At 11am on May 1st three cities are going to be linked in Open Coffee and inspiration.
OpenCoffee Club was started in London to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meet-ups to chat, network and grow. The Cork Open Coffee meetings tend to take place every second Friday, in Dublin, Limerick and Waterford, their meetings tend towards a Thursday. And not only are their three sessions taking place at the same time tomorrow, but they are going to be linked. And New York is joining in too.
The three OpenCoffee sessions are going to be broadcast online thanks to Joe Garde of OnlineMeetingRooms and Bernie Goldbach of Tipperary Institute (Update : And Mary Rose Lyons who is looking after the broadcast from the Dublin end). Also thanks to Chuck Boyce of ChuckTV on Blip.tv finding out about the meet on Twitter (thus proving a business use if ever one was needed) means that the Irish OpenCoffee sessions are going to be part of the wider technology community.
Attendees should have a “Twitter style introduction prepared” (or a killer 90 second pitch ready) and join in. The details for joining the online sessions are on Mary Rose Lyons of Brightspark Consulting’s site. But if you are able to attend the sessions in person, it will probably be worth it.
And be prepared for a little Twitterstorm (and probably a Jaikugale) tomorrow morning.
I’ve asked this question a few times. “We have solar powered lights. Why can’t we have wind powered lights?”. Think about it. These garden lights are not the brightest, but they look good in the garden (which is their entire point). Being powered by a renewable source gives you freedom as to how you place them. But given the amount of light we get in Ireland during the winter, when the lights are needed the most, why isn’t there a wind powered light.
Firewinder is a wind powered light, or rather a series of them in a vertical column which rotates in the wind. The rotation generates power which is used by shining (and pulsing LEDs at the end of the column. Its a little hard to describe but watch the video of the light in action and you can see how it works.
Watching the video, it occurred to me that these things look like they could cause epileptic fits (hence no embedded video). So beautiful, but might be deadly after all. Given that I’d like to plant up a medieval style poison garden (medicine garden doesn’t sound anything as good), I might as well have dangerous lights.
Pity I can’t afford version one, but by version three I might have the readies.
There seems to be an alternative, Seth Godin brought it up (pictured right), and it seems to be one that Aaron Strout of mZinga is looking at. Namely don’t send in a CV or Résumé (either in the post or as an attachment). Since they ale looking for a community-centric person person, contact them via Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn or what ever social network they both use (its not clear if he willing to join a new social network just to look at a job applicant. I really should do more in making one). Then (or beforehand), blog about why you should get the job. I presume that they have media monitoring in position (or at the very least, Google Alerts).
Unfortunately for me, the job is in Burlington, MA, USA. But it is an interesting way to pick someone. Essentially it is a try before you decide exercise, which ends up benefiting both parties.
However there is a downside to all this. As Virginia Miracle explains, it is very time consuming. I suspect that if the person’s profile and blog is interesting, you could stay there far too long.
But is anyone trying this technique on this side of the Atlantic. Did anyone try this in Europe let alone Ireland? And how did it work out?
I don’t know what all the building are (please comment) But you can see Saint Finbarre’s Cathedral, The North Cathedral and Saint Anne’s Church also know as the Shandon Bells.
Looking at the statues around the entrance to Saint Finbarre’s Cathedral in Cork I noticed this little fellow. Is it my imagination, but isn’t this the Thundercats logo?
James the EirePreneur posed the simple “how will you vote in the Lisbon Treaty”
I asked for a more detailed set of questions… If you’ve voted already in this poll, then you’ll probably see the results. If you haven’t it might help lot of people.
By now everyone has heard the old story about people giving up their passwords for chocolate. Although Bruce Schneier has pointed out that he would gladly give a fake password for chocolate. Which is a little better than loosing a lot of information about your customers. Yes I’m typing about Bank Of Ireland.
This is an interesting problem for the Bank. In 2006 Bank Of Ireland agreed to refund phishing losses suffered by customers of their internet banking service. And later updated their terms of service to include
13 Indemnity
13.2 Without prejudice to the generality of Clause 13.1 above, the Bank shall have no liability whatsoever in respect of any loss suffered by the Customer as a result of their breach of Clause 4 [jm: Security/Authentication] by way of knowingly, negligently or recklessly disclosing the Security Devices or any of them.
Richard Burrows, Governor of the Bank of Ireland, has declared on a news report that
monies lost will be refunded and that
the laptops were secured with a password.
However I reply
What hoops do victims of this loss have to jump through? After all some of the stolen information was not from BOI customers, but also those who had approached the bank for a life assurance quote. Besides, the usual procedure is to create a new account somewhere or getting credit cards in their identity, not touching the victims bank accounts directly, but ruining their credit rating in the process.
This concerns data not the laptops. Its possible that the OS requires a password to be provided, however it is quite easy to remove a hard disk and attach it to a separate machine. Completely by-passing any password requirements of the OS. Either encrypting the customer data on the disk (as happened in the IBTS incident) or making the entire disk an encrypted file. The data was unencrypted.
The information on the four BOI laptops contained the names, addresses, financial details and some medial records of its life assurance customers. Gosh that is a goldmine of information for identity thieves, phishing operators and even the odd blackmailer (if the medical information reveals things). I’ve written about this before, and I don’t think things have gotten any better.
And it happened some time ago.
Bank of Ireland said the four laptops disappeared between June and October 2007 and contained the names, addresses, bank account details and medical histories of about 10,000 holders of the bank’s life insurance policies. Ireland’s second-largest bank made the admission after the chief regulator, Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes, told Irish broadcasters RTE he had been informed of the lost customers’ data only last Friday.
It’s the silence that is slightly worrying. The Irish Banking Federation hasn’t said anything. True that these were probably €900 laptops. But the information on them do open up the bank for potentially billions of damages; not that, given the statement by the Data Protection Commissioner, such punishment is likely to happen.
Now I’m hearing rumours that the banks are now encrypting customer data, but do you trust a bank with your data that can’t even link correctly to the page with the information about the incident on their own site? Hopefully someone will notice that correct things sooner than they noticed that the missing customer data might be important.
take care of your data,
Will
UPDATE – April 28 2008 Number affected by BoI laptop thefts trebles – “The technical investigation has identified that details relating to 31,500 policies, policy applications and a small number of mortgage customers were contained on the stolen laptops.” So the numbers are worse that previously announced, and the fact that not all of those at risk are customers of the BOI. If the Data Commissioner can’t deliver punishment via a 4×2 then his remit should be altered.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m currently looking for work (and keeping my own fingers in my own projects) so I’m interested in companies and people that do things differently.
First off there is the CV. Yes I have a few that get e-mailed out (and even, gulp, posted), and I have a LinkedIn.com profile (and feel free to recommended me) however I’ve noticed that some people go further. I know I could put a résumé on the blog here, but that isn’t my style.
It is now possible to create a multimedia CV (something no longer limited to portfolios) by using Visual CV. The idea is to update the CV from it’s (mostly) unchanged roots of 1902. There is some sense to it. You can embed examples of your work in the CV. You can show off your showcases. However, being selfish, I’m not involved in the media (pix.ie account aside that is) and given that all the programming work I did has “Confidential, Proprietary” slapped all over it, embedding anything is more of less impossible (and certainly not a good idea. I mean would you hire someone who won’t keep company secrets? I really hope you answered “no”).
Are there other ways to get jobs. As in headhunted. This is where a profile comes in. Be it Monster, IrishJobs or Recruitireland (and others), putting your details in a site like these mean that companies and recruiters can scan through your details and put you firmly in the “maybe” category. Simply put, it is a keyword search. The problem with such a keyword search is that a lot can be missed. Like the little thing called you.
I’ll stick to LinkedIn for now. But despite being recommended I don’t really pump my connections for prospects. But if someone in a company knows me I will be sure to mention it.
So in the meantime I’ll apply for jobs, and hope that they haven’t been filled, like this one.
I wonder is this is where GrannyMar finds her toyboys? Or is this where her toyboys in Moate apply? The queue was too long for me to find out either way.
