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AFTER 15 YEARS of faithful service (and scaring a lot of people), Sam, the World's Ugliest Dog passed away, a victim of kidney failure. I met Sam through Doc Searls, who pointed me to Sam's "mom" Susie Lockheed. Hundreds of people have visited my Irish blog to see Sam--many fans and dog owners who know how sad it is to lose a faithful friend. Goodbye, Sam!
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LIVING IN THE SOUTHERN hemisphere (that's South Tipp in my world) allows me to share the pain of the digitally disenfranchised everywhere. But rather than complain about lack of inexpensive always-on connectivity (it's really not broadband, except in the product name), I've connected to my audio archive. Thanks to the generosity of ZeZe (yet another identity of mash-up master Steffen Coonan), I have a Casette-Corder that can happily play my tapes from 20 years ago. Two other cassette players that I inherited had inoperative headphone jacks when I tried to use them for this process. Steffen's ("Hey, it's really old man! But it lines out!") Sony TCM-16 should be on eBay earning a few bob because all it's doing is gathering dust at his place. I'm glad it's still around because it gets my analogue cassettes into my digital archive. When I line out a stereo cable from the Cassette-Corder into the mic jack of my Sony ICD-MX20, I can listen on earbuds to my 20-year-old stuff as it goes digital.
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ANYONE WHO USES or runs classified advertisements should look at the beta version of Google Base. Within a week of its soft launch, nearly 100 people have stuff on offer from Dublin, Ireland. Google Base is Craigslist on steroids. Its interface is good as a means to create a free ad to sell something because you get these free features:
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I WONDER IF the acid test of accessibility for a website is being able to literally talk yourself around a Flash screen. We are trying that in the Tipperary Institute Skunkworks. Jakob Nielsen's take on it: "A strict focus on accessibility as a scorecard item doesn't help users with disabilities. To help these users accomplish critical tasks, you must adopt a usability perspective." So if you can use a Flash screen by telling the screen what to do, does it mean it's Neilsen-accessible?
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MY JOB LED ME into computers in 1982 when I got a Morrow MD-3 CP/M machine and used WordStar on it to write commendations that were then folded into personnel records. I used that computer through the 80s, ignoring Windows at first (too slow when it was unveiled 20 years ago!) then dovetailing it with a Windows-powered laptop in the early 90s. Along with two other hands-on pilots, we used several Apple computers to mine aircraft data in 1983 and that effort won a major flight safety award. In 1984, I got an Apple II GS to run educational multimedia for kids. The MD-3 was the only desktop I purchased. Since 1992, I have owned notebooks made by Compaq, Dell (two of them), and Sony. Over the past three years, I used the laptops to analyse trends. Sometimes that means online but the trends emerge just as often through stuff I aggregate and open later when commuting or when offline at home. I don't hack much on my own computers because scripts, templates and Web 2.0 spaces like Ning. My pathway into computers is hardly as technical as others appearing on O'Reilly Radar, the place where I started thinking about how I got started.
Nathan Torkington -- "Burn in 0: How I got into computers"
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I RECOMMEND a helpful filter to the full-on chatter from Irishblogs on the Planet of the Blogs and IrishBlogs.ie. It's planetoftheblogs.com/search/mainstream and http://www.irishblogs.ie/index.php?s=mainstream. When I use these techniques, I get the pointers to news I can use for third level classes and podcast commentary. You have to wait a day between an item appearing on the POTB's trawl and then search for "mainstream" in the search box. With that built-in delay, it's more likely that you'll find meaningful comments, trackbacks, and cross-talk on the Irishblogs Yahoo! group.
Found by accident in my Statcounter referrers.
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ON THE WEEK that IRMA announced proceedings against music consumers, Sony Music was installing evil rootkits on computer that attempted to play some of its newly released CDs. Don Kaminsky says, "It now appears that at least 568,200 nameservers have witnessed DNS queries related to the rootkit. At that scale, it doesn't take much to make this a multi-million host, worm-scale incident". The process of discovering this has led to some significant advances in the art of cache snooping, including some insightful data from Dan Kapinsky. A quick glance at DNS servers in Ireland shows a major cluster of customers in Ireland were caught out by the rootkit. In fact, Ireland was among the Top 25 places in the world for the Sony Rootkit. From the research done by DOXPARA:
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BECAUSE I LOVE COFFEE, I have become a frequent Kenco coffee drinker. The first Kenco coffee for our newly-annointed pantry comes in a coffee-brown jar with the logo "Kenco Sustainable Development" just above an authentic-looking certification from Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms. From Kenco:
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PEOPLE ARE LOOKING for greater "audthenticity" from mainstream media and perhaps for that reason, radio listenership by commuters is falling off. As Brian Greene (BHG) points out, the trend revealed at iTunes, PodNova, and Podcast Alley suggests that by March 2006, there will be more syndicated podcasts than commercial radio stations. That's how BHG sees it.
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EVERY EVENING AROUND 10 I walk the (deaf) dog around the 'hood and can't help but notice the flickering glow through many windows at night. It looks like a lot of people are watching broadcast television. There has to be a better offer.
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