Inside View

CAO Round One Offers

THE Central Applications Office (CAO) WEBSITE is feeling the effects of a denial-of-service attack but Gav Reilly has scraped relevant CAO data that will help ease the distress. Over on the CAO website a polite notice advises, "Due to maintenance work, the CAO web site is currently unavailable. We apologise for the inconvenience." I wonder how many years will tick by before the CAO asks capable institutions to mirror their major database on peak days like today. I also wonder why the Higher Education Authority and the CAO haven't set aside a small amount (say 5%) of their unused IP space for the public good--effectively transforming the space into sticky honeynets or tarpits. We discuss those kinds of things on the third level degree programme in Tipperary Institute but I can strongly recommend this as a strategy to be explored by the CAO. Another denial of service will happen. Buying more servers isn't the most cost-effective way of combating the problem. As TippInst graduate Pieter Vos says, "The government should setup their own cloud computing cluster, and redirect resources where they're needed." Sound advice.

For the record, students who try to enter the creative multimedia programme at Tipperary Institute via the CAO must have nearly 300 points. Here is a complete breakdown of points required for all the TippInst courses:

TI007 Social and Community Studies 225
TI008 Environmental and Natural Resource Management 245
TI010 Accounting and Finance 245
TI013 Business 240
TI018 Computing - Games Design and Development 215
TI020 Computing – Smart Sustainable Energy 275
TI113 Business (Clonmel) 225
TI117 Information Technology - Creative Multimedia 295
TI121 Marketing 225

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Props to Gav Reilly -- "CAO 2010"

Suggestion: Use CAO WWW2 to see Level 6/7 points. Or drill into some info I've scraped.

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Being Social is More than Managing Pipes

LEO LAPORTE, a voice I respect, has turned against Google Buzz. In a tweet heard around the world, Leo said, "I have had an epiphany due to this Buzz thing. Social media isn't content. It's narcissistic crap. No one cares. I've been wasting my life!" Leo was upset because it appears that Google Buzz was not piping his content into multiple social networks. "Oh for crying out loud. Nothing I've posted on Google Buzz has been public since August 6. Worst thing? No one noticed. Not even me," he wrote. I hadn't noticed that occurring because I see Leo's stuff through Buzz and his ideas were piping onto my Buzz screen day after day. I don't trust Twitter as a conduit so I don't follow Leo through Twitter. I see Leo through occasional Buzz comments, provided his thoughts drop into the 100 Buzz items that appear when I open Google Mail. But Leo uses Google Buzz as a manifold through which he pipes thoughts to multiple places through the Buzz infrastructure. When Buzz failed to push his content out, Leo started seeing it as a waste of time. He may revert to posting only on his blog and to holding live chat room conversations on the TWIT network. This would be a shame, because doing this would reduce Leo's standing. He would devolve into a broadcaster and live among the crew addicted to the ego-centric rockstar mentality that sucks all the conversation out of these online spaces.

Sunday Times from my Back Garden

I RECORDED 10 minutes of video in my back garden while thumbing through the Sunday Times, Sunday Business Post, FT Weekend and the Sunday Tribune. (I rarely buy the Sunday Independent since its headline writers don't appear to use any sort of fact-checking.) In both my short YouTube video and on Sunday morning chat shows, the smiling face of Senator Ivor Callely gets more than 15 seconds of fame. Callely's paid political behaviour puts a sordid coating on the concept of ethics. Eric Schmidt (Google) shares thoughts about privacy in the Sunday Times. Hotel managers deny the value of free wifi in a Sunday Business Post story. Damien Kiberd relates constituency politics regarding waste policies to the cost of doing business in Ireland. And Bryan Appleyard's photo essay in the Sunday Times Magazine makes me hope for the day that I can return to Montana for a week. You can see a lot of these stories and hear my take on them in my YouTube channel.

 

Sunday News 24 August 2010

 

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Audioboo: Sunday Newsboo

Last Year: "Learned from my seat" aboard Aer Lingus, 22 Aug 09.

Five Years Ago I was helping O2 profit (22 August 2005).

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Learning about eBay Turnover

A FEW YEARS AGO, I listened to John and Patrick Collison explain how power sellers leveraged eBay through the use of smart software. The recession has been good news for many businesses selling on eBay. Jonathan Moules has seen data that suggests "the number of £1m-plus turnover companies trading on the online marketplace is set to double this year." Moules looked at eBay UK and the numbers say "66 businesses turned over more than £1m last year." The trendline is promising: "eBay expects this total to rise to 127 £1m-plus compnaies by the end of this year, with an average increase in turnover of about £600,000 per business." The Financial Times Weekend profiles Jeremy Wicks who started his business as an 18-year-old. He sells B-stock, pre-owned and ex-display electronic equipment now, under the brand Why Buy New UK. He dispatches about 400 eBay orders per week, selling stock at a fixed price, rather than using eBay's traditional auction service.

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Jonathan Moules -- "Turnover boon for eBay businesses" in the FT Weekend, 21 August 2010.

Reduced prices on Behringer gear.

 

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Never a Clean Desk

EVERY SUMMER, I MAKE a solemn promise that I'll clean off the top of desk and leave enough room to drop all my bags in the empty space on top of my workspace. This is my tenth year starting a new academic year and as the video (above) shows, I'm already a failure in the "clean desktop" category.

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Joyous Brevity in Video

TWO DAYS OF on-site HD recording has reinforced why I think the best video is short-form video. I get a lot more joy from 90-second clips. No matter how hard I try to compress my video work flow, every minute of work on a remote video shoot requires at least one minute of pre-production later on. So we spent 80 minutes out along Brocka on the Water and my time sheets show 82 minutes pulling the files off the two cameras, dropping them into work folders, rendering them for a preview AVI file and annotating them on a studio worksheet. Because we shot a generous amount of file footage, we have at least four times the running length of the final production. Looked at another way, that's four times the rendering time that the end clients will see. The additional time burden is worth the unbillable hours because the by-product is easily repurposed as file footage. That means it has to be findable and ready to be dropped onto a DVD editing timeline. Now it's back to work to sort all that out.

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Sent mail2blog using Nokia E90 O2-Typepad service while traveling between Long Table venues in County Tipperary, Ireland.

 

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Clocks Cubing

One Perfect Cube by Florian Jenett is made of three synchronized clocks that form a sign every 12 hours for exactly one second. There’re actually 43200 constellations within every 12 hours. This video is a time lapse of the work running for 24 hours.

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More videos by Florian Jenett.

 

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Long Table Harvest

THE LONG TABLE DINNER happens across four special Tipperary venues next week and I'm watching several food producers prepare their checklists for next Wednesday evening's big meal. As a member of a video documentary team, I'm capturing some footage at each of the four venues. Along the way, I'm also getting a lot of local colour, such as the dramatic sweeps of farmland that's now ready for harvest. The Long Table dinner slots into National Heritage Week. In keeping with custom, only food from Tipperary will be served at the traditional long table feast. Fresh, seasonal produce from over 30 food producers-–all members of the Tipperary Food Producers Network-–will be used. The creative menus combined the very best artisan food from throughout north and south County Tipperary. As part of our pre-event coverage, I've sample some delectable samples. Only a few seats remain unreserved for the evening. I feel bad that most of the A-Listed Food Porn Bloggers won't be able to attend. Not to worry--we'll have video footage that will vividly show the five-star Long Table dinners prepared at each of the four venues.

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Full details from the Tipperary Food Producers Network. Direct Line to tickets: +353 52 6182477.

 

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Exploring Paper.li

 

Click to play

 

WE PLAN TO USE Paper.li as one of the resource feeds in the Media Writing module of the creative multimedia degree programme at Tipperary Institute because it is delivering a pleasant mash-up of tagged content alongside serendipitous information. My collection is at Paper.li/topgold and I like what happens to the Paper.li content when it aggregates as a small print edition. I made a video of the print version and selected one item from each page for a short commentary. I shot the video with one hand on a JVC HD handycam while using the other hand to page through the content. I'd like to train first year students in making this work.

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Direct link to the video

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Cyberbullying: Unpacking the Research, Starting with the Playground

EWAN MCINTOSH dropped into my Typepad control panel with an interesting observation:

When we perceive of risk in sharing publicly and interacting online we nearly always risk obscuring huge benefits with our own inflated fear of the unknown. Research shows that digital risks are far outweighed, in fact, by challenges more close to home and school.

via edu.blogs.com

All you have to do in my local Irish school is listen to the attitude several pre-teens have on the town's playground. It's a lot more direct than in-your-face cyberbullying.

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