Inside View

Why women live longer than men

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From a semiotic analysis of Wallis advertisements as discussed in Tipperary Institute's Media Studies course.

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McDowell's Definition of Security

PERHAPS THE MOST well-defined Irish politician is Michael McDowell. You know what you're getting when you give Michael McDowell a platform. Now he is defining a platform for the Progressive Democrats and his initial work with the platform shows he knows more about the electorate than many public opinion surveys. That's because McDowell knows what a significant percentage of the voters really want the government to do with immigration. They want it throttled back.

Most Irish Dislike Bush

THE LATEST Sunday Tribune/Millward Brown IMS opinion poll puts numbers behind a sentiment that many American university students expressed to me during their backpacking trips through Ireland last summer. The poll proves four out of five Irish people believe that the policies pursued by US president George W. Bush have made the world a more dangerous place. He has done this through a lack of an effective conservative ideology and through actions that translate into extravagant domestic spending, two bungled wars, a doubling of the national debt, a ruination of America's moral high ground in the war against terror, the worst use of the US intelligence services since the Bay of Pigs, the fostering of Iran as a nuclear power and a squandering of global energy reserves. All these things appear on national television in Irleand. They fan a distrust of the American president.

Daily Kos and Carole Let Me Finish

SOME READERS OF The Daily Kos are just discovering Carole Coleman's interview of George W. Bush. When backtracking over more than 550 comments extending from the thread of discussion, I stumbled upon the words of Will Rogers. "It's no disgrace not to be able to run a country nowadays, but it is a disgrace to keep on trying when you know you can't."

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Previously seen by IrishEyes -- "Carole Coleman Does Dubya"
Daily Kos -- "Let me finish"

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Lifespan of Dell Inspiron 8000

WE BOUGHT a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop in July 2001. It was made and sold in Ireland. We still use it on a weekly basis because it can crunch background processes very efficiently by leveraging a gig of RAM and a 1-GHz processor. This five-year-old piece of kit is the longest-serving technology in my personal workspace. I mention this because several times a week, people land on this blog when searching for "lifespan of Inspiron 8000" which suggests there are a bunch of these heavy twin-fan laptops still working after five years. As Google reveals, its battery is its weak part. Ours lasted four months. We never replaced it. Unlike some people's, ours never even got hot or felt like it would explode.

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Photo of Inspiron 8000 next to the computer that replaced it for most of its multimedia college support activities.

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One Reason Not to Upgrade iTunes

IF YOU USE a wireless connection between your iPod and your car radio speakers, you might want to avoid an upgrade to iTunes 7 becacuse the upgrade normally wipes the radio station menu from your iPod, as Security Monkey reports.

Amazon Knows More Than My Bank

TO PROTECT my online commerce with their merchants, Amazon has recorded more information about me and my personal data than my Irish bank. I'm impressed that Amazon could verify my Social Security Number against my birthdate and my place of birth against my year of birth.

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Plus, Amazon answers email sent to it--something my Irish bank cannot do.

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The Problem with Furries

WHEN MAKING PICTURES with furry animals, leave plenty of time. Because the hardest part about wrangling wild animals is waiting for them to show up near your camera teams.

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Images from Seville Pictures for "The White Planet" shown in the Toronto International Film Festival, 2006.

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Meet the BarCampers

JAMES CORBETT PROVIDES a handy way of viewing all the newsfeeds of those signed up to attend BarCampIreland at the end of September. He made a feed grazer for people "who might not wish to subscribe to all the feeds of fellow attendees but would like a way of temporarily following their writings to discover ice-breaking points of discussion." Nice one.

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BarCamp Ireland -- sign up please.
Grazr -- the easy way of seeing loadsa info quickly.

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You Tube Owes Millions

WE TEACH multimedia students that you cannot use the music or the videos of signed artists in personal media projects without working out some sort of licensing deal. The same concept works for You Tube and My Space. Universal Music Group chief executive Doug Morris told Merrill Lynch investors on Tuesday that YouTube and MySpace are “copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars”. He added, “How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly” and as Pete Cashmore notes, that suggests "the world’s biggest record company could be taking legal action against the sites".

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