The draft Northern Ireland budget was published yesterday after a long debate in the Northern Ireland Assembly and, of course, had a huge amount of media coverage.
However, as the media frenzy focussed on semantically dissecting the Finance Minister's speech and his after speech interviews, along with the inevitable responses from everyone else, a little noticed event virtually happened under everyone's noses.
As Dirk Gently would say, "to solve the whole crime and find the whole person one must make use of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things". (by the way, I just watched the BBC 4 screen adaption of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and I loved it!)
The interconnectedness of all things on the 15th December flows thusly,
- The day begins whilst most people are still asleep, a nice way to start.
- It is 15 December 2010, a Wednesday no less.
- Its my wife's birthday.
- I get up, get the kids up, get them ready for the day and take them to daycare.
- I travel to work as the radio babbles on about what the budget will contain.
- I go to a Participation Network event in Parliament Buildings while the the Budget Debate is ongoing.
- Lots of tweets about Wikileaks and Julian Assange
- Because Julian Assange was being banged up in the old nick, a lot of virtual anarchists were virtually crippling PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and having a right good go at Amazon.
- The draft Budget is out for consultation.
- No one can access the consultation because a number of NI Departmental websites are 'unavailable'
- This has been noticed by fellow twitterers, including @A2BNI "@iwhitten All departmental sites appear to be down!" - around 12.10pm
- To which i respond "@A2BNI anything to do with #wikileaks? :)"
- The Consultation documentation finally appeared on the NI Executive and NIDirect sites
The interconnectedness of it all? (Possibly) Julian Assange.
I have heard a rumour that whilst 'oor Sammie was up on his feet there may have been a malicious DDOS (or Distributed Denial of Service) attack on all the Northern Ireland departmental websites, as from a few sources I have heard that all of the sites were inaccessible for a period of time.Quite why the Online Living Consciousness of "Anonymous" would spend any time at all attacking Norn Iron departmental websites in order to strike another blow at the repressive establishment, who they deem are trying to silence Julian Assange, i am not too sure, but there you go. Maybe it was a vindictive attack from disgruntled hackers who failed to hack Amazon? In the same way a disgruntled thug puts his kicks a cat in disgust at finding he is, for nay number of reasons, now unable to have a good riot and throw stones at the police.
At least it makes a difference from "you've got ten minutes to clear building".
By the way, you have until 9 February 2011 to make your thoughts known to the relevant authorities on the Northern Ireland Budget. Or, keeping the Douglas Adams theme going, as many public services may be saying come March ".... So long and thanks for all the fish".
