Rubrication

For those of you who missed out on it, Richard Waghorne wrote an extremely amusing post on the Irish language. Apparently a few people were incensed. I myself thought it was quite funny and I sent it to my wife straight away. She, not being as familiar with Waghorne’s antics, was quite convinced that it was a parody.

I didn’t have time to prepare a response due to other constraints. Soon after the post appeared I found a post which covered nearly every argument that occured to me to put forward over at Talideon.com. Even the post title which had arisen in my mind was stolen by some clever soul working at Údarás na Gaeltachta before I could use it.

I’m quite convinced that Ireland is in the midst of a cultural revolution. The economy is booming in Ireland and the McCulture that can be offered by the global entertainment industry and the appeal of excessive drinking can only hold the attention spans of an affluent population for a limited time. The popularity of the Gaelscoileanna are growing rapidly and visits to Irish classes in the Gaeltacht are booming. TG4 offers reasonable entertainment value which is at least as good as most of the programming on the english language stations. And now, we find that even youtube.com has modern Irish music in its repertoire.

As evidenced by the juggernaught that is the Welsh language, or the meteoric rise of Finnish, It doesn’t take long for people to take back their native tongue. All it takes is the will to see it used.

I look forward to the day when dinosaurs like Richard Waghorne will have to make a choice of whether to move into the modern era or hide under the swiftly fading shadow of Englands hegemony.

I got my citizenship notice today!!! I’m an Irish citizen! Now I can vote! And I’m an EU citizen! It came two months earlier than I thought it would. Hooray!

I’m without internet access yet again and I’m unlikely to get it for at least another week or two. You can expect the updates to be sparse until then.

On a related note, broadband penetration in Ireland is so bad that we are being overtaken by Slovenia and Hungary:

http://www.ofoghlu.net/log/archives/000648.html

The *number* of broadband companies is exploding though so hopefully things will improve. I, for one, will not hold my breath.

I’ve often had questions that I wanted answers to and didn’t know who to ask. Sometimes the questions are unanswerable unless some mighty alien intelligence were to come and give them to me. Often times however, they are questions that should in principle be answerable. Here are some questions from my current wish list.
(read on…)

I didn’t realize that I had set default so that comments required moderation. Thats been fixed. If it turns out I’m getting lots of blog spam, I’ll just add a captcha or something.

I’m totally disgusted with the handling of Katrina. I’m just so utterly shocked that things have degraded to this level that I find it hard to talk about.

There are a couple of thoughts that have been spinning around my mind and I need to get them off my chest. I’m utterly amazed that the US federal government did not immediately send busses and other transportation to evacuate. The evacuation was completely voluntary, and therefor exclusively for those who can afford it.
(read on…)

The last few weeks has been really exciting. Our friends Emily and Joe and their son Oisín came to visit us a few weeks ago. We managed to make our way up to Belfast, which was tremendously interesting. Truely a different world. We went on a tour of the city where we were able to see the huge blast walls sourounding the court house, the Unionist and Republican murals and the multistory police stations housed almost entirely underground. (read on…)

My grandparents gave me a digital camera!! Yeah! Even better, it works in linux without any hassle since it acts as a USB mass storage device rather than requiring some esoteric invocations.

I recently moved to dublin and have been eyeing the view out my back window for a photo since I moved into my house. Dublin 8 sees more development than I’ve ever seen in my life. There are cranes visible in nearly every direction.

So I’ve finally jumped on the blogger bandwagon. I probably never would have gotten around to it but as it turns out I’m currently employed as a web developer working with… you guessed it… blogs. Since I’ve already charged my employer for the learning curve, I don’t have much of a reason not to write in one anymore. Anyone who knows my alterego on IRC knows that I’m actually a prolific writer. However, my writing style, accuracy, and of course, spelling could almost certainly improve from writing in a less transient medium.