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Irish marketing

‘This commercial free Bank Holiday Monday is brought to you by Magners.’ - Virgin Radio (25 August 2008)

Well it may have fooled some of the listeners but it certainly didn’t fool me.

knowing me, knowing you

[ This post also had working titles of ‘Friends, bloggers and countrymen’ and ‘anti-social networking’. ]

A few weeks ago, a gentleman called WaveyDavey001 was kind enough to invite me to participate in a Fantasy Football League.

Rather rudely, I attempted to invite several of my friends into the same League so I only needed to manage one team. WaveyDavey001 politely agreed with the caveat; ‘I’d like to vaguely know most (of them)’.

in praise of Disqus

Disqus recently released a update which includes the ability to export comments on a WordPress blog so I have just exported all historic comments left on this blog (when it was running WordPress) into Disqus.

This operation was slightly complicated because this blog now uses Habari but the necessary steps were:

1. Download and install the new Disqus 2.0 plugin for Wordpress.
2. Delete all obvious spam so the export only processes genuine comments and runs faster.
3. Switch the archived WordPress copy of the blog back to the original location.
4. Export all comments from WordPress into Disqus.
5. Claim comments left by myself using an alternative email address before I had even heard about Disqus.
6. Wrap the WordPress blog in cling-film, label and place back into cryogenic storage.
7. Reinstate the Habari blog.

However, because I am pretty stupid and overly hasty, inevitably I omitted step 3. This meant that while all comments appeared on the Disqus site, the permalinks to the individual blog articles were incorrect and referenced ‘/wordpress/’ instead of ‘/blog/’.

Venetian philosophy

Holidays are a time blissfully free of the modern distractions of computers, mobile phones, games consoles, televisions and a time for the family to spend some quality time together and eventually fall out.

Inevitably, this leads to varied, interesting, thought provoking discussions. During the Brightside annual vacation in Venice, the following thorny questions were posed:

• If you immersed yourself in a foreign country, how long would it take for you to become proficient in the language ?
• If there was a 15 km stretch of beach resort including hundreds of young people, bars and restaurants in England, how many riot police would be required ?
• If soldier ants are so damn clever, how come they didn’t land on the moon first ?
• When the bus was forced into that emergency stop, was it the German tourist or the Italian bus driver who screamed ‘BASTARD’ ?
• What’s the Italian for ‘Cornetto’ ?
• If mosquitoes could be trained to attack people with the same blood group, would the bites be rendered harmless ?

how to make 100 friends on identi.ca in 14 days

• Look for people with similar interests.
• Look at the friends of people you have just followed.
• Look out for people who have criteria for following others e.g. ‘I will only consider following you if you have ever replied to me (and made me laugh out loud)’. Satisfying the first is easy, the latter less so.
• Scan the Public time line. Occasionally, you will find a gem in the fast flowing river.
• identi.ca currently doesn’t have an ‘Import my friends’ but they will undoubtedly use the same old tired nickname with the same old, tired profile pic.
• Old technology, admittedly but you could email an invite to friends who might be interested.
• Never, ever unsubscribe from anyone. This is easy on identi.ca as this is not currently supported..
• Use searches to find like-minded individuals talking about common subjects of interest.
• If you stumble across interesting content on another service (FriendFeed, blog, Twitter) with a link to their identi.ca profile, follow them.
• Blindly follow anyone who replies to your posts.
• Look out for people located close to you (town, county, country).
• Do not troll for followers on other services although subtle, understated evangelism may prove worthwhile.
• Do not, ever, under any circumstances, beg or plead for followers.

chance meeting with man in Gents toilet

In my job, I am often summoned into very important, high powered meetings at short notice. It doesn’t matter what I am doing, who I am doing it with or where I am, I simply have to make my apologies and leave.

Last week, a client took this approach to conducting business to extremes. I was standing at the urinals, fondly remembering previous posts on manners and officious, distracting and confusing corporate directives.

Wimbledon match report

On Friday, Norman Junior III and myself loaded up our picnic hamper, packed the cool box with brightly coloured Bacardi Breezers and set off for SW19.

We had been lucky enough to get tickets for Wimbledon tennis in the public ballot last year but, thanks to the English weather, we only saw grey skies and 63 minutes of play. It was scant consolation that we saw Maria Sharapova in the flesh. OK, I’ll admit it - that was a massive consolation !

Gmail on the up down under

Although it’s very cool to post on the corporate message board: ‘Hey - why don’t we save the company millions of dollars by using Linux, Gmail and OpenOffice ?’, there are obvious barriers (security and Excel Luddites to name but two) to large corporations adopting server based software.

However, I always thought Google Mail would be an obvious fit for academic institutions to reduce the costs of software licenses and IT management. Adoption of such ‘software as a service’ would make sense as although some students are ’late risers’, the majority could also be classified as ’early adopters’ who are comfortable with the technology.

in praise of Frank Dancevic

Two weeks ago, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Surbiton Trophy where I enjoyed a day in the sun watching an excellent Men’s Final between Frank Dancevic and Kevin Anderson.

Norman Junior III also plays tennis at Surbiton albeit not to such a high standard. In the lull between the main event and the Men’s Doubles Final, Norman Junior III and the juniors came on to entertain a handful of spectators on the two main courts, performing some standard drills with their coaches.

Intranet on the Internet

Oracle AppsLab is one of my longest standing and favourite blogs.

Jake Kuramoto (and the AppsLab team) always post interesting and thought provoking articles and I also share a few areas of common interest (Twitter, Disqus, FriendFeed et al).

Although I happen to work for the same company as Jake Kuramoto, I have never actually met Jake in person. Curiously, I have had more interactions with Jake by commenting on the blog as opposed to communications via Oracle email.