Hey Fianna Fáil – leave Conor Casby alone
In an astonishing display of naiveté by someone in the upper echelons of the Government/Fianna Fáil party they have managed to draw an enormous amount of attention to the Conor Casby painting fiasco.
Approximately 3 weeks ago two paintings were hung – apparently without permission – in the RHA and National Gallery of Ireland. The paintings were caricatures – nude head and torso – of An Taoiseach Brian Cowen.
Last monday evening RTÉ news ran a report on the 9 o’clock TV news on these paintings which included several visual shots of the paintings. The broadcaster subsequently issued an apology on Tuesday’s evening news and removed the clip in question from its website.
Today it emerged that Will Hanafin, a presenter on the Today FM radio show which had some correspondence with the artist, Conor Casby, and read out a statement from him on Tuesday morning, had received a visit from a Garda detective who was conducting an investigation into the artist on three charges: incitement to hatred, indecency and criminal damage – for hammering a nail into the wall of the National Gallery. He said that the detective had seemed very embarrassed to be there but was determined to continue as “the powers that be want action taken.” The Gardaí were apparently intent on pursuing this, to the extent that when Today FM refused to hand over correspondence between them and the artist, the detective said he would obtain a warrant requiring them to do so.
I can’t wait to see which judge signs off on that one.
Will also said that a Fianna Fáil spokesperson had confirmed to him that he had demanded an apology from RTÉ.
What gobshite in Fianna Fáil thinks that this is a sensible way to deal with a piece of satire?
TD Michael Kennedy was on Matt Cooper’s drivetime show The Last Word on Today FM this evening making a complete arse of himself waffling on about how it was disgraceful and offensive that this was shown on RTÉ news. He wasn’t blinkered enough to say that this was a good use of police time – although Matt Cooper had to ask him about 5 times to drag that out of him – but he managed to do an extremely good job of taking himself, his party and a cartoon painting entirely too seriously.
Fianna Fáil, get your heads out of your arses, issue an apology to Conor Casby – who voluntarily accompanied the Gardaí to make a statement in Pearse St. Garda station – and tell people like Michael Kennedy to say nothing from now on. The only thing you have achieved by pursuing the matter in this fashion is to ensure that it gets worldwide publicity.
As if we didn’t have enough to be embarrassed about.
Whoops, time to send the Gardaí round
ICAI investigating director’s loans and other matters at Anglo Irish
The Chartered Accountants Regulatory Board issued a statement yesterday that they have appointed John Purcell, former Comptroller and Auditor General to investigate the actions of directors at Anglo Irish Bank.
Sean Fitzpatrick, David Drumm and William McAteer who all resigned in the fallout after the disclosure of unethical activities regarding directors’ loans and unusual lending practices at the bank are all members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland.
The appointment of a Special Investigator follows from the determination of the Complaints Committee at its meeting in January 2009 that the issues under consideration constituted a matter of public concern as per Bye-Law 71 of the ICAI Bye-Laws.
The special investigator will also be examining the performance of Ernst & Young, auditors to Anglo Irish Bank, in relation to the loans given by the bank to Sean Fitzpatrick.
This is an extremely necessary action by the self-regulating Institute in order to protect its professional reputation and that of its members.
Ulick McEvaddy – Anglo investors were “heroes”…haha good one Ulick
This has got to be a joke – Ulick McEvaddy, the successful Omega Air Inc co-founder, Fine Gael supporter and Libertas donator said on RTE Radio today that the the 10 individuals who were loaned €451 million by Anglo Irish Bank to buy its shares – a transaction which would have nicely boosted protected its share price by not allowing 75 million shares being offloaded by Seán Quinn to hit the market all at once– were ‘heroes’ supporting the Irish Economy.
He went on to say that he’d have also participated in the share purchase transaction had he been invited.
Heroes on a handout
No shit Ulick. If someone came up to me and said “Hey buddy, want to borrow some money to buy shares in us? By the way, if the shares tank, don’t worry about paying back the money…we just want to make our share price look good” I think I might just have accepted.
Yes, these people have NO obligation to repay more than 25% of the money…other than a moral one. The bank loaned them money to buy shares in itself…and it was securing the loan itself because the shares were the security for 75% the loan….if the share value went up the investors could just keep repaying the loan, confident that the shares are worth more than they’re paying for them. If the share price drops they can just stop paying and walk away with no legal obligation to pay off the loan.
But the share price would never drop, right?
As it stands, the investors have repaid €83 million, or 18.4% of the loan but says that it is “not optimistic about recovering the rest of the loans.”
Yet another mind-boggling event in the banana-banking industry in Ireland.
There still isn’t any reason for these people to be named though. The bank set up this ridiculous transaction, therefore the bank as an entity is to blame. Who takes responsibility for the actions of a corporate entity? The directors do, and to some extent the auditors (Ernst & Young).
And the Financial Regulator has finally realised that it has been misled by Anglo Irish…ya think?
Why are the executives being allowed to leave the ship
On Wednesday the chairman of Irish Nationwide, Michael Walsh, resigned…at a time when he believes “It is clear to me that Irish Nationwide Building Society cannot survive without reorganisation and significant Government support.” He was just the latest in the line of top executives to leave the ship when it starts sinking, including Denis Casey, Peter Fitzpatrick and David Gantly from Irish Life & Permanent, and the ringleaders at Anglo Irish, Sean Fitzpatrick, David Drumm and Lar Bradshaw.
These people got us all into this mess – why are they just allowed to walk away when the shit hits the fan? They should be forced to stay and work night and day until they sort this situation out.
Let them sit in a national government
Enda Kenny is doing us no favours shouting in the Dáil for this and that. Shouting does no good at this point. We all know that the government are utterly incompetent and probably as lacking in integrity and morals as the bankers who are in the spotlight at the moment.
The opposition have been shouting for years, and have evidently accomplished utterly nothing by doing so. Lets see what they can do when they all have to shoulder the responsibility together.
A general election is the last damn thing we need at the moment. We need unity, decision and strong leadership. We need a firm plan to get us out of this, and the steadfastness to stick to it. Unfortunately this sort of action is inconceivable to the party in power at the moment because they fear the outcry by the people who kept them in power.
We’re all going to suffer financially no matter what happens. Make the hard decisions and for fucks sake get on with it and do it before there’s nothing left to salvage.
Updated on the 21st because there were some inaccuracies regarding the loans for purchase of shares and to give a wee bit more info on the man Ulick.
Anglo Irish Bank, Irish Life & Permanent and the magical mystery money-go-round
The farce continues:
Revelations yesterday that the €7 billion deposit by a subsidiary of Irish Life & Permanent, Irish Life Investment Managers, with Anglo Irish Bank shortly before Anglo’s financial year end which was then withdrawn just after the year end in order to make Anglo’s deposit base look healthier had in fact originated in a loan from Anglo to IL&P brought the latest round of scandal within the Irish banking sector to new heights.
This is nothing less than a complete fabrication of the bank’s financial position and is massively misleading to shareholders and potential investors, not to mention highly dubious in terms of the deposit-to-loan ratio guidelines imposed by the Financial Regulator.
Once again this is the sort of activity which external auditors are supposed to expose.
Ernst & Young, Anglo Irish Bank’s auditors, have shown themselves to be guilty of gross incompetence and negligence, and when the fallout of this situation accrues to the people who were in charge (and it must if we are to have any hope of regaining our credibility as a country and as a global business) at Anglo at the time – Sean Fitzpatrick, David Drumm, Donal O’Connor, Lar Bradshaw et al – and the directors at IL&P who are currently in a crisis meeting, some of the blame must pass to Ernst & Young and possibly also to KPMG who are auditors to IL&P.
Edit: In fairness to KPMG, as IL&P’s financial year follows the calendar one, they can’t really be held to blame for this as this event probably wouldn’t have yet come under their scrutiny.
Round & round the garden, like a teddy bear
So just how much money do Irish banks have on deposit?
This is the question which arises as a result of the disclosure yesterday that the Financial Regulator (motto: hey, better late than never!) and the government-appointed auditors are investigating transitory deposits at Anglo Irish Bank.
It has emerged that Irish Life & Permanent deposited €7 billion with Anglo Irish Bank shortly before Anglo’s financial year end, then withdrew these deposits immediately after the year end, roughly 10 days later. This amount equates to roughly 8% of their total deposit base.
What this does is make the bank’s deposit-to-loan ratio look healthier than is actually the case, as it entirely misrepresents the hard cash carried by the bank.
According to IL&P:
During a period of unprecedented turmoil in global financial markets there was an acceptance that financial institutions would seek to provide each other with appropriate support where possible
It is absolutely disgraceful that the directors of the bank carried on this sort of behaviour, and for the auditors of either bank to claim that they had no knowledge of the activity is beyond belief. For the record, Ernst & Young who are Anglo’s auditors have already disavowed knowledge of similar shady practices by Sean Fitzpatrick, the former Chairman. The auditors to Irish Life & Permanent are KPMG.
One has to wonder just how many other banks have availed of this back-scratching relationship. It is scary to consider how badly this sort of banana-republic banking will affect our already seriously damaged reputation globally.
Microsoft’s response to Google Apps
Last month I wrote about the costs of outsourcing email versus hosting it in-house, and followed on to have a look at how Google offer very low-cost solutions for a basic web presence.
Microsoft are fighting back with their Office Live Small Business offering. They will let you host a website for you, provide you with hosted email and even give you a free domain (for the first year, or two years if it’s a .co.uk) if you sign up…for the low-low cost of €0 – for 1 year.
There is some small print, among which is the gem that you’ll be looking at ads in your email unless you want to pay to remove them – much like Google Apps, the collaboration tools don’t scale as cheaply as Google’s do and the webspace provided free is utterly hopeless compared to the big G’s offering, but this is still a respectably low-priced software-as-a-service product.
It’ll be interesting to see what sort of uptake they get.
Irish banks – why is the Government persisting with recapitalisation?
On Saturday the AIB and Bank of Ireland agreed to the Government’s recapitalisation plan. Under the terms of this agreement each bank will receive an immediate investment from the Government of €3.5 billion in the form of preference shares.
€7 billion…cha-ching!
These shares will not carry an equity stake but will require an annual interest payment of €280 million to the Government by each bank. The Government will then have the option to buy a 25% ordinary share interest in each bank at the current market share prices.
It is actually quite a good deal for the Government, as the banks are currently massively undervalued, and although they do carry a not insignificant loan-to-deposit ratio (AIB’s is lower than BOI’s), barring a catastrophic occurrence several magnitudes beyond what we have seen in the past 18 months, shares in both banks should be worth significantly more in 5 years than they are now, so the Government will be effectively short-buying (probably not the correct term).
A solution to a different problem
One must wonder why the government is doing this though. The basic thrust of the plan is to get more money circulating in our economy.
The idea is that if the banks have more cash they can lend that cash to Irish businesses in the form of credit…who can expand operations/employ more people who can spend more on goods and services…which increases businesses’ profits so they can expand and employ more people and generates a higher tax take for the government and we all live happily ever after.
When people aren’t spending money the tax take drops, retailers and the service industries suffer, employers start tightening their belts and trimming the workforce and everything goes to shit.
So that’s a slight oversimplification…but there are people who can explain this far better than I and it’s not the point of this post.
AIB in particular have been saying that even if they have more capital they are not going to increase lending. Charlie McCreevy, our wunderkind of the Celtic feline warned today that governments are attaching too many conditions – not pay cuts for executives, but rules forcing them to lend to Irish businesses at the expense of foreign ones – to capital aid will force protectionism among our neighours. For a country as dependant on Foreign Direct Investment as Ireland (€131 billion), that would be a disaster.
The banks are also being pressured by the Financial Regulator to reduce their loan-to-deposit ratio – this means that they need to have a higher proportion of cash on deposit to the loans that they are giving than is currently the case.
You’ve loaned too much you naughty bankers…now loan us even more!
Radio talk shows and newspapers are full of people giving out about reckless lending. The banks themselves are beginning to accept that they lent too much and unwisely, although Robert Gallagher in this case blames ‘incomplete information’ rather than taking direct responsibility…who was providing that information Robert? Is it so difficult to admit you were wrong? (Our fantastic Fianna Fáil government thinks so).
Watch the bank balance sheets improve
Guess what’s going to happen to that cash? The banks are going to sit on it. This is not the solution to our problem, and it is going to compound the suffering of existing shareholders in the two banks in question by diluting their share interest, or forcing them to sell before the 5 year deadline to avoid that dilution.
(Apologies for the heavy reliance on the Irish Times)
Battlefield 1943 – AWESOME! (eh…not really)
When I heard today that EA were going to release Battlefield 1943 – 3 of the best maps from 1942 all souped up with the Bad Company physics engine – I was seriously excited.
Then I went and had a look at the trailer here…and I couldn’t get over how good it looked. Classic BF1942 action.
And then I read the small print and my heart sank.
24 players max? You’ve gotta be kidding me. EA what are you doing? What made the various incarnations of Battlefield great was the large-scale action. When you limit it to 12-a-side it removes so much of the dynamic, not to mention intimates much reduced versions of the original maps.
Boo
Bypassing the primary interface
At CES a couple of weeks ago, toymakers Mattel demonstrated a nearly-ready-for-production release of a toy which is operated simply by concentrating.
Telekenesis? Not exactly
This device claims to translate brain activity (measurable via EEG) into a command which controls a small fan…this fan blows a stream of air which lifts a light ball into the air. The ball can then be moved around a sort of obstacle course. All this movement is apparently triggered by how much the player is concentrating.
My first reaction was that it would probably be quite easy to fake this…just make the fan blow randomly and you’d probably achieve a sort of placebo effect, where people convinced themselves that it was their concentration which triggered the fan. I’d still love to get my hands on one to try it.
Straight to the core
A researcher (fellow) at MIT has developed a relatively inexpensive device which allows images to be projected directly onto a retina, thus allowing people who are blind as a result of afflictions such as hemorrhages to ‘see.’
The device can be connected to to devices such as cameras and computers. It is effectively a miniaturisation of a scanning laser opthalmoscope which has achieved massive savings in terms of cost of production and size due to the development in technologies such as LEDs, which have replaced the laser in the original device.
Our methods and channels of interaction are changing
For the last few decades the speed of communication has been increasing at a much accelerated rate compared to the decades of the early 20th century.
The telegraph instigated the move to binary storage and transmission of data, but the same input/output channels were utilised – fingers which previously wrote now tapped keys, eyes which read letters on paper now read letters on screens, ears which listened to sound still listen to sound, albeit transferred through a different medium such as VOIP, and vocal cords are still used to generate that sound.
There have been some recent evolutions, such as voice transcription systems, and text-to-voice transcoders, but nothing which truly stepped outside established channels.
Now we have (if it’s not a hoax) a system which can translate brain activity – thoughts in their base form – into action in the world around us. Yes, this current implementation is barely more than an on/off switch, but it opens up the realms of possibility. Suddenly, controlling devices by thinking doesn’t seem impossible.
Imagine the combination of an evolution of these two devices – a paraplegic could ‘think’ into a computer, which could then create an image of that text and project it onto the retina of a deaf & blind person. It is an extreme scenario, but think of the possibilities it represents in terms of data communication, and the boundaries which it crosses.
Quickbooks – disable close button on application window
Quickbooks, while it is a very nice integrated accounting package, has long had a major usability flaw – it is very easy to accidentally close Quickbooks.
When its internal windows – reports, registers etc – are maximised the button to close the internal window sits directly inside the Close button on the application window…much like in Excel:
Closed the program by accident…again
Unfortunately it is very easy to click the main application Close button instead of the internal window one. The first time you do this the program asks you if you’re sure you want to exit. If you tick the “Do not ask me again” box when answering this question, there is no way to re-enable the dialog (re-installing isn’t an option due to the difficulty of getting licenses for older versions of Quickbooks from Intuit).
This is more of a problem on older versions of Windows where the application Close button was identical to the internal one, but even on XP and later we had a frequent issue with people in the office getting frustrated because they closed the application by accident. When you’re running on old hardware and you’ve got a company file open which has hundreds of thousands of transactions, generating reports can take upwards of 15 minutes. Losing all that because one has accidentally clicked the wrong button is frustrating.
Searching the various user forums found several people citing the same issue, but with no resolution. Digging through the XML in various settings files didn’t turn up the option either.
It appears that Intuit may be fixing this in Quickbooks 2009, but they still don’t explicitly say that you can re-enable the option.
Solved by a script
So I looked at a couple of different options, but the only one which I had the confidence to attempt was to disable the generic Windows application Close button. The only scripting language I have much experience of is AutoHotKey.
This script polls for the existence of Quickbooks application windows every 5 seconds, and if one exists, calls the appropriate dll and removes the Application Menu Close option and button from the window, if it hasn’t already been removed.
It has only been tested on Windows versions up to XP, and on Quickbooks versions up to 2006, but as long as the Quickbooks developers don’t decide to change the (bizarre) name of the Quickbooks app class – MauiFrame – it should continue to work for newer versions of the software.
Its not the most elegant solution, but it works, and the users in our office, particularly some of the less technologically inclined ones, were very grateful for it.
Get the .exe here (codeplex isn’t the most appropriate place to host it but I don’t have anywhere else just now) and place it in the Startup folder. The source code is here – open it in any text editor.
