Inside View

Black Thursday with the 97th

AROUND 11PM ON the 16th of December, I look up and listen. Most of the time it's very quiet and that's the way it sounded over RAF Bourn, a wasteland of mud and Nissen huts, as 21 Lancasters from 97 Squadron droned back towards England from a bombing run over Berlin. They would have left just before sunset on one of the most threatening bomb runs. It took a little under a half hour to get the squadron airborne, each Lancaster bomber needing a minute to goad its four Merlin engines up to full power before setting off down the bumpy runway. The airfield would sit under a silent shroud for seven hours, the smoke from each hut's coke fire hanging in the damp air.

Fighting the Cold

MY FIRST WINTER in Ireland comes rolling back to me in waves whenever something touches my toes. Because during December 1994, I remember the days when I could feel my toes on the days when they weren't numb. Rewind to the 15th of December 1994, when I found a charming little flat in Greystones going at a dirt cheap rate so I snapped it up and discovered the reason for its inexpensive pricing: no heat, no electrical connections for a kitchen stove, no kitchen sink. This charming little bungalow taught me more about the concept of fuel poverty in three short weeks than expert agencies would explain to me the next 14 years. I had never gone about heating a living space without simply arranging for a delivery of oil or coal. And I never tried cooking for myself while washing up everything in the bathtub. So I bought candles--lots of candles. And I also bought several varieties of space heaters, burning through piles of punts trying to get the right mix without inducing asphyxiation. Today, I walk alongside terraced houses insulated no better than that Greystones flat, knowing how cold inside walls must be to the touch, wondering when the Irish government will energise grants to retrofit homes where people living on the edge might have a warmer Christmas in the years ahead. I'll never forget how cold it was for my first Christmas in Ireland and today, I buy more candles than we'll need to help warm the memory that I have of this winter season. And I also spin the radio dial towards BBC Radio One, whose signal is quite strong along the eastern Irish coast, and I hear a mix of like the one embedded in this blog post. 

---

Warm your earbuds with Rosko's Essential Mix [129 MB newmix] with playlist below the break.See photos of Christmas in Ireland.

x_ref125mw

2012

UPDATED in late 2011.

MY WORK DAYS PUT ME in contact with a special group of creatives--all third level students--nudging me to consider what kind of world awaits them in 2012 when all will be through a BSc in Creative Multimedia. I think they will enter a workplace where it will be unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. Blogging will be going strong in 2012. In the age where leaked information has become an online sport and with social networks peeling back the layers of anonymity we used to enjoy down the pub, in an Irish society where pre-crime is becoming ushered in as a forensic approach to civil order, some truths will be hand-rolled, others will be outed and spotlighted. This is something my twice-retired CI buddies are telling well-regarded transition team members right now in the Old Executive Office Building and it's a careful advice I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did. And by 2012, we anyone with rudimentary skills will know your first degree of separation, the geotags for your home, the financing remaining on your car, and the last time your pet was immunised. This is the near-term future and we have made it that way.

---

Self-shot in Havana, a free and open wifi zone in a friendly centre location of Dublin, Ireland. I used a three-year old Fujifilm S7000 camera while thinking of Euan and tapas.

x_ref125mc

Buzzards Over Batmobile

BUZZARDS ARE CIRCLING over the batmobile.

Three Reasons

NOW THAT IRELAND is feeling recessionary winds, my local BMW dealer is feeding me reasons to upgrade the batmobile to something that's more fun to drive while saving the planet. Unfortunately, the sales crew want to take more than €40,000 from me before I get the keys to a new drive, so it's not going to happen before 2010. Nonetheless, I am intrigued enough by three reasons given for me to stay with the BMW 3-series.

Serious Carbon Savings. BMW has this catchy EfficientDynamics initiative that has resulted in saving grams and millimeters all over the sedan. Other cars in its class look portly by comparison. I've looked at carbon tags on the Audi A4, Jaguar X-Type, Lexus IS220d and Merceds C180--all left behind with their larger carbon footprints.

Ridges. I like waxing ridges on cars, an addiction acquired with my first car, a Corvette. BMW humours me with a new ridgeline on the 3-series bonnet that evolved from the cloth-covered Gina concept car.

Stop-Start. Like most BMWs, the 3-series shuts down when the car is in neutral and at a dead stop. This alone won't save the planet but in my weekly driving, I know it will save me at least the cost of a pint a Guinness. Knowing that, I am keen to drive to more urban pubs, saving publicans and the planet in one simple movement.

I am off to convince my unflinching wife of the logic of upgrading in the winter of 2010. Stay subscribed to my photostream to see the results.

---

And none of the three reasons include getting a cup holder.

x_ref2540

Digging and Filling

IT'S SUMMERTIME IN IRELAND and there's a lot of digging and filling in the back garden that has to get done, so don't expect much to be written on this blog through the end of August 2008. Now get back to work. Or listen to me babble on Twitter.

Reconnecting to Wired Broadband

AFTER MORE THAN THREE WEEKS without the use of wired broadband service, I've learned enough about how to leverage portable broadband connectivity for e-learning. More importantly, I've reaffirmed my faith in text messaging (without becoming as avid an advocate as Liam Burke), I've rediscovered the elegance of mail-to interactions, and I've concluded that social networking works a charm when it's portable and prescient.

Adjusting the Flow

AS I FINISH OUR first week of broadband access only over-the-air, I remember clearly the feeling I had while living in dial-up land less than three years ago. We rented a house in located seven miles from the nearest digital telephone exchange and that meant no DSL for the six months as tenants. Today, since our O2-Ireland 3G SIM cannot see the 3G mast located three miles from our home, we live on the EDGE network. That effectively means speeds similar to a 28.8 modem. With that being the best on offer, I have adjusted my data habits and reinstated procedures I learned as a dial-up customer.

Need Help Resurrecting a Raw File

THROUGH MY OWN CARELESSNESS, my Nokia E90 reverted to a power-saving mode during the most high-profile Qik video I created. With two minuites of the 4-minute video uploaded, the phone warbled its low battery warning and then quickly shut down all camera operations. That's what my phone is set to do, just in case something happens to deep-drain the batter. So at the moment, I have 9.4 MB of raw QIK video sequestered in a folder on the phone's main memory. I also have a 3.6 MB FLV file. I would like to upstream the raw video to Qik but I don't remember how to do this. So I'm asking for help with this blog entry.

UPDATED ONE DAY LATER. I've resurrected the raw video file from the main memory in the Nokia E90 and after several attempts, I sent the file via email to Jackie as requested.

---

x_ref125mw

At the K-Level

YEARS AGO, IN AN environment that sounds so harshly foreign to many of  my work colleagues today, I worked in an organisation as a K-level employee, in some ways like a Formula One driver. More than 350,000 people worked in this organisation but in my specialism, fewer than 350 of those people would be qualified to sit in my seat. No day was and less than 12 hours long. Some days overlapped. The phones would trigger a crescendo of different pulses, ring tones and flashing lights and you decided how high up the console to squelch the noise. For nearly three years, I endured that job and then resolved to get out of it, never to return to the top of my game.

To my right elbow at the moment, a clear blue sky shows a plane full of holiday makers overhead,flying ahead of contrails towards a summer sun destination. As a K-level controller, I would be the voice at the end of a phone call that would turn planes around or direct them into safe havens. By using exceptionally powerful HF radio transmitters, I could throw my voice around the world, under the sea, and into the belly of concrete bunkers where other K-levels would respond to familiar requests with no questions asked.