Inside View from Ireland

248 ways to annoy people

JUST A FEW ways to annoy people from a well-written list:

• 9. Make beeping noises when a large person backs up.
• 13. Sew anti-theft detector strips into people's backpacks.
• 41. Ask the waitress for an extra seat for your "imaginary friend."
• 46. Make appointments for the 31st of September.
• 57. Staple papers in the middle of the page.
• 68. Write the surprise ending to a novel on its first page.
• 113. Switch your neighbor's lawn furniture with someone else's.

---

via Jonco.

x_ref153

Skype 3 Firefox Calls

INSTALLING SKYPE VERSION 3 also installed the Skype extension for Firefox on my browser. The extension turns phone numbers on websites into buttons which you can click to call from Skype. This has resulted in me using Skype credit faster than ever before. It's also handy for eBay merchants who know they can close deals faster with a voice call from a customer.

---

Skype Version 3 (beta) only for Windows.

x_ref261763

Learning from Neighbours

IRELAND WON'T beckon Bulgarians to the land of a thousand welcomes but in South Tipperary, we know from our Polish friends that it's an insult in Bulgaria to give an even number of flowers to anyone. Even numbers of flowers are placed on graves or on caskets. Unless you're presenting a bouquet, you shouldn't give a Bulgarian an even number of flowers. Now you know.

---

via Monika Rjtner.

x_ref261763

Arrested for Singing

COPYRIGHT LAW allows criminal prosecutions for copyright infringements. Ruthless enforcement in Japan led to the arrest of a 73-year-old bar manager this week, Joi Ito writes. Masami Toyoda, of Tokyo's Nerima-ku, illegally performed copyrighted tunes by the Beatles and other artists on his harmonica. He had been repeatedly warned. He has repeatedly admitted to humming the music we hear on the radio. This is illegal copyright infringement--just as it is illegal to sing Happy Birthday to children gathered in a commercial premises for a Happy Meal.

Invention of the Year

TIME MAGAZINE cites YouTube as the "invention of the year". "It's been an interesting year in technology. Nintendo invented a video game you control with a magic wand. A new kind of car traveled 3,145 miles on a single gallon of gas. A robot learned to ride a bike. Somebody came up with a nanofabric umbrella that doesn't stay wet. But only YouTube created a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, shock, rock and grok one another on a scale we've never seen before. That's why it's Time's Invention of the Year for 2006." As John Dowdell points out, "It's cool how the underlying Adobe Flash technology is again invisible, in the background, taken for granted." It might not be Open Technology but Shockwave works better than nearly any other rich media technical infrastructure.

---

x-ref125mc technoculture

Music Tax on Zunes

DOUG MORRIS, Chief Executive of Universal Music says, "I don't want any business built on our music without getting paid a part of the business. There's a great deal of music that's stored on these devices that was never legitimately obtained, and we wanted to get some sort of compensation for what we thought we're losing. I want our artists to be paid for the music that makes these devices popular."

John Walkenbach, chief custodian of personally acquired whole wheat radio snippets says, "It's an unofficial, yet mandatory tax imposed on all Zune owners, and Microsoft is the tax collector."

---

John Walkenbach -- "Don't Buy a Zune"

x_ref125mc

Slashdot Ran Out of Comments

CMDR TACO points out that your blog can run out of comments. That's probably not going to happen with me since I rarely get more than five a day. It's a problem Tom Raftery is facing--not in terms of numbers but in terms of comments not posting. According to the Commander, Slashdot "crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We're awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement... but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we're disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves."

---

Cmdr Taco -- "Slashdot Posting Bug"

x_ref1256

Camcorders Pushing Up Daisies

BACKPACKS AND PURSES floating around Tipperary Institute contain a new breed of small, point and click digital cameras that integrate easy-to-use movie modes. No one wants the bulky camcorders that recorded their teenage years, their family Christmas dinners, or their holidays in the sun. Instead, they have little video cameras that slip easily into purses, use rechargeable AA batteries and records drag-and-drop videos at high enough quality to play on mobile phones or inside pop-up Flash windows on computers. The big deal is you don't need to plug a cable into the side of a computer. You merely drag and drop the video files onto a timeline, edit, compress or convert. It's often as fast to perform those steps as it was to record the original footage.  And what's "footage" in a realm of gig storage cards?

---

Steve Makofsky -- "Camcorders are pushing up daisies"

x_ref153 technoculture

Geekspasms

IFILM GAVE ME spasms today when I saw the end of Spiderman.

x_ref2540

Why You Need Pocket Vox

WHEN HE VISITED Cork last month to research his upcoming book, I noticed Shel Israel did not record sound. I recommended that he get a digital voice recorder. Actually, I was rather snarky about it, telling Shel that I could not imagine a 21st century city-hopping traveling author doing the rounds without recording voices. Those international voices have emotion, pronunciation and vocabulary that correspondents often inadvertently homogenise. Only later, when the time zones have changed, can an author revisit primary research and clarify a point.