tomorrow ireland gets a new taoiseach (prime minister), brian cowen and he will meet gordon brown at some stage in the near future.

for that meeting some paper somewhere will have the photo caption / headline: “how now brown cowen”

i left ireland around the time enda kenny become leader of fine geal (the second largest political party) so i never really saw much of him on television. most of my irish news gathering comes from listening to the radio. i just saw this video of him on youtube talking about a policy that his party had (basically “if we get into power and we dont do all these things - i will resign”). something very odd about him. it has the feel of a comedy sketch.

“the big dig will start in about 2 years time, the city centre will be dug up with the new metro and luas lines”

said by frank fahey (member of the irish parliament and head of the transport committee) on today fm (i heard it through the rail users ireland podcast). the phrase “the big dig” scared me, the history of tunnelling in dublin scares me as well as the thought that frank probably thinks that doing anything is better than doing nothing or putting thought into what is done before doing it.

there was a fascinating show on rte radio 1 over the last few years called “what if…” that dealt with what might have happened in irish history if something didnt happen - like if trams werent taken off the streets of dublin in the late 1950s, “if there was no miserable irish childhood”, if the irish electoral system was different, if cricket was irelands national game and so on.

the latest series is available via podcast with the preceeding series available as streaming audio.

“what if the trams were kept”: real audio link

waiting to leave ireland. some photos online (more to come when i get back home to helsinki in a few weeks). but for now, [2007.07 ireland: flickr set].

next stop - copenhagen.

irish people, go here and look, then go there and have a look. its on when im at home too. which is nice.

tonight in helsinki placebo play a concert. 602 people going to that concert have joined the concerts event page on last fm.

as of right now last.fm has 36,658 members in finland (population of 5,2 million) - ireland has 6,072 members (population of 4,1 million)

tonight in ireland the votes are being counted. rté is providing an sms update service for each of the 43 constituencies - on average it would cost the user up to 3,75€ per constituency to recieve updates.

on the other hand irishelection.com is using twitter to provide their own sms update service - seems to be going well - 60ish followers (as of now its only been updated once in about an hour or so - an eternity in the world of election countings). it did take some hunting around on the irishelection.com site to get the actual link (i had to follow three pages of stuff like “go to our twitter page” to actually get to the link for the twitter link”). this service is free for the user.

currently downloading the latest firmware for my phone. i was looking at my operators website just now and i see that my ongoing phone activity for the month has already the current download in the list. i noticed aswell that so far this month (12 days) i have downloaded 220mb or so on my mobile phone - thats in jaiku traffic, internet, shozu/flickr uploading and the afore mentioned firmware update. the cost for all this is 9,95euros (that includes unlimited data transfer at 128kbs, 1000sms and 1000mms).

the same data transfer on an equivilant phone (monthly bill on o2) in ireland would be 1100€ (they charge 5€ per 1mb transfer). (vodafone works out at 425€ for 225mb transfer). is there something i am missing?

worst thing about this time of year is that the (eugh) “irish blogosphere” turns into a “please vote for me in the irish blog awards” free for all. its everywhere.

(worst thing = its annoyed me for a grand total of about 7 minutes over the last month or two.)