Inside View from Ireland

Job sculpting

KILKENNY -- Hiring good people is tough but retaining them can be even tougher. I was talking to friends who will lose a star performer next year because his contract forbids him from personal development. He is happy with his job but achieves through self-growth. The management in his job imposes a self-defeating set of work practises that ensure the highest peformers cannot set foot in industry during the course of their contractual employment. For star performers, the contracts mean they cannot pursue deeply embedded life interests while fulfilling teaching duties. The constraints are the remnants of work practises scrapped by lords of the manor three generations ago. That they exist in 21st century Ireland is a damning indictment of managerial judgment.

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More in Harvard Business Review
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All the Internet

OPTE -- How about mapping the Internet in a single day? The Opte Project tries to do that and takes musings about spiders by Katie Holten to a totally different level. This Opte Project visually depicts a space that is very much one-dimensional, a metaphysical universe. The data represented and collected for the project serves a multitude of purposes:

• modeling the Internet
• analyzing wasted IP space
• IP space distribution
• detection of natural disasters, weather, war
• extended conversation about aesthetics and art.

Airzooka

I JUST  "snapped my desk" for an online gallery because I want friends to see how much havoc they could wreak with an Airzooka. With a little finger pressure, you can pump up a ball of air and then shoot it at paper piles 20 feet away. In one fell swoosh, I could obliterate a morning's work. How many other office distractions are there that combine scientific principles (like the Bernoulli vortex) with no power outside that of your fingers? I think I will buy two Airzookas (they cost around EUR 20 each) so we can do battle at opposite ends of the ICT office in Clonmel. Nothing works better than rubbing out frustrations on the job.

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Richard Barkins has the "ICT Clonmel" image in his "snap your desk" collection.

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Once in a Lifetime

EMI -- The Talking Heads came out of the New York punk scene around the time I was in jet pilot training on the opposite coast. I remember their phase-shifting on vocals, the scepticism in their lyrics, their 70s hair and no guitar solos. And I remember their radio play because it was in my ears and marked the end of the 70s. The Talking Heads' box set "Once in a Lifetime" is out in time for Christmas 2003. I should get it because its tracks mark my time.

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Thanks to Francey/Studio Zimbra for the image.
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Blokes with boobs

KILKENNY -- What is this? I am getting spammed about boob jobs for blokes. How humiliating that my e-mail system has mirrors. It really is time to start hitting the pavement hard with my running shoes. The cold frost on my nose is a lot less painful than spam that gets too personal.

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Sky Internet

AVC-LTD -- If you get SES Astra satellite service, you can get several free TV channels onto your PC along with 512 kbps Internet connectivity downlink from the satellite. The Astra satellite delivers Sky Digital TV. Many of the channels in the standard Sky package are free-to-air. The Internet service requires a satellite dish, USB modem, monthly charge of £35, and a landline to connect upstream. This service would meet the needs of 30% of Irish living outside the range of ADSL service.

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AVC Broadband -- Satellite Internet service is offered by British and Irish companies
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On Thanksgiving

CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- On Thanksgiving Day, I cannot see the Google Turkey logo, so I'm displaying one I have from Thanksgiving 2000. Tom Raftery told me I can work around the Google re-direct by telling my browser it's the Google toolbar.

Singing horses

HOGAFFLA HAGE -- Dick O'Brien found the horses to be "strangely soothing" on Thanksgiving Day. You can too, if you click the image for the Flash effects. There must be something in the Scandanavian water because I remember encountering some equally wacky Finns several years ago and they could have collaborated on developing this horse chorus.

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Sveriges Television presents exceptionally wacky creations.
Backseat Drivers present an acerbic blogworthy wit.
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Second look at ChooseIT.ie

CLONMEL -- It's important for Irish leaders to highlight pathways into ICT skills. We had a look around ChooseIT.ie with our IE6 W2K E1 desktops . We probed the interactive features and looked around at how the site appears to electronic crawlers as well as how it appears to second level students.

Referrer Intelligence

CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- On Thanksgiving Day--with me unable to see the Google Thanksgiving page--this weblog now gets 10 percent of its search engine referrer traffic from Yahoo. These results mean that the Google share of traffic has declined at least 5% since August. It seems to reflect Yahoo's more aggressive crawling, portal position, and relevant search engine features.

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Turkey extracted from Google's 1999 Thanksgiving Web page.
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