Inside View

Scanning Manuals

SINCE ONE OF THE most regular uses of this blog is by people searching for missing manuals, I've started scanning and saving manuals from nearly every electronics gadget and appliance in the house. Many of the appliances don't work anymore of they are long gone but there's a historical value in scanning the documentation.

Today's Hate Mail

I JOINED THE FACEBOOK group "I judge you when you use poor grammar" because it was the first group I found with more than 100,000 members. That means it has a solid channel of hate mail targeted at the Grammar Nazis, like the pieces below the break.

Orienting to World of New Students

EVERY SUMMER, I think about the world of my incoming students because if I don't respect the perspective of new third level students, I become irrelevant or worse. I would be "lame" but that would not mean "disabled". I scribbled down 10 things that place those students in a mental space that differs markedly from where I have come. This fall, half of the members of the Class of 2011 were born in 1989. For them, Ted Bundy, Don the Beachcomber, Emperor Hirohito, Abbie Hoffman, Huey Newton and Andrei Sakharov have always been dead. Here are 10 questions that could come from those born before the 90s.

Morning Coffee Squeeze

JUST A FEW YEARS ago, I could view all my overnight emails, flick through all my essential news headlines and assess early submissions on my e-learning site before finishing a second cup of coffee. Nowadays, I have additional burdens in the form of expanded e-mail discussion lists, microblog items from Twitter and Jaiku as well as follow-ups on Facebook. I need to squeeze everything back into two cups of coffee and that means managing more by RSS. I want to be able to start my day knowing about the information I monitor as well as having my iPod synced with my audio subscriptions and ensuring my mobile phone is backed up on my laptop. My mobile phone also grabs my newsfeeds and holds them in its memory so I can flick through hundreds of headlines during dead time. Several operating principles are helping me along my daily routine and three of them are worth sharing.

Back Channels at Ireland's First Live TechTV Event

IRELAND'S FIRST LIVE TechTV event occurred in Limerick's AbsoluteHotel (chat session shown at left) during a regularly scheduled (free to anyone, arranged by the anonymous John Kennedy  and promoted by James Corbett) OpenCoffee meet-up that attracted the founders of Auctomatic (funded by Y Combinator), one iPhone, one SonyEricsson P1i, 14 people on site and 12 people online following the video stream. Some American viewers in Boston did not understand all the Irish accents. You can decide by listening to the [47.3 MB 96 kbps MP3] podcast. Camera1 (live UStream) was Conn O Muineachain from Edgecast and Camera2 was Simon Curran from Tipperary Institute (video segments to follow by free subscription on OpenCoffee.ie next week). Those who had their instant messaging or mobile phone text in-boxes configured could follow the event easily on the Jaiku Irish OpenCoffee channel. For those who missed the action, here's a back-to-front flow of the day pulled from my newsfeeds. It's probably not the entire flow, because both Google Reader and FreeNews fail to hoover all lines from Twitter and Jaiku.

Emergence of Irish Micromedia

THOSE WHO WATCH Irish bloggers have noticed a decrease in the web page activity by the most active writers. The drop in page activity often means some of the most active web writers have started microblogs. Business communicators and marketers should read on. This is not about navel gazing. This is about the emergence of micromedia, now well into its second year of existence.

Inside Information

ARISING FROM coffee chatter at Limerick OpenCoffee and some personal experience gained while returning to the grid comes ten tips that a few visitors here validate as inside information useful when reconnecting to places where you've been banned. If you've been kicked out of a discussion forum, blocked by civic sites, blacklisted by eBay, evicted from a social network or otherwise shunned for something you have fixed, these tactics may work for you. They got me back online in one place and they are the reason I carry around four different nics when setting up microblogs across the internet.

Defining Web 3.0

ERIC SCHMIDT SAYS that while Web 2.0 was based on Ajax, Web 3.0 will be "applications that are pieced together" with the characteristics that the applications are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the applications can run on any device (PC or mobile), the applications are very fast and very customizable, and are distributed virally via avenues like social networks and email. [1.03 MB 96 kbps MP3 clip] Actually, as Attention Ninja Chris Saad suggests, Schmidt misses the mark because Web 2.0 is much more than Ajax.

ROI on Shannon Service

AER LINGUS will abandon its Shannon-Heathrow service in favour of Belfast-Heathrow based on better returns for shareholders. ¹ The losers--businesses based in the Shannon region--must look for alternative air links to Heathrow. Easy access will be difficult. What's easiest is for the Irish government to buy two or three Heathrow slots from Aer Lingus or the grey market and then offer them at reduced rates to any carrier willing to operate a Shannon-Heathrow direct service. It's very straightforward and would cost less than constructing a light rail connection from Dublin city centre to Dublin Airport.

Aer Lingus has a lot of slots for Heathrow operations. Pre-issue valuations gave the slots valuations for around EUR 10m each. Perhaps the Irish government values Shannon region employment at worth EUR 30m over the next decade. If so, all that's needed is to launch an eBay bid for the Heathrow slots. Anyone with EUR 10m to bid will get at least one slot for perpetual use.  Long haul operators covet the slots. Qantas paid close to £20 million for two pairs of slots in late 2003 and Virgin Atlantic paid £20 million for four slot pairs. Previously the market valued prime slot pairs at £5 million to £6 million. The Irish government, not known for striking a tough bargain, could find it relatively easy to get a few slots for less than it paid for the failed e-voting fiasco. As a taxpayer, I would cap my budget at EUR 56m and return to the public with five slots in my pocket. My fee would be no more than 10% of the total transaction. Interested government officials can contact me directly through Jaiku or through the email link in the right hand gutter of my blog.

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1. Michael O'Regan -- "Minister Rules Out Action on Aer Lingus Proposal" in HomeNews, The Irish Times, 7 August 2007.

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Living Where Object Maps Would Help

I LIVE IN A semi-rural area in Ireland (evidence at left) where nobody knows the numerical designations of most of the roads. This seasoned ignorance becomes apparent when American visitors ring up for instructions, politely mentioning the R-route they're following to get over the mountain from Kilkenny and into the safer valleys of Tipperary. You could talk to a farmer on some of those rural roads and he would deny the road markings. Instead, he would tell you something like, "Go straight until the fork in the road then take a right turn down the boreen until you get to the oak tree. Go around to the left and down the hill to Mulcahy's pub. You can see the cemetery from there so head right towards it but mind the sheep." It doesn't matter what the GPS is telling you. Sheep do not figure on the GPS schema. Neither do pub fronts nor do oak trees. For those things, we have Google's street-level mapping.