Kevin Muldoon

A duck walks into a bar….
Got any bread..
Barman says no..
Got any bread .
No..
Got any bread .
No..
Got any bread.
No.we haven’t
Got any bread,
Ask me again and i’ll nail your freakin beak to the bar, you irritating bastard of a bird….
Got any nails?…
No!
Got any bread ?

This has been out for a while so you may have seen it. I saw this the other night and I couldn’t believe how crazy these guys are. These two French guys climed to the top of a crane and started doing pull ups.

I was getting vertigo just watching them!

I came across this cool flash tool called World Names. It shows you how popular your surname is across the world.

With my Surname, Muldoon, being of Irish descent, it was no surprise to me that the most Muldoons are in Ireland. The rest are in popular colonies of the UK ie. where most British have emigrated.

Heres my stats :

Country Frequency Per Million
IRELAND 273.25
AUSTRALIA 69.9
UNITED KINGDOM 46.98
CANADA 27.05
UNITED STATES 17.53
NEW-ZEALAND 10.73
SPAIN 0.63
ITALY 0.06
GERMANY 0.04

Top Regions
Area Name FPM
WEST , IRELAND 610.45
NORTH EAST , IRELAND 514.45
NORTHERN IRELAND , IRELAND 514.45
MIDLANDS , IRELAND 509.21
EAST , IRELAND 486.03
NORTH WEST , IRELAND 457.58
DONEGAL , IRELAND 359.17
NORTHERN IRELAND , IRELAND 359.17
NORTHERN IRELAND , UNITED KINGDOM 342.81
DUBLIN , IRELAND 237.41

Top Cities
City
BELFAST , NORTHERN IRELAND , UNITED KINGDOM
GLASGOW , SCOTLAND , UNITED KINGDOM
LIVERPOOL , NORTH WEST , UNITED KINGDOM
EDINBURGH , SCOTLAND , UNITED KINGDOM
MANCHESTER , NORTH WEST , UNITED KINGDOM
WISHAW , SCOTLAND , UNITED KINGDOM
MOTHERWELL , SCOTLAND , UNITED KINGDOM
BIRMINGHAM , WEST MIDLANDS , UNITED KINGDOM
COOKSTOWN , NORTHERN IRELAND , UNITED KINGDOM
ST HELENS , NORTH WEST , UNITED KINGDOM

I think this is an interesting tool as for most names it shows you where the name originated and where people emigrated to as well. The top cities shows my home town, my birth place, where I went to Uni too, where I lived and worked for a year and where my brother lives now. Freaky! haha

So how popular is your surname?

Link : How popular is your surname?

I’m not long back from Valencia but I’m away for the weekend to Belfast to stay with my brother and his wife. Belfast is a lot like Glasgow, only smaller.

The flight there is very wuick and easy too. It’s only about 35 minutes from Glasgow Prestwick. We did a tour of the city last time I was over but this time it’s probably going to be just drinking, eating and relaxing!

Hope you all have a good weekend

Kevin

In the UK the Inland Revenue looks after all the tax and VAT in the UK. They are probably the most understaffed organisation in the world. When I worked in Pensions a few years ago we had to occasionally get information from the Tax Office. It was not uncommon for replies to come a year later. I called up once expecting a quick response and got told there was a 6 month backlog and I shouldn’t expect anything soon! (this was around 2002).

As an individual my experiences with them have been even worse. The other year I moved to New Zealand to live with a while with friends. Before I went I told them I was leaving and so I had to submit my tax early and stop my national insurance contributions. I also had several questions about my tax, about what I was eligible to pay, what I wasn’t etc. I never got one response. I waited for ages on the phone and no one had any idea what to tell me. They all just said speak to your accountant but I didn’t feel like paying £500 just to get an answer to what, I suspected, was a very easy question.

Me and my friend started an online shop earlier this year and have been selling the odd thing through ebay every week since. Because of this we registered a partnership and today we sent away the tax form for it (as the deadline is 31st October). So I decided to submit my individual tax form for 2007/2008, which should be easy as I was out of the country the majority of it and because I spent a lot of money on a few sites I probably made a loss as well.

Unfortunately, I am unable to do so. My user id, which has been working for 2-3 years, is not working. My password is definately working as I had to enter it to get a new user id sent….which by the way doesn’t work either!!! The only message is to call up the helpdesk.

So I called up the helpdesk and got an answering machine message saying ‘Due to the high volume of calls we cannot take your call’ and then it goes directly to the beeeeeeeeeeeeppppppppp.

Frustrating to say the least. There’s several adverts on the tv every day telling you to submit your tax return before the deadline and then when you try to do it the system doesn’t work and they’ve put an answering machine on the helpdesk phone line.

I’ve emailed them about all of this but I’m not holding my breath for a speedy reply.

I was out Saturday night for a friends birthday in Glasgow. We went to Jaunglers, one of those branded comedy clubs which are around the country. It was good night so the inevitable hangover arrived Sunday morning. I got up at 10am and went to the gym for a few hours which squared me up. Still, I was certainly not going to be very productive so a few of us went to my friends house. 2 games of football and the Ryder Cup ensured that we would not be bored.

Just before the Ryder cup started my friend James told me a funny story which I thought I would share with you guys. James used to work with a large telecommuications company, one of the biggest in the UK. They got a contract with a huge bank and James was part of the team which looked after it. Being such a large company, it was important for telephones and other communications to be on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. He told me the contract was worth around 900 million pounds so it’s safe to say they were an important customer.

Soon after the contract started the bank started complaining. Everything was going down in the middle of the night – all the phones etc were just offline. Apparently this was easy to fix and just needed a reset but they couldn’t figure out what the hell was going wrong. This went on for a week or so and the bank were understandably pissed off and were threatening to take their business elsewhere.

As a last resort they sent 2 of the technicians down to the datacenter to see what was wrong. So the 2 guys had to do a nightshift and sit all night in the freezing cold datacenter to see what, if anything, was going wrong.

Nothing was happening but then, at around 4.30am, an old cleaning lady came into the room. She promptly took out one of the plugs which powered one of the servers, plugged in her vaccuum and starting cleaning up. Shellshocked is probably the best way to descrive the reaction of the 2 tech guys. ‘What the hell are you doing!!!!’ or something along those lines was shouted in a high pitched voice. Turns out the lady had been lifting up the small piece of carpet and innocently pulling out a random plug so that she could do her job. All the other power areas had been locked but for some reason this one didn’t have a lock which is why she used that one.

So to summarise, this company nearly lost a contract worth close to a billion UK pounds because of a hard working old cleaning lady who was clearly obvlious to the carnage she was causing. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when senior management were told why all the problems were ocurring.

I came across a list of the Best Global Brands of 2008 today. What surprised me was that out of the whole list, there were only 2 which I hadn’t heard of before (SAP & UBS).

It just highlights how much advertisers infiltrate our lives, whether we like it or not. It’s also a great example of how important logos are for branding.

Check out the list and see how many you can recognise.

Link : best global brands

I had to laugh when I came across this story. It’s one thing to get caught walking in the street in Googles StreetView, it’s another thing to get caught sleeping on the street pissed off your head.

The man, Bill, is not planning to make a complaint.

I’m not too happy about it’ said Bill.

‘I mean, I wouldn’t have been there in the state that I was in, but I wasn’t really thinking there would be someone driving by with a video camera on the roof filming me, either,’ Bill, 36, said from northern Australia, where he is working with a fishing company.

‘What do you do when you lose a mate like that?’ he said of his pal, with whom he had been planning a motorbike holiday around the island of Tasmania.

‘I know what he would have done if I left – he would have partied, too. That’s what I would’ve wanted him to do so that’s what I did with some friends.’

Bill said he accepted he could not expect to have complete privacy in a public street, but he questioned whether his embarrassing moment should be broadcast over the internet.

Link :
Google’s Street View captures the moment a drunken Aussie keeled over outside his home

I finally got off my ass and did some work today. I arrived back from my 2 weeks holiday in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, on Sunday night. Yesterday was pretty much a write off with regards to work as I hadn’t slept much Friday and Saturday night so my body was playing catch up yesterday.

Anyways, I thought I would post about a funny story I read today on BBC. Today, people from the Greek island of Lesbos lost an appeal to stop gay women around the world calling themselves Lesbians. The guy who started the case, Dimitris Lambrou, said that islanders refer to themselves as Lesbians and the term has disgraced them for years.

I can appreciate that islanders may now be embarrassed and frustrated by what Lesbian means in todays world but I think it will be impossible to change the meaning of the word, particularly since Gay Women have been calling themselves Lesbians for years. I’d say they have as much chance as making the term ‘Gay’ mean fun and happy again.

Full Story : Lesbos locals lose lesbian appeal