Damien Mulley

After the interview with ice cream maker Kieran Murphy, I was wondering what flavour ice cream would represent the blogosphere. Of course no one flavour ever would. So then I was thinking what flavours would represent the various bloggers out there. It started off as a small list and now is bloody huge. Am sure you can add in your own in the comments too. In no particular order:

Tom Coates Ice Cream
Vanilla Ice Cream with english toffee swirls and miniature bassett’s jelly babys.

Mike Arrington Ice Cream
Vanilla with crunchy cookie pieces, candy pieces and anything else that goes crunch! Unusually there’s a swirl of barbeque sauce in the ice cream too. Highly popular with Silicon Valley nerds but the ice cream spoils quickly when consumed around Mountain View.

Robert Scoble Ice Cream
Creamy and dotted with gummi bears and bits of marshmallow. Very popular flavour and the subject of many debates about whether it is a good flavour or not. Funnily enough both sides on the debate keep consuming it.

Hugh Macleod Ice Cream
Redbull, coffee and scotch mixed together. This ice cream has quite a kick and also has interesting squiggles running through the scoops.

Jeff Jarvis Ice Cream
Like the Hugh Macleod ice cream but without the scotch and with twice as much redbull and coffee and also with guarana. This ice cream is wired and will have you talking and blogging at twice normal speed. Lots of jalapeno peppers sprinkled inside.

Om Malik Ice Cream
Various spices mixed together, along with heaps of coffee. The only ice cream in this list to have nicotine as an ingredient.

Evelyn Rodriguez Ice Cream
Jasmine, Camomile and Chai Tea flavour.

Dave Winer Ice Cream
Vanilla. The Dave Winer ice cream is the base ice cream for thousands of other flavours. A little bit nutty and with swirls of coffee flavour. A nice caramel centre welcomes you after a while. There are hidden slices of jalepeno in this ice cream too. Like the Scoble ice cream there are lots of fans and lots that don’t like the ice cream due to it’s no bullshit plain flavours.

Marc Canter Ice Cream
A multitude of flavours all mixed together. The Canter ice cream simply demands that all other flavours are mixed with it. A great, storming, kicking ice cream. Just don’t consume during tech conferences or it might send you to sleep.

Boing Boing Ice Cream
Bubble gum and candy mixed with mint to make it even cooler. Amazingly this ice cream is carb free.

Mena Trott Ice Cream
Ice cream packed in the inside and outside with hundreds and thousands of coloured sprinkles. An ice cream used by many as a core ingredient for all other ice creams.

Doc Searls Ice Cream
Genuine all-American dairy ice cream with a few gold flakes added in. This tried and tested ice cream remains consistent while all the new “trendy” flavours come and go.

Dave Weinberger Ice Cream
Contains all the miscellaneous flavours available and mixes them together.

Tom Raftery Ice Cream
Made from Murpy’s Irish Stout and with a ginger swirl.

Seth Godin Ice Cream
Purple coloured, dairy cream. This ice cream is so good that you find yourself going out and getting others to try it.

Guy Kawasaki Ice Cream
An unusual flavour which is a mix of pineapple and shittake mushroom.

Kevin Burton Ice Cream
Coffee flavoured but caffeine free.

Jason Calacanis Ice Cream
Rich ice cream designed by hired experts.

Kevin Rose Ice Cream
Young, fresh, the flavour is always changing depending on popular tastes of the day. The ice cream was rumoured to cost $60 a scoop but apparently the scoops are practically cost free.

Bruce Schneier Ice Cream
This special ice cream does not give you belly aches, it fights cavities , makes your teeth stronger and lowers your cholesterol. Has a slight squid flavour to it.

Nicolas Carr Ice Cream
Dairy free. Sugar free. With a twist of bitter lemon. Sometimes people mistake this ice cream for a lump of coal.

Shane Ross uncovers some of the biggest contributors to IBEC in the Sunday Independent today. The main issue for me though is the taxpayer funded organisations and how much they pay in:

An Post pays €123,000 of taxpayer money to IBEC.
The DAA pays €120,000 to IBEC.
The ESB als pays €120,000 to IBEC.
RTE pays €90,000 to IBEC. Is 10 IBECs worth one Pat Kenny?
Bord na Mona pays IBEC €75,000.
Bord Gais pays IBEC €63,000.
Coillte pays IBEC €60,000.
CIE pays IBEC €27,000.
That’s €678,000 of tax money each year going to an organisation that’s very much pro monopolies. I’m not even certain are these all the orgs or just the ones that pay the most.

Going back to the overall article though. Ross mentions how much banks pay in. What about other industries? Where’s the O’Reilly group in this? Do eircom, Vodafone, o2 etc fall under the TIF group which is a satellite of IBEC? Lord knows they pay enough into it to have a Vodafone director state there is no demand for broadband. Right, yeah. Why is Voda bringing out a 3G data card then? Maybe as time goes by the Indo will be less pro-eircom. Maybe.

Blogger Adam is all hip with his SoAP. Way ahead of the Curve again. I envy that coolhunter.

Edit: Awww, Adam’s taken up another blogger habit and is deleting or totally rewriting posts now. Here’s a screencap of Adam’s original “I’m so cool I’ll refer to it as SoAP” post.

Funnyily enough I’m first on google for: “i want these motherfucking snakes”

Listening to a few tunes from Born Ruffians who are playing a few dates in the UK next week. I really like the song “This sentence”. It seems very Pixies influenced and I’m also reminded of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Wouldn’t mind hearing more of them. Found via I Guess I’m Floating.

Also been listening to a one guy band called Black Bear. Listen to the first song “Black Bear”. Really catchy. Reminds me of “Birdhouse in your soul” by They Might Be Giants. Blue canary. Found via Said the gramophone.

Via Waxy is Dapper, a cool web app that takes any website and turns it into an XML source allowing all kinds of fun to be had.. Create RSS feeds for websites that don’t have them, something which Feed43 does ,though it is 6 hours out of synch with the Net. You can also take various websites and mash them together. Great idea but I have a feeling sites could start banning the Dapper IP addresses so they can’t scrape the information.

One of the apps created thanks to Dapper is Magg which is a mashup of the existing video sharing websites. Handy that.

Another app that was quickly created is Blotter which graphs your site in terms of inbound links and Technorati ranking. This is the plot for my site:

Happy mashing!

A few journalists contacted me today asking me had I anything to say about eircom CEO Phil Nolan. It was Dr. Phil’s last day. He was on Morning Ireland this morning where he stated:

Eircom had the market in controversy well cornered by the time I got here I think.

Very true Phil but you actually stoked up the flames of that ongoing fire even more.

Phil also added:

So I think, you know, broadband is set well. By international standards in terms of supply we have eighty-five percent of lines in enabled exchanges, that’s on a par with Europe, it’s better than the US, and demand is accelerating and it’s all about demand now to get take-up and I think the industry and the department are getting behind that.

A statement which regulars of this blog will know is bullshit. 2nd last in the EU Phil. Same as it ever was. With the millions you personally made from eircom, here’s what you’ve actually left to the consumers of Ireland: The highest line rental, probably on this planet but certainly in Europe. 8 euros above the European average, an average which eircom have made quite high just from Ireland alone. Yet line rental is about to go up again. The Minister and the telecoms poodle are not going to stop it. They have no balls or really any right as they made a system that prevents them from stopping it. You’ve left the eircom network in such a state of disrepair that when it rains some people can’t even get voice calls. eircom’s last filings with the SEC showed that. 400M depreciation a year and 200M reinvestment. There are TDs and Senators that can’t get broadband on their lines. One of them is in the heart of the Capital. Not far from the Dáil. But this isn’t all your own fault. There was a policy of taking a phoneline and splitting it between homes or businesses to save on copper. All grand and well for low quality voice but it screws anyone who wants dialup and DSL. Instead of stopping this as the Internet took off it still happened. According to your own figures you gave the Oireachtas (yeah I managed to get them) it will cost €200M to fix all these split lines. It probably would have cost less 5 years ago. Until these are fixed it’s tough shit for all those failing line tests today.

Now thanks to you and the telecoms poodle, things like local loop unbundling are still a running joke in Ireland. Up until last week you couldn’t keep your number if you wanted to move to Smart or Magnet. Christ on a bike! So yeah Phil, thanks for grudgingly bringing out broadband, thanks for the 2nd highest landline bills in the EU, thanks for a phone network in bits and this comes from the head of the company that bought it and then thanks for the statement that people just don’t want broadband in this country. Great legacy. Enjoy the Irish Management Institute.

Pierre Danon is a different man to Phil and has a different style. Hi Pierre! Pierre reads blogs don’t ya know. Or he has people to do so. All the same, the guy is sharp. He knows his stuff. He knows his tech, he knows his finance and he knows people. Before he was ever officially put in the eircom throne he was meeting with consumer groups such as IrelandOffline, interest groups, the various telcos, groups like the Irish Internet Association, he met our telecoms poodle, the DCMNR and the Government. He genuinely asked for viewpoints and inputs and followed them up later by email or phonecalls from his people.

Pierre now has a shitty network, as his Aussie boss noted, he has a company with a debt of 4 billion (that’s €1000 for every man woman and childeen in the country), he has a plummeting amount of revenue from landline calls and he has a union with a considerable amount of shares in the company. How are you going to do it Pierre? We’d love to know. You’re pretty much in the position Phil was in 5 years ago so we’d love to know how you’re going to work this.

Pierre’s first big test and the biggest challenge for the PR Department will be the line rental increase. It’s either that or getting a big wad of cash from the Government. Money doesn’t grow on phone polls. There’s bound to be backlash. But us Irish will accept the situation and moan a little. I want to retire from IrelandOffline as soon as possible but I can’t see me walking away when there’s so much to be done. I had once written in a newspaper article that Isolde Goggin, Noel Dempsey and Phil Nolan are the only people who could turn Ireland into a broadband paradise. I think it’s down to the whim of one person now. It should never have come to that.

Holy shit but it’s beautiful right now in Cork. I wish I had a working camera.

Welcome to the Irish Blog O’Sphere Graham Neary. I’m not sure who he is but he linked to me so right back at ya. He’s trying to get onto IrishBlogs.ie it seems. No luck so far.

Everything you wanted to ask a Christian but were afraid to ask. Well, actually, Steven has decided he’s game to be asked questions we wanted to ask Christians but didn’t want to go to church to ask. Though I am not religious, I do have some questions that clarify half-baked notions I have. Play nice people.