Friday filings

TEMPLE BAR -- The biggest discovery I have made today is the presence of a free Eircom node in the heart of Temple Bar. Thanks to "Eircom 130", you get this blog post at no charge.

I had a quick read of several Irish broadsheets but only skimmed over the leading story about the quashed convictions in the Brian Murphy case. The legal system is not my forte. In Ireland, it favours the accused. Other tidbits:

• Pure Telecom has launched an all-Ireland broadband service.
• Rumours abound that Flickr will be bought out in a deal to be announced on 1 March.

  Google and Yahoo want to buy it outright, while venture capital firms are flooding it with all kinds of creative proposals. "We get four or five calls a week from VCs," says Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr with his wife, Caterina Fake.

• George Bush has discovered that Russian democracy differs from American democracy.
• Citizens from the EU accession states are going hungry in Ireland because they must live for two years in the State before getting social welfare. The current exhibition in Temple Bar Gallery & Studios makes this point.
• The Irish government launched Culture Ireland, an agency to promote Irish art overseas this week. Meanwhile, the Wexford Festival, one of Ireland's premier cultural events, is now outsourcing its music to Poland and its singing to Prague.
• Almost 50,000 immigrants from the 10 new states of the EU have come to Ireland since May 2004. A further 29,000 work permits were issued to forieng workers from outside the EU.
• Danny O'Brien writes about Ajax and Google Maps.
• Ryanair ordered another 140 Boeing aircraft in a deal valued at up to €6.8bn to support plans to carry 70m passengers and become Europe's biggest airline over the next seven years.
• TD John Deasy from Waterford received €110,000 in expenses last year but that reflects some 2003 reimbursements. My local TD earned €81,000 in expenses, the 15th highest in Ireland.

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Sent mail2blog using my Nokia 9500 on "Eircom 130", a Wi-Fi acess point in Temple Bar Square. I think this kind of filing will be pulled into the Yahoo directory within four days of posting, which is as fast as its indexing with Google.
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