ciaran...

A earthquake measuring 2.2 on the Richter scale has struck north Donegal.

Many listener contacted Highland Radio this moring claiming to have experienced the small earthquake overnight.

Tremers was felt in areas including Kerrykeel/Fanad,  Downings, Letterkenny and Buncrana.

The British Geological Survey confirms that their equipment in Buncrana recorded a magnitude 2.2 earthquake at 1.04 this morning. The quake’ measured depth was 3km.

 

I heard this last night just after 1:00am, and thought it was thunder which seemed unusual as it was a beautiful clear night.

THE CHANCES ARE that you’re among the large swathes of the Irish population for whom today is the last day of the Christmas holiday.

Just to make sure you’re totally up to speed – today isn’t actually a public holiday, meaning you’re not strictly entitled to have the day off.

The difficulty is that ’bank holidays’ and ‘public holidays’ are not the same thing – one has a legal status, and the other doesn’t.

Legally speaking, there are nine public holidays. They’re defined in the Organisation of Working Time Act, 1997, and are as follows:

Christmas Day [December 25]
St Stephen’s Day [December 26]
St Patrick’s Day [March 17]
Easter Monday
The first Monday in May
The first Monday in June
The first Monday in August
The last Monday in October
January 1 

The law specifically defines the holiday as being “the 1st day of January” – and doesn’t make any allowances for what happens whenever these fall on a weekend.

So because yesterday was the public holiday – and because the law doesn’t provide for a person’s holiday entitlement to be moved – a weekend public holiday is far less useful to the majority of workers.

On a public holiday – i.e. on any of the nine days mentioned above – employees are entitled to paid leave, or another paid day off within a month (or an additional day’s annual leave, or an extra day’s pay, or the nearest church holiday as a paid day off).

But that’s only the case if you would otherwise be working on that day. If you don’t ordinarily work on weekends, and the holiday falls on a weekend, your entitlements are lesser – you’re only entitled to a fifth of your normal weekly wage.

That’s why you’re probably being given a day off instead – because that’s where a bank holiday (an institution with no legal status whatsoever) kicks in.

The majority of businesses, following the titular example of the banks, do decide to transfer the holiday entitlement to their own staff – largely because if they didn’t, they’d have to give you an extra day’s pay.

This is where the handy list from the Irish Payment Services Organisation – a representative body for the payments industry, which includes banks – comes in.

It lists the eleven days considered to be ‘Bank Holidays’ in 2012 – one of which is January 2nd.

Panic over…

Tips and tricks blog Lifehackery recommends that the next time you thaw frozen meat try pouring a cup or so of vinegar on the frozen flesh—the vinegar will lower the freezing temperature of the meat so it will begin to thaw more quickly and the acid in the vinegar will break down connective tissues that will make the meat more tender.

You can always rinse the vinegar off the meat once defrosted, but in some dishes the vinegar may add a nice flavor, such as using an apple cider vinegar on a Bavarian-style pork roast.

People will now be able to search the ‘British Newspaper Archive’, which is made up of four million pages - containing articles from local and regional papers going back to 1700, for details about members of their family who may have been eminent in their local communities hundreds of years ago.

The launch of the archive is the first time people will be able to digitally access and search through millions of newspaper articles from the comfort of their homes. Up until now, people have had to travel to the British Library newspaper depository in Colindale, North London, to access the entire collection of 200 local and regional newspapers.

Highlights of the vast collection include gems such as vivid accounts of General Garibaldi’s UK visit to a “magnificent reception at Crystal Palace”, published in the Dundee Courier on April 18 1864, and the creation of the phonograph by Thomas Edison, in the North Wales Chronicle on December 1, 1877.

Ed King, head of the British Library’s newspaper collections, said: “People will find this archive extraordinary on both a personal and historical level. For the first time people can search for their ancestors through the pages of our newspapers wherever they are in the world at any time.

“But what’s really striking is how these pages take us straight back to scenes of murders, social deprivation and church meetings from hundreds of year ago, which we no longer think about as we haven’t been able to easily access articles about them.”

The archive also features hundreds of letters from soldiers in varying war zones, which were published in local papers as a way of bringing attention to their needs and informing people about life at war. One such letter, published in The Reading Mercury on January 27, 1855, was from a soldier fighting in the Crimean War begging for food to be sent to him as the British army’s supplies had dwindled to record lows.

However, anyone wishing to fully access the newspaper archive will have to pay to do so. People can search the site for free but will need to pay either £6.95 for 48 hour access; £29.95 for 30 days or £79.95 for an annual subscription. Once logged in, users can download a pdf of a particular page to keep forever. The archive can be accessed for free in the British Library’s Reading rooms.

The digitisation project, which started last year, will take 10 years to complete, with a total of 650 million articles on 40 million web pages expected to be in the finished archive by 2020. British company Brightsolid, which also owns Friends Reunited and Genes Reunited, is responsible for digitising the archive - a painstaking process as much of it needs to be done by hand as so many of the pages of the newspapers are too fragile to be processed by machines.

Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, praised the project, saying: “The British Newspaper Archive is a rich and hugely exciting resource, packed with historical detail. It’s a great example of the public and private sectors collaborating to deliver something that neither party could have delivered by themselves. I searched for my own constituency of Wantage and within seconds had 42,000 results – an indication of the breadth and variety of material featured. I’m delighted that the British Library and Brightsolid are working together to transform access to the nation’s published memory.”

Visit http://aka.ms/wpdemo on your phone….This is cool :)

This is so funny ..