If this sounds like a re-run of the problems Sony encountered that’s because to all intents and purposes, it is. I’m not a gamer, I bought one game using Steam, Half Life 2. There was no reason why I should have left my credit card details with them and yet I’m sure they structured their service so that I did without thinking too hard about it. In fact it makes less sense that I left my credit card details with Valve than if I left them with the staff of my local bookshop where I make many more purchases in a year than I ever will from Valve or even with the butcher up the road.

So this morning I’m sitting down and trying to draw up a list of the sites and services that have my credit card details and I’m a little shocked at myself. Not that these sites aren’t trustworthy, it’s more the case that there is no compelling reason for me to have given these companies permission to keep this information.

So this morning, having been told to monitor my credit cards by a company I made one or two purchases from my advice is to do a personal data census:

Who has your credit card details and why?

Ticketmaster? Amazon? Play.com? Web hosting companies? Cinema websites?

The movie Atlas Shrugged is opening this weekend. The book came out in 1957 and it was absolutely panned by critics.

Some of the readers didn’t like the criticism. Here’s one such response:

November 3, 1957:

To the Editor:

Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. Mr. Hicks suspiciously wonders “about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,168 pages and some fourteen years of work.” This reader wonders about a person who finds unrelenting justice personally disturbing.

Alan Greenspan, NY

Yes, this is real.

If we could figure out how to make societies run like the socialist camping trip, we would rejoice.

Yes, that’s quite out of context. Jason Brennan tackles G.A. Cohen.

So some random thanks to:

Friends: The one’s who’ve slept on my floor, whose floor I’ve slept on. The ones I’ve eaten with, heard music with, seen plays with, walked and talked and drank with. You were great.

Twitter: Your torrent of tweets describing meals in restaurants, hangovers and puns on film titles at first annoyed but then amidst the scratched together words of people’s quotidian observation there was both scattered pearls of fruitful thoughts, the crossings of paths, solutions sought and rendered, a measure of the tidal surges of anger and joy, and distraction when it was needed.

Ice cream in Beirut, orange juice in Shatila: After walking the Corniche in August heat, chatting, with a part-lame friend, that ice cream near Hamra street will live forever. There’s a a corner of a foreign tongue that will remain forever Beiruti ice cream. In second place might be an orange juice in Shatila and several Almazas supped in Adma and elsewhere.

Border friends: The Syrian lady from Hull who helped me at the border crossing into Syria when my passport disappeared. The French couple who exchanged dollars into Syrian pounds for me when I got the bus out of Syria without realising there was an exit tax. The bus driver who kept moving slightly but didn’t drive off when it turned out the Syrian border guards had screwed up my visa and insisted on shouting at me in Arabic. Syrian border guards for not just taking all my money off me.

Beach House: Songs from Teen Dream in Whelans, more at Primavera; summoning up those spooked hearts and pushing at the veil of love. Plenty of music this year worthy of shout outs, but I’ll stick with just one

Coffee: Where would I be without you? Sleeping soundly, but you eclipsed tea in twenty ten. So I think I’ll give you thanks and maybe become pals again with tea.

Verbs: You make things happen. More of you in 2011.

Soy sauce: I don’t need to explain my thanks to soy sauce.

The Atlantic ocean, when I get as far as you I’m home.

America is the world’s leading exporter of both regular and irregular verbs.

FROM: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, a research paper availabe here  http://www.librarian.net/wp-content/uploads/science-googlelabs.pdf [PDF]

Here’s to a bloggier 2011.

The Kitsune Noir blog have a really excellent series where they post up new wallpaper for your computer screen regularly. The latest is lovely. They have it in sizes for all you computer needs, from PSP and iPhones up to full HD screens. Go check out the Desktop Wallpaper Project!

Well that was what appeared on RTE this week during the coverage of Irish league soccer. The third time they gave us the guests names they couldn’t come up with a factoid for Colm Foley beyond his fascination with space travel? Lordy…

Stop beating around the bush, just nationalise it. That way you don’t have to pump in the potential black hole in cash, you can just assume ultimate responsibility for the debts and allow the bank to operate as if it never had toxic assets, that is, making loans to those who are worthwhile. Then you can allow those debts that are assumed to be toxic to either unwind themselves over time without the bank going to the wall or you can shift them into a holding bank/ company.

Nationalising removes the legal obligation of the bank to the shareholders that would remain if the government attempted to “insure” the bad debts (as though the government can afford to do that at the moment). €340 million? Just buy the damn thing Lenihan, it would be in the best interests of bank customers and the taxpayers. This goes for BoI too.
Or that’s how I see it.

That building is Villa Nurbs. Cool as it is it’s the green streetlights that interest me. Hmm