James Galvin

With the amount of sports on at the moment, I picked a bad two weeks to go to America. Hundreds of TV channels, including dozens of dedicated sports channels, and 90% of them show nothing but college football.

In a country where 34.5 million people claim Irish heritage, I had expected it to be easier to find a place to watch the games. The Rugby World Cup is relatively easy to come by, since the Ireland games come standard with Setanta. I made it to the Hibernian Pub in Cary, North Carolina, to watch us blindly stumble their way past Namibia, and I’m happy to say that I didn’t go out of my way to watch the Georgia game. There was nowhere within 300 miles that was showing the Euro 2008 qualifier vs Czech Republic… although I gather that may also have been a blessing in disguise.

The one game I could not afford to miss was on today, and I was surprised to find that Napper Tandy’s Irish Pub, in Raleigh, was showing the All Ireland Football Final. We paid $20 each to watch the game, surrounded by Kerry people. What a disaster. All credit to Colm Cooper - he is a class apart. It has been a rough few months for Irish sports, particularly for a Cork person. Hopefully we can show some spark against France on Friday.

One of the most effective ways to achieve anonymity online is by using TOR - the Onion Router. A minority of volunteers run servers which make the service possible. It is risky, because, if you run a server, it could be your IP that is logged when somebody does something illegal.

The TOR website has an abuse FAQ that asks “So what should I expect if I run a server?”. The answer they give is:

If you run a Tor server that allows exit connections (such as the default exit policy), it’s probably safe to say that you will eventually hear from somebody. Abuse complaints may come in a variety of forms. For example:

* Somebody connects to Hotmail, and sends a ransom note to a company. The FBI sends you a polite email, you explain that you run a Tor server, and they say “oh well” and leave you alone.

Alexander W. Janssen tells a different story:

I was arrested. They scared my wife. They consfiscated all my equippment. They stopped the investigation. I’m sitting on a pile of bills from my lawyer no one except me has to pay. I’ll sue for compensation, but I don’t think that this will lead anywhere. I’m now accused of something else.

The one stop shop for Irish politics on the web has just been relaunched . How it works: just install this plugin on your Wordpress site and it will automatically link every time you mention an irish politician. I like the way it brings together so many different perspectives. Politics in Ireland posts whatever the bloggers are saying, so any apparent bias stems from the consensus of the blogosphere.

Sinéad Gleeson is back with a flurry of activity this week. A lot of new music I’ll have to check out, and a good question here:

Has anyone, who isn’t born and bred here, ever managed to pull off a decent Irish accent

A good few comments but I don’t think anyone has really hit the nail on the head. The only one that springs to my mind is Daniel Day Lewis, but he is an Irish citizen with an Irish father.

Michael Arrington has announced the relaunch of a more localised Techcrunch, Techcrunch UK - sometimes referred to as Techcrunch UK & Ireland. It’s good to see a place which will bring more coverage to Irish tech news, but it is disappointing to see the owner (of all people) referring to it as “Techcrunch UK”. Yes, I’m being a bit picky about this, but I’ve seen it cropping up so often lately, it is not a good precedent to set. I have no problem with people lumping the UK and Ireland in together - it makes a lot of sense. But at least the likes of Yahoo UK & Ireland give us our own subdomain!

Attention any Linux users having trouble with Totem: be careful of what information you submit in your bug reports!. (Well spotted, Killian)

A 22 game ban seems very lenient for this: