Inside View from Ireland

Skewering Memory Sticks

THE OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS for my new Memory Stick Pro Duo includes some operating instructions that explain how I can skewer the memory stick. Not included in the list are suggestions related to washing the item.

Parliamentarian Questions

TWENTY MAJOR ASKS questions about the handling of immigration matters in Ireland. He points to some dubious priorities in how the Irish State decides who enters and who stays in the Republic. I have intimate knowledge of these matters since I was once refused leave to land in Ireland. My TD, Deputy John McGuinness, skewered one of his Saturday constituency clinics a few years ago while trying to keep me in Ireland. Instead, my tax money paid for the €740 one-way airfare to New York where I enjoyed one week with my mom and dad. It was a remarkable journey because those September moments would mark the final three months of dad's life with a surprise visit from his eldest son. Dad didn't know I spent a night in Mount Joy prison before ending up back in the family home. It was just a suprise trip which cost me $140 in return airfare during the autumn of his life.

30 day notice

I HAVE GIVEN 30 day notice to my landlady before getting a firm understanding from my builder that the house will be ready for occupancy. The way I figure is it will take us a month to prepare our new home for its first Christmas and that means we need to be moving in before 25 November. So we're leaning forward, anticipating a place that is more habitable than Garringreen in Kilkenny. With Mellifont in Cashel, we have no plaster dust, the cooker isn't wired to the doorbell and you can walk around the whole place without turning on a light since our windows are huge.

Authentic Noise

FOR MUCH OF MY LIFE I have worked around the noise of fans cooling electronic equipment. My first paid employment alerted me to the good noise of avionics cooling fans in an underdeck area of the Lockheed L-300 aircraft. You could tell how close you were to finishing pre-flight based on the level of noise under the cockpit. A decade later, liquid cooling systems supplemented the fans that circulated air around some serious communications equipment when I worked 150 feet underground in a command bunker. When I came to Ireland, I spent two years freezing inside a server room. Fans kept the temperature nippy. Today, I have the same frequency of noise and I want to escape.

Window Seating

Doc Searls snaps yet another reason to request window seating. This one is of Tioga Pass.

Interesting TechCamp Metric

THE MOST INTERESTING metric I have seen on the heels of TechCamp Ireland comes from Flickr. People interested in TechCamp Ireland (or Digital Rights Ireland) are just as likely to view the images as they are to read blog posts about these interesting initiatives.

Learning from TechCamp

IRISH SOCIOLOGISTS are going to love the next 20 years because we have entered a phase where connections to our virtual communities transcend our ties to our physical surroundings. This fact was quite apparent during the day-long Tech Camp held in the Northside Community Centre in Coolock on 15 October.

Nokia 9500 Network Settings

MY NOKIA 9500 returned from the shop after three days but it was scrubbed clean of its network settings. Actually, I received a reconditioned unit in place of my original Nokia 9500 which is probably all the better since my original had survived three carpet bounces. After too many bounces, Nokia bricks fail to work as phones. The reconditioned phone has a cleaner screen, looser piano hinge and tighter back cover. Its housing doesn't look as bright as my original phone although I may be confused by the shiny features of the P910i--they make the Nokia 9500 look dull by comparison.

It's a little tedious setting up the phone for different functions because my mail is not a default setting. Although I could configure all local phone network settings by hand, it's much easier to receive the settings by SMS and let the phone take care of everything.

Digital homes are smart homes

I WORK WITH several people who are building their own homes. Most of them incorporate wiring and systems that make their homes smart. Intelligent homes alert residents to events and they can maintain systems at predetermined settings. CNET explains the ideas in a well-presented manner online.

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CNET -- "Digital home DIY"

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AvantGo RSS

YOU CAN NOW create an "RSS Channel" on your AvantGo accounts. This means AvantGo will produce an RSS feed for any page you're watching. You can get WAP2 access via http://rim.avantgo.com and when using the Irish mobile phone networks you get impressive browsing speeds by using the mobile side of websites. This is cool. Thanks, Russ.

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Russell Beattie -- "AvantGo Goes RSS"
Bonus Link: Salon via RIM on AvantGo.

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