1800-MUMDAD

There's a new service in Australia called 1800MUMDAD. What happens is, when a son or daughter run out of credit on their mobile phone, and are in a 'time of need', they can ring this free phone number and reverse the charges to their parents. The rates the parents are charged are apparently 50% cheaper than the standard reverse charge rates. However, this is still about $5 Australian Dollars for the first 60 seconds, which is charged to the parents phone bill.

Would it work in Ireland? Who knows? What I do know, is that the company are doing very well in Australia and it looks to me like a franchise you could roll out worldwide. Check out the site below.
http://www.1800mumdad.com.au

Public Relations Student Blogs

All those in the Online PR module should leave your blog address here as a comment. I will then link to the RSS Feed of your blog with my RSS Reader. Instead of me checking your blog every day to see if you have posted a new entry, my reader will let me know when a new post has been written. There is a good video explanation of this is my earlier post, 'Explanation of RSS Feeds & RSS Readers'.

A Clamp Too Far - DkIT ???

Well I suppose the 'clamp too far' happened last week when seven co-workers' cars were clamped in the staff car park...but that's a whole other story. Was just leaving work today when I spotted the scene below in the carpark of DkIT. I'll leave others to discuss the pros and cons of clamping, but suffice to say I was baffled by the explanation I received from the clamper as to what 'law' the poor student had broken. "Have you got a licence?" he barked at me with a strong Northern accent. "Certainly do", says I. "Well then you'd know that its breaking the law cross a white line", he blasted. "Thanks for that golden nugget" says I. Oh he also muttered something about the dreaded 'health & safety'.

€65 and three hours after the girl first noticed the clamp, the ordeal was all over.

Explanation of RSS Feeds & RSS Readers

Great video of a guy from Commoncraft explaining what an RSS is and how to set up your RSS reader to view RSS feeds of your favourite news and blogs on the net.

Kayaking Vs Drugs (Virtual Communities at work)

I was trying to find my mate's email address today by searching the web, and ended up stumbling across an engaging discussion he was involved in a while back. It is an interesting case of how passionate people can get about different topics and how discussions, forums and communities bring people back to a website again and again....like nectar to the bee.

You have to read down a little bit before it gets good but essentially, the discussion centres around the sponsoring of a 'Kayak Drop off O'Connell Street Bridge' in Dublin, being sponsored by a pharmaceutical company called Novartis. It seems like some of the kayakers had a problem with the "big bad drugs company" sponsoring the event and the discussion went from there. Looks like its one of the most popular threads ever and its nothing to do with kayaking!!
The link to the discussion is http://www.irishfreestyle.com/node/957

I'll have to ask him what the end of the story was and post again.

Ten two letter words of confidence

I was watching The Open Golf Championship yesterday and the commentator alluded to a piece of advice which Butch Harmon recently gave to a golfer. The advice was "If it is to be, it is up to me". I checked around the web this morning and it seems to have been said originally by a guy called William Johnson, of whom there are about 20 famous enough to be on Wikipedia so who knows. Great quote though.

News travels fast...be it true, false or somewhere in between

Back in the 19th Century, Mark Twain said "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes". This quote is remarkably appropriate in this age of the Internet where, as something happens it can be on someone's computer halfway around the world in minutes or even seconds.

The problem arises not necessarily when an action is broadcast or reported on, but when it is broadcast or reported on with bias, prejudice or just out of context. Ironically, Twain also said "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please”, which sometime seems to be the way certain news organisations report certain issues.

Must add a few examples of this.

China - The Experience So Far

I am out in Hangzhou, China lecturing for a few weeks. Then off exploring a few more cities before I return home. All is great here so far. The School of Informatics in the Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics have put me up in the modern Xiasha Campus accomodation and have given me a nice suite with a kitchen, washing machine, fridge, living room, leather sofa, computer with speakers etc. Then the bedroom and bathroom are next door in another adjoining room. Happy days.

Most of the cultural difference so far revolve around the food. For starters, nobody warned me that nobody seems to have any English in this region, and that a knife and fork were seemingly never invented here. This can prove difficult when deciphering what is on the menu and then of course, trying to eat it. For example, yesterday's option in the accomodation restaurant was chicken claws in barbeque sauce or fish heads. I went for the vegetarian option. Today I ended up having eel, but didn't realise until I'd eaten it and the chef told me. Well he didn't so much tell me as dragged me over to the fish tanks and pointed to the bucket on the ground where about 50 eels were swimming around. Ended up having pigeon, duck's bill, frog, turtle and a few other delicacies along the way.

There are three Dundalk IT students studying out here for the year and I have met them a few times. They are all getting on really well. Two of them are staying in the apartment lived in by DkIT students from last year. The other guy is across the way in the same apartment block. They seem to be nicely set up with jobs, friends, extra curricular activities etc. Not easy coming out here for a year. Quite daunting actually.

As I head up to Beijing and back down to Shanghai next week I'm sure there'll be more to tell.

Funny Scare

There's a whole load of ones like this on YouTube. Search for 'Scare Tactics', its an American tv programme. Some very funny clips.

Bug found in blog post

Saw this today and thought it was good. Looks good when sent in an email on a white background. Just right-click on the image, save the picture to your computer and attach it in a mail.

New EBay shop in Drogheda

Passed by this shop the other day in Drogheda and had to look twice. I had heard of these before but had never seen one in Ireland or anywhere else on my travels. It will be interesting to see how well it does. I will be calling in to have a chat with the owner when it opens for business next week.

6 year old solves a rubik's cube in 38 seconds!

Iraqi Dinar...the web's worst, best kept secret

So there I was in the pub the other night when talk turned to the Iraqi Dinar. It seems investors are speculating that once the Dinar hits the open market, the value will increase to that of the US Dollar, and they will be millionaires. Buying this currency seems to be the worst, best kept secret on the web at the moment. So off I headed to eBay and got myself a few.
Next thing I hear is all the negative publicity, bad value for money prophecies and counterfeits stories. I'll post again when I get my hands on my purchase.

Web addiction...my typical day

My first hit of the day comes about 8.30am when, using FireFox, I check my GMail, Hotmail, SquirrelMail and Google Calender to see what's new and in store for me for the day. Lamentably, this process is repeated several times an hour for the duration of the day.
Next to be updated is my page on BeginnerTriathlete.com. Depending on what training I did the day before, this task could be skipped or else savoured as I input a run, jog or cycle and proceed to compare how Dok and the rest of the lads performed in the past few days.
This blog has been neglected but gets the odd update and i will always have a quick look at the page analysis.
Next stop, generally to while away a lunchtime, is wikipedia.org, o2.ie, youtube.com and maybe check my balance or make a transaction on AIB Internet Banking.
At some stage during the day I will log into Google Reader, which uses web feeds to constantly check, retrieve and aggregate my favorite news sites and blogs for new content. To check for new podcasts I will log into iTunes.
Finally, on a Friday afternoon without fail, I give in to one of my strongest web addictions, the time-sapping Fantasy Premier League. This site will tide me over for most of the weekend as the results start coming in and league positions are fanatically monitored.

Countries I've Visited

Looks like its 21 countries. Thought it would cover way more of the world map.

Create your own visited country map

WebSite Analysis

(SiteMeter, StatCounter, Google Analytics)
Once you have created a space for people to visit you online, you should be looking to embed a good stat counter so you can see, at the very least, how many people have been there. I use a few on this site. One that is very easy to use is Site Meter. It offers basic and some in-depth analysis including, average per day, average visit length, visits today & this week as well as analysis of visitors by referral, by location, by entry pages and a few more.
A similar site to this is StatCounter where you can also download a free and invisible stat counter which embeds into your webspace and provides you with detailed information about how people are using your site.
The one that has impressed me most is Google Analytics, which is very easy to setup, especially if you already have a google account. Everything from user interface to site analsyis is far more superior and sophisticated to both of the others. Whichever one you choose, after the initial setup, will be collecting data about your traffic, and displaying the results on their website.

EBusiness Module

At this stage everybody in the 4th year EBusiness Module, Dundalk IT, should have created a blog here on Blogger.com. You should know your Username and Password and the full address of your blog. Reply to this post, letting me know your address.

Witness the Fitness

Chatting recently and were trying to remember this video. Here it is - Roots Manuva, Witness.

Roots Manuva - Witness The Fitness
Uploaded by Colin Cooney

Classic news story from 1993 about the Internet

Found this clip on The Break the other day. 1993 seems a long time ago now. Its funny to see the older computers and hearing the screeching when one guy is connecting to the Internet. The clip ends with a short cartoon arguing that the Internet is really only used for one thing...

Porn Percentages

It turns out there ISN’T as much sex out on the internet as some had thought. Only about 1 per cent of the web has sexually explicit material according to a recent study. The study by a University College Berkeley professor estimated the number of pornographic websites based on a random sample of sites catalogued by Google and Microsoft’s MSN.

• The study found that about 1.1 percent of the sites in the search engines’ indexes contained sexually explicit material.
• Also, filters blocked from 8.8% to 60.2% of sexually explicit material. However they often also block a lot of clean content — 0.4% to 23.6% sites blocked didn’t have any explicit material.

This does not mean that the Porn industry isn't doing well. AVN estimates US adult products market to generate $12.922 bln in 2006. Adult movies remain the largest sector at more than $3.6 bln or 28% of the adult entertainment market. Falling prices for adult DVDs caused a drop of 15% in revenue in that segment, but unit sales were up, indicating a continuing market for adult films. Distribution over cable channels showed strong growth in 2006 at 34%. AVN estimates the Adult Cable/PayPerView segment (home and hotel TV movies) now represents $1.75 bln in revenue, annually.

What is most notable is that Internet sales of adult content, which includes images, live-chat and live-streaming video, is the main growth area. In fact, AVN reports that in 2006, Internet Sales became the second largest adult entertainment segment, with 22% of the market or $2.8 bln in sales.

Dell Wifi Hotspot Finder

Last Feb I bought the Dell Latitude 610. Turns out the new model has included a unique feature called "Wi-Fi Catcher" located on the left side of the notebook. You can use this switch to turn off all wireless radios by putting it in the 'Off'position, but far cooler than that, push it all the way forward and it will blink green as it searches for a Wi-Fi network and if one is present it glows solid green, if none is found it shows orange. This Wi-Fi Catcher works whether the notebook is on, off or in standby mode. So there's no need to boot up and search for wireless networks, just push this button to find out.

More on this at... http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2846&laptop=Dell+Latitude+D620+Review

Securing your wireless network...alternatively

Just got Broadband in the house and have a wireless router broadcasting the signal around the house. I haven't bothered putting a password on it, so I suppose my neighbours could be having free access. I was thinking about this and came across a story of a guy who is securing his wireless network in an alternative fashion. Essentially, he is messing with the layout of the pages that his neighbours are browsing...their fault for piggybacking!!

New Year's Resolution(s)

The only one worth writing about is 'to complete at least one triathlon'. Booked myself in for one in Carrick-on-Shannon on April 22nd. Consists of 24 lengths of the pool(600m), 18km cycle and 5km run. Should be easy enough in theory, only I still can only swim two lengths and I've no bike.