Inside View from Ireland

Moleskine 1003

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if I lost one of my Moleskines? It would be like losing the glue that binds my to-do list to my calendar to working notes to my primary memory jogger. It means losing my "at a glance" method of creating multimedia. It means failing to see how students are doing in assigned work. I want to ensure that I don't lose the important stuff in Moleskine collection, so I'm starting to make quicklinks to my Moleskine notebooks.

At the top of the heap sit pages dedicated to Open Coffee, Tech Online, Dads and Daughters, Social Entrepreneurs, Business Video Production, Social Messages for Government, RSS Revision FLVs, Enhanced Podcasts, Business Cards and Flickr Cards.

On the Resource Shelf

RESOURCE SHELF brings me reliable information and some of the online categories deserve serious exploration by third level students in search of resources. The copyright section explains how intellectual property in the digital age can challenge organizations of all sizes. The section for educators is helpful and also the category for conference presentations.

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via Gary Price.

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Need a Fire Hydrant

FIRE HYDRANT.ORG is the largest and fastest growing fire hydrant resource on the Web. Why not browse the site and find original hydrants like the rare Mellert hydrant shown here. It was "a basket case when discovered, brought back to life through the efforts of Ralph Bascelli and his community. Local businesses participated by donating their services". Living in Ireland, I walk pavements where most hydants are nestled underground. I believe the time has come to proudly display a purple fire hydrant prminently in front of my home. I'm eagerly watching Fire Hydrant.org in hopes of finding a well-preserved American fire hydrant painted metallic purple.

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Removing Tourists from the Rock

MY PHOTOS OF the Rock of Cashel often have faces of tourists distracting from the lines of the rugged Rock. Fortunately, help is at hand and there is a very straightforward way to remove tourists from your photos by using Photoshop skills.

Tourists are often irritating digital artefacts. Like bugs on lenses or dust on a filter, those tourists have to go.

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Darby Sawchuk -- "How to remove tourists from your photos"

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Resources Spotlighted For Schools

MORE THAN 100 primary school and second level teachers will attend a day-long "Internet Experience" conference in Tipperary Institute on Thursday where they will learn about emerging trends in ICT supporting education. My presentation (and accompanying podcast) points to useful online resources beyond those commonly used from Scoilnet and TeachNet that can be blended into education. I prepared this blog post as a jumplist for content that I will discuss and podcast in support of the event. I have used most of the sources cited in this jumplist. My listing also shows the limited reach I have in the area and it suggests the kinds of things I use in the education materials I produce and in third level research done by Sharon Fitzgerald. I have integrated suggestions from readers of this blog and from Irish educators in the DITAT group on Yahoo! If you have suggestions worth considering by educators on a shoestring budget, please offer your pointer. In fact, the message I'm hammering home is that lofty goals behind the National Digital Learning Repository will be achieved only when people share their links, collaborate with one another, and build on the work of others. You can follow this discussion by clicking on the orange "RSS"rectangle, such as the one on An Timeall. Thanks to RSS, important information flows to my (free) Bloglines account and into my Google News Reader.

Banned Mastercard Commercial

FOR ALL THINGS, there's Mastercard. Including this banned commercial via Flowering Woman.

Spotted in referrers

REFERRERS EDUCATE me, especially when they come in swarms of 10,000 page loads a week. Today I learned:

• Cartoon Saloon is cartoon-asdl.adsl.esat.net (193.120.103.218).
• People like old Guinness advertisements.
• Mobile video is about to explode.
• More people are looking for iPorn than motoPorn.
• This works because F-Secure says so: Putting $sys$ in front of a file name like a CD burning program makes Sony's DRM software hide the file. This means other DRM programs that try to detect CD burning programs on your computer won't be able to see it either.
• People like reading old manuals for things like telephones and washing machines. You should save your stuff for your grandchildren.
• NetVibes shows photos from Flickr faster than Flickr's Flash interface shows the photos.
• Of all the 21st century technologies discussed on my blog, the one most-searched concerns call centres. On a related note, the first cold call I got over Skype was from someone selling Boston t-shirts.
• When people land on this blog looking for t-shirts, they normally want Dublin Fire Brigade t-shirts. The most popular item of attire searched for here: thongs. Some guy (had to be a guy) came looking for "thesis on thong".
• There are five times as many references to "Irish Barbie" than "Irish Bernie" in the search engines.
• I record more searches on this blog for Ryanair than for Aer Lingus. "Kilkenny" is the most commonly searched-for destination. I used to live there and blogged about that.

Battlefield glow

THE GLOW on a 21st-century battlefield is more likely to come from a laptop than a campfire. And some of those laptops have produced "the blogs of war" that John Hockenberry has profiled in the August 2005 Wired magazine. They deserve bookmarking because some of them are books in their own right. I'm trawling around them at the moment to see how the story of Cindy Sheehan is resonating among active duty bloggers of the US military. Here are my regular milblog reads that will inform my judgment:

Pages Removed

PORTIONS OF THE AL-QAEDA TRAINING manual discovered in Manchester is available online, minus the chapters most useful to terrorists.

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Quicklinks 0512

Journal 0512 contains a few remaindered links that bear visiting so I'm listing them here for archiving.