27/06/2009

Everyone remembers what they were doing when...

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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:

A picture named M2

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.

26/06/2009

The twitter affect (death of Michael Jackson)

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

25/06/2009

Warren Elsmore - Community relationships

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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.

22/06/2009

The Stig reveals himself

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A picture named M2

Something fishy with this... ;)

21/06/2009

What site bookmarking tool do you use?

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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?

17/06/2009

Bullshit detector goes off

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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."


17/06/2009

Mac people upgrading your iPhone, beware if you use vmware

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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).