Inside View from Ireland

Geocaching Kilkenny

SCIAM -- The rules of geocaching are very simple:

1. Take something from the cache.
2. Leave something in the cache.
3. Write about it in the logbook.

Thanks to enhancements to the Wide Area Augmentation System, newer GPS receivers can determine a user's position within nine feet, assuming that the user has a clear view of the sky and that the weather is not too cloudy. I need to get a Magellan SporTrak Color, a unit on sale in several Dublin shops. It stores more than 100 waypoints, displays various features in different colours and feels good in your hand.

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Geocaching -- 76,477 sites in 190 countries near you, with 50 new caches being hidden every week.
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Learn. Create. Produce.

TEMPLE BAR -- Sometimes I see the faces of new media artists in the shadows of the dusty spaces of the empty white shell of Arthouse in Curved Street. It's a shame to see the space laying waste to an opportunity for welcoming emerging artists.

Visiting Dublin

TEMPLE BAR -- You can mark the end of February 2004 in Dublin by some memorable features.

• Several Temple Bar restaurants now offer set lunch menus for under €9.50. That price point is less expensive than many venues in Kilkenny.
• The Clarence Hotel sells bratwurst but they unflinchingly call it a hot dog. It costs €10.50.
• The mobile phone menace has expanded to include phones with loudspeakers. The irritating louts on speaker are as stupid as they are loud.
• Yellow paint lines, arrows and numbers mark the sidewalks where five people died under a Dublin bus last week. It's directly outside the back room of the Library in The Clarence Hotel.
• Shoppers heading from the Central Bank to Grafton Street pass by two travel agencies advertising "shopping trip flights to New York" for less than €440.
• One of the large ground floor plate glass windows in Arthouse is broken and replaced with brown plywood.
• You can find free Wi-Fi in the Chester Beatty Library and The Front Lounge, among other places.

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Sent mail2blog using Nokia Communicator O2 Typepad service.
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Racism in Ireland

UPDATED 18 MAY 2006 (Removed anti-Irish comments.)

More than any other part of Dublin, Temple Bar enjoys real diversity. It's enjoyable because more nationalities visit Dublin's cultural quarter than any other art of the city. They come. They spend. Everyone is happy. But in many parts of Ireland, people are not happy with diversity. Read today's broadsheets and see what I mean.

Wireless Internet for College

AROUND A YEAR AGO, I spotted some guys in the Waterford Institute of Technology doing some Wi-Fi work next to the school cafeteria. I fired up my TransNote, couldn't detect the node and thought it was just a circle of interested hackers. It was more. It affects what I am doing in Temple Bar with Dun Laoghaire College of Art Design and Technology.

ECDL Quick Facts

EXAMINER -- More than 250,000 Irish people hold the ECDL and are helping reap annual benefits of over EUR 121m for the economy. That's the conclusion of the Itech Research report.

Fertilising time

KILKENNY -- Farmers around Kilkenny are ploughing fields and laying down fertiliser. It's time to turn over the 1000 posts in Irish Typepad, linking them to course materials in five modules I teach. This kind of cross-fertilisation is an important element of knowledge management. I figure that I have enough content to incorporate two blog items into every lecture. I plan to use the blog items as springboards for discussion during in-class tutorials. Students who do not attend the lectures could still receive continuous assessment credit when commenting electronically on material.

Personal Phone Company

PULVER -- Why not run your own personal phone company with Pulver's Internet Phone Patch. The smart little kit provides a bridge between two pairs of Tip and Ring circuits. Calls can be forwarded or 2 stage dialed between any analog PSTN phone lines, Cellsockets, or analogue telephony adaptor type devices. It is chock-full of useful features.

Three Cs of personal branding

BRAND CHANNEL -- William Arruda points out several benefits of being a strong brand are tremendous. If you personally cultivate a strong brand, you command higher pay or fees. Your company's strong brand ensures it can thrive during economic downturns. As a self-employed professional, you get to choose the clients, assignments or positions you want PLUS you can transition your business or career with ease. Arruda believes strong brands have something else in common. They all exhibit the “three C’s” of branding: Clarity; Consistency; and Constancy.

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William Arruda -- "Three Cs of Personal Branding"
Trevor Cook -- "When a brand is damaged"
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Watching digital content being made

CLONMEL SOUND STUDIO -- I witnessed a process that transfers sound in sound bytes, to a computer disc instead of to the ear in sound waves. I remember when you needed a tape recorder with spinning wheels to record voices. You could cut the tapes and join them back together with cello tape. Today we cut whole sentences easier than cutting butter with a knife.

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Our results are online. Posted by Lucy Gleeson in the multimedia degree programme at Tipperary Institute.
Sony -- "Learning and Teaching with Multimedia Tools"
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