Inside View

Getting police response

THIS TACTIC also works in Ireland. Read on:

George Phillips of Meridian, Mississippi was going to bed when his wife told him that he'd left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window. George opened the back door to go turn off the light but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.

He phoned the police, who asked "Does someone live in your shed?" and he said no. Then they said that all patrols were busy, and that he should simply lock his door and an officer would be along when available.

George said, "Okay," hung up, counted to 30, and phoned the police again. "Hello I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people in my shed. Well, you don't have to worry about them now, cause I've just shot them all." Then he hung up.

Covering BT Young Scientists

ALONG WITH THREE super-charged students, I am on the floor of the 2006 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in the RDS, Dublin. The event is open to the public from 1000 to 1730 from Thursday to Saturday. Some of the stands are gutted by Saturday. During lunch hour, it is more congested than Saturday shopping in Grafton Street. All shops within a half mile of the venue offer sandwiches at rip-off prices.

Just walk away

WITH 22 YEARS of electronic communication under my belt, I have endured withering attacks, abusive language, legal threats and tiresome spam. Long ago, I figured that sometimes the best course of action is to walk away, disconnect-all or filter-out. In my current job, my filters automatically trash mail from dozens of named individuals because those people seem to raise my blood pressure whenever they write e-mail. The point worth remembering is that what technology gives, technology can take away. You don't need to interact with electronic correspondence. The world coexists with discussion boards and mailing lists; it does not revolve around them. This is an important fact that needs to be woven into the mix by the Anti-Bullying Centre in Trinity College, Dublin.

You annoy me so you're nicked

DURING THE FIRST week of 2006, President Bush signed into US law a prohibition on posting annoying web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your real identity. Declan McCullagh found the prohibition buried in the "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Bill". Crriminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

Time Has Been Good to Me

Boards.ie reminded me about the passage of another year and caused me to reflect that time has been good to me. On top of thoughts about good health, a wonderful partner and enjoyable friends, I got an alarm clock modeled after the instrumentation aboard N-X-211, "The Spirit of St. Louis". While I doubt Ryan Aircraft would have manufactured handsome wood-grained cabinets for aviation radio sets, the replica's brushed aluminium features look spectacularly like the finished exterior surface that carried solo aviator Charles Lindbergh from Long Island, New York, across the Atlantic Ocean, over southern Ireland and ultimately to Paris, France where he touched down after 33 hours, 30 minutes.

Scientists this week

THE BT YOUNG SCIENTISTS Exhibition runs this week and we will be on the floor meeting some of Ireland's up-and-coming talent. Some of those young teens will become part of a podcast mash-up to be released on Friday the 13th. Last year the RDS was clearly beyond its fire-safe limits during several lunchtime periods. That's when we plan to be there with mics and a mixing desk. If you're curious, stop by Tipperary Institute's booth. Otherwise, tune in and listen to 30 minutes of an on-the-floor report.

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Mash-up tracks coming from Steffen Coonan, a podsafe musician and multimedia programming student in Tipperary Institute. We nicked his image from his Flickr photostream.

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How wrong will Adrian Weckler be

ADRIAN WECKLER STICKS HIS neck out when making 15 predictions for 2006. They're worthy being his first blog entry because several would attract comments from the Weckler Fan Club. The 15 predcitions appear in the first Computers in Business for 2006. Here they are:

Drag and Drop on iPod

MY IPOD assumed another mission when I started using it as a drag-and-drop device. It still plays music as good as any MP3 device but knowing it's there with gigs of other stuff makes it more useful than a dumb music player.

For nearly a year, I used XPlay 2 from MediaFour when transferring MP3 files from intranet drives, removeable gigs of storage and even from mapped FTP locations. If Windows Explorer could see the space, XPlay 2 could drag-and-drop into it.

Two other things XPlay 2 did for me:

Learning real-time

ON A DAY WHEN colleagues from Digital Rights Ireland told me I would no longer enjoy a "private" status for web-accessible educational podcasts, I got an invitation to discuss strategies in a Learning Center wiki. I told Damien Mulley that I think I can avoid the wrath of IMRO by availing of a license spotted by John Handelaar. We need a license because ASCAP fees normally follow from podcasts distributed over the internet. Some of our educasts contain tracks harvested from students' MP3 players in real-time educasts made in college classrooms.

Your Digital Rights

I READ A PIECE FROM BEUC (Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs) the same day that I opened bulk mail promoting knowledge management. The two perspectives often conflict. Current international IPR policy, especially the concepts I read from the European Union, grate against my established rights as a consumers. As BEUC points out, "the ease of digital copies has challenged traditional business models by lowering the cost and effort of reproduction and distribution. Different business models for content delivery compete in a fast developing technological environment. As a result, values such as the protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) on the one hand and the protection of the private sphere and consumers on the other seem to be more and more at odds."