Mikael Fernstrom

>At work, the University of Limerick, we have a group of people called ITD – Information Technology Department. Recently, and over the last couple of days, they apparently had a problem that one (out of 256) computers in our user group (IDC) had been used for hacking. Hacking. First of all I’m delighted that our students actually hack. In my mind, that’s real programming. That’s exactly what I’m up to tonight. The friggin operating system isn’t good enough, other people’s lousy software is crap, and eventually you get angry enough at the sheer incompetence and ignorance and sit down and break your brain to write something that’s better. Much Better. Just to prove that the ignoramus are as incompetent as they appear. Well. To cut a long story short, our beloved ITD people decided to block all IP addresses in our block, all 256 of them, hence our web servers, groupware, etc., does not work for the outside world at the moment. If they get their act together, you’ll get my photos in previous postings. Otherwise, I’ll move the files to a server in the free world.

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Thursday was a soft day… Not really raining, but all surfaces outdoors get wet. I think Hundertwasser has a point there – colours and textures only come to life when they are interacting with water. I got some PhD work done, but there’s still a lot to write. A lot…

Wednesday evening was beautiful. Warm, blue skies and everything. The grass has been cut in the field in the back of our house. Comparing to last year, it’s two weeks earlier! We did a BBQ and had our dinner outdoors – a couple of home made burgers, bread and salad, with herbs and rocket from our own garden. And, of course, a couple of glasses of wine.

En evening like this really makes we wonder. What’s life all about? This of course, living! Enjoying nature, listening to the birds singing, touching the grass, feeling the soft warm air against your skin, having a quiet conversation, playing with the dog.

>It’s all about this, isn’t it? I think we’re starting to see the scenario now. Some people are sitting on a smaller amount of oil. They love money. They see other people, who have a lot more oil, not giving an ant’s fart about them. The aforementioned people would like to make more money from oil, their own and other’s. First problem is that you can’t raise your price as the friggin Arabs has much more of it and, in fact, control the supply side of the market. So what do you do? Well, you pick one of the Arab countries and go to war. If you’re really lucky, you might even get control of their oil as well. In any case, you’ll make more money of the little rock-juice you have, as the prices go up and up and up. If, by any chance, your war-making is compromised (e.g. no weapons of mass-destruction; not bringing peace, rather torturing and killing at least as bad as it used to be), you tell you electorate that the terrorist threat is increased (while your intelligence people don’t raise the alarm, as they’ve been burnt several times already by your lies). Yes, as before, I’m writing about by view of GWB and his friends.

Why don’t we see that this oil thing is screwing us all! It doesn’t matter if we can manage to pay factory workers or nurses less to keep inflation goals. GWB, his friends, and the Arabs will wreck the industrialised world economy anyhow. And the situation is getting worse as the industrialised world is spreading. India and China’s oil consumption is currently increasing by 150-200% per year…

We need other forms of energy.

Sometimes, although it makes me a bit sad (not for my own sake, but for all the people that will suffer more if things get really difficult), I’ve been thinking about designing a sustainable place to live, especially when I get older. West Clare is so far my geographical preference. Still, it’s challenging when you ask yourself how you will heat your house, transport yourself and whatever goods, get clean water (normally not a problem in Ireland!), get light during long dark nights, grow food that won’t kill you, etc. It not easy, but it must be possible. The nice thing with West Clare is that if all things fail, there are always nice scenic cliffs around to jump from, to be recycled without any extra cost.

To close this note, I’d like to say that it is ridiculous to allow GWB to land in Ireland (Shannon) in June. The Irish government is putting Irish lives at risk by allowing this. The main risk is probably not terrorists. It is that some of GWBs security people will shoot people that are there to tell him to bugger off.

>I just received my copy of Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant’s latest book Designing the User Interface. I’m delighted that he took our comments and feedback onboard and the index now includes terms like sonification. I’ll read it thoroughly over the next week and drop a note about it.

>So, just when I’m suffering trough food poisoning, Lui has started to post some lovely Italian recipes in her blog [Heavy sigh]. I’m stuck on soup and cracker bread plus a few pills and plenty of water.

In the RTE news on TV this evening they said that the Irish whatever authority wanted to block one of the ads for the upcoming EU election. One of the clips in the ad was a woman breastfeeding a baby. OK, it’s kinda metaphorical – having a choice (left or right;-), but Irish kids’ health would definitely benefit if more of them were fed the natural way. I find all these television ads about artificial baby food, or artificial food in general, appalling. In fact, most of the ads on the telly are bad. How many shampoos, cars, toilet papers, sanitary napkins (silly term!), wash-up liquids, etc., do we need? How about some ordinary soap! And, people are paying these companies to tell us this via the TV, through their purchases of their products,?! I would like to see more film on TV. Good film. Not Questions and Answers from Dublin (What do you think you’d find in your belly button?). Enough for tonight. Back to the loo.

>Over the last couple of days I’ve been busy with meetings and admin, Yuk. Today it is yet another beautiful day in Limerick. I’m working at home today, writing on the PhD. When I feel stuck/frustrated/mad, I can go for a short walk down the fields and then come back and work and feel better. I snapped the image of the dragonfly, below, earlier today.

At lunchtime, I went out to Shortt’s steel workshop with one of our part-time MA by Research students, JJ Hegarty. His sound sculpture is finally coming together, full-size, in stainless steel.

Inside each structure he’s fitting a loudspeaker and a modified Theremin device. The output of the Theremins are then connected to a PC through a PICO A/D converter and the signals taken in by his pd patches that he has created for his sound designs. The final piece will be fully interactive. When people walk in between the three structures their movements will control the pd patches and the resulting sounds. We need to find a site for this piece of work, preferably indoors… Suggestions?

>Thinking about why we can’t get broadband (boredband) where I live, just about 10 minutes drive from the University of Limerick (which is connected to the HEA-net) and 4 minutes from the village of Annacotty. Last autumn Shannon Broadband dug up the roads through our nearest village, Annacotty. They buried a bundle of dark fibre, i.e., optical fibre for telecommunications and data communication that is not yet in use.

It is 3.3 km from that optical fibre to my house. Good olde Eircom is out here on our road every other day. I’ve had a few nice chats with their workers. One major reason their out fiddling around with the copper-cables is that THEY DON’T KNOW who’s connected to what! This, of course is part of the problem as they now have to unbundle, to allow other, more competent, operators to provide the entire service – both connectivity and traffic.

Just to get the bigger picture, I did a quick surf to ITU’s server (International Telecommunications Union), and found a report from last year. This shows that Ireland is currently number 26 on the list in terms of digital access. People, that is I, you, my neighbours, are screaming, phoning, spending hours in voice-mail systems to ask for good connectivity, but they won’t give it to us! Instead we hear that government ministers are worried about the low uptake of broadband in Ireland. WHAT BOREDBAND? Get real!

Digital Access Index value, by access level, 2002 (Source: WORLD TELECOMMUNICATION DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2003, ITU)

1. Sweden 0.85

2. Denmark 0.83

3. Iceland 0.82

4. Korea (Rep.) 0.82

5. Norway 0.79

6. Netherlands 0.79

7. Hong Kong, China 0.79

8. Finland 0.79

9. Taiwan, China 0.79

10. Canada 0.78

11. United States 0.78

12. United Kingdom 0.77

13. Switzerland 0.76

14. Singapore 0.75

15. Japan 0.75

16. Luxembourg 0.75

17. Austria 0.75

18. Germany 0.74

19. Australia 0.74

20. Belgium 0.74

21. New Zealand 0.72

22. Italy 0.72

23. France 0.72

24. Slovenia 0.72

25. Israel 0.70

26. Ireland 0.69

27. Cyprus 0.68

28. Estonia 0.67

29. Spain 0.67

30. Malta 0.67

31. Czech Republic 0.66

32. Greece 0.66

33. Portugal 0.65

34. United Arab Emirates 0.64

35. Macao, China 0.64

36. Hungary 0.63

37. Bahamas 0.62

38. St. Kitts and Nevis 0.60

39. Poland 0.59

40. Slovak Republic 0.59

41. Croatia 0.59

… the list goes on. 178 counties are included in the full report.

Hey, Janis – sing us a song!

Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Gigabit link!

>I just did my normal scan of the news feeds on the web this morning. GWB has fallen of his tricycle during the weekend. I guess he was probably using chewing gum at the same time, hence no capacity left to things like balance or navigation.

The picture above shows some of the scratches but according to the report knees etc were also bruised. Perhaps Al-Qaeda had sabotaged his bike.

>I’m delighted that Michael Moore‘s film Fahrenheit 9/11 got the Palme D’Or. I can’t wait to see the whole piece. I’ve seen snippets on TV and on-line over the past few weeks, that looked very promising. From now on, every time GWB appears on TV, he’ll be aware that somebody, somwhere, out there might be recording and re-editing him to bring the lies into the open.

I read another interesting piece about America by Kurt Vonnegut, Cold Turkey.

These two guys, Moore and Vonnegut, at least gives us some hope and perspective on what Americans think are going on on Earth. To quote Vonnegut “We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey”.

>Today is lobster day. I went in to Limerick city this morning and called in to the fish merchant Réne Cusack’s. Half an hour later, back home, I had the lobsters boiling in some salted water with dill.

After boiling for 20 minutes, leave to cool in the pot, to be served cold this evening with a fresh salad and bread.

It’s a beautiful day today.

Blue sky, the sun is shining, and birds are singing.

Carpe Diem!