Dav Waldron's Blog

I have a mole on my inner right arm – just at the elbow.  One day I noticed it was bleeding and wasn’t sure if I’d caught if off something or what, so I went to the GP to get it looked at (after some encouragement from the twitterverse).  GP looked at it and suggest it might be easiest to have it removed and to then be able to forget about it.  This seemed logical to me so the necessary paperwork was put in place and an appointment made for the hospital on Baggot St.

So headed along there today, waited for a bit (thank you Streets of Rage on my new netbook for keeping me sane) and went in to see the Dermatologist.

My GP warned me about Dr Dupont saying he’s kinda gruff, but very good at what he does.  He struck me as being a no-nonsense sort of man who, like me, will throw in technical (well, medical in his case) terms into his conversation and figures you either know what it means or will ask (but I got the impression he would make a point of making a big sigh if he had to explain).  Some people would think of this as rude, I don’t.  Here’s an expert in his field trying to get through the day the same as the rest of us and who’s probably seeing similar things day after day that might well be avoided by a little bit of education.  After a brief exam of the mole itself and some history I was asked to strip and an all over search was carried out.  It’s weird having an old man with a magnifying lens looking over all your bumps and spots  But he declared everything ok and that the mole on my arm shouldn’t be a concern and that he didn’t see the need to remove it.  There’s almost no sun exposure on it anyway and any time I’m in sun-light, I have factor 50 on so he said to carry on like that and all would be well.

So off I went and bumped into a college friend in Burger King and had a chat before he headed back to work.  I finished my own burger and made the trek back to Golden Lane and into Boards HQ.

Got home from my softball match last night to find all sorts of commotion at the front door of the house. Seems like the place had been raided by the Gardaí. They broke down the front door (after the occupant of the front flat saying he was on his way out to open it when he heard the first *BANG* of the battering-ram-door-breaker-downer thing) and proceeded to break down the door of the second flat on the ground floor.

They were executing a search on the first two flats on drugs related suspicions. So the first flat was obviously open since the occupant had tried his best to open the main door (his keys were in the lock and he was trying to turn it when the Gardaí finally broke the door down). The second flat’s occupant narrowly avoided a broken face when his door swung open at high speed after being smashed through too.

So, if you’re a Garda and you’re searching flats for drugs, how long do you think it might take? A couple of hours? Maybe even a half hour on each flat?

Certainly a lot longer than the ten minutes they spent.

So here’s where I call shenanigans.

Our landlord was raging. He had to spend the evening repairing two doors and then went down to the station to register a complaint. He had his elderly (and unfortunately ill) brother with him who had to stand around whilst this mess was fixed.  There would have been no difficulty in contacting him to gain access – he’s registered on every landlord’s list he needs to be on. I appreciate though that there may have been a worry about “tip offs” to the occupants.  The man in charge said to one of the lads (who they’ve searched before) that he clearly had someone warn him an hour before they came around before – like a bloke living in a small bedsit is a major drug dealer and has those sorts of resources.

The two occupants of the flats were baffled as to how five minutes per flat constitutes a search and they both seperately told me were threatened that they’d be left homeless if they had to come back.

I’ve just lost a huge amount of respect for the Gardaí. I have always respected them for the mostly thankless work they do. Any dealings I’ve had with them have been mostly positive – specifically I recall when my life was threatened cause I wouldn’t serve a scumbag drink at half one in the morning when working in the Alexander Hotel here in Dublin. Two plain-clothes officers were on the scene in less than five minutes and did a lot to help me relax. The following night, when the scum bag was around again, they had a squad car at the hotel from Pearse St in four minutes. Can’t fault that sorta response time. I would often help them out when working in the IT Department in O’Callaghans by retrieving CCTV footage for them and they were always a pleasure to deal with.

This incident leaves a bad taste in my mouth though. I’m not trying to defend the two lads who they searched – there’s no smoke without fire as the saying goes and my nose certainly has a good idea of what kind of smoke is going on in their flats – but there are ways and means of going about your business that I feel the Gardaí involved in this raid have dealt their colleagues a massive blow in public confidence.

I’m getting awfully “meh” about my internet habits. I mean the sites I “have to” check like Facebook and MySpace. They don’t really do much for me only let me keep tabs on my friends (Facebook) and the bands I like (MySpace).  I rarely bother with Myspace anymore – logging into it the other night prompted me to start this blog post.  I used to keep a blog on my MySpace page and just sorta stopped updating it in 2007.  I don’t remember why.  Probably cause this blogging stuf is harder work than it looks.

Facebook – meh. I’m annoyed with all the applications and all that and because it seems to be the only real reason to use it, I feel like I’m totally detached from it’s function.  The people I’d regularly communicate with on it are all using Twitter now anyway and so that’s sorta taken it over.

So my day-to-day internets consist of boards.ie (well duh, it’s where I work!), Twitter, MSN, and my webcomics (xkcd, Penny-Arcade and Cyanide and Happiness mostly).  I also watch Zero Punctuation every week – it’s one of the few games review places I’ll trust.

I sometimes think I’m missing out on stuff – there’s a whole lotta interents out there.  But I get it all sorted out for me via the things I do use.

I do need to get into this blog reading thing more though.  Also, my keyboard has the ability to stream RSS feeds whilst I’m doing other stuff which is kinda awesome.  I should get that set up and running.

Is the hype of Web 2.0 crashing down around me? Am I simply too set in my ways to be bothered anymore? Comments and thoughts?