Archive for current affairs
Irish Independent in misrepresenting facts shocker
Posted by: | CommentsBroadsheet are reporting on an Irish Independent article which (either deliberately or out of sheer stupidity) has done a hatchet job on a Polish waitress living in Ireland. It stems from the comments on this Reddit thread.
It brings to mind another article on the Independent.ie website in April 2011 which was brought to my attention after some kneejerk reactions on Twitter along the lines of “what a waste of money”.
Ian O’Doherty reported that Fás were spending:
“nearly 80 grand on a course — that teaches people from the Roma community about Irish Travellers.”
O’Doherty spouts on for a couple of paragraphs and finishes off his piece :
“Also, you might be forgiven for wondering if the money would be better spent buying one-way tickets back to Romania and Bulgaria for those Roma who have never worked here and are claiming social welfare.
OK — all complaints for the above sentiment can be sent to the Press Council. “
After reading it and some of the Twitter reaction, I contacted Fás to get information on the course. Here is the course O’Doherty wrote about.
The course is “to provide participants, representatives of the local travelling community, with a forum for understanding and learning, with a view to integrating marginalised members of the community more fully into local life and with the skills to access further training and or employment opportunities.”
That’s very different from what O’Doherty riled up his readers about. Don’t know about you, but anything which helps marginalised members of a community with a voice and an opportunity for further training with a view to getting a job is a good thing. Certainly not something to misrepresent in such a deliberate way and he has no excuse of there being anything “lost in translation”.
The Line King – a very clever TY project from Students in Limerick
Posted by: | CommentsI love nifty ideas, and thankfully I spotted this one on Twitter last night. The 4th year students of Coláiste Chiaráin, Croom, Co.Limerick have set up a mini business as a transition year project.
It’s called ‘The Line King’ and it sets out to solve a problem for accountancy and business students in Ireland (and presumably further afield as well).
Here it is :
It’s a stencil that a student can use to turn any standard lined page into an accountancy record book, thereby saving money that would otherwise be spent on buying pre lined accountancy books. I know from my school days that I would spend ages ruling pages with a standard ruler and making a bit of mess of it in the process. All a student has to do now is take the Line King stencil, place it on the page, and run a pen through the lines to create their accounting book page. I’d say it would take all of 10 seconds to line the perfect page like the one below.
There are 3 different stencils available, one for each of the accounting record books. I would LOVE to have had something like this back in the day. It’s one of those ideas that make you wonder why no one has thought of it before. Great to see students coming up with ideas like this and I hope it sells well for them.
Links
RTE Player App for iPad and iPhone on the way
Posted by: | CommentsUpdate : 21st December 2011. The app is now available. Search for RTE Player in the App store. Worth the wait.
I rarely watch TV programmes at their scheduled broadcast time. I guess most people are the same. Sky+ , web catchup services and iPad/iPhone/Android apps have totally changed the broadcasting landscape. As an Apple device owner, I miss the ability of being able to catch up on RTE programmes due to the lack of Adobe Flash support on the device.
To a collective “hurray” from iPad and iPhone owners, RTE today announced they will launch a Player app for Apple devices “before Christmas”. An Android version is also planned.
One really nice feature of the app (as explained in the video above) is an Amazon Kindle like feature of syncing what you are watching between devices. Start watching an episode of Mad Men on your iPhone on the way home from work, you can pick up where you left off on your laptop when you get home. Some other nice features for sharing content are discussed in the video as well and it will be interesting to see how they work.
The ridiculously over the top “outrage” about RTE wanting to deprive bloggers of revenue annoyed me. So I set up an Irish Fashion and Beauty aggregator to show how ridiculous the whole thing is/was.
Note the little extract of blog posts that appear on the page. Can anyone, hand on heart, say that this would stop a visitor from clicking through. The beaut.ie accusation was that RTE wanted to rip off content.
Read more about it on the about page of Yeronlymassive
Phantom of the Opera at the Grand Canal Theatre
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Went to the live screening of Phantom of The Opera last night at the cinema. It was a special 25th Anniversary performance of the show and to say it was spectacular is an understatement.
I saw the show a couple of years ago on Broadway and thoroughly enjoyed it. This was despite the constant, loud snoring of a man beside me and seats that were so high up binoculars (if provided) would have been very welcome.
Whilst I’d love to have been in the audience at the Royal Albert, the cinema experience was actually a better way to experience this show. Being able to see the action on stage and getting close ups of the actors faces added immensely to the enjoyment. Only thing missing was the electric atmosphere and buzz of being in a hall with 5,000 people. That, and clapping. Myself, mrslecraic and two other people beside us were the only ones who made an effort at a bit of a clap.
This staging of Phantom has Cameron Mackintosh as producer, and it will start touring in March 2012 and it looks like The Grand Canal Theatre will host it some time after that (guessing May or June). Nothing on GCT website as yet, but keep an eye out as I’m sure tickets will sell out fast.
