I must admit I find this fascinating.  Defining
moments in history come along every now and then, and typically most people
will know where they were when they found about whatever happened.  The
older among us will know where they were when they heard about the shooting
of JFK  (if anyone was on the grassy knoll… did you see anything
strange?).  A few years later many people of a specific faith will
remember where they were when they found about the shooting of Pope John
Paul II.  In more recent years, Tinanmem Square, September 11th etc
etc.  Most recently, the death of Michael Jackson.  Like him
or not folks, he was one of the most famous people on the planet.

What I find fascinating is the methods
people found out about this news, and how it has changed over such a short
period of time.  For example, one of the most recent was September
11th.  I found out by text message and went to the nearest TV I could
find.  Based on Bruce
Elgorts twitter post a few nights
ago, I asked "how did you find out about MJ’s demise?".

Here are the answers I got on Facebook:

I got a lot more answers on twitter
to this question.   I know the results are a bit skewed by the geek
show friends I have on Twitter and FB (sorry folks, you’re geeks… live
with it ;) ).  But in total 2 people found out on TV, most by Facebook,
Twitter, some by texts, one in World of Warcraft, and only 1 by radio.

10 years from now, what way will we
all answer the question "How did you hear the news of…"  Unless,
of course Cyberdine systems SNAFU does actually occur, or North Korea just
takes a few more crazy pills, or even if another Bush comes to power -
in that case, we will know pretty easily by looking out the window, and
wont really care about the question.

Chris Miller tweeted this fascinating twitter tag cloud time lapsed yesterday during the period Michael Jackson’s death started to be reported.

Warrens RSS link is not playing nice with
PlanetLotus at the moment, but he has written
an excellent article that if you
have time, you should read.

Something fishy with this… ;)

I twittered this last week and got various
answers.  I am tired of Firefox bookmarking, and basically bookmarking
in general.  So far I have been looking at digg or del.icio.us, but
wondered what you guys all use to bookmark your favourite sites and links,
so that they are easily obtained from anywhere, plugin well with any browser
and simple to catagorise/search (something a few people have said del.icio.us
is not).

thoughts?

Nothing to do with Notes/Domino.  More
to do with poor ass data security and a terrible PR announcement trying
to cover one’s ass.   Bold emphasis is mine.  Taken from this
announcement.

"What has happened?

A burglary took place on Friday,
5th June in one of Bord Gáis Energy’s Dublin offices. During this incident
four laptops were stolen, one of which contained customer information of
75,000 customers Bord Gáis Energy residential electricity customers.

What action has Bord Gáis Energy
taken to address the situation?

Bord Gáis Energy is taking this breach
of security very seriously and a team has been set up to deal with the
situation. A full investigation is currently underway, we are working with
the Data Protection Commissioner, the Gardaí, the Irish Banking Federation
and other security experts. We have reviewed our laptop encryption programme
and can confirm all laptops are now
fully encrypted. "

…

"What information was on the
laptops?

Of the four laptops stolen, one
had hard drive encryption and the remaining three had sophisticated
password protection. One of the laptops with password protection contained
the details of Bord Gáis Energy’s residential electricity customers who
pay via direct debit."

If you are a Mac user (I am) and you work
in vmware a lot to get a Windows XP session (I do) for some dumbass product
(it is) be careful when upgrading your iPhone (I wasn’t).  During
the upgrade, the iPhone will reboot (mine did) when being prepped for upgrade
and if you are working in the vmware session ignoring the upgrade (I was)
the windows session sees the newly connected iPhone after it restarts (it
did).  So the iphone defaults to restore mode and the iTunes upgrade
fails as it thinks you disconnected the unit (it did).  Next stop,
restore to your backup that you should of taken (I had) and get it back
to 2.2.1 before upgrading to 3.0 (doing that now).

Its just come out… here goes!

Understanding Engineers
- Take one
Two engineering students were walking across a university campus where
one said, "Where did you get such a great bike?"

The second engineer replied, "Well, I was walking along yesterday,
minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw
it to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, "Take what you
want."

The first engineer nodded approvingly and said, "Good choice; the
clothes probably wouldn’t have fitted you anyway."


More
(Thank you John)

Found on Brian O’Curran’s site