Irish Rail - let's sack everyone!

I've been personally of the view for many years now that Irish Rail is simply unrecoverable as a company. This from someone who is a big believer in trains and public transport in general. The only sensible solution is to sack everyone from the CEO down and do a complete rehire, with all of them sign up to a clearly stated policy that it is the mission of the company to transport people and goods, safely and reliably within a predictable timetable to and from the destinations of their choice.

Too many people have had too many poor experiences with Irish Rail in terms of how it does business as a company and sadly how many of its customer facing (hate the expression but it seems apt here) employees treat people. Bear in mind that most people when asking for assistance from Irish Rail employees are away from home, and if stranded will have to go to considerable personal expense and suffer a great deal of inconvenience to make it to their destination by other means. Frankly for many of them it is a stressful enough experience and if they had another choice they would have made. The company and many of its employees continue to behave as if the company exists to provide them with a living and not to provide a service to the travelling public. This attitude perpetuates itself by infecting new employees as they learn from the existing staff what it is you can get away with. Hence my idea for the need for a mass clear out.

Sure, some of the trains are nicer now, but remember we the travelling public and taxpayers paid for that nice new shininess by means of Transport 90210 and other PR efforts such as "We're not there yet, and frankly we're not sure where there is". It isn't like the employees built the new trains as a favour to us crafted out of the goodness of their hearts on their own time while taking breaks from feeding orphans and widows.

Every little change in their work situation they want to be paid for. The time table changes, pay me more, time table changes back to what it was, pay me more again. New trains, pay me to learn how to drive them, and then pay me more to actually drive them. And if you hire someone to drive them but I don't drive them, pay me more to let them drive them instead.

Cowen and the real problem with his f$%ckers

Naturally, the superficial emphasis has been on the use of the word itself. Those with a tradition at this stage for missing the point by a distance greater than the human mind can encompass have praised him for showing that he is cool and down with the kids. The Evening Herald ran with a headline saying as much.

In point of fact, the issue for Cowen is not actually his swearing at all - which the finest of us do (and with some aplomb I meant add) , but the fact that he appears to be so easily rattled. Enda Kenny wasn't placing him under any especially harsh pressure, some might even say it was all fairly humdrum stuff. Until Cowen found himself unable to answer a pretty straightforward question and lacking the armoury of evasion natural to his predecessor he went lock, stock and sinker for the "attack is the best form of defense" approach. All of which meant his temperament wasn't the mae west when he turned to Mary Coughlan to make his now famous remark about" those f$%ckers". Some of the more ill informed, including as a writer for the Sunday Mirror and a letter writer elsewhere, were more appalled that he should say such things to a delicate flower such as Mary, poor innocent Mary Coughlan. Just as well for all our sakes that he doesn't carry around a nuclear button.

Fionnan Sheahan catches it perfectly with his piece on "The Touchy and Tetchy Show", indeed it is hard to see how this works to the advantage of Cowen either Coughlan.

"They don't like it up 'em, Mr. Mannering"- as a noted political commentator once said.

Crewe and Nantwich

As is my wont from time to time, I poke my nose in the politics of other countries. I don't spend any money on influencing the outcome but I do like to watch. So the by-election in Crewe and Nantwich looks to be quite interesting given the national scene in the UK. Basically, Gordon Brown seems to have been caught completely unpreparedby the British public in bed with a naked recession and he had no protection at all. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg is still learning to lead without his stabilisers on the bicycle of the Lib Dems and David Cameron has suddenly found himself faced with the prospect of being behaving like the leader of a major political party with a decent chance of being in government somewhat ahead of schedule. You can peruse the full line up if you wish but the three main parties are where the real action is as per usual.

Last time out in 2005 the final % results were
Labour 48.8
Conserveratives 32.6
Lib Dems 18.6

A shift or swing as they like to call it over there of 9% from Labour to Tory would mean Labour on 39.8% and Conservative 41.6%. However, many people - core Labour people - are likely to find voting for the Tories a bridge too far, and might either stay home or seek out a temporary safe haven in the Lib Dems. Indeed, with the Labour vote nationally appearing to be in free fall, it is just possible that some Labour voters might even decide that the only way to stop the Tories romping home is to vote LibDems. It is alternately possible that if the battle is seen as a straight choice between supporting the government or giving it a bloody nose then the Lib Dems might be squeezed out completely. With that in mind, I've got two outcomes that might result from each of the above scenarios

Scenario (A)

Labour suffer a collapse but as it is a collapse in the core vote many can't bring themselves to vote Tory so they temporarily jump to the LibDems, in fact the Labour campaign doesn't get people to vote Labour but it is effective in stopping people from voting Tory

Labour 34.8
Conserveratives 38.6
Lib Dems 26.6

Scenario (B)

Labour suffer a significant drop but the core vote holds and many including some who previously voted Lib Dems see the risk nationally of a Tory win (especially if it means an overall majority for the Conservatives) so they vote Labour. The Labour campaign gets people to vote Labour but it is still not effective in stopping middle ground people from voting Tory.

Labour 39.8
Conservatives 44.6
Lib Dems 15.6

We'll know tonight. And there is always scenario (C), (D) and so on and so forth.

Voting on Lisbon

I'm going to give the feelings in my water expression over the next few weeks as we close in judgement day for the Treaty of Lisboa - June 12th.

As of now I would suggest the support levels of

Yes 60% No 38% Spoilt 2%

And the final cylon is...

Admiral Cain!

Seriously, wouldn't that just kick that part of the body that is in most contact with the couch. It is only a guess mind. My guess, all my guess. And entirely consistent with my view that the final cylon is someone already died who would have to be resurrected. And guess what? We're off to a resurrection hub!

Newcomers

In recent weeks it has become very noticeable that various public bodies and figures have a new word for people not native to these lands. Newcomers! It comes up quite a lot where issues around schools and education are concerned and the provision of services to support "newcomer" children.

Now the word stirred a memory in me and I had a rustle about in the old brain pan for a while and what did I find only that it has been used before. Only then it was used to describe fictional aliens, by which I mean real live aliens from another planet! Who got drunk on sour milk and for whom sea water was like acid! And their lady folk could do interesting things to human males that we never quite found out about. It could just be me but I've not noticed too many kids with lumpy heads about the place. What lazy bones think tank came up with that name I wonder? What next are we going to start calling the opposition the Rebel Alliance? Or make references to a minister being of the Hutt persuasion... hang on I think that is already being done.

In related news, RTe had a report that a GAA club in Gort had managed to get a local lad of a Brazilian background to play hurling. Just an FYI for the GAA but I've had a slogan for an anti racism effort floating around in the back of the trunk for a few years now. What matters is not the colour of your skin, but the colour of your jersey.

Work in progress

Things may look a bit odd from time to time over the next while. Please bare with us.

New directions in Search

A while back I noticed my posts getting visited by something called cuill and mistook it for a company that some friends are in the process of working up called...well, you'd best just wait for that exciting news. Anyway, it turned out not to be those folks but instead cuill (say it Cool!) is a search effort headed up by wife and husband team of Anna Patterson* and Tom Costello. Anna was someone senior with Google for while while Tom had his dalliance with IBM but they're running their own show now.

They got some 2nd round money recently and it would appear their key pitch is that their search takes 10% of the effort that it does for Google. I suspect the intent of something like cuill is to provide back-end search capability as a service to large corporate or governmental environments where the reduced overheard they speak of would really matter. I'm not sure the consumer end of search is all that bothered about the resources required when they are getting to have it for free.

Then I started to notice I was getting felt up as it were by another frequent visitor from Tempe, Arizona called searchme.com. I had a looksee and they're doing what I think are interesting things with the visual presentation of search results. Imagine if they had a client like this for the desktop we might be able to find some of those things we've lost on the harddrive. So it would seem that search isn't as static as some might think, and that old idea of some other new fangled interface for browsing or presenting content hasn't gone away either. There was a suggestion floated semi-seriously by some in the mid 90s that the Doom engine from ID could have been appropriated to give us that 3D world that Gibson et al had prepped us for. It never came to pass that I'm aware of in part because people thought that the footprint of the Doom client would be too large! Anyway, try the public Beta for size, it seemed to not be too keen on Firefox today but ran fine under IE and they have a blog too.

*I met Anna about.. Christ could it be that long ago?... 12 years ago now in Prague. She was at some maths conference and myself and a mate were in the city for sort of a lad's holiday. We were looking for an Irish pub that might have had the GAA results, net cafes being thin on the ground at the time. And we wandered into the James Joyce just of Staré Mesto, and we got chatting to her. I think one of us (probably me) made up some nonsense about working in the Oil industry mainly because we couldn't have looked more unlike some roughnecks in from the fields.

The pubs are calling us back

The publicans are going to spend money! to try and get people back into the pub. I've got a crazy idea how about killing the noise and encouraging people to talk to other people in pubs again. To people they don't already know! And if there is music, let's not be too holy about it. I can't stand being in a bar and then some live music starts and everyone is told to keep quiet.

Unexpected opportunties for the disabled in Beirut.

Reading the beeb site for news and mild distraction I was I must admit a little taken aback to see this image of a Hezbollah gunman in Beirut who it seems may have seen action before



Look closely, it is hard to see where his arm ends and the gun begins. Of course some might say that true equality is when the disadvantaged are as capable of doing idiotic things as the rest of us.

Where it went wrong for Hillary

You see I can be wrong! what did I forget in my prediction? I forgot all those smaller states that Obama simply rolled up like so much carpet.

http://dansullivan.blogspot.com/2008/02/hillary-vs-who-and-what.html

Brian Blessed on HIGNFY last weekend : Update

Some buggers have tubed it darlings, They put it on the bloody intercom thingy. Here's where you catch Part 1 and then do the rest yourself you lazy feckers. I do love you all really.

Provisional Driving restrictions revisited.

Anyone remember the introduction of new restrictions on driving on a provisional license last October Bank holiday weekend? It generated loads of topics last on pi.ie at the time and it prompted the creation of the first campaign area for politics.ie. Well, the May bank holiday is behind us and the June bank holiday is fast approaching and that means the issue will be back with us all inside a few weeks. The deadline that Minister Dempsey set himself was the end of June for the full introduction of the new measures. Measures that by and large the vast majority of people around the country support. The problem was entirely with the manner of their introduction. One of the criteria for the introduction of the measures at the end of June was and I'm quoting from the RSA here "By the end of June 2008 all applicants for a driving test will be able to get a test on demand (within 10 weeks)." On demand, within ten weeks. See that, you demand something and you get it within ten weeks. So are they there yet?

The most up to date average times for getting a test would appear to suggest we are some way off that target of everyone getting a test within ten weeks. 15 of the 48 test centres are over the 10 weeks upper limit. Indeed 12 of them are more than 50% over the average.

There was something about that average number which intrigued me. How are they calculating it I wonder? It's not by treating all the centres as if they handled the same amount of people is it? Because that would be plain silly. Yet, it seems that is how they are doing it. The average time is calculated by summing the waiting times for each test centre and then dividing by the total number of test centres. That approach would be fine if each test centre was dealing with the same volume of tests but since we appear to have just 4 test centres for Dublin, while 2 for Kerry and even 3 for Galway I'm guessing those volumes at each of these sites aren't the same. So the magic figure quoted at the bottom of the report of 10.5 weeks average wait time is not the average time a person will be waiting. We are meant to be talking about the average wait time per person. And for that you need to fact in the number of people processed at each location. There again a failure to think of people is what has us in this mess in the first place.

Also, in the world of letters from employers and such like to expedite the process some folks get tested much earlier than the average at present. Since we are still dealing with averages that means for every person that gets the test in 2/3 weeks where the average is in fact 10 weeks that some other poor eejit must be waiting for 17/18 weeks for the sums to be correct. Or perhaps there are two people getting it in 13.5/14 weeks but you see where I'm going with this. The average wait time is plainly not at the 10 weeks barrier that Dempsey set for himself. 10 weeks was to be the outer limit not the average. A 10 weeks average is explicitly not the target that the RSA and Dempsey set themselves they said "The Government has already committed itself to providing the necessary finance to the Road Safety Authority to ensure that all 122, 000 applicants currently on the waiting list will have been tested by early March 2008. This will have eliminated the current backlog as promised. By the end of June 2008 all applicants for a driving test will be able to get a test on demand (within 10 weeks)."

I should say that I don't personally view getting a test within 10 weeks as being on demand but since it is the measure Dempsey set himself it's only fair to start by measuring him against his own goal. On demand in my view would be 2/3 weeks max. I'm guessing the true average wait time is more than the 10.458 weeks you get if you divide the sub totals by the total number of test centres.

So the questions are

Have all those 122,000 sat the test since last October?

How much extra cash was splashed to sort out the problem of the backlog?

How long is the back log now?

What is the true average wait time per person nationally?

Update: I had started this last week back and was just finishing it when I read this in the Indo today. Seems the RSA is back-pedalling faster than ice cream melts in the lovely weather we're having.

Brian Blessed on HIGNFY last weekend

A instant classic, you should try and catch it on the repeat thing on the beeb site but only if you're in the UK. As for the rest of the world, I guess people will have to wait for it to appear on some Tube or other.

Eagles soar - but how high?

So we made the play-offs with a 5-0 spanking of Burnley who to be fair had nothing to play for. So we're playing Bristol City next Saturday and Tuesday and if we get past them we play the winners of Hull-Watford on the May bank holiday weekend. I'm all a quiver.

Mayoral predictions - how did we do?

The actual result in London Mayoral Election

Johnson	CON	1,043,761	42.48
Livingstone	LAB	893,877	36.38
Paddick	LD	236,685	9.63
Berry	GRN	77,374	3.15
Barnbrook	BNP	69,710	2.84
Craig	CPA	39,249	1.6
Batten	UKIP	22,422	0.91
German	LL	16,796	0.68
O'Connor	END	10,695	0.44
McKenzie	IND	5,389	0.22

Our prediction had Boris Johnson on 39 % Ken Livingstone on 37 %, which was reasonably close, within the margin of error for Boris at the worst. We did overstate Paddick on 14 % and Berry at just under 5 %. We were damn close with the BNP at 2.5 % (and that's as close as we ever want to be to the BNP. And we understated the others at 1.5 % when they closer to 4%.

New Carlsberg ad - Have it!

I never did find out what happened to my application for the Ireland job but here is what some others are doing about it.



They really do like to play with a big pair up front.

Local Elections England/Wales - how bad?

Really bad, really, really bad. The beeb are still insisting on going more and more down the road graphically orientated tom foolery with Jeremy Vine when what they really need are Charlie McCreevy and Ivan Yates arguing over the direction of the transfers of the Ballydehob local bigwig on the anti fish scale tax party.

One problem for me is that they only report seats gains and losses not the % that a party got in which council area. With 1st past the post it is possible that a disaster decline can be masked or that a minor gain can translate into a large seat gain. The national vote share projection is some help but for the really nerdy amongst us (I'm saying us so I must be including myself in that number) we want to see how the % vote has changed in each council. And nowhere on the beeb site can I find that. And they appear to be completely at a loss as to how to report on the Mayoral count with the only semi useful quote being "With 27% of votes counted in each of the 14 electoral areas - Mr Johnson has the lead in 9 while Labour's Ken Livingstone is ahead in five." how big are the 9 areas compared to the 5 and ahead by what margin! God help me but with a few dozen Tallymen we'd have a projected first count at this stage on 27% of the vote counted, and we'd have some idea where the 2nd choices were going. And this in the birthplace of parliamentary democracy.

Update: according to the Guardian blog there are screens at the count centres that are giving the 1st preferences and 2nd choices as they are counted. So why is no one reporting the actual numbers? Do they think people can't understand them?

Boris the blade or Red Ken

While I'm technically a Croydonian by way of being a Mayday baby, I do on occasion social climb a tad by regarding myself as a Londoner by association. So by that reckoning I'm as entitled as anyone to be taking an interest in the mayoral election across the pond.

I would probably vote for Brian Paddick or Sian Berry No.1 and then give my No.2 to Ken Livingstone. I don't agree entirely with everything Ken does but the city is in his heart. I think he has been proved correct about efforts like the limitations of the Public Private Partnerships in funding public works and also he has shown a willingness to embrace some aspects of the market like the idea of a bond issue for the Tube. Boris is a likeable enough bloke and would probably make for good company on a night out but that is no reason for vote for someone to have executive power, whether Boris or Bertie.

We seem to get few enough people who are proud of living in cities these days. For all our love of the arboreal or pastoral ideal, I think cities, properly run are the true apex of human civilisation. It's not a popular view in the modern world and especially not in Ireland where everyone appears to want to live in the subrural splendour of the detached bungalow on the edgetown.

My Predictions? I've not had a good hit rate this year but sure why not...

Boris Johnson - 39 %

Ken Livingstone - 37 %

Paddick - 14 %

Berry just under - 5 %

BNP - 2.5 %

Others 1.5 %

At the end of the chain

With the building industry apparently stalling it is worth noting who it that is going to get hit hardest. It will be those small contractors and suppliers who are owed what are for them quite large sums of money. Loads of tradesmen, the plumbers, the carpenters, the landscapers the ones doing plastering and gangs of labourers will be left out of pocket at the last minute. You can bet it won't be Tom Parlon's boys at the CIF. God no Those lads will simply go to the wall, let the banks and by extension the savers at those institutions take the hit and be back in business a few weeks later with another name and the same faces in places.

The Examiner today appears to link financial problems in the business of Dermot Flood with the deaths of the family. Whether there is a link or not - the article and the details of the turnover and outstanding monies owed to the business is illustrative of the problems that many at the end of the chain are faced with. According to what they found the accounts showed money owed to creditors increased from €27,660 in 2006 to €49,421 in 2007. And over the same period, the amount owed to the company by debtors nearly trebled from €40,111 to €118,202. Owed by debtors, that would be people he did work for, they owed him more than twice what his own debts were. If this was a factor in his actions (and it seems at this stage that the deaths were as a result of his actions) then I wonder what part concerns about money had to play in his state of mind leading up to this. Where is Tom Parlon to talk on behalf of the small traders and ensuring they are getting paid by the big boys in the building industry today?