Inside View

The Day TV Arrived

AROUND 40 YEARS AGO, my dad came in the front door walking sideways, carrying a black and white television. It took a few days to sort out something other than a coat hangar and to get a signal but we figured it out. Then we turned off the set until a few hours before Eagle descended from the mother ship and descended onto the surface of the moon. I remember lying down on the carpet in our living room to watch that event because I was taking up a lot of space from my four brothers. The moon landing happened, we talked about it for ages with friends, and we knew it had really occurred because the event replayed on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. The moon landing was the first event I saw on the television and shared with friends. The moon landing opened the door to our home to television. The set had to be plugged into a switchable mains power outlet that my dad kept under control by a firmly-placed strip of duct tape. You couldn't untape the switch and power up the TV unless you had his permission. Mom was too easy--her permission didn't count. Landing on the moon and sharing the story with friends also opened another chapter in our lives because on Sunday evenings we were allowed to go down the street to a neighbour's colour television set to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Colour. We were also allowed to change the station on the family radio, one similar to several sets I saw in East Berlin when I visited there before the Wall fell. My sensory world exploded in the late 60s, thanks to the moon landing. Sometimes I want to switch everything back to black and white.

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Lessons from Packing Up

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I worked with a team of people who arranged for the removal of intermediate nuclear forces from Europe. This effort involved more than pulling back and decommissioning weapons like the one at right. It also resulted in the loss of employment for thousands of military personnel, civil servants and contract support staff in England, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union and the United States. I learned some things back then that I've kept close to the way I operate today. Perhaps the most important thing I learned was that no job lasts forever. In the case of nuclear surety, highly-qualified specialists were given their walking papers from an exceptionally specialised occupation that often required a cursory security clearance for a spouse. I also learned that nothing prepares you for a jolt better than preparation in the first place. Between 1989 and now, I've moved between more than a dozen different job titles. A section of a report from a cost-cutting task force in Ireland recommends abolition of my place of employment, saying "The Institute is located near two other Institutes of Technology and has a high complement of staff compared to full-time students." This is the warning bell for a series of actions that will probably result in the realignment of priorities, and whatever happens, I'll remember lessons I learned as I roamed through the forests of England and Germany, counting nuclear warheads, support structures and personnel as they wrapped up and turned off the lights.

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Endeavour Launches a Flashback

JUST LIKE CLOCKWORK, STS-127 launched at 6:03 PM from the Kennedy Space Center and 18 minutes later, its telltale white spot and trailing orange payload was passing overhead my home in County Tipperary. I should have placed a tripod in the back garden and pointed the camera in a south by southwest direction with its shutter open for 30 seconds. I would have captured more than the black sky that I recorded on the HD Handycam that I borrowed from Tipperary Institute. As the shuttle blasted its way overhead, I enjoyed a nice flashback from the evening when I watched the moon landing with my four brothers. That grainy black and white experience launched me into a whole new trajectory.

Working Around Slow Eircom Connectivity

LAST NIGHT, MY internet connection with Eircom slowed to one half the speed I get when using my Nokia E90 as a tethered modem on my laptop. I took a screenshot (click on it at right and see the highlighted area in better resolution or watch a screencast) and then poked around in my twitterstream for earlier advice from Sean O'Grady. Sean suggested a few tweaks to the settings on my XP laptop and I made them, as shown in the screenshot at right. This was important because on the evening of Monday, 13 July 2009, I had to be online to see Robert Scoble crest over 100,000 followers in his Twitterstream. Seeing Sabrina Dent make this happen while connected to the internet is like a holy moment in Knock. The moment it happened, I sprinkled Knock Holy Water on my Twitter t-shirt and fell asleep. I awakened to an Eircom spokesman saying absolutely nothing helpful on a 15-minute national radio segment and then saw the drivel put out as a press release by Eircom. Neither the radio commentary nor the vacuous press release help arrest the uncomfortable feeling I have that the Eircom night shift are asleep at the firewall. The paucity of information in mainstream radio makes me happy to know there's a community of people who are not afraid to offer a recipe for solving problems. So my hat's off to helpful commentators on Twitter, especially those who ground their advice on soundings they fact-check at Boards.ie as well as getting the straight scoop from the ever-vigilant Twenty Major.

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Disclaimer: I use Twitter wrong.
Learned Last Night: "How to gain 100 Twitter followers a minute"
Bonus Link: Eircom DNS Problems.
Justin Mason -- "Eircom's DDOS, or not".

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Kick-ass BP-4L Nokia Battery

MY NOKIA E90 lasts an entire work day, even when I have two hours of talktime recorded (literally recorded), an hour's worth of blogs read, and 21 minutes of tweeple engagement. I get only six hours of use from the thing if I stay hooked onto wifi seek mode or when I let Gravity poll for updates across the O2-Ireland network. This 1500 mAh Li-Pol BP-4L battery is a workhorse. I have two Nokia E90s, both more than two years old, and the original battery has been running and recharging since I got the first phone in November 2007. I believe this phone and its battery will run another year of daily use. When I get the Nokia N97, I'm retiring the E90 into the batmobile because that car's centre arm rest is already configured for the large format Nokia devices. According to people who have used the N97, it delivers on its rating of six hours of talk time and 20 days of standby. Like my Nokia E90, the phone will play music for up to 37 hours. In summer BBQ usage outside my back door, the Nokia E90 can stream across the garden and onto a Bluetooth speaker for an entire evening without pause.

Sunday Business News from Ireland

NEARLY EVERY BROADSHEET in Ireland on nearly every day of the week has coverage of the next thing to be cut from government services. That storyline continues across the Sunday broadsheets in Ieland today [1] [2] sith "significant job cuts in education, including in third level institutions" according to several reports. Those kinds of cuts affect me and my continued employment so times are tense. They're also a little tense on the other side of the classroom as the Minister for Education has signalled his support for a new loan scheme that would require students to repay the cost of their college fees after graduation. [3] The cuts that will have to be made to public spending will hurt, but there is no other choice. [4] I cover these topics and a few items related to business technology in todays 7-minute Qik clip.

FT Weekender Tech Items

WHEN THE SILLY SEASON hits Ireland during the summer, the Financial Times delivers real news. This weekend's edition has several items worth reading and that probably means they will be covered in Irish newspapers early next week. I open my 10-minute Qik video clip with a shot by London-based photographer Nadav Kander along the Yangtze River. "China is progressing rapidly," says Kander, "and the landscape both economically and physically is changing daily." The shot he snapped under a bridge in the city of Chongqing shows people dwarfed by their surroundings. It's probably an image that will never be snapped again. I noticed some other interesting things in FT Weekender when reading the photos. I discovered Savik Shuster, Russian presenter of a hit political talk show, uses a Nokia E90 (my favourite phone). And I noticed Evan Williams, the Twitter guy with more than one million followers, carries a Moleskine (my favourite journal). Both of those images are in the FT Weekend. But there's more.

The Scoble Smackdown

ON MOST MORNINGS, the Really Mobile Project gives me a rush with its lively perspective. Today, the rush came on the back of a Scoble Smackdown. I won't go into the details because I think Dan Lane does better as he explains the core of global mobile expertise. "Android is based on the Linux kernel which was started by a man in Finland and maintained by a man with a beard in Wales. It's also heavily based around Java which was invented by a Canadian. All Android hardware available so far has been designed and built by HTC in Taiwan.

The iPhone is famously designed by Apple in Cupertino and built in China (presumably by underpaid workers). The principal designer of the iPhone is Jonathan Ive who comes from Chingford which is on the border of London and Essex, about 5 miles away from Chigwell which was the location for the 1980's BBC Sitcom "Birds of a Feather" which was about two wives of robbers currently serving a sentence in prison and has absolutely nothing to do with mobile phones but it served as the acme of british humour of the period, much the same way Dad's Army did in the decades preceding it." I like the history lessons.

Marking Six Years on Typepad

PERHAPS I SETTLE into routines easily and that explains why I've happily stayed with Six Apart's (6A) Typepad for six years. I've dabbled with Blogger, Movable Type, Radio Userland, and Wordpress. I trust Typepad more than any of those services and now have six years of blog posts on the 6A servers. During those last six years, I've watched some very important shifts occur in technology. The world is moving quickly to netbooks and many people think those small form factor devices are the only things around where you can get a computer running quickly from a cold start. The little Nokia 9210i at left would argue the point and so would its descendents, including the iPhone. Truly smart phones are mini-computers that boot quickly and never lose your work. The iPhone has captivated millions with its touchscreen UI. Some of my first posts onto Typepad came from the touchscreen of the IBM Transnote computer shown at left. Back when my Typepad blog was new, its high speed updates happened because I had very pricey ISDN at home. Nowadays, I use O2-Ireland's 3G service for half of my blog posts and that costs me no more than one-quarter of what I was spending on ISDN plans back in 2003.

Friday Business Technology News from Ireland

THE FRONT PAGE of the Irish Times pointed to "Giant Leaps" in technology due to the Moon landing so I bought the paper and discovered a rich mother lode of information on the business technology pages. I would have bought my local broadsheet, the Irish Examiner, because the story that Pat Phelan helped bring to a happy ending (the one about the three Texan backpackers [1]) was on the front page but I'd already been talking to the Texans on Facebook so I knew more than the newspaper article. I made a Qik clip about the Friday business news and as promised, I've shoveled a few of the notes from the news I cited below the fold on my blog here. If you want to see the news clip that I made with my long-serving Nokia E90, go to http://www.qik.com/video/2144504 or keep reading this entire blog entry.