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\/__/ \/__/ \/__/ \/__/ one.eleven
20.12.02
Imminent Major Holiday Overlooked
www.imho.8m.com
by Hugh mT
====================================================================
Welcome to another issue of Ireland's finest - and AFAIK, only -
sarcastic technology/media internet newsletter, sent out to a very
select readership of key executives, company principals, and budget-
controlling decision makers. And you.
* * * Back issues online at http://www.imho.8m.com * * *
Print hint: IMHO looks best in Courier New.
Ingestion suggestion: IMHO contains hyperlinks - read it online, and
follow 'em.
We Bowdlerise colourful language (e.g. 'bas7ard') so that IMHO can
sneak past corporate obscenity filters, unlike Youssou N'Dour and
his band past Irish immigration control.
====================================================================
Thanks for feedback on 1.10! That means you, Tom Walsh, for
pointing out nicely that Lonnie Donegan was in fact Scottish and not
actually Irish, as we claimed in IMHO 1.10 - our fact-checker is in
the dole office as we speak. It means you, Santa, that is Santa
Cymru of http://www.santacon-cymru.co.uk (and hopefully not the
'Santa' of http://www.asmallvictory.net/hhhs/), for the details of
the inaugural Welsh Santacon, we wish you pob lwc with that! It
means you, Sean, and you, Ross, for invaluable-as-ever
contributions!
But this issue, above and beyond, it means thanks to you, MATT, from
an awful lot of people, for http://www.tomasdowney.com.
====================================================================
It's the season of goodwill, so we're making a special entreaty this
issue for you to help boost our plateaud distro:
PLEASE forward IMHO to as many friends and acquaintances as you can!
They can then SUBSCRIBE by sending mail to imho@eircom.net with the
word 'subscribe' in the subject line. And check out the back issues
at http://www.imho.8m.com.
====================================================================
AN INTERNET EIREANNACH.......................Anti-Social Engineering
We did it! A Nation Once Again!
http://www.imho.8m/com/pics/wedidit.gif
Now, if we can just get IMHO awarded the 'Grand Prix' at the First
O2 National Digital Media Awards...
http://www.digitalmediaintelligence.com/o2categories.html
(apparently "the sector is now reaching critical mass", LOL)
*
Shadowy IMHO field agent Firbolg has been monitoring the Internet in
Norn Iron, finding ominous sectarian developments in the flags being
waved at soccer matches at
http://www.online.ie/viewer.adp?article=1896717 ("that explains
why I once saw an Israeli flag flying in Portadown", he writes) and
parallels of regional tensions in minor business spats between UTV
and eBid at http://www.ethos.org/ebidblocked.html ("the doublespeak
from the ISP makes the language of the peace process seem quite
sraightforward", he writes). Somebody buy Firbolg a PC-compatible
iPod ("now that it's finally reached the apparently far-flung retail
shores of the Emerald Isle and selling here at about four-thirds
apple's own RRP", he writes)! Give his head peace!
*
Novelty bets: they're always good for a lazy piece of half-a$$ed
journalistic space-filling. So browse on over to Paddy Power's for
such classics as Will it snow on Christmas day (5 to 1)? Who'll be
knighted first out of 'Rodger Moore' (sic, 3 to 1) and Gerry Adams
(500 to 1)? or even Will Oasis win a Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 (250
to 1)? Ha bloody ha.
http://www.paddypower.com/bet?action=go_category&category=SPECIALS
*
Now that the magic mushroom season's over, you'll need something
else to get you out tramping around the fields at six in the
morning. How about helping out with a nationwide survey of frogs?
http://www.ipcc.ie/aboutsurvey.html
And no, you can't lick 'em...
*
Office party this weekend? Read this sound advice before you go:
http://www.worksmart.org.uk/rights/viewquestion.php?eny=460
Irish IT workers will probably be more familiar with this particular
predicament, however:
http://www.worksmart.org.uk/rights/viewquestion.php?eny=445
*
At http://www.honeynet.ie you'll find the 'Irish Honeynet', a
network of deliberately unsecured internet servers which is
monitored for illicit Blackhat hacking activity, in order to gather
statistics about the nature and number of attacks such hosts are
likely to be subject to. The About Us page declaims sonorously that
"It is important to note that the Honeynet is not 'advertised' in
any way to the general public. It is housed in an anonymous location
and does not have the effect of enticing anyone to it. This is
essential in order to maintain the integrity of the data it produces
and the validity of the results."
Oh really? Top secret is it? What about the 254 results that a
search for "Irish Honeynet" produces in Google? What about the non-
stop droning on about it in the national press? What about the
endless stream of press releases coming from a PR company called
Raheengraney (which, strangely, always include a URL to a Bed &
Breakfast)? You call that anonymous?
Anyway, in the interests of skewing their research curves, like an
innocent 15-year-old schoolboy sniggering as he ticks the "Paint
thinner" and "Every day" boxes on a survey of teenage drinking,
we're suggesting that everyone has a go at cracking the honey pot.
A hundred Pooh Bears, all from Oceanfree.net, all using the W2K/IIS5
exploit at http://www.eeye.com/html/advisories/IISHack1.5.zip (needs
a C compiler)... wouldn't that be grand? Let's make those December
statistics something to see.
*
What every preachy, primitive usability site needs: photos of the
Usability Expert (TM) on holidays in Thailand:
http://www.usabilityireland.com/Personal.html
(Look, IMHO has a crap site 'cos we're LAZY, not 'cos we think it's
purer or anything...)
Shame that spell-checking isn't a part of standard usability
heuristics, though:
e.g. http://www.usabilityireland.com/Advice.html.
*
The grandiose-sounding Office of the Director of Telecommunications
Regulations was recently replaced by the snappy, dumbed-down
"ComReg"... and in an occult attack on the very foundation of our
society, it seems the word "Resource" has been replaced too:
http://www.comreg.ie/rec_detail.asp?RAuto=36
*
While you're waiting like a goombah for an Irish Big Brother... will
this do?
http://www.thinkzoo.com/episodes/episode1.shtml
* * * * * * * * *
IMHO'S PICK: JOB...........................It's The Economy, Stupid!
We WERE gonna skip the jobs section this ish, but when we heard
about the cancellation of the High Skills Recruitment Fair at the
RDS (as much a part of Christmas as striking baggage handlers or
hateful Gerry Ryan TV retrospectives) we felt honour-bound to step
in and fill the niche. There were probably only gonna be two jobs
there anyway, and here they are:
1. GMAC, the financial services company which is apparently part of
the General Motors "Family", are looking for SOFTWARE DEVELOPEMT
ARCHITECTS, WEB DEVELOPERS and NETWORK ANALYSTS, all strongly
Microsoft-slanted and with fairly heavy experience criteria (new
graduates need not apply, sorry!). Info requests or applications to
recruitment_ireland@gmaccm.com.
Oh, these jobs are in Mullingar, by the way ;-)
2. If you know any MAC GRAPHIC DESIGNERS who can speak basic
Deutsche - don't they all? - then tell 'em to email ewald@adam-
agentur.de, a German advertising agency based in Waterford.
Pretty poor pickings, eh? Yeah, we know, but what you gonna do?
* * * * * * * * *
IMHO'S PICK: EVENT.......................Ringadingalingadingdongding
On December 23, you can go drinking in the Ginger Man with the
people from boards.ie - if you can find them. Join the 53
"jackeens" who've proudly signed up at the time of writing:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=69111
Apparently they're "trying to keep the police out of this one", so
make sure not to browse on over to
http://www.garda.ie/angarda/email.html and let the cat out of the
bag. It also appears that "cluchie type people" aren't invited
either. On the other hand, it says somewhere else that everyone's
welcome. But as Barthes said, the contradiction of our times may
well make paradox the condition of truth. Ask them and see.
*
At this time of year, people all over the world are united in
excitement and anticipation of *the* big seasonal event... the new
Lord of the Rings movie. Celebrate by meeting up with like-minded
fans at a LOTR Meet-Up (if 'like-minded' means that you think that
"Clontarf looks fabulous"):
http://lotr.meetup.com/?localeId=878&setLocale=1
And if you do go along, make sure to bring your Lords of the Rhymes
gangsta hobbits single, from http://lotr.fistfulayen.com/:
"Well my name is Gimli / I'm a fuc&ing dwarf! /
I been slaying mutherfuc&ers / from the south to the north..."
* * * * * * * * *
IMHO'S PICK: DOWNLOAD..............................Make .MOV Not War
The Irish Government recently said "Ara no thanks, you're grand"
when the UN tried to give us Iraq's full weapons report - which, as
a member of the Security Council, we're supposed to see. The
reason? We don't want to accidentally learn how to make any nuclear
weapons. Well duh. Who cares about that when it's all on the
internet?
Take for example the (deep breath) US Department of Energy's
Openness Initiative Historical Nuclear Weapons Test Films page,
where you can download such thrilling movies as 'Operation Upshot-
Knothole, Atomic Weapons Effects on B-50 Aircraft-1953', the Federal
Civil Defence presenting the stoic 'Let's Face It' (a sequel to
'Meeting the Terrorist Threat'), or even the folksy-sounding
'Operation Teapot'. To pick an example at random, this is from the
blurb for 'Atomic Weapons Orientation Part Five':
"This video shows the heat, blast, and radiation effects of a
nuclear explosion on personnel (dummies), structures, and military
equipment. The video is a compilation of numerous nuclear
detonations...".
http://www.osti.gov/historicalfilms/filmlist.html
This is real military footage and media indoctrination and frankly,
it scares the hell out of us. All together now: We'll meet again,
don't know where, don't know WHENNNN...
*
Not strictly a download this one, more a system tweak. Apparently
it's a "poor man's official james bond megalomaniacal super-villian
world domination mission control video wall" - picture Ozymandias'
expanse of CRTs in Watchmen on your desktop. Whatever it is, it
looks fantastic. Screenshots, full instructions and links are at
http://www.formandcontent.net/projects/worldview/worldview.htm
We REALLY wanna see an Irish one of these. Start collecting those
local webcams.
*
Bookmarklets have been around for a few years now, and it just ain't
right that they haven't gone global, 'cos they're a truly great web
idea. Essentially just snippets of Javascript code, you store
Bookmarklets in your browser's Favourites and activate them when you
want functionality like, say, to see when a page was last updated,
to list all the links in a page, or to kill unwanted Flash or applet
objects. They take seconds to install and once you've gotten used
to them you'll wonder how you ever browsed without. Start
collecting at
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/
* * * * * * * * *
IMHO'S PICK: COMPETITION.............................#include Kill.h
Okay, we don't even know what the prizes are in this particular
contest, but we're gonna recommend it anyhow...
As everyone knows, parallel programming and cluster computing are
more fun than a sackful of leprachauns. The latest in the yet-to-
take-off videogaming fashion of write-and-deploy battle programming
(Micro$oft even ran a .Net version earlier this year) is the totally
cool-looking GRIDWARS at http://www.gridwars.com. Download the
software, write your battle program, upload it to the Gridwars app
server and watch as it either dominates all the processors on the
grid or gets wiped by some 13-year-old Korean's killer kode.
This one's fairly hardc0re and prolly only for the geeks out there.
But if that's you - registration started on the 14th, get going!
* * * * * * * * *
IMHO'S PICK: INTERNET^HWS..................Homepage for the holidays
Nasty tricks to play on co-workers, #57:
When they're away from their desk, disable any screensavers and
paste this URL into their browser (you may need to hit the Play
button, too):
http://makeashorterlink.com/?G6B4521D2
*
The latest fusillade in the war of Good vs. the Music Industry:
apparently they were LYING with all that rubbish about piracy
hurting sales!
http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html
"The record industry cut their inventory (and artist investment) by
25 percent and sales only dropped 4.1 percent"
*
Op-ed in the New York Times ie always good for a laugh - for
example,
"What are you getting good at when you spend hundreds of hours
playing video games? Research is making one answer clear: killing."
http://makeashorterlink.com/?X2C5214D2
Oh yeah? Tell that to the bouncer who turned the IMHO Christmas
party away from the POD last Friday. We couldn't even mess up the
crease in his pants, and we've been playing GTA3 *every day for a
year*.
*
Art and the internet - a marriage that's yet to be fully
consummated. Projects like the Listening Post are still trying
gamely to fuse the pretentious vacuity of conceptual art with the
scarily democratic technological principles of the web. And to be
fair, it does a pretty cool job (it sure beats the hell out of that
exhibition in Dublin that Thomas McLaughlin was bashing to bits on
'The View' last week). From the blurb:
"The visible and audible text in this installation is live,
collected in real-time from tens of thousands of chat rooms, forums,
newsgroups, bulletin boards, and other public online communication
channels ... A tonal soundscape underlies the spoken text, its
pitches and timbres responding to changes in the flow and content of
the messages".
Test your tolerance at
http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningPost.html
*
If you're dying of suspense waiting for Amazon to deliver your
Segway, you can watch people riding them here:
http://www.bookofseg.com/
* * * * * * * * *
LEGACY MEDIA........................Whenever you rent or buy a video
IRISH TV: There's only a paltry few days of top-quality indigenous
televisual entertainment before the Christmas bonanza, and we're
damned if we're gonna tackle that... so yet again, it's a week off
for IMHO's review of upcoming delights on RTE 1, Network 2, TV3 and
TG4. We note with faint relief a distinct absence of public demand
clamouring for its return.
VIDEO/DVD: In light of the fact that it's the highest-gaining
internet search query of 2002 (see Google's rather boring year-end
Zeitgeist at http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html), and also
because of its recent arrival in Irish video libraries, we're gonna
say a few words about SPIDER-MAN.
It's good. It's a traditional comic book adaptation and it doesn't
mess about with the formula. Tobey Maguire's dewey-eyed innocent
shtick works fine for Peter Parker, Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin
energetically chews the scenery before blowing it up, and Sam
Raimi's vigorously swooping direction shows the evolution of the
inventiveness that gave terrible cameras-on-sticks perspective to
Evil Deadites back in the day. The exposition's a lot of fun and
the climax satisfactorily black and white. Like all great comic
book adaptations, it takes its visual cues from the original medium,
and the street combat scenes are particularly fun, recalling the
glory days of Superman II. The script is fairly solid, too. It's
an old-fashioned movie for kids, a movie for old-fashioned kids, a
movie fashioned for old kids, or something... does any of those
describe you?
* * * * * * * * *
COLOPHON................................................OVER AND OUT
We'd like to focus mainly on the IRISH Internet - have you seen it
anywhere? Help us out by mailing in your topical Irish net news,
your high-profile .ie failures, your worthy Gaelic successes, your
hilarious local web misadventures, anything that seems messed-up,
inappropriate or insane... or just mail us your feedback. (That
address is imho@eircom.net)
But whatever you do, PLEASE PLEASE SPECIAL-CHRISTMAS-PLEASE send
this on to as many people as you can.
Yes Hugh mT, there IS a Santa Claus.
====================================================================
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