Things that strike me

One of the things which annoys me most about the current crisis is that the only way I can really get through it personally is to depend on the old reliable of “life goes on”.

It’s just I’m concerned at what’s going to happen before life goes on. I’m actually getting to the stage where I don’t trust anyone much. Everything I am hearing about banking in Ireland suggests I can’t trust bankers. I already know I don’t trust mortgage brokers. I am going to be needing some serious dispassionate pension advice soon and I frankly think based on my experience of bankers, mortgage brokers and stockbrokers, I don’t know whether a trustworthy financial advisor actually exists? I am starting to doubt it.

I wonder if people actually think about this. If they wonder “what will happen if I reach retirement age – which wil be 70 by the time I get to that age and sweet Jesus what do they expect me to be doing then – and there’s no money. No money to feed me, no money to pay for shelter”. I think about it a lot. I think about it a lot now because it appears to me that no one much in any position of power thought of the future, my future or anyone’s future. I could slowly go mad thinking about it.

This morning my laptop was a photographer work station.

In the meantime I’ve added some stuff that I used to know a bit about but have basically forgotten now in the way of programming languages. I’ve harvested what’s available on the Microsoft developer site for free (Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Visual C# because the latter was recommended during the week). I’m putting Eclipse together (yawn) for both Java and php. I don’t know php. I remember thinking it was bloody ugly the last time I looked at it. Java I used to be able to write but haven’t used it in about 4, 5 years despite writing the odd bit of network related stuff.

In part this is inspired by my efforts to make sense of some NCL during the week.

Down. Basically, down. How far down is the problem. I don’t know. And over what time frame, difficult.

But

1. falling incomes
2. general CPI deflation
3. increased property supply
4. increasing tax burden
5. increasing interest rates
6. increasing unemployment
7. collapse in inward migration
8. increase in net emigration

This suggests downwards in the short term.

On the other hand

1. government action by way of moratoria on repossession proceedings
2. government action on properties securing loans to NAMA
3. ECB giving up on fighting inflation temporarily
4. another financial shock.
5. Demolition of  ghost estates
6. unexpected economic turn around in an as of yet unknown industry sector.

The problem for me is I can’t see what’s going to absorb our unemployment. The Green Party will tell you it’s renewable energy initiatives. So will Spirit of Ireland. Other members of the government ramble on about smart knowledge economy. But I can’t see that sector necessarily absorbing all the current unemployed.

If I had to put anything in writing – and this is a pure guess – I think that in the short term, property is going to head further down for the next 2-2.5 years. After that, I think it will bounce along the bottom for a couple of years.

It is – sometime soon – Saint Valentine’s Day. Every single company who sends me promotional email – which I don’t mind because sometimes it’s useful (it includes money off vouchers for one of my printing companies, for example) – and anyway I signed up to it – has been also sending me suggestions for presents for that special someone.

I don’t want these messages. I don’t want someone to suggest a pink iPod nano for my girlfriend because guess what I’m a girl and think my boyfriend – if I had one – would probably run a mile if I bought him a pink anything. At least, every boyfriend I ever had would have run.

I am wondering if there is a market for a mail filtering service that says “don’t send me promotional email that includes the word “Christmas” “romantic get-away” “Valentine” and such and lets the “we’re broke buy more stuff from us” emails through with the special offers.

Then I could skip out on the pink hearts and red hearts and lovey dovey nonsense.

Any thoughts?

List of stuff I wanted to do today:

• trip to beautician for painful stuff
• bake olive cake
• cut up mangos and freeze the cut up pieces
• dinner
• weave the ends on the cardigan and wash and shape it
• proofread a document for a friend
• close look at iPhone App development tools
• reinstall Java development tools on the computer
• change sheets on bed.
• wash sheets from bed
• more work on lace skirt at crochet group who’ve forgotten I exist it’s so long since I’ve been there
• find pattern for baby blanket and start said baby blanket for cousin’s baby due soon.
• order yarn for second cardigan

Stuff I got done

• trip to beautician for painful stuff
• dinner
• olive cake
• proofread document
• weave ends on cardigan.

Apparently now I look shattered.

On the baby blanket front it looks like I need 5 times as much yarn as I have in baby yarn stash. As I tend not to make stuff for babies, this is inexperience speaking on the baby yarn front. It’s a nice pastelly orange colour but…short about 1000 metres. Which has the bad part of suggesting the blanket could take forever and five days to make.

The olive cake turned out okay I think. The olives and the rashers floated to the bottom, but the thing rose and hasnt yet collapsed. The mangos are glaring at me. They will head freezerwards tomorrow instead.

I understand why I am shattered so much lately however. When you get in from work and you’ve to face into that list of stuff to do, and don’t even barely make half of it…you have two problems. The pressure mounts and The amount of stuff to be done mounts. I didn’t make it to a climbing wall or a swimming pool that ever was since last Monday.

I don’t know when I am supposed to find time. I really don’t.

Thanks to the Sunday Times. I was too angry to read this one on Sunday so here are some thoughts on the idea.

Eamon Ryan, the communications minister, said that the government had taken steps to rescue the banking system, and now had to help individual homeowners. “Just as the banks were assisted to protect the greater good, we need to help those struggling with indebtedness so they can be part of the recovery rather than be caught up in Dickensian court proceedings,” he said. “Many people are now facing difficulties in managing their own debts as they struggle to hold on to their homes and return businesses to their full potential.”

I’m really angry about this. I refused to vote for the Green Party last time out over their idiotic health care ideas plus the fact that their then health spokesperson was against vaccination. I’m deeply unhappy with John Gormley over his road to Damascus realisation that we have issues on the water supply infrastructure but at least that’s supposed to be part of his brief in environment. Eamon Ryan, however, is supposed to be looking after communications and since the country has severe issues with highspeed broadband provision it’s fair to say he might want to concentrate on that.

That being said.

• Bankruptcy legislation needs to be reformed. Is this suggested? Nope.
• Lots of people are not in trouble financially with their mortgages because they didn’t take out mortgages, or have resolutely been paying them down. Are they going to get any bail out? No, they will be paying for it via increased taxes.
• Lots of people are in trouble because they remortgaged for investment purposes. Should the taxpayer be bailing them out? No. Absolutely not.
• The argument is that the banks are being bailed out so the borrowers should be as well. This doesn’t cut it with me. Everyone knew the risks. EVERYONE heard the bits on the ads about how your home was at risk if you didn’t keep up payments. But people still borrowed insane amounts of money.

I didn’t. I won’t be being bailed out. I will be paying higher taxes. I will still have to support my own rent. I was sensible, dammit and no one is supporting me because I don’t need to be supported. But I’ll be doing the supporting.

If debts connected to home mortgages are to be written off in any respect, supported by the taxpayer, I think that those who are not so endebted and not so seeking support should get some sort of recognition. Reduced tax, perhaps. Increased mortgage interest support if they have a mortgage. Increased rental relief if they rent.

The argument is that the banks were bailed out, now the people should be. Well I don’t agree too much with how the banks are being supported and I hope they’ll be paying increased banking taxes into the future to deal with this.

For the prudent; the people on whom this country is increasingly dependent; the ones with savings, the ones without debts, what interest do they have in this country?

You’d have to wonder. Right now, I really wonder what the point is.

I bought a couple of applications for my phone today. I don’t know how I feel about that right now but okay…there’s some background. There is also a technerd/business piece coming up later in the week about vendor lock in but for now, it’s actually today’s experience in trying to buy applications for the phone. I’m not short of applications.

When I bought the iPhone in November, I really didn’t expect to do that much with it beyond a) use it to phone people b) use it to check my email c) use it to occasionally browse the internet in dial-up land and d) use it to send text messages.

In terms of the applications I bought for it when I got it, most of them were photography related because at heart, I am a photographer. I’ve used DSLR Remote once and Photoshop for the iPhone twice and that’s really it for the iPhone and the photography toys.

The glamour toys that come with the phone, the video and the camera, well I’ve not used the video camera at all – not yet anyway although I suspect it could have a use for some photography projects I have – and I’ve barely used the camera, despite its fantastic 3MP. Today I was looking for organiser software.

It’s not that I don’t like the Calendar application that comes with the phone, you understand. It’s just there’s this feature that Google Calendar has that allows you to load several calendars into a single view. I have a busy and complicated life. I’d like to be able to sort events in some respect that separates out my private life, my work life, my financial stuff and various and assorted items like that. Despite a lot of googling and hunting through the Apps store I couldn’t find anything that was exactly that.

You could argue that perhaps I could just you know, use Google Calendar via the Google App but I don’t want to. It may seem irrational, but I’d rather keep my calendar stuff local to me rather than stored on a server owned by someone that I’ve no really obvious financial stake in. Given that the primary reason that I was looking for a multi-calendar function involves organising some financial details and tracking direct debits and stuff, I’m particularly unwilling to farm that data out to anywhere else.

But I didn’t want it tainted by task or to-do lists. I get integrated task and todo lists with GroupWise nearly 10 years ago and they wrecked my head. The place I need to-do lists most is at work and I organise them via blogging software and a notepad. It works for me. Not only that, at least 2 of the applications that handled calendar filtering seemed to involve storing data on a remote server not owned by me so see what I had to say about Google Calendar for that.

So I gave up on the calendar front and found two separate applications to handle two of the items that I had an interest in tracking on my iPhone, namely a calendar driven financial manager which may or may not work out okay – I’ll start dealing with it over the next few days – and something called iP.

If you search the iPhone App store for calendars, a fair number of the first 25 or so are period related calendars. If you’re a guy, you’re either going to ignore this, go slightly pale or think, what a great idea. I’m interested to see how this one works in practical terms. It has to be better than the back of my personal journal which is what I’ve been using hitherto. You also find a bunch of calendars that enable you to predict when you can get pregnant. You won’t find one that does exactly what I need.

It’s frustrating when something like that happens; ultimately, a good response would be to see if I can write one myself, then you have to get it accepted and right now I haven’t time to sit down and work out how to write stuff in Cocoa, how I’m going to test it because I’m not jailbreaking the phone I have. All that’s for another evening.

Leaving aside the new calendar applications when I need to get working correctly, a couple of applications are standing out as being particularly useful or well designed,

1. Daft.ie’s location based property search is great. It picks up houses possibly in a wider radius than it claims but I’m not complaining because it’s giving me back the information that I have to go through a bit of picking a searching to pick out on their website. If you are house hunting, this is a treat.
2. Echofon is my client of choice for twitter.
3. Radio IO’s iPhone player is really nice.
4. MPORA’s client for accessing their site is pretty groovy also
5. I like Maps also but I think I need to look at it in more detail.

Your iTunes stuff. It works. Most of the time I think it’s great.

When I am signed into my account and redeeming gift vouchers please do not demand I re-enter my account information again. Why the hell should I have to when I am already signed in? Yes, I know I need an account to redeem but I AM ALREADY SIGNED IN.

Also, are your voucher codes case sensitive? The assumption that they are together with your infantile insistance on me re-entering my account information caused me to have to reset my password today.

In other words, not altogether user friendly as experiences go.

regards

wnb

I haven’t taken any photographs or blocked it yet or anything like that – uhem – but I finished working the cardigan yesterday.

It’s looking really nice. However, I appear to have an adequate amount of yarn left to do…another one. But the second one I need to do has to be in a different colour so….

What did I find hard? NOt much. I had a mental blip finishing off the edging and failed to read the instructions correctly and I found the sleeves a little harder than expected. But all told, the pattern itself was easy to follow so I am really happy with how it’s turned out. Hopefully I’ll be wearing it by the weekend.

Photographs to follow.

I don’t often have television on but this evening, I happened on something called Discovering the Elements on BBC4. It caught my attention because I like chemistry and I like the history of scientific discovery.

In particular, the development of the Periodic Table of the Elements fascinated me when I was about 15 years old so episode 1 is particularly fascinating.

From what I can see on the BBC science page, it looks like this is a three part series. I am not sure what’s coming up next but I am looking forward to it.

Sometimes television is actually worth something.