does say is ‘Insert this CD in your computer and discover exclusive audio, video and more through opendisc technology’. Not a word about ‘additional proof of identity / security software install required’.

So , here’s a quick question: what would your customers do if you treated them like this?
a) Come back and spend more money with you.
b) Grumble and spend their money on one of the many other entertainment options available.

No prizes for guessing which on I am doing.

Much has already been written about EBay - a lot good (100,000 plus people making a living from buying and selling items online, the ability to find items on ‘the long tail’, not just the items worthwhile for shops to stock), some bad (serious question marks have been raised over the Security of both the Auction site and the related Paypal service).

The reason for this post is that yesterday I bought my first item on EBay - a Nokia phone cover - for half the price I would pay in the local market in Drogheda. So why the delay you might ask ask, for somebody who tries to be ‘ahead of the curve’ on all things internet related? The first is that I find it very hard to find things on the site (although, given that millions of other people successfully buy and sell, I’m likely to be in a minority of one). The second is that  until now I tended to use the web for services (e.g. search for information as part of providing Java and Internet consultancy, airline and hotel bookings etc.). The third is that farmers who examine the back end of the tractor they’re about to buy, I’m more interested in the ‘ugly bits’ of the site - the API that allows you to write programs to automatically bid at auctions etc.

Now that the last person in Ireland (me!) has started to use Ebay , Irish business has a fantasyic opportunity. The Northern Ireland Equivalent of Enterprise Ireland (Invest NI) is already running courses on how to sell surplus stock on EBay. In these days of Ireland having the reputation of ‘rip off republic’, it’s also a good way of finding new,  low cost suppliers online.

(Related Post - outsourcing of services)

Both Metro and the Herald AM free newspapers launched this week and now you can’t leave a Dart station in Dublin without getting offered both. For the Record, I’m a Metro man myself , having used it (unsucessfully) to try and learn Flemish / Dutch while in Brussels.

The word has it that both were ready to launch, and held back several times while waiting (a) for the legal action to finish and (b) to see what it each other did.

It makes you wonder about the (good) flexibility of the Irish Jobs Market. Here , in an era of ‘full’ employment these guys can launch at the drop of a hat (less than 48hrs notice) and still have hundreds of people out on the street to do the distribution. Given that it’s unlikely they had the distribution guys on a retainer , shows that the Irish Jobs Market is definately more Boston than Berlin .