Thomil's Random Ramblings

Remember when the pandemic started? All of a sudden, working from home was everywhere, out of sheer necessity. After years of prevaricating about the issuer, it seemed like working from home was here to stay. Open-plan offices, the “industry standard” for decades, went from the default setting to seething cesspools of filth and infection, a status heretofore reserved for the newsrooms of Fox News or the Daily Mail. The birds were singing from the rooftops that, come the end of the lockdowns, all those shiny new office buildings that had been built in recent years would be reduced to empty husks, forlornly waiting for a new purpose. Yet, if you look at the news websites here in Cork, this is clearly not happening. Penrose Dock, where my own employer has their Cork office, is fully let. The two blocks of Navigation Square across the river are also nearly full following an announcement by NetApp earlier this year. Next door to Penrose Dock, Horgan’s Quay is filling up as well, with a sec...

Public Transport – It’s always a bit of a hot topic here in Ireland. Everyone seems to have an opinion on it, and it’s usually negative. I myself have hardly been a cheerleader of Irish public transport in the past. However, is that really the case? Is Ireland as bad with regards to public transport as everyone makes it out to be? Or is it hugely overblown, which wouldn’t be out of the question in a country whose public opinion vacillates between fire-and-brimstone damnation and unquestioning adulation, with no space for nuance or grey areas? A recent opinion piece in the Irish Times certainly would seem to suggest the latter. And while my first reaction as a long-suffering Bus Éireann passenger was to think that the “expert” quoted in that opinion piece had been hitting the paint thinner pretty hard, upon second reading, the article made some valid points. For example, the article correctly points out that Ireland kept up public transport funding during the pandemic, even increasing ...

There’s no way of putting it gently – Twitter, a social media platform that I’ve enjoyed for years despite its many problems, is in dire straits. Granted, the platform has always had a plethora of issues, but things have really started going down the drain ever since Elon Musk took over. The self-titled “chief twit” has turned out to be a major twat, acting with all the moral authority and subtlety of a Freddy Krueger or a Jason Vorhees. Many of the key staff have been fired, the company has stopped paying rent on many of its offices, oversight has been reduced to next to nothing and what’s worse, Elon the Muskrat has recently been embracing openly neofascist loons and conspiracy theorists. The results have been entirely predictable. Advertisers are fleeing in droves, users are jumping ship, and the platform itself has shown more and more signs of being unable to handle the load, with bugs and even outright outages becoming more and more frequent. It seems like it’ll only be a matter o...