Damien Mulley

I’m currently trying to get someone to build a coverage map for broadband in Ireland. It will list every enabled exchange and have a 5km radius around each exchange to show max coverage. I have the locations of all exchanges but need someone to plot them on a map of Ireland now. Can anyone help with this? Looking to have this done by Thursday if possible.

UPDATE: I’ve posted what I’m looking for here.

Scoble says if your name isn’t on the list you’re not getting in. Scoble was once boastful about not moderating comments and very very very rarely deleting them. Now he’s become an editor of the thoughts of others and if he doesn’t like your comment he’ll delete it. I’m sure we’ll all be comforted with a new suckup cartoon from Hugh Macleod that’ll make everything better.

Google, Amazon and Ebay tell AT&T to make their day, punk! About time. So, in case anyone wasn’t aware the large telcos like AT&T wanted to blackmail the large web traffic generating sites to pay them to bring customers to them. Nevermind they are already payed to do this, the greedy telco dinosaurs now wanted premiums from Google and Amazon and EBay, three hugely wealthy companies. The worrying issue here is that with Washington being what it is, the telcos are lobbying hard and might just get their way with the FCC being almost as bad as the Irish Telecoms regulator.

Imagine charging people a road toll and then charging them differently depending on which shop they’ll be visiting, even if all shops are in the same location. That’s what AT&T want. The Networking Pipeline I referenced above is now speculating that Google, Ebay and Amazon might just route around AT&T and buy chunks of wireless spectrum and provide customers with an alternative way of getting online. Kinda cool that a principle of the ‘net is to route around damage and that’s what Google et al might just do. Google has already been buying up a lot of dark fibre and hiring dark fibre experts. They have also been investing in broadband over powerlines (won’t happen) and they are playing now with wireless networks in San Fran and Mountain View. GoogleNet is much closer than we thought.

Greg Knauss makes a great blog post over on Kottke about referential and experiential bloggers. So, what be they? He says:

The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere … They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.

The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion … They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.

Very valid points. I think when it comes to these ideas I’m a bit of both. I use other blog posts as jumping points into deeper discussions on my own blog, these blog posts are catalysts for thought reactions but I also have linking posts that send people away from my site. “Nothing to see here today, go here and play instead.” I’d actually think a lot of bloggers are a mix of both types more than excusively one or the other. Still it’s a good observation by Greg on the various behavioural types of bloggers. I mostly started off as a referential blogger using my blog as link log and added some comments then over time I used it to express ideas I was thinking about and as Greg outlined, added links more as a way of enforcing my thoughts and ideas. I’ve noticed some people start like this whereas some have started as experiential and evolved into referential blogs.

Adrian Weckler thinks the UCC Podcast/videocast idea is doomed but according to this Sky News piece the idea is that videos and podcasts of lectures will help out those that missed lectures and be an additional study aid to those that attended the lectures. Looks like James Bowen is one of the people behind this. James is not liked by the Freedom Institute. Whatever about his politics, this guy lectured me when I started an Elec Eng degree years back and he honestly gives a damn about UCC and Ireland producing world class students. This initiative looks to be a very good start and UCC seem to be out of the starting blocks way ahead of other colleges and it looks like they have a lot of backing in UCC for this.

Bernie adds his thoughts to Adrian’s piece and wonders how UCC will manage this given the time it takes to do a simple podcast. They already have managed it and they’ve done it well. So far they have produced 80 videos from 10 different UCC Departments (and another 4 on the way). They also have covered special public lectures, conferences, information for prospective students, special events like Pierce Brosnan getting conferred and loads more topics.

Already there are videocasts from the following UCC departments:

* Astrophysics
* Biochemistry
* Computer Science
* Earth Science
* Geology
* Geography
* Health Science
* Microbiology
* Physics
* Zoology

and more on the way from:

* Anatomy
* Applied Psychology
* Chemistry
* Physiology

Go visit the UCC Outreach TV site for more information. I guess this is one reason why they have won University of the Year two years in a row.

Tuesday April 18th 2006 is going to be a day history is made for Sligo Tourism as Aine Chambers finally gets to go on the Podge and Rodge show. I’d like to see the ratings for that night. The Ballydung boys were just on the Ian Dempsey show on TodayFM where Aine from Sligo made it into their Top 5 tottie list. Tune in on Tuesday!

EDIT: Thanks Des!

Let’s hope it doesn’t crash or get swamped like all the other Google projects. HAHA. Error message as I typed that: “Calendar is unavailable right now, please try again in a few moments” Title of this post amended.

Fuckwits. For fucks sake lads, get it fucking right.

September would be good for me. Now would be a good time to start organising it lads and ladies.