Inside View from Ireland

OK to boo?

CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- There's a recurring argument in the Irish press that revolves around the question, "Is it okay to boo?" at soccer matches. So friends of E.F. Fanning from Rathfarnham, County Dublin, have set down their views in a website. Interesting perspectives all around, especially for American viewers where crowd sentiments range from Mexican waves to heated expressions of frustration.

---

OK2BOO -- "ok2boo: a non-sectarian, non-racist organisation"
P45 rant -- "OK2boo?"
x_ref125mw

Weblog Technology in the world of writing

AFTER POINTING TO A slide that could have originated in the skunkworks of Macromedia HQ, Thomas Burg notes that "John Robb visioniert Weblogs als Pendant zu MS Word."

Here is a simple way to look at how Weblog technology fits into the larger world of publishing.  Sure, there are higher end methods for extremely large sites, large print facilities, etc and there is some bleed over between the tool sets, but this is generally the lay of the land.  Note that all of the dominant tools mentioned are desktop tools (which puts some vendors ahead of the curve here if the model stays true, which I suspect it will).

It amazes me that Web publishing has come so far so fast.

---

John Robb -- "Publishing Technologies" in his Weblog.
thomas n. burg -- "Bloggen als Fixbestandteil unseres Kommunikationsportfolios"

x_ref125mw

List talk about SO BIG

CLONMEL -- Lots of chatter about the SOBIG virus. A brute force approach is to filter out any messages that contain "see the attached file for details" (some say Please see and some say See, so the see alone matches). I am also getting hundreds that say "Wicked screensaver" in the subject line, which I'm auto-deleting too.

• Michele Neylon -- "Just checked our stats. There was a huge jump in viral activity in the last 12-24 hours."
• Ross Cooney -- "5.43% of all email on the Cyber Sentry network have viruses."

---

x_ref1482 x_ref153

Cross_Links 20 Aug 03

CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- I lost power to my laptop which means more than half of my daily blog tracking is behind a broken power connector and totally inop at the moment. It's proven handy to record my cross-links, since I'm trying to manage several blogs. I'll scrape together the main points from 20 August so I can have a record for my internal tracking.

• Best Practise: "Dark matter of the Internet" >>
• Best Practise: "e-mail publishing is dead" >>
• Blogging: "Throttling blogging" >>
• Blogging: "A beginner's guide to TrackBack" >>
• Business: "Walking around with a SOBIG virus" >>
• Findings: "Sky+ Ireland leveling rooftops" >>
• Photos: back garden Garringreen >>
• Search engines: "Give them what they want" >>
• Wireless: "Spam on my phone" >>

---

I learned about Pixagogo from Google AdSense.
x_ref1431

The next tech wave is lapping at my blog

I SCROLL THROUGH referrer strings from 400 different people who visit my blog every day. Nearly 100 visitors come from search engines where they are looking for specific things about technology. Their queries suggest a pattern of consumer behaviour. They want info about digital cameras, Nokia's digital pen, smart phones (Nokia9210i and Motorola 720i), MP3 players (Archos Jukebox) and personal video recorders (TiVo and Sky+). They're making dates online (Another Friend), instant messaging (Trillian Pro), sending photos from their PCs (Photobox.ie) and building a grassroots model of economic exchange at eBay. Consumers never lost faith in technology. If my referrer log is anything to go by,  the resurgence in consumer electronics will prod corporate IT departments to restart their spends on technology. Could you imagine what the entertainment industry would be like if music labels embraced digital distribution instead of fighting it? Think of broadband without cables (Sony Roomlink and Prismiq) carrying videos around your home along  with your playlists and family photos. All this exists now and hundreds of my visitors are aware of it. There are huge things a personal computer can do now, thanks largely to standard features in Microsoft Windows and the ingenious capabilities of Mac OS X. At the consumer level, this foundation has changed how people live and work. At the level of my blog, I can see a rising trend of people lapping up the technology on offer.

---

Sent mail2blog over Nokia 9210i O2 TypePad services aboard Bus Eireann services passing through Kilsheelan.

x_ref26121 x_ref125mw x_ref153

Risks of declining skillsbase

CALLAN -- I think Ireland is at the cutting edge of information and technology. Others are catching up. India and China award many more natural science and engineering degrees than Ireland. The only way Ireland will move up one rung on the skills ladder is to ensure that the workforce keeps learning. At the corporate level, training programmes need to help current employees move up in their careers. At third level, we need to insist upon more sophisticated portfolios on graduation.

---

Sent mail2blog over Nokia O2 TypePad services aboard Bus Eireann.
x_ref153

The coming revival of technology

CALLAN -- My first batch of third level software development graduates landed in a swamp of a recession in the tech industry. Getting started in IT today means living in a land of reduced expectations. Yet there are some promising things ahead like Wi-Fi (pioneered in some ways by Apple's Airpot), e-business that works (think eBay, Yahoo, Overture, and Google), and inexpensive mobile phones. Intel chairman Andy Grove thinks "the rate of change in technology is as much today as any time in my experience."

I think a gratifying tech revival lies ahead. Problems include spam, piracy, privacy, and security problems. Nonetheless, the tech rebound has started and that is good news for everyone.

---

Sent mail2blog over Nokia O2 Typepad services aboard Bus Eireann.
x_ref1482

Why not conserve at source?

KILKENNY -- When I watch my new house being built, I was surprised to see that it did not require a water meter, dual flush cistern or a downpipe water butt to catch rain for garden use. Those features would reduce my household water consumption. I think they should be integrated at source, during new construction projects. After this dry summer, Ireland needs to remember that less than 1% of all water on the earth is fresh water. That's a supply many people crave.

---

Sent mail2blog over Nokia O2 TypePad services from McDonagh Station, Kilkenny.
x_ref19 x_ref125mw

An expectation of civic responsibility

KILKENNY -- I just sorted paper, tin, aluminium, and three different shades of glass into separate containers before taking them to a recycling yard. It galls me that I pay salaries to government employees who don't sort their rubbish at work. And it deeply troubles me to discover that the Irish Heritage Service (Duchas) has been using an illegal dump across county lines for office trash.

Deputy John McGuinness has pictures and a partial inventory of the dump. He gave them to Environment Minister Martin Cullen who promptly announced he would ask Duchas to look into the matter. He didn't call in the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate. And why not?

Nearly 4,000 tonnes of waste were thrown into this illegal dump. Duchas rented this parcel of land outside the village of Killenaule in South Tipperary, at Burnchurch, Moyglass. It sits inside a game reserve in a very scenic area. The dump backs on to a small lake which has been partially covered by the waste material.

If you walk around the dump, you can see storage heaters, lagging, large bags of concentrated lime, chairs, rubber, paper, cardboard and Duchas brochures. This is refuse normally relegated to weekly bin collections. Things like food waste, plastic piping, bags of cement, plastic buckets, large metal barrels, plastic covering for silage and copies of the Heritage Week 2000 programme.

I cannot fathom how an organisation empowered to preserve national heritage sites could desecrate natural resources in this manner.

---

Sean Keane -- "EPA should probe illegal dump, TD says" in The Kilkenny People, August 22, 2003
Sent mail2blog over Nokia O2 TypePad services from McDonagh Station, Kilkenny.
x_ref19 x_ref125oj

Spam on my phone

CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- The first spam I received on a my mobile was an advertisement for tatoos. It's rather remarkable, because I am using a SpeakEasy phone number that has never sent a text message to any commercial organisation. That suggests the tatoo artist has generated a sequence of phone numbers and is simply scatter-shooting text spams. On a day that SOBIG is shutting down my in-box, it's nice to reflect that in eight years of owning at least a dozen different mobile phones, I've received a single spam text message.

I really resent getting unwanted text messages or unsolicited emails because much of the time I use my phone as my mail point of contact for the Internet. Just skim over my Irish Typepad entries and you'll see plenty of references to my posts made from my Nokia 9210i to my blog. When working in that environment, text spams are very unwelcome.

---

Manik Fish spammed me.
x_ref1482 x_ref160