8tung! 8tung!

I’ve ranted on numerous occasions about my feelings on ‘textese’ and how I feel that it is stamping out the Queen’s English wonderful nuances in all written languages that we have arrived at over hundreds and hundreds of years of a beautiful mishmash of cultures, quills, clashes, mistranslations and misunderstandings only to have it downsized by evil kids hellbent on using the magic of SMS in the bloody wrong way! (yes, I’m a grumpy old cat lady).

In a way it speaks to me of yet another piece of ‘evidence’ of the dumbing down or simplifying of culture and society in general, where everyone watches Big Brother, shops in Tescos, can’t recite any of the periodic table, can’t do simple sums in their heads, and Googles words instead of using a dictionary (okay, I do this. See? My brain is already rotting!).

While I still stand by my general rant I must stand corrected on the textese front because this linguist, David Crystal says in his latest book The Gr8 Db8 that only only is this harmless but we’ve been abbreviating for centuries and the fact the some kids come up with abbreviations that play on phonetics etc means that they have strong language skills in the first place.

After all Shakespeare made up half the words he wrote down. And some were great words indeed. Did you know that he came up with the blogosphere’s favourite word? rant (Hamlet)! Or was that gossip (Comedy of Errors)? Maybe jaded (King Henry VI) is the word in many cases.

Here are some interesting examples of Kri8v textese from David Crystal that appeared in a New Scientist article. See if you can guess what they are:

• (/)pnc, HHkrs GYd 2T glxE
• 1st amgst =
• dad@hvn, ur spshl
• ggggUK4gg
• LEmntry, my dEr wtson.
• 4scr + 7a ugo r 4fthrs brt 4th on this cn10nt a nu nAshn cnCvd in lbRT + ddc8d 2 th prop tht (evRE1) r crE8d =
• 2b? nt2b? = ???
• fr ur ii only

The answers:

• “‘Don’t panic’, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” – Douglas Adams
• “First among equals”
• “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name”
• “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” – Shakespeare, Richard III
• “Elementary, my dear Watson” – attributed to Sherlock Holmes
• “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” – Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg address
• “To be or not to be, that is the question” – Shakespeare, Hamlet
• For Your Eyes Only – James Bond short story collection by Ian Fleming

Virtual worlds are like, sooo 2006

lively, originally uploaded by pixie*von*dust.

Two questions: Why did Google decide to bring Lively out now? And why is it so eh … crap?

If you feel like hanging out on Sex Island or a room simply titled ’sex’ (which by the way appears to have beige carpet and potted plants. Yeah, sexy as hell) then head over to Lively where you can mingle with the some randomers who seem as lost and confused as you do.

Although Google says it has added the ability to watch YouTube videos inside Lively and view some photos within in-world picture frames I would rather look at YouTube videos from the YouTube site and view my pictures on Flickr et al.

If I want to have an IM conversation I’ll just use Gchat. I am really not getting the ppoint of this and on top of that it has been done already and done better by Second Life.

Yes, I acknowledge that SL is a silo and a virtual world will only ever take off if it can integrate with other apps and platforms on the web so the fact the Lively lets you embed a chat room into your site or blog is a plus but I still don’t see the benefit.

The bizarre thing is the list of actions or animations you can choose from. You can chest bump, puke, moon walk, etc. It kinda reminds of of Comic Chat which was okay but the novelty wore off and I still went back to good aul’ mIRC for a text only chat.

Remember the Phishtank? Does that still exist?

Scoble broke my Friendfeed

Like many others Twitter’s recent teething problems sent me in the direction of Friendfeed (and Summize, which I now cannot live without). I had already signed up a few months ago but hadn’t really done anything with it. After all, my friends were either on Gmail or Twitter so there was no purpose - if I commented on something nobody really heard. So what did I do? The same thing I did when I was a Twitter newbie - I subscribed to Robert Scoble’s Friendfeed and *boom* all this information came whizzing in.

Scoble bookmarks, blogs, Twitters and comments like a mofo so I was getting all this new information and on top of this I was getting feeds from Scoble’s friends. All of a sudden this utility that was meant to agregate all my online social activity into one place and reduce noise was becoming a sonic nightmare. Everytime I log on I have to sift through tons of Scoble’s friends to find activity from my few actual, real friends.

My thesis is that Robert Scoble is so powerful that his gravitational pull distorts the space/time continuum of social networks like Twitter or Friendfeed. You know how in school you were told that the observer by his/her very presence changes the nature of that being observed so that it is impossible to seperate the two? Scoble brings this to a new level. He is observing a system full of people observing him oberserving them. Confused? Me too.

So why don’t I stop following Scoble? Because then Friendfeed or Twitter would not have the same meaning for me. With the noise come *some* great ideas and observations.

Finally, in case you’re interested, here’s an interview I did with Scoble a few months ago.

Microsoft Imagine Cup - Paris

Just a quick post before I head to the demo room where Sligo IT team ParkIT will be making a presentation that me and two other journos, Emmet Ryan and Karlin Lillington, are privileged to sit in on. Just came in from misty rain-covered Paris where Team Acidrain  were demoing their conversion engine and explaining all the complimicated stuffs going on under the bonnet. Brian explained the fuel bit and Aodhan explained the circuitry bit. Then Karl fielded a very good question on the fuel/food balance - is biofuel bad for the world economy - grown in favour of food crops. So this is a political matter reckons Karl but would like to see biofuel increasingly derived from sea based crops in the future.

I’ve arranged for a photo to be taken with team Acidrain in front of the Eiffel Tower later today. Am so spyched - it will look brilliant. And then i can nab the guys and get them to explain the conversion engine to me one-to-one! Hopefully some nutella crepes will be squeezed into the schedule too!

TechLudd and technoguilt

I was at the TechLudd/TechCrunch aka CrunchLudd event last week (organised by Anton Mannering) at 4 Dame Lane and it was fantastic to see so many promising new web startups all gathered in one room. It was a great night, loads of energy and interesting conversation (as well as free drink) flowing. But one thing that struck me afterwards was that there were no women fronting any of the startups demoing that night.

No, this is not going to be a rant about women in technology, this is merely the technology world as experienced from my point of view.  You see I carry a weight of shame when it comes to this subject. I studied computer science in UCD six years ago and I did not enjoy it at all. I dodged classes, dragged my heels and somehow managed to come away with a general degree (that’s three years instead of the four needed for an honours degree).

Although I was obsessed with computers and the internet from a young age it didn’t translate into an education. It could be the fact that I coasted through primary and seconadry school, never studying but always managing to get good marks and then got a kick up the arse when I found out that you had to *gasp* actually study in college. Or it could be the fact that I was afraid to try becasue I knew deep down that I wasn’t cut out for it.

To this day I still feel horribly guilty - even more so because I am a girl and have let the side down, falling into the predictable masses of ‘girls who just don’t get technology’.

So how do I vindicate my credentials as any sort of techy person? I crept away in shame to do a course in journalsim because I’ve always enjoyed writing and then realised that the only thing I wanted to really write about was technology.

Alas, some hard core techies snigger at journos, feeling that they don’t really understand what they are writing about. So this is another weight to carry. But don’t feel sorry for me because I love watching the technology scene, writing about it and learning as much as I can every day.

And of course I love that I know some cool geek girls like Alexia, Ellybabes and Martha Rotter. Martha, if you’re reading, when is the next Girl Geek Dinner happening? Looking forward to it.

Tweetscene

I can’t really twitter the extents of my thoughts - too long for tweets - so I guess the whole blogging thing might come in handy. Anyway I registered tweetscene.com and thought it would be cool to have a site like StrawPoll that uses the power of twitter to do clever things. TweetScene could scan your previous tweets for keywords and suggest like minded peoples to match up with in your locality. Could also have a ‘hot or not’ element as Pat Phelan suggested, where you could vote for your favourite Twits.

Blogging: Inspiration, justification and procrastination

The problem with maintaining a blog is, for me, threefold.

My dayjob involves writing so when I get home I feel as if I am spent. All the good words have been used up already and what remains is a mushy jumble of infantile word soup best used on (sometimes drunken) conversation with friends. I lack, in a word, inspiration. New exciting thoughts that I want to share with the world don’t arrive on cue when I turn off my work PC and fire up my MacBook.

Then there is the problem of justification. Who wants to read yet another blog where someone like me makes a few observations that have probably already been made a thousand times and in a more eloquent manner? When I get passionate about an issue more often than not I am left dumbfounded by anger or enthusiasism and end up shouting incoherently.

Finally, my biggest problem is sheer laziness.  If I just jotted down ideas during the day and then set aside time to write something that I felt made a good point or did the subject matter in question justice, then that would be great.

It seems as if this post is all about why I shouldn’t subject the world to my boring thoughts but actually what it is is an exercise in getting those negative feelings off my chest and moving on. Mostly this is due to reading a beautiful, inspiring post by Darragh Doyle which made me think that we all have something important to say some of the time, that and I wanted to let the world know that I had a dream about a brilliant board game involving Clint Eastwood quotes but when I woke up I couldn’t remember why it seemed so marketable at the time. Oh, and I sorta nicked the idea from a Mexican bouncer that wouldn’t let me drink an open bottle of beer on the lawn in front of my old primary school. Bastard.

Frankie say w00t

I was alerted by Furball to the fact that cool London designer Katherine Hamnett of Frankie Say relax fame will be appearing at the Button Factory in Temple Bar tonight in honour of Ireland’s first Ethical Fashion Week.

That certainly is an iconic t-shirt but methinks we need an updated Frankie 2.0 so I’m getting my graphic designer co-worker to design one for me that says ‘Frankie say w00t’ in a retro green tech font. w00t! and he’s making a badge too! Next stop, a bag with the graphic on it.

TCD academic scoffs at notion of robot love …

I wrote a story a while back about a PhD researcher, David Levy, who is doing some work on human-robot interactions, and he made a prediction that robots would be getting married and having relayshuns with humans by 2050. I interviewed someone I knew at Trinity College Dublin and it resulted him laughing about the notion of him scoffing at all.

Anyhoo, I just remembered that when I came across this funny comic - Diesel Sweeties. So far it involves an indie rocker who doesn’t play an instrument or have a band and it has this girl who is dating a robot. Funny stuff and just geeky enough to satisfy my nerdish inner core.

And I remembered that pic of me holding hands with a robot when I was on holidays in Prague. Ah, good times. Gah. I seem to have lost all of these pictures …. a thorough search of my laptop reveals a conspicuous absence of a huge chunk of my photos …

8-bit boredom

Boredom, I was randomly searching through www.archive.org because I’ve discovered great music there before like ST Ternemar and Takeshi Nakamura. Then I came across a genre called 8-bit - it sounds like old computer games but mixed with great melodies - love it! This is addictive and upbeat stuff. Anyhoo download Lullatwerp by Disastertron ( collaboration by two guys called Disasterpiece and Spamtron).

I’d better drag my ass out of bed. It’s almost two and I have to tidy my place before a friend comes over to look at the MacBook Air, the sexiest laptop in existence. I’m reviewing it for this week’s product section - what a fun product to review. I have the urge to throw it up in the air to demonstrate how light it is. And because it’s so expensive I have the urge to fling it in the Liffey - I get that every time I walk over a body of water - just throw something important in like my phone. A friend of mine said he had that urge and just flung his grocery shopping right in - how satisfying.

I was with him at the cinema last night and we were planning to see Juno because our drink-addled brains, tender and fresh from a Friday nights drinking could possibly take more than light comedy. Juno was sold out but I am so glad because we watched Cloverfield. First of all I had read hardly anything about it nor had I seen ads on TV so I was able to approach it with an open mind. Secondly the lack of soundtrack and video camera mode worked really well - not annoying like in the Blair Witch project. I was actually gripping my seat the whole way through, I become completely engrossed.

Okay looks like I need to get in gear and do some serious cleaning. I thought Sunday was a day of rest.