« August 13, 2006 - August 19, 2006 | Main | August 27, 2006 - September 2, 2006 »
IF HOMELAND Security guidebooks are your point of reference, perhaps you should wear sunglasses at airports. Here are facial expressions that reveal your attitude:
They can tell you're evil by that thrusting jaw.
Take the Facial Expressions Test.
YOUR 15 MINUTES of fame could affect you in ways you don't expect. In a recent podcast (from 29 to 31 minutes on DSC 447), Adam Curry recalls his unexpected elevation to pop culture icon, accompanied by his tendency to smash his fists into sheet rock. Robert Scoble recalls what his appearance in The Economist as Microsoft's "Chief Humanizing Officer" meant to him. And Maryam Scoble tells the story of an Iranian imprisoned for the same infraction--appearing in The Economist. Since two out of three examples that suggest being a poster boy does not create a warm memory, I take pictures instead of posing in them.
The Economist -- "Face Value"
Maryam Scoble -- "The Economist and the Fate of Two Men: Robert Scoble and Ahmad Batebi"
Robert Tait -- "A Cause without Effects"
RICK KLAU AND Bill Tancer offer thoughts related to helping businesses (or politicians or production researchers) get themselves sorted. For example, Hitwise predicted drops in home sales before they happened. Bill Tancer points out that the National Association of Realtors needs around a month to cobble together their analysis, so definitive data about July is in front of the US housing industry nearly a quarter later than it unfolded as a tidbit in search engine analysis.
As Klau says, "Hitwise saw this coming. The web stats and competitive intelligence company saw a drop in July in searches for terms relating to home sales, and has seen a similar pick-up in August. So Bill’s not only saying they saw this coming, he’s predicting that August’s numbers will pick up. (Reuters picked up on this yesterday.)"
Continue reading "Irish Blogosphere Could Monetise" »
AFTER FOUR YEARS of entombing my stripes identity in a cesspool of spam, I resurrected the account by using the symbol Pi on the mailman.iol.ie control panel. It's a very obtuse thing to do but not unlike finding a secret door in Hogwarts. The Greek symbol activated some ruthless spam blocking alongside hundreds of rules I've invoked to block spam at the door. Then I forwarded all the mail into another spam-cruncher at work and voila! I am getting fewer than two pieces of spam for every 100 e-mails.
Continue reading "Return of Stripes" »
I KNEW ALLPEERS had finally released to the masses because two requests for connection landed in my email box. Those emails came from music listeners and they offered up their top-down tracks for the weekend. Since they had installed AllPeers into Firefox, there was no need to send me megabytes of music. I fired up Firefox, added their user names to my contact list and before I opened another tab, their tracks were waiting in my download folder.
This was a legal transaction, since the music came directly from the artists. However, AllPeers will absolutely become a thorn in the side of the RIAA since the tool offers a Napster-easy way for DC++ to meet Bittorrent in a browser-simple style. If you know those tools already, you won't find much unique about AllPeers. You download the plug-in and it creates a peer-to-peer connection between your Firefox browser and the AllPeers server. AllPeers sets up peer-to-peer to the Firefox browswer of the friend you nominate. AllPeers does not deliver peer-to-peer directly between Firefox windows.
Continue reading "AllPeers Review" »
REGULAR READERS know I'm a fan of Problem-Oriented Medical Records. I work with an ICT programme specialist who has plans to enhance the IT support structure for Irish medicine. A few days ago, I read about Scoble discovering an electronic cow in a hospital. If these things interest you too, here is a listing of slang guaranteed to help you understand your charts the next time you're in hospital.
* 3H enema - Enema that is "high, hot, and a hell of a lot." Reputedly given to patients who give staff a hard time.
* 10th Floor Transfer - dying (floor number is always the next number on from the highest floor in the hospital).
* (Acute Lead Poisoning) Air-conditioned - Multiple gun shot wounds.
* ALS - Absolute Loss of Sanity (nutcase)
* AQR - Ain't Quite Right.
* AST - Assuming Seasonal Temperature (dead).
* BMW - Bitch Moan & Whine.
* Bugs in the rug - pubic lice.
* Bury the Hatchet - accidently leave a surgical instrument inside a patient.
* Chocolate Hostage - constipated.
* CRAFT - Can’t Remember A F*cking Thing.
* Eating In - Intravenous feeding.
* FTD - Fixing To Die.
* God's Waiting Room - intensive care unit and/or geriatric unit.
* Hi 5 - HIV positive ("V" being Roman for 5).
* Incarceritis - becoming dubiously ill when arrested or in court.
* Negative Wallet Biopsy - (US) patient transferred to cheaper hospital because of a lack of funds or no insurance coverage.
* OB/GYN - actually means Obstetric/Gynaecology, rumoured to mean "Oh Boy-Got You Naked".
* OPD - Obnoxious Personality Disorder.
* Pumpkin Positive - a penlight shone into the patient's mouth/ear would encounter a brain so small that the whole head would light up.
* Rule of Five - if more than five of the patient's orifices are obscured by tubing, he has no chance.
* Stream team - urology dept.
View the complete list at the Messy Beast.
QUESTION FROM the back room of this blog: Would you freeze-dry your cat? Or embalm her in your coffee table? Or make him into a pet pillow? So many choices, aren't there?
That's Sam, the world's ugliest dog, who died earlier this year.
FACT: Third level multimedia students starting their award or degree years prefer to manage their music and take their pictures with their phones. In Tipperary Institute, the SonyEricsson Walkman phone rules the roost. Its megapixel images of Ireland are sprinkled throughout Flickr with shots taken during both day and night. As a music player, it's sweet and simple. It can be cabled over to the campus network where owners drag and drop tracks directly onto the phone. The college even gives away free power to recharge phone batteries, which guarantees a full day's listening when on campus.
Continue reading "Walkman Phone Beats iPod" »
TIME MAGAZINE calls Pixsy one of the coolest 50 websites on earth. Some analysts believe visual search is the fastest growing segment of search on the web today. If you want to monetise that audience, you need to populate it. Pixsy's image locator fingers hundreds of images when asked to locate Irishblogs. Pixsy doesn't find everything tagged with every label but it appears to locate items with word stems already located in its lexicon. For example, it won't find Tom Raftery but it does find Raftery with hair. Knowing this, I'm thumbing through some of my images and giving them appropriate surnames.
REFLECTING A CULTURE of legal posturing in place of careful consideration, MCD initiated a lawsuit against the largest collective of Irish online. According to Scrudu, fewer than a dozen Irish bloggers have noted the story. Not unexpectedly, the MCD action has stifled some discussion threads at boards.ie but what might not be expected is the self-inflicted damage MCD has incurred as a result of attacking pop culture at the water cooler. More than anything else, the discussion at boards.ie connects people throughout every county in Ireland. It takes just little ripple at boards.ie to wash over every ticket-buying twentysomething in the State. Has the MCD executive suite considered how long it might take to recover from the chill brought about by legal proceedings?
Continue reading "MCD Oxegen Burning" »
