Inside View

Starfishes and Spiders in Limerick OpenCoffee

WITH A LONG TRAFFIC delay availing an opportunity yesterday to think about the evolution of Limerick's un-meeting series (Limerick OpenCoffee with Conn holding the mic), I listened to Mitch Joel wax eloquently about the starfish and the spider. Speaking in Montreal, Canada, he was talking about the way we network in Limerick, Ireland. I spent the first decade of my working life in a starfish organization, one with a purple water fountain and designated colours of ink for people with brass on their shoulders.  Its organisational focus on structure and procedure caused me to crash out with anarchy coursing through my mind. The opposite is happening in Limerick OpenCoffee and the social dynamic there would intrigue most business consultants. Then there's the book.

The Starfish and the Spider tells stories about centralised, decentralised and hybrid organizations. The title refers to those life forms seen commonly crawling on the ground and how you can kill them. If you want to kill a spider, cut off its head. You cannot cut off the head of a starfish as it does not have one. If you cut off the leg of an starfish, it will grow another starfish. Nature suggests why decentralised organizations like Al-Qaeda  have always been around and why terrorist groups with cells will always run a step ahead of institutionalised police forces and large government departments set up to defeat terrorism. Brafman and Beckstrom tell these stories well, offering examples of the most potent characteristics of decentralised organisations. The book featured in a Greenfields Report [4 minute MP3 file] on the Six Pixels of Separation podcast.

Pure Play First

PURE PLAY, Keith Bohanna's astute musings from the centre of Ireland's creative universe, gets the Six Apart spotlight as "Typepad Featured Blog" of the day. This puts Keith into an A-List complement among previously mentioned Steve Rubel, JD Lasica, and Kathy Sierra. I took comfort in running with Typepad from Keith Bohanna's adoption of the platform and like Keith, I have been well-served by the robust back-end support of the platform. At one time, I ran 28 different blogs from the one admin control panel while third level students learned how to fidget with templates. The Bohanna blogging karma has trickled over into other related sites, including Kilkennyman Ken McGuire, Spoilt Child Alan, and digital media engineer Robin Blanford. I think all of us would offer congratulations to Keith's time in the Six Apart blogging spotlight.

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Typepad -- "Featured Blog: Pure Play"

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Leaving Behind the Holy Water

WELL-VERSED AT security protocols at airports, I have to leave behind my vials of Knock Holy Water ® while heading through airport security checkpoints. As fellow believers will affirm, Knock Holy Water has miraculous healing powers, originating in a sacred grotto, plumbed for believers through Irish copper pipes and dispensed at water fountains near the shrine. Even when I have put the water inside plastic bottles shaped like the Baby Madonna (available in all fine Knock gift shops), the security personnel in both Shannon and Dublin airports are nonplussed. I haven't determined whether you can clear through security at Knock on international flights with a belt full of water-filled vials. Anyone know?

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Releasing Grip on P1i

BECAUSE I LIKE the SonyEricsson P1i more than my P910i, I'm really hesitant to release my grip on it and let it land in the lap of James Corbett. But James has assured me he will run it hard and give me some feedback as a totally uninitiated user of a touchscreen jog dial wifi 3G multimedia phone. This phone won't appeal to digital natives who text while driving or to those holding out for a low megapixel, low bandwidth, iPhone. However, it has served me well for nearly a month by reducing my costs while simultaneously increasing my information flow. This is the most practical 3G videophone I have ever used because of its form factor and smart handling of communications protocols. I use it most of the time while mooching on free wifi nodes for downloading mission-critical mail, skimming through a well-populated collection of newsfeeds on FreeNews and handling GTD task lists with AquaCalendar. The phone does not hit all the hot buttons for everyone, largely because of its rocker keys and tight resolution.

Spirited Soil

ROBERT KAPLAN CALLS IT "the plane that would bomb Iran" but I knew the B-2 Spirit only by its impact on coral and soil. That's because years ago, when the B-2 stealth bomber was just a rattling saber, my job involved performing a few tests on soil samples taken from airfields suitable for use as alternative landing strips. You can locate those fields as small dots in the ocean today, similar to the island-hopping bases that served the US military during WWII. In the current issue of The Atlantic, a section of Kaplan's upcoming book features prominently along with a slideshow and a double-truck photograph of one of the most lethal pieces of technology ever assembled. It's been used to blast people out of caves because its bunker-busting ordnance can be delivered more accurately and more powerfully than cruise missiles or hand-held rounds. Supporting the 21 B-2s in the US Air Force takes a lot more logistical dedication than many strategic planners envisaged when I cobbled together deployment packages for the aircraft in the Pentagon. I think I still have some original working notes about the aircraft when it was in the blueprint stage, funded as a black project in some nondescript cubicle. Kaplan offers a much more interesting treatment of this billion dollar fixture than any other author I have read. If you like paintball, you will probably enjoy most of Kaplan's story about the people and the defense mission.

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Robert Kaplan -- Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground ISBN 978-1400061334
Robert Kaplan -- "The Plane That Would Bomb Iran" in The Atlantic, September 2007.

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10 Questions on Sunday

READING MY SUNDAY papers, listening to Jaiku texts beep on my P1i, and flicking through Twitter while using Google Reader, I have 10 questions. First and foremost, why is Jason Bourne reading The Guardian?

Blowing Up Samsung DVD Player

TODAY, I BLEW UP our Samsung DVD player (at left). It was an accident meant to happen because I was running Saving Private Ryan at near-maximum volume to get the full effect of the bullets hitting corpses. When I pulled at one of the 5.1 speakers, I accidentally jerked its lead from the back of the DVD player. That effectively shorted out the DVD player and left us without a main source of entertainment. The unit was dead-black--no infrared light, no soft blue backlights. We liked the Samsung HT-Q20 a lot so I found my small screwdrivers in the gadget drawer and slid back its top cover, hoping to find a reset switch. Nothing but really sweet looking circuit boards inside. Resigned to buying another DVD player and this time ensuring nothing could pull its speaker cables loose, I slid the HT-Q20 back into the sitting room cabinet and covered it with a burial cloth. But then I noticed its little blue power light glowing! As luck would have it, the unit resets itself when its top cover slides back from the housing. That's good news for us and we hope to get at least five years of use from the DVD player.

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Google finds nearly 1000 results when searching for "Samsung HT-Q20 problem".

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Talking Tech to Taximen

ONE INTERESTING TACTIC that I use to keep taxi drivers from talking about the weather, the politicians or the state of Rip-Off Ireland is to divert their attention to their phones. More than any other section of Irish society, taxi drivers have used their voice on cellular networks to connect with real business. I remember the incessant chatter from my very first taxi ride in New York City. Decades later, I remember the purr of a Mercedes engine interrupted by a datafax transmission onto the dashboard of a Finnish taxi. Its voice channel was muted. Today, I watched an Irish taxi driver call himself by talking to his car. He was over the moon because his taxi knew his voice. After we bonded (I was a fare worth EUR 50), he revealed to me that he could text or call his Avensis with his pocket phone (a trusty Nokia 6310i) and tell its passengers he was going to shut down the car and lock its doors. He was so impressed that through the magic of telematics, he could stop his car and lock its thieves inside. Then I pulled out my mobile phone (at left) and politely said that the Nokia N95 could do those things too PLUS they had maps more accurate than the strip map he used in his glove box.

Time for Remote Phone Sync

I HAVE COMMITTED to handing over a SonyEricsson P1i to the Eirepreneur in hopes that he can break it without physically damaging the phone. Before the hand-off, I plan to sync my back-up phone to ZYB's online services and I've pulled the process into this blog post as a point of reference.

Nokia N95 Award Winner

NOKIA'S N95 multimedia phone--a computer wrapped around a megapixel camera--has been voted "the European Media Phone of the Year 2007-2008" by the European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA), Europe's leading association for consumer electronics. EISA praised the Nokia N95 as containing "practically every feature one could imagine in a mobile device." My personal opinion is that the phone is more than bling. It feels good and works well for those interested in creative multimedia.

The judging panel cited Nokia N95 features such as GPS, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and MPEG4 video capture of up to 30 fps. EISA also highlighted the device's data access of up to 3.5 Mbs, advanced web browser, Wi-Fi, microSD slot, and audio reproduction of multiple audio formats. If you have a mature version of this phone, you won't be disappointed with its feature set.