IRISH DOCTORS’ ENVIRONMENTAL ASSOCIATION

Open Meeting
Date;Fri. 23rd Feb. 07
Venue Tailors Hall, Back Lane,Dublin 8
(Near Christ Church).

HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT

11.30 - 13.00
Dr. Elizabeth Cullen - Health Implications
of ClimateChange.

Michael McKeon - Mercury in the
Environment

Ms.Juliet Duff and Dr Ohnesorge
Ecohealth Education.

14.15 - 16.00
Dr. Vyvyan Howard - Health implications of
nano-Technology.

Dr.Gerd Oberfield - EMR and Public Health.

Dr George Carlo - Mobile Phones and
Health.

16.00 Break
16.15 - 17.00 - Open Forum and Close

17.00 - 18.00 AGM.

for the record. I got wind of the balcony TV take down from Inga in Boston who is on a different time zone to me. I did my usual 5 hours sleep but started at 11pm so was up at 4:30am. saw the issue. blogged it, and while I blogged it I was so pissed, and answering Inga’s request for a fix/take down from a myspace & web site for the broken video’s I decided NO feck that I wont. I will re upload the videos. Now here is the science bit. You can and should take copies of stuff on youtube if you ever feel it may be removed by whomever! details on how to archive it will be at the bottom of this post.

So i went to my virgin youtube account, and uploaded the very FLVs I supplied to enterprise ireland a month ago for the midem bash in france. youtube took the FLVs that it once gave me and the two eleanor mcevoy videos are restored. o happy days (for me not balcony TV).

What the hell is youtube up to? i suspect Balcony TV was a director account? and had 223 vidz up there? and the cut off was ever so clinical? when 2-tone.info migrated from majordomo to google groups (gg), GG had an oops, you can’t message 900 people an invite, who are you? kinda response. 2-tone.info said who they were etc. and all was well. DMCA viacom is the tip of the iceberg, if WIPO gets podcasting inside the broadcast treaty, we are all doomed. Thankfully PodRepBod and its international partners including EFF & the international podcast group are keeping an eye to that area.

so mystery over, thats how at least two Balcony TV vidz of old survived..

there is a way to grab the feed of a youtube video.

using the firefox browser get a plugin (add on) called videodownloader
from http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php

follow its instruction and change the file extension to .flv
and you have your own copy of the video without the youtube ‘dog’

you may play these files with a .flv player like FLV player
http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/article/flv-player-updated

you are then able to one click convert it to things like a video iPod
with a tool like http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/iPod/

all software discussed is Free/shareware/or Open source

RTÉ has a new tech news portal and a fine looking thing it is. the content is of high quality too. its in conjunction with techcentral.ie and the site is here. http://www.rte.ie/business/technologynews.html

but my 2KB of woe with this is that, for purchased-in content, why does this ‘portal’ make the old mistakes of web 1.0 in the ajax age, and make Friday the tech news day. news happens when it happens, it can be published on or off site with wonderful CMS and work flow management tools, so why devise a special day for tech news. also the RSS feed from the tech news page is for the business site. but unless the tech news goes daily I wont need the RSS feed that does not exist.

BTW the same issue applies to business news / aertel p130, it happens at the weekend too, ok not as much but it does happen.

I Squatted Your .EU writes EUBrowser Loses UDRP - buy-sell.ie

isn’t buy and sell up 4 sale! my comment failed to submit over on that blog so here it tiz

the amount of inbound google searches to my blog for bebo.ie makes it clear to me, bebo is leaking at the till for these lost sheep, eubrowser can wag their tails behind them along with their irish hosting 365 friends who’s banner adorns their ad-fest pages. bebo.ie is directed to bebo.hu now! surely the inbound links off the h365 ad to http://www.hosting365.com could address the squatting issue, and take the HIGHER moral ground rather that the cheap publicity (non paid advertising?) that the ad now gives. see ipod.ie

eonline.com reports

For the second time in four months, Viacom has demanded that the video-sharing site remove all content from its networks, including MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, VH1, CMT, Spike TV and BET, an estimated 100,000 clips total, after licensing talks broke down.

see also will youtube give mtv the sack (25/1)

something i noticed today.

The certificate for “www.paypal.com” is signed by the unknown Certificate Authority “VeriSign Trust Network”. It is not possible to verify that this is a valid certificate

this is happening on this blog page for a paypal https located button image call. happening in FF2 & Opera9.01 but IE7 is cool about it.
the issuer is VeriSign Trust Network
VeriSign, Inc., VeriSign International Server CA - Class 3, www.verisign.com/CPS Incorp.by Ref. LIABILITY LTD.(c)97 VeriSign

heads up to anyone with deep link pages using this type of button… /bhg/

[update] they may have fixed this already..!

a viral txt message is doing the rounds on the vodafone network in Ireland, the viral message asks recipients to txt 10 friends (on vodafone network) the news that vodafone 2 vodafone txts are free for life. when you have sent the tenth message you are promised €5 extra credit, then the message signs off as being from vodafone.

this message has been seen since Saturday (20/01), and hit an 087 phone here this afternoon, I smelled a rat as to grant the €5 credit vodafone would need to be reading your outbound txts and that would be illegal without court order to gardai.

its in fact a fraud committed by persons unknown and vodafone benefit from revenue made of the gullibility of some of their customers to the offer. vodafone after 3 days have not put a press release here on their website (18:55 22/01/2007). Vodafone cust care are aware and have asked me to forward the txt to 50005 for the data protection commissioner, this i am assured is not to grass up my stupid friends that sent the txt but to gather a general count of how many txts are whizzing around. BEWARE OF VIRAL TXT SPAM - vodafone a little PR on the web would help.

[update] this is happening to o2 as well (see comments) also among a group of 7 tonight 5 had got these txts

[update] 50005 is not data protection. its a vodafone number see digitalrights.ie on txt spam

why design DVD drawers that close on push when

1. the remote has an open/close button

2. the front panel has the same

3. the mechanics are not designed to take a push close for a sustained use!

i also would love to find the person in Dell that designed a DVD drawer in a tower that is under the drawer when open, stupidity. The 3 year old has done some damage to a €80 dvd player with push close tactics (i fixed the drive this morning). I used to snap the fingers of trainee DJs that did similar to radio studio Denon CD players. If they designed it that it was non responsive to push, a generation would learn that it is the mechanics and not the IC that will let you down first, the built in “planned obsolescence” of a tiny spring and a plastic arm, just like the rubber spindle was in the compact cassette recorder. It you really want them to last don’t push, never pull and do as the Sugababes asked, push the button.

sky are reporting BREAKING NEWS, BBC Licence Fee to rise £19.50 by 2012, a 3% year on year rise.

also just out 21 million ipods sold in the last 3 months. apple up 78%

with all this social networking and blogging, are forums and mailing lists used less? SNs and blogs don’t seem to do ‘virtual community discourse’ like a good old flame war on a BB or a mailing list.

blogs and “be-my-friend” sites are all about the me meme or me,me,me. Where as lists and forums, notwithstanding their more vocal contributors, were to me, all about reaching a public consensus on the topic or thread, to a point where all the points were made or the topic goes cold due to exhaustion.

a quick fire of comments to a blog post might do more for the ego than it will ever do for a topics full on agenda.

has anyone any ideas on how web 1.0 affected the BBS’s etc. of yester-year. or on how web 2.0 is hitting the community driven forums we all hung out on.?
While no one would shut down a forum just because web minutes are being spent elsewhere more (nowadays), as people, and forget tech for a moment, if we fail to use our community forums we are in danger of ending up in gated apartment blocks owned by newSINternational and gooogle. iWarn. Slán.

[cross posted on OPEN list]