Month: November 2007

  • Science Week: What was the favourite invention from your childhood?

    To celebrate Science Week bloggers are being invited to talk about the effect that science has had in their lives through a range of topics – each day the organisers will reward the best post with a Nintendo Wii console. This post is one of my entries to the competition.

    “Q1 – What was the favourite invention from your childhood?”

    While I was born a few years after the creation of the Compact Disc and so grew up during the time that its prominence began to take hold, I’d have to say that my favourite invention during my childhood was its predecessor the Compact Cassette, or as they were usually called, the tape.

    For me, a tape was a unique source of entertainment with any number of uses. It was a way to capture and listen to a particular song of the moment from some radio station like Atlantic 252 (before it went crap, of course). It was a way of checking out some album a classmate was big into at a time when MTV was one pop-centric TV station and the internet had yet to be invented. It was a way of piecing together songs you loved in an attempt to create the ultimate mixed tape (which you soon got bored with and taped a new one over). Finally, with thanks to the microphone input on my family’s old tape deck, it was an opportunity to “broadcast” a radio chat show, which usually consisted of me interviewing my cousin, who played out some character or another, whenever he stayed over.

    Of course it wasn’t just about pretending to run a radio station. I quite fondly remember one occasion when my brother and I recorded an interview with my sister and then edited it to sound like she was saying funny things about herself – so for example we’d edit in one of us asking her if she smelled bad to which she would magically say ‘yes, I do’. This kind of stuff was both fascinating and hilarious at the time.

    I think it’s easy to overlook how revolutionary the cassette tape was but that chances when you realise how inaccessible music was before the tape hit the mass-market. Portable audio was confined to FM radio players and the closest thing to a home-made compilation was to manually swap records around after each song.

    There were plenty of things that frustrated me about tapes too, although they formed such an integral part of the process that they’ve now become part of the fuzzy nostalgia I feel for the invention.

    I smile when I think about having to put cello-tape over the top of the cassette to cover the tab (that had been pushed in to stop it being recorded over). I laugh when I remember sitting like a dog in front of the tape deck with my finger over one button or another, waiting for a song to start or end so I could get a completely uninterrupted recording of it. I feel a mischievous pang of guilt when I think about the times I’d swipe one of my parent’s tapes that I knew they never listened to, just so I could record another ultimate compilation. And I can’t help but chuckle at the hi-tech way in which you would know if your batteries were running low on your Walkman (basically the tape’s speed would start to slow down and the singer’s voice would start to get slower and deeper).

    Of course there’s no doubt that CDs were worth the upgrade, likewise DAPs. But both have their limitations and neither have the ceremony to them that cassette recording did. There’s nothing wrong with that, I guess, but what is a little bit sad is that while the great format of vinyl has found a constant following despite its imperfections the cassette tape has not and is now all but dead.

    Some more of today’s entries: Simon, Conor, David, Catherine, Joe, Kevin, Joe, Paul (leave a comment if you have an entry you want added)


  • Tribune still losing money, albeit slightly less than before

    The Sunday Tribune has been on financial life support for some time now and talk of its impending demise has been as frequent as that of The Progressive Democrats’. That said the company’s latest accounts, as detailed in The Irish Examiner, are going to do very little to improve the perception that it has no future.

    The numbers speak for themselves:
    The company lost €2.6m in 2006 (which is an improvement on the 2005 figure of €3.3m)
    Another loan was required from 29.9% shareholder IN&M, this time for €587,000
    The Tribune owes around €13m to IN&M in total, at an interest rate of 8%

    As Ian Guider’s article points out those figures equate to a loss of around €50,000 a week, that’s a loss of 71c for every Tribune newspaper sold.

    The company are remaining bullish, expecting profitability in 2007. But with the company continuing to lose readers and with two years of cost cutting measures only reducing losses rather than ending them, it has to be asked how such an outcome is realistic.

    So it hasn’t been the best month for the newspaper so far and rumours of its demise are sure to remain for the foreseeable future.

    What makes things worse is that while the board must find a way to turn a profit it must also rely on IN&M continuing to find its vital investment in the company worthwhile; management is sure to be hoping that Denis O’Brien’s continuing pressure doesn’t result in any “rationalisation” of company shareholdings at Independent House.


  • A threat to democracy?

    Fine Gael’s Dr. James Reilly has demanded that RTÉ tell all about the decision to drop Dr. James Crown from last Friday’s Late Late Show which is shaping up to be the story of the week.

    Crown is an outspoken critic of the Government’s cancer care policy and was stopped from appearing on the programme after a decision was made by someone above the programme’s staff. Allegations are now doing the rounds that RTÉ was contacted by the Government and ‘advised’ not to let Crown appear.

    Bertie Ahern has said that he is not aware of any Government figure contacting the station, a statement which will do little to calm things. James Reilly said that if the Government pressured the broadcaster into such a decision it would amount to censorship and be bad for Irish democracy.

    That seems like a bit of a dramatic statement to make, however as with many State broadcasters RTÉ’s coverage of current affairs carries a level of trust and gravitas amongst the public that commercial alternatives do not.

    What is sure to enhance the issue is the fact that the TV licence fee is currently being reviewed by the Government.
    The Government was said to be debating a €2 or €4 rise in the fee over the last week or two but with an independent review body already suggesting that no increase was necessary, the Government has the freedom to leave things as they are until 2009 if they wish. Bosses at RTÉ, whom were looking for a rate rise, are sure to be aware of that.


  • Delevan story rolls on

    The Irish Times has picked up (subs required) on the sacking of Richard Delevan and has confirmed the rumour that Bill Tyson has quit his position in solidarity.

    It is suggested that management found the ‘tone’ of the Hooke & MacDonald article to be inappropriate and from there they decided to sack him. As with the recent Phoenix article a suggestion is made that Delevan was being considered for, or in this case was due to become, the newspaper’s Online Editor.

    However, the limited comments made by the newspaper’s editor Noirín Hegarty make it clear that the article is not the only piece of the jigsaw. As many have assumed, Delevan’s sacking seems to have come after a culmination of events; although whether it was a series of editorial issues or the culmination of a long-term personality or advertising/editorial clash is not made clear at this point.


  • Richard Delevan sacked from The Sunday Tribune

    As Damien has already pointed out, Richard Delevan has been sacked from his post at The Sunday Tribune, where he had been Business Editor for some time.

    The alleged reason for the sacking centres around an article Delevan wrote for yesterday’s Tribune, where he highlighted the case of a property auctioneer who could not sell his home. Apparently Ken MacDonald, of Hooke & MacDonald, took issue with Delevan’s work and the Tribune’s bosses agreed.

    MacDonald’s intriguing dilemma was first highlighted by A Random Walk, although tellingly their treatment of the issue is no longer available.

    The timing of Delevan’s forced departure is far from perfect for him, if ever such a time exists, and perhaps the complaint following the MacDonald article was seen internally as the last straw.

    Delevan is currently the “star” of another Phoenix article, this time focusing on accusations of bullying made by Ken Griffin. Griffin moved earlier this year to The Tribune from The Sunday Business Post where he had worked as a Sub-Editor and Journalist for somewhere in the region of two years.

    The article in Phoenix states that Griffin had to be given an office separate to Delevan due to the situation and that the newspaper had brought in an external bullying expert to investigate the claims made. He was to report his findings in the near future.

    As with most articles in Phoenix, it is completely unattributed and without quotes so knowing the source of this leak is next to impossible. If Griffin had been moved as a result of clashes with Delevan then it can be certain that many in the office knew there was something going on, however rumours are abound that the leak actually came from a senior figure in the newspaper rather than another journalist. If this is the case it is clear that Delevan, who has amassed a reputation for being abrasive and to-the-point, had failed to endeared himself to some in important positions and as such the writing for today’s turn of events may well have been on the wall for some time.

    What is perhaps most interesting about the Phoenix article, which naturally would have been written before the sacking, is its reference to a possible move by Delevan to the position of Online Editor at the Tribune. Delevan is well known for his progressive outlook in terms of online content and has been critical of The Tribune’s website on many occasions – it is likely that he expressed this view to management too and urged them to fix it on many occasions.

    If it is to be believed that the Phoenix article was a leak from a senior figure in the newspaper, this reference becomes far more important than the throw-away line given to it would suggest. Was this someone holding out some bait to encourage Delevan to start playing nice and toeing the company line or was it a taunt made to imply that he was about to be gifted the job but the damage done by the alleged bullying had cost him it?

    We’ll likely never know now.

    (Disclosure: Ken Griffin was working in The Sunday Business Post at the same time that I was doing regular shift-work there. He and I worked together on two occasions on features for the newspaper – one of which was on the CAO and another on environmentally friendly businesses. I have only spoken to Griffin once since then – in relation to one of these two articles – and Griffin has not been contacted by myself in relation to this issue, nor has he been in contact with me.)


  • Light and lively laptops (Buyers’ Guide, CiB, SBP – 4th Nov 2007)

    Today’s Computers In Business supplement of The Sunday Business Post features a buyers’ guide on laptops written by yours truly.

    The piece looks at some of the more useful laptop features available to business users and reviews some of the latest models from the big manufacturers.

    You can find the article here (for the next week anyway), or you can pick it up in your local shop all day today!