pre-schaedenfreude?

Dalkey, with a population somewhere short of 10,000, currently has at least four coffee shops and a half-dozen pubs where you can also purchase the brewed bean. That hasn't stopped Starbucks from renovating a premises in the middle of the town, due to open some time soon going by the "Staff Wanted" notices. Personally I'm hoping that their general downturn in fortunes due to rapid expansion might mean that this particular outlet never sees a single customer...

collect the whole set!

According to a newspaper I refuse to link to on the grounds that it's a poorly-disguised tabloid, "There are 195 independent states in the world, and people from 188 of them were living in Ireland at the time of the last census."

BoI: don't click on IP-addressed links. Unless they're ours.

My online banking stopped working with Safari. Known problem, apparently. I just tried logging in, got the error page, and recycled back to the front page only to discover that there's now a separate link for people using Safari to follow.

When you click on it, it goes to an IP address, and you get a certificate error on account of this (hostname doesn't match certificate). This is exactly how people get spoofed by phishing sites, and here's the Bank of Ireland doing it all by themselves. Most excellent.

update: for bonus points: the IP address doesn't have a reverse lookup (although whois reveals that it's at least in BoI's IP space); and for extra bonus points, there's a "Protect yourself online" link which, when you follow through it and click its "Proceed" button, dumps you back to the real site where your hapless Mac browser will fail to work once more. A+.