Inside View

Another Season of Shedding and Shredding

EXACTLY TWO YEARS AGO, I sat in the Cashel Palace Hotel with a page open in a book about effectively reducing outgoings. I'm doing the same thing again, except I'm not in the Palace.

Back in 2009, I wanted to cut out more than $500 from my monthly outgoings. I succeeded in trimming only EUR 300--almost the $500 I had targeted. We've taken a hit in the household income in 2011 and expect to have to pay at least EUR 500 more to the Irish government next year as the December budget unfolds. Our biggest sacrifice is travel--we don't make annual oceanic crossings anymore. The little blue dots in the photo still illuminate our kitchen countertop but there are fewer things in the cupboard, fridge and wardrobes.

HoursTracker Helps GTD

I AM A BIG FAN of HoursTracker, an iOS app that is helping me burrow through important tasks.

In fact, the $2.99 app (also available for free) is doing more to positively affect my daily workflow than any other speed drills or GTD regimen. Part of the reason is how I carry the iPod Touch with me everywhere so I always have the app to hand. Every time I adjust the iPod's earbuds I think about what's on the HoursTracker schedule. I'm recording tasks as religiously as a time-motion study researcher because I'm bribing myself with a monthly pay-off based on what the app calculates as my billables. I'm also relating the app to my old skool Moleskine notes. The combination of the two of these practises improves my time-on-tasks by reducing my tendency to drift out of focus.

Check back in another month to see if HoursTracker is working as well for me when the heat of the academic term subsides.

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GTD

Sunday News with a Hint of Christmas

ADRIAN WECKLER GIVES TOP BILLING to the "Protect IP" movement in the States but his important perspective gets buried inside the Sunday papers--I put it at the front of this week's newsround.

There are austerity discussions through the Irish Sunday broadsheets today, thanks in no small way to the Irish budget being leaked to the German Bundestag. Nearly everything will cost two percent more in Ireland as the VAT creeps up to 23%. That's a 23% sales tax for Americans who read my blog. Fortunately, the total price at the counter is all included in the price on the shelf so there's no big surprise at the cash register. I listened back to my Sunday newsround and admit that I have to slow down. I blame Jeff Jarvis, the motor mouth who read his own Public Parts on Audible. I hear his reading and start to slip back into talking faster than I think. You decide whether that's a problem. The video is below the break.

Sunday News with Christmas Lights

Another Voda Modem Success

MY TRUSTY VODAFONE USB modem surprised me with service that I've never enjoyed from a mobile device before. It uploaded an entire DVD in the background.

I never intended to use Vodafone's mobile broadband service to shift big chunks of content because I think it's a little rude to monopolise cellular masts with big clumps of data. However, based on a fat-finger error, I inadvertently dropped the entire contents of a two-hour DVD from my laptop to Libsyn, a trustworthy rich media data archive. This was a mistake because I don't like using most of my monthly Libsyn allocation with the uploading of a single file. I'm still trying to figure out what I did to upstream an archive when I meant to upload a single 30-second feature film extract for the Media Writing module I teach in LIT-Clonmel.

Anyway, the upload is complete and I'll probably keep the big file on Libsyn since I can now stream one of my favourite J.J. Abrams films through my Nokia E7 and onto our TV set via an HDMI cable. It's unexpected elegance and encourages me to put all of our four year old's favourite DVDs up into the cloud so we can serve up Peppa Pig and friends no matter where we are in the world.

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Photo of late night Vodafone service connected to my Dell M2400 laptop.

mobile

Sketchbooks of Hate

I HAVE READ Tears in the Darkness twice this year. Its moving story of survival on the road to Bataan in 1942 makes any of my sacrifices pale by comparison.

Interspersed inside the book are sketches by Ben Steele, a survivor. The images often come dripping with hate through the pages in his sketchbooks, spanning more than thirty volumes of trials and exercises. The leaves of Steele's sketchbooks hold his ghosts: page after page of prisoners of war and the Imperial hohei who guarded him for one thousand two hundred and forty-four days.

The book reads like a novel and its drawings provide an emotive layer. The sketches of faces followed Ben Steele home from the prisoner of war camps. To see his sketches is to visit the haunted memories of the man himself.

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Sent mail2blog from my Nokia phone after packing Tears in the Darkness for a loan.

Michael Norman and Elizabeth Norman -- Tears in the Darkness ISBN 0312429703

bookshelf

Phone Storage Space is Getting Low

I STARTED LOOKING UP the exact phrase "phone storage space is getting low" five weeks ago when my Sony Xperia Arc  (at left) displayed the message every time I turned it on. Bloated contacts created the problem.

After repeated attempts, I deleted all 1674 contacts off my phone and that freed up 26 MB of space on the phone's main memory. From experience, I know I need to have 20 MB free on the phone's internal memory if I expect to run the Xperia Arc as a truly smart phone. The phone has 400 MB of internal memory and it's very easy to fill that with apps that won't move over to the SD card. I have also figured out that several apps want access to my contacts and if I fail to control the access, the phone's contact database starts to get bloated. I also know that when I let the contacts sync with Google Contacts, Facebook Contacts and LinkedIn Contacts that I can return to the "phone storage space is getting low" message. So now I'm messing with settings, trying to stabilise the poor phone's data-eating habits. I can keep things under control by occasionally deleting more than 50MB from the cache of Google Plus. According to System Panel, G+ is the biggest memory hog on my phone so I target it ruthlessly.

Have you a similar experience?

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Bonus Photos: my Xperia Arc and some of its shots

howto

StudentMarch to Keep The Grant

SEVERAL BUSLOADS OF STUDENTS have left Tipperary for an organised march in Dublin.

While on location, a group of those students will gather images, video, and sound clips that support a creative multimedia course objective of creating a social media news release. Hopefully, the storyline will pan out to be a visual narrative because that is the sort of message that many people will stop to watch. The message resounding from students I've heard departing on the bus from Clonmel is how difficult it is to make ends meet while committing to a third level college education in Ireland. I can see it now in the campus canteen based on the kind of food selected at lunchtime. Where I work, you won't find many students eating anything other than a half portion of chips during the eight hours they're on campus. Things are as tight as the marchers say. "Stop the fees".

Craig Todd is Skint

Watch the YouTube clip below the break.

How to See the Future

IT TURNS OUT that some of my students think I'm meant to show them how to see into the future.

They suggest that's what it says in the academic syllabus in the Emerging Technology module I teach at LIT-Clonmel. I thought out loud for a minute, trying to list ways I thought people could set themselves up to monitor emerging trends and to perhaps predict what's ahead on the technology roadmap. In my mind, it's a matter of clever listening, especially when around smart people (like those in the photo from Limerick OpenCoffee). I have watchlists, reading lists, and trust agents worth following. The watchlists often generate photos and descriptions of brand new technology. The reading lists emerge from suggestions I find on blog posts, trustworthy tweets, and conference proceedings. The trust agents are people with backgrounds worthy of respect. Getting the watchlists, readings and trust agents into one nice compilation is an on-going process. What's fresh and compelling today could easily be stale and dull a year from now. Nonetheless, I'm going to create a presentation that lays down my schema for seeing into the future and then I'll blog my thoughts and see if anyone affirms my viewpoint.

Respecting Those Who Cannot Connect

I AM SHARING AN IMAGE that includes some people who never connected to the internet because they represent a constituency I want to represent in Ireland's Knowledge Society.

The adults in the photo had life sorted. They had the essential things like heat, electricity, and food as part of their routines. They didn't check in, tweet or even read Facebook wall posts. They didn't need the burden of a computer (although an iPad might do just fine) and as pensioners, they wanted to avoid the recurring expense of an internet connection.

But in the 50-year-old home, there's music from a radio, a satellite television connection and CD players in the kitchen and car. There connection points for MP3 players and mobile phone audio.

Palm-sized view of the Sunday Business Post

I USED ONLY THE Sunday Business Post digital platform for my weekly newsround. The youngest SBP reader accompanied me (at left).

It's actually more work cutting through iOS screenshots to create a ten-minute news synopsis than just using my Sony Xperia Arc to simply record what I've circled in print. Plus, unless I add more effects to the result, the app-ony news presentation is boring on screen. I think it's alright when heard on Audioboo. I took the time to make this short report because I believe the Adrian Weckler and crew are headed the right way in trying to recapture hundreds of paying readers. However, I don't think an iOS app alone will get a result. There must be more channels and that could mean several people on the Business Post staff will need to upskill in programmes we teach at the Limerick Institute of Technology. I offer some ideas below the break.

Sunday Business Post App Only