thedeadone.net » Irish

Obligatory post on the Irish Election: Change

Mark Cunningham — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 19:23:41 +0000

Yesterday I vote in the Irish elections. Today (and tomorrow I think) they’re counting the votes. I’ve been sort of avoiding the live courage, but it’s pretty inescapable. It’s on TV (which is on the shops), it’s filling my intertube feeds. Instead I focused on doing stuff with the kids, playing football with my 3yo son in the morning and then taking my 6yo daughter to her pony riding lessons in the evening. Afterwards, on impulse, I suggested taking the stabilisers off her bike for the first time. My arm is wrecked from holding her saddle while she tried to keep balanced. And then when my wife came back from the shops with my son, and so the kids and myself spend the remaining light climbing trees and running around on the grass with my son’s hysterical laughter.

I normally try to avoid talking or writing about politics, mostly because I feel I don’t know enough or that I haven’t thought deeply about it. (A quirk of being an engineer is that you are more aware of what you don’t know, then what you do). But I think this time, it is worth speaking about, even if it’s just to say, I have thought about it. And I was torn about my vote this time. I didn’t vote the Fianna Fail last time and certainly not this time. I put my first preferences to Labour. I’m not liking their policies on tax (I’d be hit by it) but they are more liberal in their other policies such as, the can of worms that is, abortion and also equal marriage rights for gays. The Fine Gael seem to be going backwards on these issues.

This year we, as a family, have started to feel the pinch. Both my wife and myself work full time, we’re got college degree’s behind us, ten years professional careers. But yet, we’re starting to accumulate a debt, one we can’t just shake off. We’re certainly not in danger yet, our mortgage is still paid on time. But the reasons for this are rooted in the politics, the disastrous decisions of the previous government, a government I had voted against last time.

The result, as far as I can tell so far, looks like what was predicated before the vote. The idea that Enda Kenny will be Taoiseach just because he didn’t make any mistakes during the election campaign, just feels off-putting. It’s obvious I’m not entirely happy about the result so far, I wanted more change. But the important thing is that it’s a change. A reminder that being in government shouldn’t be taken for granted.

I don’t think our debt is going to disappear when the new government shake their magic wand at the IMF or that things are going to get easier. I suspect things will get harder to be honest.

I’m still cooling off from running around chasing the kids outside. They are quiet now watching some DVD on the TV. Dinner is on as I’m typing away on my blog. No matter what the rest of the result is, the government has changed. That’s something.

Some fun with Planet Irish Gaming

Mark Cunningham — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:27:43 +0000

So I’ve been doing some hacking for and analysis of Planet Irish Gaming and I’ve added one new feed and welcomed back another.

Using the power of python, I wrote a site scraping script that generates a feed of LiveJournal blogs that are members of the irishgaming LiveJournal blog i.e. an RSS feed of the friends page. It’s updated three times a day (which seems to be good enough for the rate of posts) but any post that doesn’t have comments enabled can’t be included (because the site scraping script can’t generate a permalink for that post). The link to it is here on Planet Irish Gaming and it’s included in the big feed. It’s pretty nifty.

I continued with my script-hacking and created a script that “fixes” the feed from irishgaming.com. There are some technical problems with their feed so that I couldn’t include it in Planet Irish Gaming. As far as I know, they were not going to get fixed any time soon. My script fixes them and generates a valid feed so now I can include the feed. Yea!

Ah scratch that. I just checked both feeds and they have totally the wrong date. *hack* *test* *debug* *fix* … an hour later… fixed. It seems individual items in both of these new feeds were picking up the latest date rather than the last date the item was added. Should be working fine now.

Because I added the “fixed” feed from irishgaming.com to Planet, I saw this morning that they have added “ads” to irishgaming.com. So I guess I shouldn’t really have been worried about adding ads to the irishgamingwiki.com - not that it’s earned me much (if anything).

If you’ve been using the big feed from Planet Irish Gaming, you’ll know that it gets very busy. Quite a large number of posts per day. Mostly polite drivel from forums around the place, so much so I barely scan the feed. I thought that normal users might find it overwhelming. Well, thanks to the power of WordPress, you can just grab a feed without forums (I’ve even added this feed link to the frontpage of Planet Irish Gaming) and that includes the new friends feed from livejournal so it’s pretty digestible.

Still though, even doing that, there isn’t really that much genuine roleplaying or gaming news in there. There isn’t really that much genuine Irish roleplaying and gaming content to be honest. The thought had occurred to me that I add a new category to the site (and hence a new feed) that contains only items that actually pertain to roleplaying and gaming. What I could do is add a “vote” like link to the other feeds and if an item gets a few votes it gets automatically added to this category, much like digg.com or reddit.com. However this would require users to interact with the site on some level and I’m not sure the effort I’d have to put in to implement this feature would pay off in terms of people using it. Anyone got any opinions on this?

More Irish were sold as slaves than Africans?

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 12:03:53 +0000

Or more exactly “that from 1600 to 1699, far more Irish were
sold as slaves than Africans”. This is the claim from this article.

Reading the article, there is a certain amount of sense there but I can’t verify any of the facts or info on it as I’m not a big history buff. If it is true, how did I miss this in my Irish history class in school? Why is it something that’s ignored by modern Irish culture? It would seem to me to be a greater tragedy than the potato famine.

The Irish slaves, apparently, even got treated worse than other slaves because they were cheaper and Catholic:

Although the Africans and Irish were housed together and were the property of the planter owners, the Africans received much better treatment, food and housing. In the British West Indies the planters routinely tortured white slaves for any infraction. Owners would hang Irish slaves by their hands and set their hands or feet afire as a means of punishment. To end this barbarity, Colonel William Brayne wrote to English authorities in 1656 urging the importation of Negro slaves on the grounds that, “as the planters would have to pay much more for them, they would have an interest in preserving their lives, which was wanting in the case of (Irish)….” many of whom, he charged, were killed by overwork and cruel treatment. African Negroes cost generally about 20 to 50 pounds Sterling, compared to 900 pounds of cotton (about 5 pounds Sterling) for an Irish. They were also more durable in the hot climate, and caused fewer problems. The biggest bonus with the Africans though, was they were NOT Catholic, and any heathen pagan was better than an Irish Papist.

Is this bullshit, “bad history” (ala “bad science”) so to speak, or is this true?

thedeadone.net » Irish

Obligatory post on the Irish Election: Change

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Some fun with Planet Irish Gaming

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More Irish were sold as slaves than Africans?

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