Endeavour Launches a Flashback

JUST LIKE CLOCKWORK, STS-127 launched at 6:03 PM from the Kennedy Space Center and 18 minutes later, its telltale white spot and trailing orange payload was passing overhead my home in County Tipperary. I should have placed a tripod in the back garden and pointed the camera in a south by southwest direction with its shutter open for 30 seconds. I would have captured more than the black sky that I recorded on the HD Handycam that I borrowed from Tipperary Institute. As the shuttle blasted its way overhead, I enjoyed a nice flashback from the evening when I watched the moon landing with my four brothers. That grainy black and white experience launched me into a whole new trajectory.

Working Around Slow Eircom Connectivity

LAST NIGHT, MY internet connection with Eircom slowed to one half the speed I get when using my Nokia E90 as a tethered modem on my laptop. I took a screenshot (click on it at right and see the highlighted area in better resolution or watch a screencast) and then poked around in my twitterstream for earlier advice from Sean O'Grady. Sean suggested a few tweaks to the settings on my XP laptop and I made them, as shown in the screenshot at right. This was important because on the evening of Monday, 13 July 2009, I had to be online to see Robert Scoble crest over 100,000 followers in his Twitterstream. Seeing Sabrina Dent make this happen while connected to the internet is like a holy moment in Knock. The moment it happened, I sprinkled Knock Holy Water on my Twitter t-shirt and fell asleep. I awakened to an Eircom spokesman saying absolutely nothing helpful on a 15-minute national radio segment and then saw the drivel put out as a press release by Eircom. Neither the radio commentary nor the vacuous press release help arrest the uncomfortable feeling I have that the Eircom night shift are asleep at the firewall. The paucity of information in mainstream radio makes me happy to know there's a community of people who are not afraid to offer a recipe for solving problems. So my hat's off to helpful commentators on Twitter, especially those who ground their advice on soundings they fact-check at Boards.ie as well as getting the straight scoop from the ever-vigilant Twenty Major.

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Disclaimer: I use Twitter wrong.
Learned Last Night: "How to gain 100 Twitter followers a minute"
Bonus Link: Eircom DNS Problems.
Justin Mason -- "Eircom's DDOS, or not".

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Sunday Business News from Ireland

NEARLY EVERY BROADSHEET in Ireland on nearly every day of the week has coverage of the next thing to be cut from government services. That storyline continues across the Sunday broadsheets in Ieland today [1] [2] sith "significant job cuts in education, including in third level institutions" according to several reports. Those kinds of cuts affect me and my continued employment so times are tense. They're also a little tense on the other side of the classroom as the Minister for Education has signalled his support for a new loan scheme that would require students to repay the cost of their college fees after graduation. [3] The cuts that will have to be made to public spending will hurt, but there is no other choice. [4] I cover these topics and a few items related to business technology in todays 7-minute Qik clip.

FT Weekender Tech Items

WHEN THE SILLY SEASON hits Ireland during the summer, the Financial Times delivers real news. This weekend's edition has several items worth reading and that probably means they will be covered in Irish newspapers early next week. I open my 10-minute Qik video clip with a shot by London-based photographer Nadav Kander along the Yangtze River. "China is progressing rapidly," says Kander, "and the landscape both economically and physically is changing daily." The shot he snapped under a bridge in the city of Chongqing shows people dwarfed by their surroundings. It's probably an image that will never be snapped again. I noticed some other interesting things in FT Weekender when reading the photos. I discovered Savik Shuster, Russian presenter of a hit political talk show, uses a Nokia E90 (my favourite phone). And I noticed Evan Williams, the Twitter guy with more than one million followers, carries a Moleskine (my favourite journal). Both of those images are in the FT Weekend. But there's more.

The Scoble Smackdown

ON MOST MORNINGS, the Really Mobile Project gives me a rush with its lively perspective. Today, the rush came on the back of a Scoble Smackdown. I won't go into the details because I think Dan Lane does better as he explains the core of global mobile expertise. "Android is based on the Linux kernel which was started by a man in Finland and maintained by a man with a beard in Wales. It's also heavily based around Java which was invented by a Canadian. All Android hardware available so far has been designed and built by HTC in Taiwan.

The iPhone is famously designed by Apple in Cupertino and built in China (presumably by underpaid workers). The principal designer of the iPhone is Jonathan Ive who comes from Chingford which is on the border of London and Essex, about 5 miles away from Chigwell which was the location for the 1980's BBC Sitcom "Birds of a Feather" which was about two wives of robbers currently serving a sentence in prison and has absolutely nothing to do with mobile phones but it served as the acme of british humour of the period, much the same way Dad's Army did in the decades preceding it." I like the history lessons.

Friday Business Technology News from Ireland

THE FRONT PAGE of the Irish Times pointed to "Giant Leaps" in technology due to the Moon landing so I bought the paper and discovered a rich mother lode of information on the business technology pages. I would have bought my local broadsheet, the Irish Examiner, because the story that Pat Phelan helped bring to a happy ending (the one about the three Texan backpackers [1]) was on the front page but I'd already been talking to the Texans on Facebook so I knew more than the newspaper article. I made a Qik clip about the Friday business news and as promised, I've shoveled a few of the notes from the news I cited below the fold on my blog here. If you want to see the news clip that I made with my long-serving Nokia E90, go to http://www.qik.com/video/2144504 or keep reading this entire blog entry.

Turning Americans Away from Ireland

I HAVE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE about being refused entry to Ireland. I also know other Americans who were denied entry to Ireland when presenting their passports at immigration control at Dublin Airport. I can understand how immigration control follows rules about keeping its borders tight. I can also understand a need to be flexible when reviewing a person's documents. This kind of flexibility is not an inherent characteristic of a lot of border control officers. In my case, I got punted from Dublin to New York because a passport stamp was outdated and the investigating officer did not want to give me a day to update my status. At that point in time, I owned a house, two dogs, and had permanent employment in the technology sector--it didn't matter because my stamps were out of order. I didn't mind the free trip to NYC because I saw my dad before he died a few months later. In the case of another American, the passport control team did not agree with a local school's assessment of education entitlement for a postgraduate researcher. In the case of three Texans, the Garda National Immigration Bureau did not understand how couchsurfing works (photo above left) nor did they want to look at online bank accounts to verify a visitor's ability to pay his way. In the current news, a story about three Texas travelers is making its rounds through Irish national radio and it's also an AP news item.

Secret Powers for Irish Police

IRISH POLICE will be given extraordinary powers as a result of the Criminal Justice Bill winding its way into Irish law. The law will abolish jury trial for gangland cases, let gardai of any rank give opinion evidence about the existence of a gang, and not require corroboration of such evidence. This is bad law and it has attracted the attention of more than a hundred defence and prosecution lawyers who have written directly to the Minister for Justice and to major media outlets in Ireland.

Getting Them Talking

ONE OF THE NICEST things about blogs, Twitter, Facebook or discussion boards is conversation. It's nice to have pleasant conversation that weaves around topics of interest. A few years ago, I flew off to art exhibitions every two months and spent time in Berlin, London, Venice, and San Sebastian. At these events, some of the conversation would be helped along by expensive catalogues in the hands of facilitators. Those people didn't spend the €40 to €80 to get the books because curators handed them over with the knowledge that the books would be used to entice others to buy more books, to visit the exhibition or to build the brand of the gallery. Some Irish bloggers get tickets into shows, plays, exhibits and green rooms. They share their experience online and get people talking. Other bloggers get free use of technology, some keeping the gadgets longer than others. If they write about the gear in the broadsheets or show an unboxing video online, people often remember the information when they walk into a shop looking to upgrade their phone or to buy some products. When this happens, talking about the branded item materially benefits the brand through a purchase. Some people might want to wave a red flag in front of the eyes of anyone looking at a rugby team jersey for fear that the viewer might be influenced by a Six Nations' winner who was marked with a logo or a team captain who was drinking water from a branded bottle. In today's connected society, I have to smile at those who would have a world where everything is free, where all campaigns are measured against the benchmark of giving away loads of stuff to a wide audience. You can't exist in today's world without being surrounded by brands, brand enthusiasts, cultists and paranoid keepers of the truth.

I'm thinking all these things as I thumb through photostreams from a few years ago, when I would sit around the table with beautifully adorned and marvelously expensive works. I remember thinking I could never afford to buy the art being described by the critics, also knowing they didn't have that art hanging around either. I also remember enjoying catalogues of works printed with glorious care on glossy paper, knowing their owners didn't pay for that printed material. And today, when I ramble on about liking my Guinness, depending on my Nokia phone, planning my day around my Bosch washing machine or driving my BMW, I don't care if I have fallen into some of those products through deep discounts, clever hassling of salesmen, or straightforward hand-outs by manufacturers. I tell people what the items cost and I normally declare how I came into possession of the gear. I like to think people come to read my reviews and then give some of my ideas social currency by talking about them to their friends.

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