Scared Out of My Earbuds

RARELY DOES THE DARK itself scare me but something happened the night after Halloween to jolt me out of my earbuds. I was walking through my kitchen a few hours after midnight, not needing overhead lights since the road lights outside push shafts of illumination through the windows. A few frames of Taken were running backwards in my brain. I'd awakened with a jolt from a Liam Neeson interrogation sequence, one that has eerie parallels to something from a training event four decades ago. And just as I finished pulling a glass of water from the tap, a haunting shadow of our cat (above left) appeared on the windowsill outside just as the forty-fifth second of the remastered version of "Black or White" pumped into my ears. You might not get the same experience unless you mash-up the exact scene with the dream, the shadows, the cat and Michael Jackson. I'm using the track below in a blacked-out lecture hall on Wednesday to see what happens.

Michael Jackson: "Black or White" (remastered)

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Production Note: Sound Forge Pro 10.0 decrypts M4A files. No cats were harmed in the writing of this blog post.

Direct link to "Black or White" http://www.insideview.ie/files/michael_jackson_black_or_white_remastered.mp3

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Qik Sunday News

TODAY'S SUNDAY BUSINESS POST (the Sunday newspaper in Ireland I always purchase) leads with a report that the Irish government is seriously considering a 10% pay cut for top State jobs. I've made a six-minute video with my Nokia E90 about other items of interest. The Sunday Business Post always finds new start-ups (like Cork-based social networking firm Loopthing) to spotlight and the newspaper is also pointing to problems with existing firms. [1] The day may come when Ireland has a number like 311 for citizens to call with questions about local government services. [2] The opening frame of today's Qik clip comes from T2, a Sunday Tribune magazine, concerning the Kindle. [3] The feature item also cites "five things that have changed how we live our lives" and includes Sky+, the iPod, YouTube, Facebook (not Twitter) and iPhone Apps. Ireland's Killer Apps are part of Agenda magazine in the SBP.

Sunday News from Ireland 1 Nov 09

In Search of Third Level Electives

APPROACHING MY TENTH YEAR inside third level Irish education, now working down the road from the sign at left, I've seen some administrative practises that make me wonder. Above all else, I wonder why Irish universities and institutes of technology are not required to permit students to fulfill graduate requirements with a small sampling of accredited electives earned outside of their own campus locations. If the Higher Education Training and Awards Council laid down this idea as best practise, we would could possibly avoid the current logjam of applicants to want to earn a qualification in renewable energy. At the moment, students apply for enrolment in one place but if the course is full, they wait on a list. As we know from our frontline position at Tipperary Institute, programmes for renewable energy are fully subscribed. The Tipperary Institute programme is Ireland's longest-running (seven years now) and people are wait-listed. There are ways to solve the waiting list but from a higher level position there should be a way for the system to accommodate the desire of a student to upskill or reskill by starting the programme in one area and finishing it in another. This is normal practise throughout the United States. For up to two years, college and university students can often spend half of their timetables on elective courses that are approved by their academic advisors. In Ireland, specific restrictions exist that force students to return for an entire year when they fail a single module. I have never understood this restriction because it seems to fly in the face of the European model of ensuring students can finish a degree in as short as three years.

The Sunday Times

I TAKE TITLES from inbound search engine requests and at 8AM on Sunday, someone came looking for "The Sunday Times" so I made a short six-minute video while flicking through the paper. The front page leads with a smear about David McWilliams [1] and with impending pension cuts for retired state workers. [2] But the greatest trauma was perhaps the hurt felt by Stephen Fry when someone tweeted that he was boring. [3] Social networking makes the business pages, with reports that Minister Mary Coughlan attended a Facebook employment announcement and quipped, "You must be joking," when a journalist asked her if she was on Facebook. There are plenty of fans of Cecelia Ahern, now using Skype to talk to the public about her new book. [11] [4] John O'Connor from Custy's folk music store in Ennis posed with his Koltec zapper, the device he uses to spark when men urinate on his shop. [5] Cuts are on the way for State workers--but they can expect little sympathy. [6] Ireland's public service could do with major reform, Brendan Touhy writes. "There is a need for far greater personal accountability with consequences for public servants, so they can discuss and explain their decisions (and failure to take decisions) and be held accountable. [7]

Sunday Times from Ireland 1 Nov 09

Skype in Pocket

ONE REASON FOR SKYPE'S continual growth is its strong position as a utility. And nothing makes something a dead-simple utility than a resemblance to a standard household item (like a phone). That's what Skype is for me. It fits in my pocket (see left) and it rings on my home DECT phone. During the last quarter, Skype’s registered users grew 41 percent to 521 million people. That means 10 times the population of Ireland became registered users of Skype during the summer. Revenues grew 29 percent to $185 million. Free Skype-to-Skype minutes grew 74 percent to 27.7 billion minutes. I was one of the consumers who paid for SkypeOut minutes, a section of Skype revenue that grew 44 percent to 3.1 billion minutes and paid the company $185m in revenues, up 29 percent from a year ago. If the current Skype trend line continues on its current slope, it could mean one billion dollars in annual revenue in early 2011.

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Skype shown running on Nokia N97. Figures from Marketwatch, 21 Oct 09.

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Semple's Law

EUAN SEMPLE'S LAW: "If you squelch all noise, you ain't got no signal." The law arises after considering Leo Laporte’s observation on Net@Night and TWiT when Leo observed that YouTube has ten hours of video uploaded every minute of every day. He then quoted Theodore Strurgeon who claimed that “80% of everything is crap”. Euan and Leo gave this some thought, concluding if 99% of everything is crap, a very viable one per cent of all video generated for the internet is totally excellent. When you consider that six minutes of excellent video has been uploaded in the time you've spent reading this blog post, you're stuck realising that you'll never be able to watch all the totally excellent video minutes being uploaded for free view on the internet.

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Screenshot from the totally excellent Vodspot template.

Euan Semple -- "80% of everything is crap" on his blog, 21 Oct 09.

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Halloween Under Unwelcome Yellow

ANOTHER HALLOWEEN and another night of yellow-lighted roadway outside my home. It's overhead lighting from National Roads Authority fixtures that ensure road traffic outside can accelerate to 50 mph before leaving the built-up area. There's really no other reason to erect motorway-style lighting if you don't intend people to think the road surface invites steady acceleration. We used to live in Ballyclerihan, just outside Clonmel, where the yellow lights were confined to a ribbon on the main road and where you could see the stars outside our home. Because it was so dark inside the home, one 60-watt electric bulb really looked like 100 candles. Not here in our current home. Yellow light bleeds into the place and that actually creates another effect--we can actually move around the house without turning on any lights. All we have to do is remember to keep a few drapes split wide enough to let a sliver of light pour inside.

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Image from Gregory Crewdson's "Beneath the Roses", an exhibition that took three years to create, requiring the sort of production team usually reserved for a film.

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Start with Teachers Collaborating

IRELAND LOOKS SET TO abandon the most most critical paradigm to Irish economic success as a December 2009 budget imposes several constraints on teacher training and schools' IT infrastructure. It's as though the Department of Education does not believe world-class ICT provides an essential building block for the delivery of education services. A quality system of education believes that teachers need to be educated on the clever use of technology that students now carry in their backpacks. Some teachers have never stepped up from a clamshell phone, never seeing the need to use a phone for more than talking or texting. To keep phones at bay, some schools force them to hibernate in power-off modes when they could be used as low-cost access points to e-learning materials. When I suggest phones or personal netbooks deserve to be incorporated into a primary schools's ICT strategy I often get confined to the corner of discussions by principals who believe computers belong locked in separate rooms, scheduled when they're updated with the latest anti-virus software. That's so wrong--just as it's wrong to assume that the best way to use State-funded computer assets is to lock them down for most of the year in separate rooms. The world has changed--the canteen is the computer lab now (see above).

Music Goes With Me

MY LUSTWORTHY BORDEAUX Walkman phone is part of the problem some in the Irish Recorded Music Association feel. Most of the music on the phone's 16 GB removeable memory comes from tracks that landed on the phone from various collections, online subscriptions and Bluetooth exchanges. Since getting my first Walkman device, I've throttled back my purchases of CDs. Along the way, Zavvi, the music retail change formed from Virgin Megastores exited the Irish High Street. I buy five times as much music through online shops than I buy from racks of CDs around Ireland. I wonder how bands are making it. At the bottom end, some bands are getting licensing deals for their music (as little as $2,500 per contract). Getting your track used for a season of CSI means $30,000. Pixar paid Robbie Williams $100,000 to use his swing track in "Finding Nemo" and Feist got nearly a quarter millionm dollars for 1,2,3,4 in an Apple promotional advertisement. At the very top of the pay-off pile are groups like They Might Be Giants who signed for $1m when creating original music for Dunkin Donuts. I'm headed over to iTunes to see if there's something else I want on the Walkman phone. Good new music always sells.

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What Eric Schmidt Thinks Ireland Needs

ERIC SCHMIDT, CEO OF GOOGLE, visited Killarney last week, and suggested Ireland invest more in communications infrastructure. Schmidt believes broadband capability is a precondition for economic growth in the next 10 years. But not the kind of over-the-air sprinkling that the Irish government currently endorses. Google cannot deliver real-time full-screen rock concerts like U2 in the Rose Bowl if viewers have measly wireless connections like the one shown at left. "The right thing to do is to light up Ireland with fibre, and to do that systematically over a 10-year period." He points to "Singapore, Tokyo and Korea--in Korea's case they have 160 Mbps default penetration. At those speeds, the distinctions between movies, DVDs and the internet go away and are just replaced by a fibre cable and that's the future."

Broadband on Drivetime

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John Kennedy -- "Broadband leadership will be a precondition for economic growth" in eThursday, the Irish Independent, 29 Oct 09.

Previously -- "Irish Rural Broadband Hoax" on Inside View, 23 Jan 09.

Direct link to RTE Drivetime segment: http://www.insideview.ie/files/broadband_ondrivetime_14oct.mp3

Sample of my home broadband speed tests.

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