thomas fitzgerald.net

(Image Courtsey of iStock Photo)

For several years now I’ve heard the horror stories of the Irish medical system. The news is awash with tales of woe. The system, it is claimed is overburdened and underfunded, and the brunt of this is bore by Accident and Emergency (What in the US is referred to as the ER). It’s one of those things though you hear about but don’t pay too much attention to. It’s like when you see a disaster on the news happening in some foreign country. You feel bad for the people involved but you don’t really connect on a personal level. Until of course, it happens to you. Earlier this week I had the misfortune to experience the nightmare the Irish hospital system has become, and I can tell you now, it’s as bad as you’ve heard.

Last week I had the good fortune to spend some time away from soggy Ireland, and travelled to the Big Apple for a weeks vacation. As an avid Mac user and all round Apple fan, I couldn’t help but notice a few distinctly Apple flavored things while I was there. Of course being from a small country town in Ireland originally, I always find it overwhelming when I go to New York and this time was no different. Fortunately my first day there also happened to be my birthday, and my Girlfriend took me to the very lovely Boathouse restaurant in the middle of central park for a birthday lunch. On the way back we stopped in the Apple Store in fifth avenue to pick up a copy of snow leopard. I have been in the 5th avenue store before, but every time I can’t help but be blown away by the crowds that visit the place. You can barely move in the store with the throngs. When you consider that only a few years ago Apple was considered to be on dearths door as a company, and to have gone from that to being one of the busiest attractions on one of the busiest streets in one of the busiest cities in the world really is truly remarkable.

I wrote a few weeks ago that I had left my full time job to go work as a freelance. Part of the reason for that was so that Id have more time to work on my own projects, including writing on this blog and working on my photography. I find myself running into one of the all time bugbears of self work – motivation, or more importantly lack thereof. This is a common problem for people working for themselves. You go through slumps every now and again. For me, I find that the problem is often not that I don’t want to do anything, but that I want to do lots of things, and by the time I figure out what I want to do at any particular time the humor is gone off me.

Goodbye 2008. Hello 2009. Wishing you all the best wherever you are.

From The Irish Times:

DETAILED INFORMATION on the web pages people view will be retained for possible future criminal investigations if telecommunications operators comply with a letter from the Garda Commissioner.

The request for real-time web-browsing information – the content or the web address (URL) of every web page browsed by users of mobile handsets, palmtop devices or 3G modems – goes beyond the European Union’s data retention directive, which the Government intends to implement as a statutory instrument.

Such a measure would cover the content of web-based email. “The directive does not pertain to the retention of content, and this would be very concerning,” said Deputy Data Protection Commissioner Gary Davis.

Here are some amazing pictures of the new president elect from boston.com taken throughout the campaign. Absolutely stunning photographs.

A very interesting article from the BBC on why, when the term “Average” is bandied about in statistics, the results aren’t always what you’d expect or representative of what you would perceive as normality. For example:

What’s the average number of feet? No, not two. The answer is slightly less. Think about it. This is because the average can be pulled to one side by the influence of a tiny minority of people, in this case, the small number who have fewer than two feet.

[Read BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Just what is average?]

Good article from the BBC about the UK Police Force harassing innocent photographers.