Inside View from Ireland

Tiny Flores Man

A SPECIES OF tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago. Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people, nicknamed 'hobbits', made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.

The find has excited researchers with its implications - if unexpected branches of humanity are still being found today, and lived so recently, then who knows what else might be out there? The species' diminutive stature indicates that humans are subject to the same evolutionary forces that made other mammals shrink to dwarf size when in genetic isolation and under ecological pressure, such as on an island with limited resources.

Eminem's New Video Lyrics

YAHOO -- Searching for Eminem's controversial new agitprop video? Think of poor Gavin Sheridan who is getting buffeted with 12 gigs a month of transfer data, much of it related to the rapper of our time. Then point your eyes to Singing Fish where the hordes have pushed Eminem to the top of the digital video search charts.

Yahoo reports "the rapper's new anti-Bush video Mosh is up 1,239 percent in search. Eminem himself is up 37% in terms of search engine queries. The video is quality animation, expressing very direct criticism of President Bush. It could earn the rapper a visit from the FBI because the vdieo makes Bush a shooting target. But this video has legs. It should be getting primetime play in front of a white bread American public going blind from Fox News and the pseudo-religious waffle that emerges with an election pitch. There is no way anyone who watches "Mosh" can stereotype Eminem as an inane, uneducated rant case. This is required viewing on our multimedia degree course in Tipperary Institute.

Deluged but Running

UNDERWAY -- The Irish countryside is soaking wet which means electric signals on mainline train routes are malfunctioning, effectively cutting off Waterford rail service to Dublin. That means I have greater seat selection when boarding in Kilkenny and more time to discover the Friday papers where this blog gets mentioned in The Irish Times.¹

Truth be told, this blog is a second generation survivor that has borrowed from inspiration and examples of those who have gone before. An entire generation of Irish bloggers mashed up cyberspace using LiveJournal just after we deemed ourselves Y2K-compliant. I marveled at college students who kept bashing away with musings about anything under the sun. That intrigued me because I wanted to encourage first-year students to write and I felt I had discovered a natural channel where they could express themselves in a self-motivated way. I think that psychology works and now we have woven blogging into education at Tipperary Institute. Different samples of student writing appear in our Sunny Southeast and Media Studies Classroom blogs. Both will evolve with student-designed identities in 2005.

John Peel MP3 Collection

RADIO PLUS -- Check out free and legal MP3 downloads of songs that John Peel featured on his Radio 1 show recently. All these tracks have been made made available by the bands or record labels themselves. They don't involve Kazaa or anonymous postings to alt.binaries.sounds or anything like that. The idea is that if you like the track, you'll buy some of their records.

iPod Photo

WE KNEW THE iPod Photo was coming because Toshiba was having problems getting the 60 GB hard drives.

Now that it's out on the market, multimedia students can start trawling the used iPod market for last-generation iPods. The new iPod Photo comes in two sizes: a 40GB model, available for $499, and a 60GB model that sells for $599. Both feature a crisp LCD display that lets you see your photos in 65,536 colours. Its backlighting looks to be as good as the Sony Clie's. Like its big brother, iPod Photo features the touch-sensitive Apple Click Wheel that quickly navigates iPod Photo’s new colour menu. Spin the wheel to Music, and you can scroll effortlessly through dozens of playlists, hundreds of albums or thousand of songs.

Before you pull that lever

WSJ -- Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, asks five questions about the candidates before voting.

1. Is He Real?
2. Does He See Around Corners?
3. Who's around him?
4. Does He Get Back on the Horse?
5. Is He Pro-Business?

Keyhole Review

KEYHOLE -- I just burned away an hour of browsing time searching Keyhole for several of my former Stateside addresses. It not only found the addresses, but it returned satellite images of the aircraft I flew as well. I used the program to fly over Ireland. It found roads and terrain features and named all the towns in Irish. Then I started typing in all the LAT/LONG coordinates that were on "Enemy of the State" because I was watching that program at the same time. The NSA satellites are faster than Keyhole's imagery but I know the NSA won't license that speedy imagery to punters.

Trusted VoIP

DUBLIN -- I'm building a directory of VoIP friends along with pointing out to people that fears of VoIP spam often over-reach the mark. The protection technologies wrapped around VoIP will protect users better than anti-virus technlogy protect e-mail systems.

Chief executive Donald Peterson of Avaya, which spun off from Lucent in 2000, says the future of IP (Internet Protocol) telephony -- as well as follow-on technologies such as SIP (session initiation protocol) -- will be based on knowledge embedded in the network itself:

In conversation with Neil Tanner

I SPENT THE EARLY afternoon chatting with Neil Tanner, Microsoft Ireland's Business Solutions Group Manager, about a topic he will present at the INBITE 04 conference, scheduled at the Tipperary Institute in Thurles on Thursday, November 18th. After the first few minutes, Tanner had me convinced that the "C" in CRM stood for "collaboration" instead of "customer". Tanner won't attempt to rewrite business textbooks on the definition of the CRM acronym but the business processes he shares with audiences suggest an important subtext in how CRM should be handled by SMEs. "Collaboration is actually the cornerstone." And well it should be.

Kilkenny People in court

KILKENNY -- One of the best reads in Ireland are the accounts of local court cases carried by the Kilkenny People. These gems appear this week: