Inside View from Ireland

Opening a Car That Locked Itself

I AM FLATTENING the charge on our two electronic key fobs because I have seen cars lock themselves when the fobs are totally charged. Although I have never experienced this problem, I watched a 2005 VW Passat lock itself on the main street of my town today. The problem got complicated because a three-month-old child was strapped in the back of the car. It got more complicated when the distraught mom did not have a spare set of keys anywhere on the continent. And then matters got as bad as they could when the local locksmith was more than 50 miles away at a wedding. A local policeman could not smash the driver's window with his baton. A friendly handyman offered a claw hammer and within five whacks, the street was filled with fresh glass shards. This is not an unusual occurrence.

Starfishes and Spiders in Limerick OpenCoffee

WITH A LONG TRAFFIC delay availing an opportunity yesterday to think about the evolution of Limerick's un-meeting series (Limerick OpenCoffee with Conn holding the mic), I listened to Mitch Joel wax eloquently about the starfish and the spider. Speaking in Montreal, Canada, he was talking about the way we network in Limerick, Ireland. I spent the first decade of my working life in a starfish organization, one with a purple water fountain and designated colours of ink for people with brass on their shoulders.  Its organisational focus on structure and procedure caused me to crash out with anarchy coursing through my mind. The opposite is happening in Limerick OpenCoffee and the social dynamic there would intrigue most business consultants. Then there's the book.

The Starfish and the Spider tells stories about centralised, decentralised and hybrid organizations. The title refers to those life forms seen commonly crawling on the ground and how you can kill them. If you want to kill a spider, cut off its head. You cannot cut off the head of a starfish as it does not have one. If you cut off the leg of an starfish, it will grow another starfish. Nature suggests why decentralised organizations like Al-Qaeda  have always been around and why terrorist groups with cells will always run a step ahead of institutionalised police forces and large government departments set up to defeat terrorism. Brafman and Beckstrom tell these stories well, offering examples of the most potent characteristics of decentralised organisations. The book featured in a Greenfields Report [4 minute MP3 file] on the Six Pixels of Separation podcast.

Pure Play First

PURE PLAY, Keith Bohanna's astute musings from the centre of Ireland's creative universe, gets the Six Apart spotlight as "Typepad Featured Blog" of the day. This puts Keith into an A-List complement among previously mentioned Steve Rubel, JD Lasica, and Kathy Sierra. I took comfort in running with Typepad from Keith Bohanna's adoption of the platform and like Keith, I have been well-served by the robust back-end support of the platform. At one time, I ran 28 different blogs from the one admin control panel while third level students learned how to fidget with templates. The Bohanna blogging karma has trickled over into other related sites, including Kilkennyman Ken McGuire, Spoilt Child Alan, and digital media engineer Robin Blanford. I think all of us would offer congratulations to Keith's time in the Six Apart blogging spotlight.

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Typepad -- "Featured Blog: Pure Play"

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Leaving Behind the Holy Water

WELL-VERSED AT security protocols at airports, I have to leave behind my vials of Knock Holy Water ® while heading through airport security checkpoints. As fellow believers will affirm, Knock Holy Water has miraculous healing powers, originating in a sacred grotto, plumbed for believers through Irish copper pipes and dispensed at water fountains near the shrine. Even when I have put the water inside plastic bottles shaped like the Baby Madonna (available in all fine Knock gift shops), the security personnel in both Shannon and Dublin airports are nonplussed. I haven't determined whether you can clear through security at Knock on international flights with a belt full of water-filled vials. Anyone know?

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Releasing Grip on P1i

BECAUSE I LIKE the SonyEricsson P1i more than my P910i, I'm really hesitant to release my grip on it and let it land in the lap of James Corbett. But James has assured me he will run it hard and give me some feedback as a totally uninitiated user of a touchscreen jog dial wifi 3G multimedia phone. This phone won't appeal to digital natives who text while driving or to those holding out for a low megapixel, low bandwidth, iPhone. However, it has served me well for nearly a month by reducing my costs while simultaneously increasing my information flow. This is the most practical 3G videophone I have ever used because of its form factor and smart handling of communications protocols. I use it most of the time while mooching on free wifi nodes for downloading mission-critical mail, skimming through a well-populated collection of newsfeeds on FreeNews and handling GTD task lists with AquaCalendar. The phone does not hit all the hot buttons for everyone, largely because of its rocker keys and tight resolution.

Spirited Soil

ROBERT KAPLAN CALLS IT "the plane that would bomb Iran" but I knew the B-2 Spirit only by its impact on coral and soil. That's because years ago, when the B-2 stealth bomber was just a rattling saber, my job involved performing a few tests on soil samples taken from airfields suitable for use as alternative landing strips. You can locate those fields as small dots in the ocean today, similar to the island-hopping bases that served the US military during WWII. In the current issue of The Atlantic, a section of Kaplan's upcoming book features prominently along with a slideshow and a double-truck photograph of one of the most lethal pieces of technology ever assembled. It's been used to blast people out of caves because its bunker-busting ordnance can be delivered more accurately and more powerfully than cruise missiles or hand-held rounds. Supporting the 21 B-2s in the US Air Force takes a lot more logistical dedication than many strategic planners envisaged when I cobbled together deployment packages for the aircraft in the Pentagon. I think I still have some original working notes about the aircraft when it was in the blueprint stage, funded as a black project in some nondescript cubicle. Kaplan offers a much more interesting treatment of this billion dollar fixture than any other author I have read. If you like paintball, you will probably enjoy most of Kaplan's story about the people and the defense mission.

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Robert Kaplan -- Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground ISBN 978-1400061334
Robert Kaplan -- "The Plane That Would Bomb Iran" in The Atlantic, September 2007.

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10 Questions on Sunday

READING MY SUNDAY papers, listening to Jaiku texts beep on my P1i, and flicking through Twitter while using Google Reader, I have 10 questions. First and foremost, why is Jason Bourne reading The Guardian?