Alexia Blogs

So, today is Hallowe’en. The day when we’re told that the veil between the living and the dead is at it’s weakest. When the darkest torments of our nightmare stalk free. Sometimes the scariest parts of Hallowe’en are the dog dinner costumes you see people sporting. Especially the kids.

My earliest costume was a fairy princess for a senior infants party. I was five years old. The perfect age for a fairy princess. My uncle had recently married and my mam had somehow wrangled the use of a cousin’s flower-girl dress. It was lavendar and lacy. Gently floating and dusting the ground as I walked.

One of my aunts had the ingenious idea of making a halo using a looped wire coat hanger covered in silver tinsel. And my fairy princess outfit somehow morphed into a purple angel costume. I remember resisting the concept change. Who wants to be an angel? Even then, I picked apart the costume. Halos don’t have a long wire tail coming out of them that needed to be pinned onto one’s back. They’re supposed to float. Everyone knows that.

My protests fell on deaf ears and I was grudgingly packed off to school. Once there I was the envy of every other five year girl. The boys looked on in disgust. Little did I know that this was peak of my adventures in costumes. It was such a brief career too.

The following year my mam had no costume crutch to lean on and after a recent homemade haircut disaster (not my fault, I swear), I was dispatched off to school dressed in a tracksuit. I was told I was dressed as a runner. You know - a person who runs. Oh, sweet Jesus when I think on how I looked turning up in school in one of those polymix tracksuits with piping. You know what I mean.. My new pudding bowl hair all scatty. A classic picture of the languid eighties jogging craze. You can imagine what teacher thought on seeing me appear in casual sporty attire.

Ah, but then we come to the crowning glory. Every Thursday after school, I did Speech and Drama classes in our local sports club house. My parents weren’t stage parents at all. I was 9. A mature 9 year old (and eldest child) who preferred to hang out with adults talking, than to mix with kids. Parents being parents had always thought I ought to meet up and socialise with more kids outside of school. I’d done extracircular activities on and off for years (maybe more stories down the line).

One afternoon, the drama teacher sagely announced that the following week we would have to make costumes depicting characters of our choice, wear them and do a bit of a mime. At this stage, my tum was doing somersaults. I knew the history of costume making in our house. Thoughts quickly raced through my head. Could I pull off ‘Runner: The Sequel’? All bothered I walked home, my head heavy. Once home I broke the bad news to my mam. We were going to have to be creative. We going to have to make something that didn’t stink.

The following Thursday afternoon, I trudged to Speech and Drama with a package carefully wrapped in a black plastic bag. This was my last shot at being relevent. My final chance to show my peers, that I could dress in a costume without looking like a complete gom. So, we went through our paces in the class until teacher banished us to the toilets to change. I got some looks as I tried on my outfit. Hmm - bad start?

The class had reassembled in the bar of the club house. Classy, no? Changed and ready to mime, I got into character. I began to slowly and mechanically walking around the room. After following up with other students, the drama teacher caught up with me, “So what are you?”. “I’m an alien robot”, I squawked back. She gave me the once over and looked unconvinced. The situation was not going quite to plan. She got her lines wrong. Of course she was meant to shout, “Wow, an alien robot here to enslave humanity. I surrender!” as she fell to her knees. That’s how my mam and I had planned it.

The robot idea was mine. I was thinking cardboard box covered in tin foil. You know, real shiny. The alien part was hers, ‘cos obviously alien robots are far more exotic than earth robots. As I looked back at my drama teacher, I considered the fact that she was a grown-up who had lost the imaginative spark. Perhaps she couldn’t comprehend what an alien robot looked like. Or perhaps it was the fact that I was wearing a black sack with coloured circles of paper superglued on it. What do you think?

BOO! Did I scare you ?

I want these funky bat pegs for next Hallowe’en.. Via Coolest Gadgets.

Martha is looking for girl geeks to kick off Girl Geek dinners in Ireland.. Drop by and give Martha a shout if you are interested.

Geektastic. Not a long time ago, in a galaxy not too far away.. Luke Skywalker’s lightsabre rockets into outer space.

Think I’m going retro tech. First, it’s an unhealthy obsession with 50’s Leicas, now LPs.. Here’s a new addition to my LP want list. Joy Division’s Vinyl Box Set. It’s insanely expensive, so it’s going to the end of my want list, behind an M8 and a Lear jet.

For the day that’s in it, a truly scary slice of future synth-pop, Freezepop ‘Parlez-vous Freezepop’. I findly it strangely charming, nonetheless.

Yes, I have an unhealthy obsession for La Blogotheque’s One Take Shows, but check out this great performance of ‘Amory’ from Tom Brosseau. Wait for the guy in the eskimo anorak. Amazing.

‘Cos everyone needs more ambience.. Micheal Stearn ‘The Great Design’

Reading as much online stuff as I do everyday, sometimes makes me impatient. If an article or blog post can’t deliver its message to me in the first couple lines, I’ll skip onto the next one. I came across a cool new site called Brijit via Marshallk of ReadWriteWeb.

Brijit aggregates content from news sites like Fortune, New Yorker and the Economist and generates a 100 word blurb of their articles. So, instead of jumping over a missed treasure of a slow-burning article, I can give it the attention it deserves.

In a quick to and fro-ing with @PaulWalsh of Segala on Twitter yesterday, (I would post a link to the Tweets, but of course, Twitter is down) I mentioned my patent dislike of the ‘Top Friends’ application. That made me think more about why I dislike the application and why it sullies the spirit of social networking.

Social networking as esposed by the thinkers of the realm like Jyri Engestr?m and Hugh McLeod is all about interacting around themes of interest. In the spirit of that, I like to think of the social networking landscape as a republic of sorts. A haven where feudal conventions raising contributors above their peers do not exist.

Am I being naiive here? Quite possibly. At it’s core, social networking holds the topics we crave to interact around. Is there anything more democratic than sharing ideas across the flats of easily available web access on Jaiku or Twitter? Could our communications conduit be any more open? Probably not.

The ‘Top Friends’ application represents the anti-thesis of this philosophy. Is there anything more jarring than seeing a Facebook profile of a valued colleague, friend or business contact that doesn’t rank you in amongst their ‘Top Friends’? Tough shit, I hear you cry - but it’s a valid human reaction.

If you really want to connect with as many people as possible in a open and transparent way, then I suggest that you don’t install the application. Yes, I know that you will be bugged to install the app if someone adds you to their ‘Top Friends’. Be the better networker and nix that request to install the app.

UPDATE: Of course, Twitter comes back up as this post goes live. Here’s the Twitter commentary referenced in this post.

Seriously, could the people of Ireland smile a bit more? Just a little. In the past ten years or so, I’ve noticed that the natural tendency for folks to smile or say hi to strangers had been jettisoned in favour of a grey, grumpy demeanor. It appears that it is no longer acceptable to strangers to strike up conversation on-spec or give a quick smile. Showing teeth in a smile is now virtually akin to snarling. I’m on a mission to beat this overbearing attitude one smile at a time.

I’m generally quite a chatty person and love to strike up random conversations with folks on buses and in shops - pretty much anywhere. It’s nice to share moments with people. I’m a big believer in the adage that one’s life is a packed solid with little moments. Traces of normality that we share with those we care about. And if we can’t enjoy the small pleasure in life like the smell of coffee, someone laughing, two consecutive green traffic lights or the gentle hum of an old radiator then how can we begin to celebrate meeting that someone special or holding our children in our arms for the very first time?

Just the other day, I was playing with my new phone, a Nokia N70 (that will tide me fine until the new 8gig N95 comes out), and was having a grand old time. I put it away and browsed around a store, my head still filled with the joy of playing tactile with something new. I stopped and spoke to the sales assistant asking about something I wanted to take a look at. And as I usually do, I struck up a bit of a conversation. As a former sales assistant myself, I know all of the symbols of ‘I’m bored standing behind this counter with feck all to do, please talk to me’ as well as ‘don’t effing talk to me eva, hmm, k’. At the end of the conversation, laced with casual niceties I made a purchase. The sales assistant smiled at me and asked, “New man?”. “Nope, I’m just happy”, I answered.

The point is, that sharing moments and smiles is not only showing generosity but also opening a bridge to allow it back. I’m not a happy-clappy hippy, but one must give out what they want to receive. So, try it today. Share a moment with someone out of the blue. Give a smile and brighten up the darkening darks of the impending Winter. You never know, it could become part of your social rituals and spread some smiles across Ireland.

ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency, tells us the obvious about threats to privacy caused by Social Networking. The network never forgets, facial recognition can be used for identity theft and advanced, image-crunching engines can be used to link photo backdrops to places. Phishing, identity theft - its nothing new. One should be as careful about their online identity as they are about their real life one.

We’re having a bit of a Hallowe’en do next weekend and I want to be a ghost just like Una. A Britney-loving ghost.

Now that dogs have mastered the art of shooting, we might have an uprising our hands.

The hick’s answer to the White Stripes? Slow Club ‘Because We Are Dead’.

Having an ambient moment watching this homemade vid of William Orbit’s ‘Sea Green’.

Seagate are laying off some 900 staff from their substrate manufacturing base in Limavady, Co. Derry citing the loss of competitiveness as the reason for moving operations to Malayasia. The move east has been a gradual one. In December 1997, Seagate announced that it’s Clonmel facility employing 1,400 people was closing. As part of this closure, Seagate had to repay the IDA over 11 million Irish pounds.

In 2005, Seagate announced plans to expand its operation in the North, The plan earmarked an investment of 83 million into its plants at Limavady and Springtown. Out of that substantial investment, Invest NI planned to contribute 25 million pounds. I wonder if these investment figures been reached. Will Seagate have to repay government grants given to aid in extending the Limavady plant, now that it has decided to close shop there?

Whilst there has been no news of threats to the jobs at Seagate’s Springtown facility, workers there must be looking nervously at their Limavady colleagues and fearing for the future. Redundancy discussions are set to kick off within days, but it will be cold comfort to the families facing Christmas with employment scarce on the ground and mortgages to pay.

UPDATE: The Independent reports that fears are also being expressed about the job security of Seagate workers in Donegal.

In a case coming right out of the edges of belief, a group of Second Lifers are suing another Second Lifer, Thomas Simon, claiming that he sold copies of the products out of his Second Life sex toy shop. It seems that the law is blind and virtual. I’m wondering if the case will be read in SL or terra firma.

Second Life produce is big business. Linden Labs own stats tool estimates that almost 450,000 people logged in over the past seven days. That’s a scary amount. Imagine selling small ticket items costing a US dollar to a market of that size? Drop by Amazon and take a gander at ‘Designing Your Second Life’. It advises you on how to make clothes and ‘establish a social community and career Life’. Hmm, am I missing something? A fad, you might say. Perhaps, but there’s a market for niche items by independent sellers, if the plantiffs of this case are anything to go by.

So, given the salivating market out there for SL goods, you’d think that counterfeiting items would be a tough job? Nope. It’s a well-known fact that it’s as simple as timing the pulling of items out of one’s inventory. Pick the correct moment for an inventory pull to sync with a system lag and in an effort to deal with the load, SL returns to a restore point. This has the side-effect of restoring the pulled item in the inventory. Now, where you had that designer dress, you have two. Magic, no?

Curiously enough, this is not the first case of copyright infringement in Second Life. Back in July, a similar suit was filed by Eros (also a plantiff in the new case) against a SLer named Volkov Cattaneo for allegedly copying their beds. Again, a play on sex toys. To date, the identity of Cattaneo has yet to be clearly established, although lawyers for Eros believe that they have tracked down the culprit.

It remains to be seen how the Simon case will get on in a court of law. Proof at the moment seems to centre around a collection of photos stored on Flickr. It will be interesting to see how this case develops and what implications it will have on the sale of products and services in virtual worlds. I wonder what precedents it will set and how theywill shape the virtual business ventures of the future.

So, I read that the Final Frontier of Fast Food Service has been crossed. Apparently, the local chipper may no longer be the preserve of slovenly-dressed, oily-haired guys called Tony and Basher. Instead, they are to be supplemented by call centres and a burger building video bundled into a solution developed by Exit 41.

Exit 41 has a snappy byline - the ’shortest route between hunger and satisfaction’. Exit 41’s automated fast food service solutions including outsourcing of order management and instructional video stream showing fast food assembly technicians how to make a burger. The ordering system also bundles in an Artificial Intelligence engine to help the kitchen predict how many burgers they need to whip up. Now, if they could automate the disposal of customers’ rubbish into the bin, that would be something.