Inside View

Turning 13

DAUGHTER MIA (below with her bear) turns 13 in nine months time and Twitter tells me I've been tweeting for the past 13 years. This means there's a cluster of tweets announcing Mia's birth to accompany a set of photos I've snapped and saved on Flickr (possibly requiring password access for casual readers).

Best Apps of 2019

WHILE LOOKING THROUGH listings of best apps and games of 2019, I discovered I'm running a few of the top-rated items worthy of editors' choices and winners of peoples' choice awards as well.

Best iPhone Game

Sky: The Children of the Light from thatgamecompany (screenshot above). Pro Tips: Sound is more than half of the experience. Kids using this app need to know how to read.

Memory Mic and Cupcakes #clonmel

WE VISITED SWEET CAROLINE'S in Clonmel and sampled delicious cupcakes chased by warm coffee. And you should too.

Listen to "Memory Mic and Cupcakes E477" on Spreaker.

Correlations #workflow

WE'RE APPROACHING THE END of another deep analysis of reading and listening patterns online. If you've figured out how to drive listeners while attracting readers, you've discovered a slice of business intelligence that I would love to see.

Besides correlating the incidence of high amounts of listeners to high numbers of readers, I'm also trying to optimise the workflow so the two output channels (text and audio) complement one another. These ideas are part of Topgold Audio Clip 476.

At my mobile desk with @patphelan in my ears

I FEEL VERY INCOMPLETE when I fail to share snippets of life across different forms because no matter how hard I try to enjoy the ephemeral state of Instagram Stories, I get much more joy out of hearing people talk about their daily lives. And the written word resonates with me even more.

So I'm taking some time away from grading papers to share a five minute snippet of my daily work flow. And in the middle of the recording, I heard @patphelan offer a new technique for managing noise. His clarion voice came through the loud fan noise of our local canteen and he offers advice worth considering. You can scrub forward in the audio clip below to see Pat's screenshot and hear his comment.

Where Will AMZN Top Out

I REMEMBER CHATTING WITH staff from the Irish Revenue Commission in 1996, well before the concept of taxing online commerce was rolled into Ireland. Back then, I marveled at the resilience of Amazon--but the Amazon of 1996 is a mere peanut compared to the Amazon of 2019.

According to Franklin Foer, today "Amazon controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google ... (and its) advertising business is as valuable as the entirety of IBM. One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry—institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers. Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company; Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day". [1]

Bringing strong PowerBI visuals to data points h/t @saorog

WE ARE SHARING a survey about the collaborative uses of cloud services with a framework provided by Office 365 and PowerBI. The data points come from survey work finished by creative students on the Clonmel Digital Campus and the PowerBI toolset has evolved through open documentation offered by Stephen Howell at Microsoft Ireland.

Big Reveals At Congregation

EVERY NOVEMBER, in the sleepy village of Cong, County Mayo, I try to join 80 other people to share my perspective on a major topic. In November 2019, the topic will be about "community" and I plan to update this blog post to share thoughts that extend from a blog post I've made about what community means to me.

One Year of Happy Hands-Free Recording h/t @documentally #edchatie

AFTER 12 MONTHS of using the Sennheiser Memory Mic to create hands-free classroom recordings, I'm very happy to report I have never lost an audio segment with the Memory Mic producing high quality audio or high definition video. I'm now helping other educators understand the simple and effective workflow involved to quickly produce and share recorded minutes from academic settings.

Listen to "Sennheiser Memory MIC And Spreaker E469" on Spreaker.

And a big thumbs-up to Christian Payne for introducing me to the sweet little piece of durable technology. The Sennheiser Memory Mic works with iOS and Android. It's much more resistant to water immersions and concrete bounce tests than the handsets I've used to record with it. Recommended.