Who would have thought that the rumours regarding the Irish iPhone launch were true? Apparently, O2 are the ones bringing some of the love back to the homeland. I say some, because apparently Visual Voicemail is absent. Come on O2, let my people have all the love – they deserve it.

I just found out that I share a birthday with Irish TV legend Gay Byrne. I knew I was in good company.

Anyone who has lived in Ireland, or spent a significant amount of time there, in the past 18 years probably knows of Dustin. I learned today that he is to represent Ireland in the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest with the song below. Some see it as a brilliant satirical remark about what the Eurovision has become in the last few years, others see it as a bit of craic. Whatever it is, have a look and we’ll see what happens in Serbia.

Somehow, I got some odd DNS settings on my iPhone for my home network. I’m not exactly sure where they came from, but I was getting DNS errors every time I tried to access any sites by name. Since I was at home and had access to my Mac, it wasn’t a huge deal. I finally managed to figure it out and pulled the odd entries out. I then refreshed my DHCP lease and got the wondrous glory of OpenDNS on my iPhone. The world was once more at peace, or at least my little corner of techno joy.

We’ve finally managed to figure out a way to eliminate the need to switch between morning and evening shifts every 8 weeks. I get to stay on the later shift, which makes me much happier. I do not perform well when required to get up at 4am, at least after work. My days off are rarely productive. Now that I can stay on evenings, I can live life on a much more reasonable time scale for me.

In my car, I have a stereo with an iPod dock connector. This is the main source of my musical entertainment while driving. Since getting an iPhone, I have found that I need to change some of my behaviours – mostly regarding phone calls. Previously, I would need to pay attention to the phone sitting in my pocket and its occasional vibrations because some times, I wouldn’t be able to hear the ringer over my music and general road noise. Any vibration coming though my leg would cause me to dig in my pocket to find my phone, see who was calling and hope that I’d remembered to make sure the bluetooth headset was on and paired properly with the phone. The other thing I’d have to remember to do was to turn down the music, which is normally fairly loud to drown out the aforementioned road noise.

Now that my phone and iPod are integrated in the one glorious device, I find that I no longer need to do any of this. When I get a call, the music pauses, the ringtone is played and the caller’s details are displayed on the phone (they were before too, but they’re a lot easier to read now). When I answer the call, the music remains off and I am able to conduct my call without having to worry about turning it down. I still find myself doing this, mostly because I haven’t trained myself to do otherwise. A side effect of this is that I’m growing dissatisfied with my current bluetooth headset – a Jabra 500. I think I might finally take the plunge and buy that Jawbone I’ve been thinking about.