Archive for October 2nd, 2007
Monster have a new PR Campaign
Not to jump on the bandwagon (or is it blogwagon) but things are getting interesting in the Irish blogsphere at the moment over a spam email sent from a Monster employee to all the members of IT@cork. I’m not going to publish the guys name just in case he rings me and leaves a voice mail threatening legal action.
From looking at the various blogs following this issue, it looks like the guy took all of the email addresses from the IT@Cork member list that had been published on their site and then sent a bulk email leaving each of the email addresses exposed to everyone. The monster employee seemed oblivious to legal implications of his actions. As Tom points out he could be facing a fine of over half a million euro:
The Irish Data protection Commissioner takes a very dim view of this and has the power to levy fines of up to €3,000 per address spammed (so potentially €570,000 in this case).
The strangest thing I find in all of this is that the monster employee would have been happy if his name was replaced with someone else’s name!!! I am presuming that this was a nervous slip of the tongue and he did not actually mean to say that. I think the best approach in a situation like this is to hold your hands up in the air and admit what you did was wrong. I would be very interested to see on what legal grounds the monster employee can try to get the blog post removed as he has threatened.
The comments on Michele’s post about this are pretty entertaining. It seems another Monster employee started to leave comments on this and then say that he is not a Monster employee, even after a reverse lookup of his IP address says different. I wonder what will be the outcome of all of this?
UPDATE: Monster have sent Tom an email apologising for the email sent and have asked for ways they can make this right. Just asking a question like that would put my trust back in Monster.
Leo Varadkar has lost my vote…
Posted by Stephen Downey in irish, leo varadkar, politics, questions and answers, rte on October 2, 2007
I wouldn’t normally post about anything political but I felt pretty strongly about a TV show I was at last night. I was in the audience for RTE’s Questions and Answers on what was a very good show. I was very happy to see David Norris there as he is always extremely entertaining. This also happened to be the first time I saw Leo Varadkar speak live. I live in Leo’s constituency and would always have given Leo my number one vote as I thought he did a lot in the area and seems to be on top of all the local issues. As it happened, I wasn’t actually able to give him my vote as I was actually taken off the voting resister before the last election. That issue has since been resolved and I am back on the register.
So why would I not vote for Leo any more? Up until now I thought this man was about the issues and hoped that when he got elected that he would be able to push the Government on the issues that count. Instead what I see is someone that is trying to get as many sound bites in an attempt to raise his profile as a new TD. The only comments that I heard from Leo last night were snide remarks but nothing constructive. This is not the type of person that I will be voting for in the future.
At this stage I really don’t care what happened with Bertie all those years ago. Let the Mahon tribunal decide if any of it effected the planning process and get on with running the country.