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I HAVE SOME DEEP THOUGHTS about the sanctity of privacy but have just started working out the main thrust of my opinion. I think I'll share two minutes about Facebook and privacy during the 2010 CESI meet in Thurles tonight.
Hear the whole ramble at http://audioboo.fm/boos/127813-facebook-sheep-poo
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ON MAY 13, 2000, a disused power station on the south bank of London's River Thames started a new life as Tate Modern. It's one of my favourite spaces in London, hosting some of the best modern and contemporary art. There's something electric about the venue and it's especially noticeable at night when walking its hallways. Walking across the pedestrian bridge into the old structure is part of a pilgrimage that revitalises me. It's as though the empty shell of a building that used to lurk on the unfashionable side of the Thames symbolised Britain's industrial decline but now the fixture clearly marks the prominence of another, more subtle dominance of creativity and an economic engine in itself, generating £100m in economic benefits to London annually. Art matters to England and art grows in the Tate Modern. Visitor numbers in the tenth year of the Tate Modern outstrip many other cultural venues across the globe. Nearly 5m walked through Tate Modern in its first year and it averages 4.6m per year, making it one of the UK's top three tourist attractions. I'm one of the 2m people who have participated in Tate Modern's education programmes. We're overdue for a visit to Tate Modern, my favourite London building. There's no better time than a birthday to celebrate modern art.Photo of Kitty taking a break from walking the caverns in the Tate Modern.
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ONE REASON I OFTEN FAIL to get more than seven hours of use from my Android phone is because I listen to audio clips on it for much of the day. I use Listen, a free Android app from Googlelabs. It runs in the background, grabbing new podcasts, tracks and audio-enhanced blogs. Because it truly multitasks, automagically harvesting content, it won't be an iPhone app until Apple makes a true multitasking mobile device. I keep Listen's little earbud icon on my third home screen and tap it to continue playing tracks through the day. I'm subscribed to the Daily Source Code, FIR, Peter Donegan's garden tips, Neville's boos, Nialler 9's tracks, TED Talks, the Blisslist, TWiG, TWiT and AAS. If you spend more than 30 minutes a day on Hype Machine, you should consider putting Listen on your handset. I think Listen should be burned into every Android handset at manufacture. It's an essential Android app.
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DURING THE COURSE OF my 3500 flying hours (nearly 2000 of them in the aircraft at right), I easily spent just as many hours on the tarmac, sometimes under the shade of my aircraft's wings, as maintenance crews tried to figure out what had happened to one of the four aircraft engines. On one occasion, I had an ash encounter and on several other occasions I had fodded out (damaged an engine through Foreign Object Damage) one or more engines with something abrasive like a bird, a palm frond or a big lump of compacted snow. Through the course of my accident-free flying career, I learned you don't want to keep flying after those kinds of incidents and my judgment later became part of a body of work I accomplished as a flight safety officer, instructor aircraft commander during the Global Atmospheric Research Project, Air Staff planner and airlift control centre duty officer. I'm thinking about these experiences as people ask me about a persistent Icelandic volcano that seems to produce an especially abrasive ash that the jet stream carries over much of European flight paths. The ash cloud is impacting the travels of several people I follow on Twitter. I'm writing this short blog post as I tweet them from my Topgold account and listen to an Air Traffic Control audio excerpt with a Thomas Cook 757 flight that encountered ash cloud residue yesterday. Aircraft G-JMCF was on a positioning flight as TCX952P, returned to Manchester due to a loss of compressor bleed air from one engine after crew sensed an "intense smell of volcanic ash" during the climb between FL160-FL200. The aircraft was out over the North Sea off Nofolk/Suffolk.
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I REMEMBER WATCHING Conn O Muineachain (at left) use his handheld audio recorder when chatting with people during Limerick OpenCoffee and then trying to figure out how we might teach third level students how to do the same thing. It's not just training people how to chat up someone in an interesting way. It's about recording key information about how people open up and share. More than anything else, I cherish OpenCoffee meet-ups for their collaborative potential. I'm thinking about collaboration at the handheld level now because it's a subject I'm discussing at the ICT in Education Conference in Tipperary Institute this month and at DIT's e-learning week next month. It's too big of a leap to ask third level students to begin recording meaningful audio or video clips directly so I start with key frames and captions from existing work. That leads to conceptualising cover art (like on albums, CDs and MP3 tracks) and finally into a workflow that culminates in recording a short audio snippet similar to what Conn O Muineachain used to do a few summers ago. It's time to start making and sharing these collaborative audio snippets again, perhaps attaching them as Audioboo clips to the bottom of my blog posts.
Audioboo.fm -- "Back Garden Boo
Direct link to http://www.insideview.ie/files/back_garden_boo.mp3
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ALTHOUGH SUZY BYRNE may not approve of the cover shot for my 8-minute Qik flick through the Sunday papers, I think the Sunday Times' piece on her week brings blogging alive for readers. It might have contributed to Charles O'Sullivan's feeling about today's episode. There are other topics in both the Times and the Sunday Business Post that catch my eye, including the ash cloud, good ideas about recovering from the meltdown, technology pointers and a warning about rip-off Apple pricing. I've made a short summary below the break and offer an MP3 file for those using Listen on Android or for anyone subscribing to the podflow of this blog.
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I OPERATED A CONCRETE SAW while talking on my SonyEricsson Xperia X10 phone and recorded some impressive audio results below. I got this phone from the manufacturer with the understanding that I would probably break it. I don't think they thought I'd run it with a concrete saw. Although the saw's 114 decibel roar dominates the audio recording (click the player below to hear), it's possible to discern what I was shouting as I used the saw to cut three inches off a piece of Tipperary limestone while helping complete stone facing on a wall. SonyEricsson builds noise-cancellation into their handsets and the result is well-engineered. I hadn't thought that the technology would work so well when using earbuds but why not? The noise-cancelling circuit tried to reduce the exceptionally loud ambient sound of cutting rock by using an active noise control (ANC) circuit. This involved using a microphone on the phone handset to generate an "antinoise" signal. When the antinoise signal is produced by the speaker driver in the headphone, destructive interference cancels out the ambient noise as heard within the enclosed volume of the headphone. I didn't help the process by keeping the phone in my back pocket while using the earbud within two feet of the concrete saw's motor. While listening to Adam Curry on the handset, noise cancellation gave me a decent audio level without having to raise the volume of Curry's Daily Source Code. After more than 12 hours of cutting, grinding and working with bog-standard SonyEricsson earbuds, I'm ready to move back to my Bluetooth earbuds since they block more environmental noise by fitting deeper into my ear.Listen on Audioboo:
Direct link to audio: http://www.insideview.ie/files/consaw.mp3
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I'VE ENJOYED WATCHING people click into Google FriendConnect for several months but I don't think I want to hang the FriendConnect widget on my website since a site inspection by Google Analytics says that Google's own Friend Connect makes my blog load slower. Consequently, I'm retiring the widget while knowing that I've a strong community inside Google Buzz and also inside several Friendfeed rooms. (I'm not ignoring the pull of Facebook; I'm wary of it.) The cross-talk in Buzz and Friendfeed goes unnoticed by most people who read my blog because they cannot deduce the strength of these vibrant conversation zones since both of them fail to generate detectable links to my blog.
I've learned an important lesson in my decade of reading and writing blogs--the most powerful effect of one's online presence is when you can land in another space with no apparent connection to a previous space. In my case, it means that I can have really valuable conversations with friends who may not know I'm a blogger, camera hobbyist, podcaster or short-form video guy. I don't need to advertise how I'm straddling all those zones and I don't need to show dozens of comments on the bottom of each blog post to know that I'm serving dozens of returning visitors every day with my writing style.
But if you're miffed that you cannot indicate your interest through Google FriendConnect, I'd rather you connect with me on Google Buzz because that's a real multi-player channel that gives me information I can use every day.
I've a Google profile that you can use as a connection point too.
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I'VE AT LEAST 30 full work days at the keyboard of the most-capable laptop I've ever used: a Dell Precision M2400 workhorse. It's lighter and yet more powerful than anything I've carried on my shoulder--a big help to getting more things done. However, there are a few niggling bits about the M2400 and more specifically with Windows 7 Professional. Although the operating system is a big improvement on Vista, it has caused me some headaches when managing various log-on identities. I have three different log-ons with the M2400 and Windows 7 has granted me run privileges on some programs based on which log-on I use. Other programs aren't accessible from the program file and I had to set up desktop shortcuts to them. The biggest hassle is managing my iTunes library because I can sync my iPod only to my personal log-on. When I synced MP3 files to my office log-on, I had to wipe my iPod of its libraries. As I explain in the audio clip, several important programs still remain on my DVD archive, awaiting some clear space in my schedule when I'll be able to know that everything on the M2400 runs as good as my faithful Dell D620 worked for the previous two years.
Hot Tip: Cash in a Dell Vouchers and cut your cost of upgrading.
Direct link to MP3: http://www.insideview.ie/files/m2400-1.mp3
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TIPPERARY INSTITUTE hosts its annual Schools Conference on Saturday, 15 May 2010, and I will carry the artefact at left with me during the day. I'm going to use the Sony Clie to show how I first developed handheld multimedia material with third level and post-graduate students in 2005. The basic assumptions behind effective handheld media objects remain the same. In my Audioboo (below), I explain some of those factors. Today's handheld multimedia objects benefit from easy connectivity to the cloud via free wifi and solid 3G coverage. Even so, no more than one-third of my students have mobile phones capable of high-speed wifi browsing I reckon it will take another two years before half of the entering class carries convergent phones. In the meantime, I'm continuing to prepare handheld multimedia materials with the goal of increasing collaborative learning.
Handheld Multimedia Collaboration
Direct link to audio: http://www.insideview.ie/files/handheld_multimedia.mp3
More on Audioboo.
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