Photo by @topgold in South Tipperary Arts Centre.
IT IS A QUIET (and frosty) October Bank Holiday in Ireland and we're getting ready for the Clonmel Zombie Walk by painting a few props, carving a few pumpkins, and double-checking the batteries in Mia's fat suit costume.
During this quiet time, I noticed a few people landing on my blog and then reading pieces I wrote more than a decade ago when we lived in Kilkenny. [1] I wondered what other sorts of things I might have written during the same quiet periods throughout the past decade.
2017 We were introducing Longfield to Shadow the kitten.
Shadow, a very friendly Bombay cat, joined our family in 2017 and by early November, she was ready to star in a series of video clips about Tabcat, the remote control paging device we use to summon her home.
Click on image to see 360 view (not in Safari).
2016 I was creating a showreel of volumetric imagery.
The Ricoh 360 camera showed up in my kit bag in 2016 and I started using it to capture panoramic images and 360 videos. [2] Two years later, I haven't used it to reach its true potential. I think there are wonderful business case studies for 360 photography, such as real estate or forensic analysis of crime scenes. We should consider teaching those skills in the Honours Degree Creative Media Programme on the Clonmel Digital Campus where I work.
2015 Getting ready for Digifest.
We have mounted and maintained high quality imagery on the walls of the Clonmel Digital Campus throughout the 15 years I've worked there. In 2015, we were getting ready for Digifest and as it ran, I wondered why the previous level of staff collaboration has eroded. We need a vibrant display of student work and I have to step forward to see if we can rejuvenate the past success.
2014 Thinking about geo-fenced communications.
Students are often amazed when I show them how a company phone or a company car or a company laptop is actually a tracking device. In 2014, I wrote about geo-fenced communications. They are just the tip of an iceberg worth discussing for issues of privacy and personal data protection.
In 2013, Google shoved iGoogle into the Dead Pool. Years later, it makes sense because the developers were shunted over to a team who developed clever mobile notifications and who created the Artificial Intelligence behind Google Maps. Through the years, I've changed the dashboard I use to start the day. However, I've never abandoned the pen and paper effectiveness of Moleskine notebooks. [3]
2012 Snarky social media
It's been six year since I departed an inner circle of high-flying social media colleagues in Ireland. Since that time, articles continue appearing about cyberbullying, the reason I pushed back (and then insulted) several leading lights in Irish social media space. Not only was I blocked, but several people edited their LinkedIn profiles to remove any connection to me. When they did that, they actually removed strong recommendations I had made about the high quality of their work.
One of the reasons I purchase titles on Kindle [4] is to see public comments and public highlights left by others reading the same books. Hundreds of shared highlights appeared in the Kindle book Steve Jobs when I bought it one week after it launched.
Anybody who has lived in Ireland since 2010 knows the financial pain and deep hardship endured by its citizens on the heels of the IMF bailing out the country. We faced those dark days for several years from 2010, taking wage cuts and slicing back things we never knew we could eliminate.
2009 Skype in pocket
One of the best features of the Nokia Communicator was its wide range of enterprise communications programs. I first used Skype on a laptop and then on my Nokia 9500. [5] It was a solid phone and Skype would divert calls from my online account to my mobile phone number when I was outside the range of strong bandwidth.
2008 Back yard reactor
Ten years ago, I read reports of American college students using low-powered nuclear reactors on campus. For $25m, you could run an underground nuclear reactor with enough power to support a large office for nearly 40 years. Today, I dream of having a solar array on my roof to charge a power vault that can power the lights in our home. If you're interested in the same thing, drop me a note. You can also comment below.
I think it's important to glance back at our online legacy and it's quiet little breaks in the action that gives me time to reflect like this trawl back into 10 years of what I was writing about during the October Bank Holiday from 2008 to 2018.
- Goldbach, B (2003) [accessed 28 October 2018] 'Supermacs Got Better', Inside View Blog [online]
- Goldbach, B (2016) [accessed October 28, 2018] '360 imagery', Flickr photo album [online]
- Goldbach, B (2006) [accessed October 28, 2018] 'Moleskine notebooks', Flickr photo album [online]
- Goldbach, B (2011) [accessed 28 October 2018] Things in and about my Kindle, Flickr photo album [online]
- Goldbach, B (2006) [accessed 28 October 2018] 'Nokia 9500: Moblogging and using the Nokia Communicator', Flickr photo album, [online]