My so-called life – Amazon for $250-$500 or on Ebay for £5

April 23rd, 2006

Was at a party last night and we started talking about various TV shows. Lost, Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica and the West Wing. Someone mentioned that they wanted to get “My So-called life” on DVD and the prices for used copies on amazon are over $150 and new copies retail at $250. This is a 5 disc box set. Holy mackerel. Meanwhile I can get it from someone on Ebay for a fiver sterling.

Only 19 episodes of that show were made. Pity because it was a great show for its day. Wouldn’t you think they’d drop the price and make it available to a lot more people. Long tail and all that jazz.

First Aid mp3s from UK Ambulance Service

April 23rd, 2006

Via Smartmobs, via the Guardian is news that the Sussex Ambulance service is giving away first aid mp3s on Burns, Fits, Wounds, CPR for adults and CPR for babies. These are professionally produced mp3s using the scripts that emergency operators use if you ring 999. A good resource to add to your iPod.

Sunday Times: Here be the speed cameras

April 23rd, 2006

Seems Irish people will be told where the speed cameras are. I wonder how many will still get done over this? I bet a lot.

€975 a day – PPARS isn’t gone away you know

April 23rd, 2006

From the Sunday Times.:

consultants supplied by Blackmore Group Assets (BGAL) were receiving monthly payments that in some cases amounted to €30,000

His face was caked with blood, except where it had been partially washed clean by tears.

April 22nd, 2006

He was driven to a remote area near the Sherman Hills neighborhood east of Laramie, tied to a split-rail fence, tortured, beaten and pistol-whipped by his attackers, while he begged for his life. He was then left for dead in near freezing temperatures. A cyclist who found him on Snowy Mountain View Road at 6:22 pm, some 18 hours after the attack, at first mistook him for a scarecrow. He was unconscious and suffering from hypothermia. His face was caked with blood, except where it had been partially washed clean by tears.

Matthew Shepard.

Head like a hole and other referential links

April 22nd, 2006

Guy tries to top himself by putting a nailgun to his head and pulling the trigger. Twelve nails later and he’s still alive. He goes into the Emergency Room of the local hospital a day later complaining of a headache. And the x-ray shows:

Head like a hole

via Seth comes advice from Paul Graham on worrying about your business idea being copied.

As a rule, startups shouldn’t worry so much about competitors, especially big companies. Competitors are a second-order problem. Startups should worry more about making something worth copying and less about whether someone will.

Warning naked men. Lots of em. As their warning message states:

This blog does contain adult and gay material. If you are under your country’s legal age (18 or 21), do not scroll down and leave this page now.

Foreign Policy Magazine has a blog. Go there so you can tell others that you read it.

Tom Murphy asks do PR people need New Media skills?

We need to be pragmatic in how we bring new tools to our campaigns. That doesn’t mean slow, that means pragmatic.

10 ways to create content for your blog and the cynical counter to this article: 10 ways not to create content for your blog. I like the cynical one more.

Fuck, the Law

April 22nd, 2006

Via Boing Boing comes a legal paper called “Fuck” which discusses the word and the law around it. Censorship, free speech, harassment etc, fuck is very important.

Choice quote:

Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

From an Irish perspective it is something worth looking into especially with our history of censorship and the Church and State’s constant worries about morality. On the same note I notice that Fuck.ie is available. I wonder has anyone tried to register it. Maybe I should try and register an RBN and see what happens?

This post was proudly sponsored by the FCC and the momentum for the post was helped by listening to Track 3 from Music For the Jilted Generation – Their Law by the Prodigy

Longest commute in Ireland – So much for teleworking

April 22nd, 2006

A while back TheRegister wrote about a guy in California that has a 7 hour roundtrip commute. This guy works in Cisco and drives 186 miles from his house to get there and then when finished for the day drives 186 miles back.

With his family still sleeping, Givens heads out the door at around 4:30 a.m. from a horse ranch at the edge of the astonishing Yosemite National Park. On a good day, he can make the 186-mile trip to Cisco’s sprawling offices in less than three hours.

To highlight the fact that broadband isn’t ubiquitous in Ireland, perhaps there should be a competition to find the person with the longest daily commute in Ireland? It’d be great if a broadband company sponsored this but there would be a very strong possibility the winner themselves are not in a broadband area and so it might look a tad funny if a broadband company gives the person a voucher for dialup Internet. Of course they could gibe them broadband for boats and install a satellite dish.

EDIT: When I type in Telework Ireland, the Telework Ireland site is first in the results. The site is down now but if it was up you’d notice all the cowebs on it. Not been updated in a long long while. The first ad for this search is a job ad for Google.

Shill Shill Shill – The Irish Times piece on blogs and defamation

April 21st, 2006

I see that the Irish Times turned the pimping for work press release from Karyn Harty into an opinion piece

The long awaited Defamation Bill, which was presented to Cabinet on Wednesday, may not immediately excite the interest of those who are not in the publishing business. But in reality, the increasing use of the internet and, in particular, blog sites (personal weblogs) means that it is now much more likely that any one of us could be defamed or be responsible for defaming someone.

*Yawn*

Hadly any variation on the press release. As Gavin also points out. This is pure pimping and still adds nothing to the debate. TJ McIntyre and the good folks at Digital Rights Ireland are probably better qualified to write this piece.

This is as poor as “Spam is dangerous, writes anti-spam company shill” or “Man who sells vitamin tablets tries to insinuate his competition are dodgy in shitty press release” type pieces.

*Snore*

Machiavelli personality test – 69%

April 20th, 2006

The Machiavelli personality test has a range of 0-100
Your Machiavelli score is: 69
You are a high Mach, you endorse Machiavelli’s opinions.

Most people fall somewhere in the middle, but there’s a significant minority at either extreme.