Inside View from Ireland

Google Sightseeing

MAPS.GOOGLE -- If you use Google on a virtual flight across the USA, you get a window seat that lets you see stunning landscape and architecture. The amazing power of Google Maps flies you above the country. You get the perspective of a passenger in an aircraft traveling between 12,000 - 25,000 feet. I used this technology to "fly" across the States before finishing my morning coffee. Thanks to tour guides using Irishblogs (like Gavin Sheridan) who have posted screen shots of several places worth visiting again, my flight from Ireland took me over the east coast to the west coast of America.

Mom likes SkypeIn

SKYPE -- The closest my 79-year old mother gets to the internet is to admit she has heard about it. She won't even begrudgingly admit that she's using the internet when she leaves me a voice mail message on SkypeIn--but she doesn't know she's talking to a computer when she hears my pre-recorded voice. As far as she is concerned, because she uses her centuries-old phone to dial a Philadelphia number, there's no internet in the mix. I know there is an internet connection. It runs through SkypeIn. Mom dials 12152534576 and gets me in Ireland, thanks to SkypeIn. That costs me €30 annually. Can anyone beat that without using a setup box next to an analog line?  SkypeIn has shrunk the world around me more effectively than any other piece of technology because it touches people who couldn't be bothered with using a computer.

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A big thanks to bob and other thoughtful visitors who reminded me to try the service. It should be used by all Irish colleges seeking to recruit Chinese students because you can get Chinese numbers with it.
SkypeIn comes with Skype Voice Mail too.
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Smart pictures

CLONMEL -- We are looking at several ways to leverage the metadata inside images when working with photo collections. We need to determine a way to search a collection and to see results generated from information extracted from file information, file name and EXIF data. Our goal is to make this happen offline with searches conducted on a CD and to make get the same functionality while searching the collection when it is stored online. According to Adobe, their latest offering (Adobe Acrobat Professional 7) can "search according to text and document properties to quickly find files on local machines and network drives". It costs $449.

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Pope's Dog

KILKENNY -- We lost Chuckie to ill health the same week we listened to reports of the death of Pope John Paul II. We think Chuckie would be welcome in a holy place because his gentle nature represented charity and compassion. He never snarled, never took an aggressive position, never asked for much. He politely waited for food and would even defer to cats who insisted on having his dinner (unless it was liver). Chuckie was a rescued Pomeranian--he would have been put down by the pound if we hadn't claimed him around two years ago. He showed us things we never knew dogs could do. He could smile. He could hop down steps instead of walk down them. He would patiently sit outside on a lead--sometimes for 15 minutes at a time--without barking at us to hurry up. He wouldn't eat if he was unwell because he didn't want to soil anything. That proved to be part of his demise--he refused food and water in his dying days because he couldn't stand up without our support. So Chuckie passed away under my hands. He was put to sleep when he told us it was time.

Loitering with intent

THE ATLANTIC -- Bernard-Henri Levy, "In the footsteps of Tocqueville", enjoys several Tocquevillean moments on his journey across the States. He recalls several incidents in the May 2005 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.

Nokia 9500 plays mp3s on TV

CLONMEL -- In the Multimedia Skunkworks this week, Aidan Doyle recorded a 23 minute broadcast conversation among Irishblogs as an MP3, dropped it onto my Nokia 9500 and then played the audio file over Bluetooth onto a bog-standard television. This remediation makes it look as though the Nokia 9500 is sending a broadcast signal to a television. It is actually streaming a sound file over Bluetooth to a Sony Ericsson MMV-100 Bluetooth Media Viewer. If your publican lets you slip the €100 MMV-100 onto the pub TV set SCART connection, you could play your podcasts (or music tracks or political speeches) over the pub sound system. This is more socially responsible than the "TV-B-Gone" intervention favoured by some readers in the Irish blogs Yahoo! group.

       

       

                    

   

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Sent mail2blog using Nokia 9500 O2 GPRS Typepad connection.
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25 years of Post-It Notes

3M -- On April 6, 1980, a remarkable new technology arrived in stationery stores around the States. It was simple and environmentally-friendly. It needed no semi-annual upgrades. It worked better than advertised. It was the Post-it Note. We celebrate 25 years of progress by observing the Post-It Note in the college classroom.

Big Bite on Blogs

RTE -- We have a podcast from Liam Burke and 22 MB MP3 file of the 23 minutes that David McWilliams gave over to blogging on The Big Bite. The coverage produced an excellent set piece and some cool Flickr photos that introduce mainstream audiences to Irish weblogs. McWilliams drew answers from six bloggers cited below who have around 12 years of blogging between them and they provided meaningful responses to a variety of questions. We've written time cues below next to the questions posed by David McWilliams, the mainstream journo who should be blogging. On the day The Big Bite aired, this blog recorded nearly 500 more visitors than on the previous Tuesday. However, most of those extra visitors came in search of pictures of Pope John Paul II wearing Bono's sunglasses. Fewer than 15 came looking for "Irishbogs". On to McWilliams' questions:

 

       

       

                    

   

How do you know it's time

WE HAVE AN INFIRM Pomeranian on our hands in Kilkenny and it's a traumatising event. Chuckie the polite and deferential male Pom that we adopted nearly a year ago is acting like an 84-year old person who can no longer walk a few strides at a time. A local vet says Chuckie is around 10 years old. A stethoscope says Chuckie has a weak heart. Creaky joints say Chuckie has arthritis. All together, these conditions have reduced a once lively fluffy dog into a snoring piece of fluff on the middle of our sitting room floor. Perhaps it's time. "How do you know when it's time?" asks Hilary Brown, Owner, VetPet Partners veterinary e-list .

 

       

       

                    

   

Comment Spam Round 10

UPDATE 7 Apr 05: Just after I started flagging the most popular pages visited on this blog, comment and trackback spammers began targeting them. Some things have predictable consequences.

Today is the first day that this blog got a comment spammed from an Irish company. It's the first Irish company comment spam pasted to the bottom of my blog in four years of blogging. For that, the team at NewMedia.ie earns special mention on the Yahoo group list for Irishbloggers and in my course notes for students earning our multimedia degree in Ireland. We won't mention what the Irish comment spammers do because we cannot see their message behind their Flash interface. I normally don't send emails to comment spammers because that merely adds my email address to a known spammer's database. Instead, I talk about my problem online, let Google index the perp in the context of comment spam, and the market feedback takes care of the message. That will happen rather efficiently in this case, because the comment spammer came to my website on the back of a Google Alert. The same terms used in the original alert will find this post and I'm sure the message will hit home.

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Sign up for Irishblogs.
Previously on IrishEyes: Comment spam round 9 (January 2005), round 8 (December 2004), round 7 (August 2004) . . .
Bonus Link: Brad Choate -- "Spam Lookup"

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