Inside View

Internet phones without computers

IT WOULD BE a major event if I wired my 80-year-old mom to the internet because she is proud to avoid computers. The computer technology in her car, oven, and television don't count because there is no keyboard for those things. She finally accepts the fact that she calls me over the internet when she dials my SkypeIn number on her cell phone. She has a mobile phone plan that makes it free to call nearby area codes so that means she reaches me in Cashel (Ireland) for free when dialing my Philadelphia number from her cell phone in the States. She credits the internet for the savings. So count mom as one of those non-geeks who use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) without even turning on the computer.

Beattie Puts Blog to Bed

UPDATED: Two days after Russ pulled his blog, the tech.memeorandum.com echo chamber has some interesting speculation about the retirement of Russell Beattie.

IF YOU BELIEVE everything you read through blogs, then Russell Beattie has joined the ranks of retired bloggers. I've followed Russ stuff since early 2002 when he wired some JSP into a notebook. His tribulations with Radio were shared experiences and his mobile phone advice well-appreciated. If you've never visited his space, check out the archives for essential information regarding Series 60 Nokia phones. I hope he continues his musings through the mobility community at Yahoo! Funnily enough, Beattie's shutdown has escaped notice by tech.memorandum.com for at least two days, which is strange since any kind of burp from the RB Notebook normally gets swarms of coverage by bloggers.

---

Russell Beattie -- "The last page"
James Corbett -- "I'm giving up blogging"
Bonus Link from Russ: "What's on my Nokia 6680"

x_ref1256

Irish Govt Avoiding Road Safety

UPDATED on 22 April 2006 after Bernard suggested I shouldn't invite legal action by disgruntled drivers. Let's cite the registration numbers of the cars instead of the drivers by name.

DOCTORS Fenton Howell and Declan Bedford have condemned the Irish government for failing to reduce the number of road deaths. Their points are worth considering. First, they believe the Irish government has not curbed alcohol abuse. Although the statistics suggests that nearly 40% of road deaths are alcohol-related, Dr Bedford suggests a bigger trend. He told the delegates at the annual conference of the Irish Medical Organisation in Killarney that 96% of crashes were due to driver behaviour. "We drink and drive. We speed far too much." The Irish government has suggested random breath tests but don't expect those tests outside of pubs. And the results of citations linked to breath tests have yet to be upheld in court.

On MySpace

DANNY O'BRIEN points to stuff that Wired News found on MySpace. "Online service Wired News ran the names of random sex offenders through MySpace, coming up with five people whose names and photos appeared to match". That might suggest there's real work ahead for "child safety star" Hemu Nigam who Rupert Murdoch's News Corp hired to deal with concerns that it has not done enough to protect its younger members. I'm not a MySpace fan because the stuff I find there is too unpredictable. For parents who don't cop onto MySpace, it's probably time to go swimming onto that internet space if there's a teenager in the house. There's an interesting world online and some of it means you rub shoulders with surprising people. They aren't always what they seem to be on screen.

---

Jenn Shreve -- "MySpace Faces a Perp Problem"
Danny O'Brien -- "Trading off decency and immunity" in The Irish Times, April 21, 2006.

x_ref125mc

Blinkered Thinking by Joan Miró Family

UPDATED: Copy corrected with input from arts-aware convex, a knowledgeable reader.

WHEN SEARCHING Google on Thursday for an item related to visual art, a remediated Google logo appeared with due credit to the surrealist painter Joan Miró. Nobody in the first year (freshman) class knew of Joan Miró until I moused over the image. His family objected to the free advertising given to the artist and then asked Google to take down the remediated image. Out of respect, Google complied. If it was a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement, I believe the family of Joan Miró would lose. In fact, Miró's family might wish to issue discovery orders on the Moleskine notebooks used by my students since many of them include the work of surreal painters like Joan Miró. You can take copyright to an extreme and when you use it to bar the exploration of culture by the unwashed masses, you are a loser.

Stupid Drivers in Ireland

MY NOKIA N70 automatically records all incidences of stupid driving in Ireland. To qualify for the shot and permanent inclusion in Flickr, all a car has to do is cut me off, run into me, wash me with a 60 mph air blast in a city or drive head-on forcing me to leave the road. I am not alone in this cameraphone project. You need not have a photo to qualify because you can make a JPG that describes your incident. Just upload your evidence and tag your Flickr images with both of the words stupiddriver and Ireland. We need to arrest stupid driving in Ireland.

---

x_ref125ws

Arising from third level projects

MARY NUGENT completed a fourth year project that involved brute force repackaging of online tutorials and podcasts for sight-impaired or deaf viewers. The research trickling out of her work suggests we will continue the initiative next year, this time getting MP3 players and screen players to scroll text alongside the vocal track.

Getting Google to Pay More for Meds

MORE THAN 300,000 people have clicked through this website since I coded some Javascript that permits Google advertisements to appear here. The money Google sends goes to my 80-year-old mom who refers to the monthly trickle as "the cheques from that balloon company". That would be mom's fuzzy eyesight spotting the Google logo on the big company cheque. The money pays for no more than one week's worth of cancer medication--her part of the expense since Medicare picks up 90% of the treatment costs. So those who click on Google here help mom's pocket money situation. After reading Michele Neylon's recent post on AdSense, I realised I had forgotten to key in some details on the AdSense network, so I'm pulling in less than 20% of the money this site could be generating. That's speculation, but it's based on hearing Russ Beattie talking in multiples of thousands with a logical conclusion being that AdSense should deliver me multiples of hundreds every month. I've seen other suggestions that point out this same conclusion because I've spotted Google advertisers looking at this blog through their software, trying to suss out what this blog does. Short answer: this blog attracts no fewer than 250 people a day looking for tech solutions to Motorola and Sony products. It also attracts no fewer than 100 people a day looking for gadgets, solutions to svchost, and work-arounds for DOS on XP. Although 35 people a day look at my Nokia 9500 review, most are Nigerians requesting free phones.  The remaining 1100 daily visitors come for a wide variety of long tail items that you can see as through the Who Is On Now link--the iPorn, the stun guns,  eBay suspensions, the Irish sex. I often don't have stuff written on these salacious subjects but when some comment spammer writes them on a blog post, Google often indexes the pages as porn-filled before I can delete the comment, so porn hunters come looking for them months later. Google doesn't know I've deleted the comments unless I revise content on the spammed page and then republish it.

Volunteer IT overseas

JOHN COLLINS WRITES a heart-warming piece in the Irish Times today about tech-savvy people working for non-governmental organisations in the developing world. "Technology has a huge role to play in the process of effectively delivering aid on the gorund in developing countries, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are increasingly looking for qualified IT staff willing to volunteer overseas". I've gone downrange decades ago. It wasn't for the pay.

Dennis Duggan RIP

DENNIS DUGGAN, one of the last of an old-time breed of newspapermen who many Irish heard on Sam Smyth's Sunday Supplement, died yesterday in his beloved New York City at the age of 78. Warm-hearted and keen-eyed throughout a half-century of mainstream reporting, he had the attention of millions of readers and listeners every week. Smyth liked Duggan's Irish humour. The man on the street liked Duggan's credibility. I first read Duggan in Newsday more than 30 years ago. Duggan held the posts of financial reporter and editor, where he taught me the difference between a 20 year and 30 year mortgage. Since 1985, he chronicled New York City in a way similar to Herb Caen in San Francisco. His column offered a window into all parts of the Big Apple, including places I never would go. I was always entertained by the way he could elevate the banal to the superlative, even though I often thought he was just winding up unsuspecting readers. I'll miss Dennis and wonder if there's an audible collection of his thoughts that we can work into our third level media writing curriculum.

---

Melanie Lefkowitz -- "Newsday columnist Duggan dies" with photo of Duggan from Newsday.

x_ref125ws