Archive for the ‘ireland’ tag

Farewell Bank of Ireland

We’ll be going to shut down Jeanine’s Bank of Ireland account soon. For way too many reasons to name.

But I’ll share a few recent snippets of our recent dealings with them:

“Why would you want to move your account to another branch, you can do everything from any branch.”
“Oh, you want to do (Insert any common banking activity here), you have to do that at the branch your account is held at”

“Sure, this cheque is a Bank of Ireland cheque, it’ll clear in a few hours” – Bank of Irelands definition of “few hours” means anything from 3 hours, to 72 hours.

When I want to do banking, I go to a bank. If I wanted lies, I’d go find a politician.

Difference between Road Safety ads in Ireland and South Africa

Which one do you think would be more effective?

The Irish ones?

Or the South African ones?

Meeting Mentality in Ireland, again

Yes,
I have nother better to do…
No really.

All that prep work and research I did.
All those documents I put together and printed.
Just for the meeting that you requested.

Go right ahead and cancel it 30 minutes before its supposed to start.
With no reason.

Thats fine

For those who can’t recognise it, I used somethere there called Sarcasm.

NO ITS NOT ALRIGHT FOR YOU TO CANCEL A MEETING WITH NO REASON AFTER I’VE SPENT AN ENTIRE DAY DRAWING UP DOCUMENTS AND GOING THROUGH COUNTLESS OTHER DOCUMENTS TO COME TO MY CONCLUSSIONS.

Meeting Mentality in Ireland

In Ireland, nothing starts on time. Infact, some things just don’t happen at all.
Like busses, which are never where they’re supposed to be.

People in Ireland have this mentality of “It’ll happen when I want it to happen”.
Meetings… Never happen the first time, or second time around. You have to schedule it, email them, book the room and organise the coffee. Then you wait for 10 minutes for them, then you have to go find them and remind them that they’re supposed to be in a meeting.

I presented my first training session today.
I was giving training on a new, and rather important piece of software (which I wrote)

I booked out the Boardroom, did the usual Powerpoint presentation, and had it all planned out.
Using my Outlook Skills, I sent a meeting invitation to a list of people who will need to interact with the software in some manner, around 30 in total.

12 people accepted the meeting invitation. 5 declined it.
Of the 5 that declined it, 2 told me they were otherwise busy, the other 3 didn’t give a reason at all.
I contacted the 2, and gave them a quick little training session at their desks.

The training was supposed to be at 10am today.
At 10:10, one person arrived. A person who hadn’t actually responded to the meeting invitation.

By 10:30, I started training… To 1 person. (and a colleague, who felt sorry for me)

Its now 12:00, and so far only 1 person has come to be to appologise.
The rest have been told that the new software is live, and they’re expected to know how to use it because they’ve all been trained.

Feeding the Blame Mentality in Ireland should be discouraged, but its just too easy.

What I’ve been up to all week

I’ve been quite busy this week… And this is why.

Yup, we finally bought a car.
After almost a year and a half worth of using public transport, we decided that standing in the rain after work for an hour wasn’t the best way to spend our free time.

Yep, thats a Citroen C4 Coupe. Thats the 3 door model.
Its a 2005 Model, and its in incredible condition. I’ll be taking more pictures soon, these are just from the website that I found it on.

Next, will be the “upgrading”
I’m not going to do anything to the exterior, or the engine for that matter.
Legal issues here are just too annoying when it comes to modifying your car.

I’m going to be building a PC into the car, for a load of reasons:
GPS
MP3 player
Trip logging
Work purposes (mobile internet hotspot)
And just for fun

Citroen uses CANBUS for most of the internal communications in the car, which means that pretty much anything that the car knows, my PC will know.

There are a few things I’d like to implement, that aren’t standard…
Tom has a post on his new car, and a few things he’d like to see…

Ofcourse, regular updates on this project will be posted here.

MythTV on NTL Analogue in Ireland

I’m about to submit my MythTV for its WAF rating, before being put into full use in the house.
So to make things nice and easy to use, and to also assist in finding all the favourite episodes for recording, I’ve put every NTL Analogue channel into the channel database, with mythfilldatabase working 100% fetching all the scheduling information.

So for everyone that has been trying to get this working, I’ll dump all the necessary configs here, so you can get yours going too. Read the rest of this entry »

The Monster says Sorry

And after all of that, they apologised.

It shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and Monster shouldn’t have let it grow to the point that it got to.
But they’ve apologised, and all is forgiven. I don’t think anyone will be forgetting about it any time soon though.

And, Grandad has his say too.

How not to promote your business

Okay, I wasn’t going to blog about this, as I thought there was enough coverage on it already.
But Grandad just came up with this gem, which is well worth sharing.

So, to summarize the events of the last few days.

• Monster sends spam to a bunch of people on the it@cork list.

• Monster puts all the email addresses in the cc: line, so everyone can see them.

• Michele blogs about the spam. Calls up the offender.

• Monster offender seems unrepentant

• Someone posts on Michele’s blog, attacking him.

• Michele finds the IP and tracks it back to Monster

• Someone denies working for Monster, continues to attack

• Everyone else in the Irish IT community hears about the fun, and join in.

Monster, to date, has yet to appologise. Although they did try and intimidate Tom Raftery into removing his posts about it (complete with voicemail).

UPDATE: They did appologise.

Summer

So, in the true spirit of Summer (harhar. summer was last weekend)

Man… I miss South Africa.

Back to the grind

So I returned to work on monday.
Same old nonsense, nothing new here.

A few things have changed though.
Apparently we’re trying to decrease our Carbon Footprint. Essentially, this means we have to work in the dark, turn our PCs off when we’re not using them, and walk to work.

The sun is starting to annoy me now. There is just too much daylight now, its driving me insane.

And I think I caught some sort of bug on the flight back. I feel like absolute shite!

*mutter*

« Older Entries