Archive for March, 2014

Fluffy Links – Monday 31st March 2014

Monday, March 31st, 2014

Courses:
Damn Fine Print studio is doing a 4 week (3hrs per week) Beginners – Introduction to Screen Printing course in Smithfield. Might be fun to do?

8 week course on crime writing (fiction) with Declan Burke. One night per week, starting in May.

I didn’t know Sufjan did this. “a cinematic suite inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Hula-Hoop”. Now I do.

The next thing was mobile. Mobile is now the last thing.

– The future is bright and uncertain. There is money in turning uncertainty into certainty.

Attending.io. Beautiful and very mobile friendly service for taking bookings for free events.

The Colleen/Jac Test. A way of testing a blog to see is it legit and worth working with. Handy points we could use at the Web Awards and Social Media Awards.

Are there at least two opinion pieces in the last ten posts and do they discuss something other than goods and services.

Another giving it away about a company purchase. Zuckerberg visits Oculus pre purchasing them. One would think this would be more common or those wooing would be more careful. Whatsapp sending legal letters/takedowns to third parties and now this,

Do you dare? Get someone to live critique your website.

iPhone app that allows you to read WAY faster than normal and still take it in.

Fluffy Links – Monday 24th of March 2014

Monday, March 24th, 2014

The legendary Ideo have a new campaign/movement? Called Made in the Future. Might help you figure out what’s coming next from the people that are fiddling and trying to make things for what comes next.

“I think negative stuff is interesting the first time; you’ll never reread a negative article. You’ll reread a positive one.” says Malcolm Gladwell. Writers talk about their writing.

Valentino’s Major Domo is Irish. Of course.

It was the clients. They were awful. Why I left advertising. Big fan of the writing of Bud Caddell. His next venture sounds highly interesting.

Irish B&Bs, get your pages translated properly into German. Germans are big into visiting Ireland. Take advantage. I know Holger well, he’s dead on.

How to build your personal network from scratch. From the guy that built Circa. Small town, big town, doesn’t matter. Conferences are a handy way to do this.

The golden rule at all times is that you never try to get to a final conclusion in the very first interaction.
Take that awkwardness off the table and suggest an easy action to get the email out of their inbox

Mat has too many LinkedIn contacts and so do you.

Whoda thunk it Government unit spins out to become a commercial vehicle. Course it would be the “nudge Unit” of the UK Govt.

John Adams

Philip Glass – 06 – Pruit Igoe

Fluffy Links – Monday March 17th 2014

Monday, March 17th, 2014

The Back Page “festival” is a mighty impressive few days of events around sport.

Seamus Heaney, Billy Connolly, the Beeb. Five Fables. “Five medieval Scots fables, translated by Seamus Heaney, have been brought into the 21st century as enchanting animated tales for BBC Two Northern Ireland.”

Some post that all media orgs ought to look at. 10 growth hacks that helped Metro.Co.Uk go from 10 Million to 27 Million monthly visitors.

This could easily be used for adults too. A kids’ guide to how ads on the Web work.

Nice idea. Newspaper Blackout Poems.

Nice. You can now embed Medium posts and collections on your own website.

For the fella that pretends he doesn’t read my blog but does to steal stuff. When you don’t have the natural charisma, some tips on being an interesting person at a party.

Interviewly. Or they could make Reddit look nice by default.

Why dabbling can be a good thing.

Gerard Baker described many publishers’ moves in the arena as a “Faustian pact.” For those unfamiliar with German folklore, that’s a deal with the devil.

AdAge writing on the web and not realising their readers can use Google if they don’t know what something means. Fuck exposition, fuck treating your readers like morons.

Creativity – It’s always been you

Wednesday, March 12th, 2014

Creativity is there already in our brains. Waiting to be left out. The old saying that “giving something a name gives you power over it” holds true when trying to understand things in our own mind. Having a language, a vocabulary, a corpus to describe your ideas can make them a reality.

The language to describe the things in our heads that we want to create is a hidden language for a lot of people and it’s only through reading, learning or understanding that we can structure it for everyone else (and even ourselves) to interpret it too.

Art
So when we read, view, see art and so on, that allows that fuzzball of creativity to find the language anchors or context to describe it with our own experiences if we want to produce art. As they say, that statue is already there in the marble, you just need the tools and skill to reveal it. The language to tell your brain what it is may very well be the idea of muscle memory and knowing how the marble can be molded.

Quantum Mechanics needed a new form of mathematics to be made before people could describe it. It was always there, what it was though was something that couldn’t be described with the language that already existed so it didn’t fit into the real world (in a way) until the language was figured out.

Programming
Programming has many languages. Programmers take ideas and put them into a language they know that gets a computer to do things and there we go, something is created. The efficient way to describe that process is what can make an app into an amazing app, the language that describes and defines the user interface might make it as easy to use as the iPad operating system. Software will eat the world and those knowing how to communicate efficiently in code will get fat.

You are creative, we all are creative but maybe for some of us it’s the lack of ways to describe what we want is the thing holding us back. Yeah we have the idea of the 10,000 hours but probably in those 10,000 hours are lots of figuring out how to describe to the world and ourselves, what we want to do.

Getting it out of your brain is that scene in Total Recall. The shit old one, not the shit new one.

via GIPHY

I listened to the final Reith Lecture by Grayson Perry earlier and maybe it was ideas and imagery in that that made me take that idea that’s always been there and allowed me to put it into these words.

How do you get it out?
So how do you get it out? When you walk along the same part of the carpet at home, you just wear that down more. Stop rubbing the same part of your brain with the same subject matter. It’s the equivalent of using a set of Ann and Barry books to try and map out the history of the world. It’s going to come out at the same level as those books.

So be diverse. Want to succeed in business? Stop reading all your Richard Branson books. Stop waiting for his next one before you do something. In a way, experience the world. Read lots of different things, experience the language of those things and how their creator sees the world.

It can become much easier if we have a clear way of describing it. So it’s always been about you, you have the creativity, you just need to know the language to decode that fuzz.

Business ideas, Neuroplasticity, Music, more. All have their own languages, fluency in them or experience of them could give you an advantage. You have the ideas, find the language to describe them.

Fluffy Links – Monday March 10th 2014

Monday, March 10th, 2014

It’s been a very busy week at Fluffy Links HQ and it seems we were looking at far too many business articles so we’re very BIZNEZZ this week.

True Detective fan? 100 year old book that the show “kind of” has found inspiration from. Book is public domain too.

Learning to write, with William S. Burroughs!

30 seconds no more, no less, can change your personal and business life.

Free audiobooks. Lots and lots of them.

EA has internal programmes to find their next leaders. Interesting way of sustaining a business for the long term.

How to make yourself work when you just don’t want to.

“No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.”

As mentioned in the latest Radiolab podcast.

Vladimir Martynov – Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished): Movement II

Tiny Telephone Exchange – Victory

The eroding of our accents due to technology

Wednesday, March 5th, 2014

Now I’m the most positive future of tech person around so I decided to do an Andrew Keen type post about some odd things I’ve noticed. Accents are important. Identity, even if a construct, readily uses accents. It tells people where I’m from or it can be used to hide where I’m from. The old joke about going home to top-up the accent is like many jokes, based on reality. You can trust, let down your guard, get turned on, get scared, get aggressive with someone from an accent alone. So what if modern technology forces us to speak in a certain way?

Already we have kids with American and British twangs because of Disney shows and Ben Ten. But they’ll move back into the localised accents over time. Maybe. Hopefully maybe. Now in fairness they’ve been saying that about kids accents ever since One and Two channel land first imported TV shows and to a little degree the words we used and the sounds they make has changed because of this. Language and accents evolve too and naturally so. Stan Carey is the person for all of this and more.

However, with the increase in interactions in verbal ways with technology, what will become of our accents and the way we structure sentences? Today we have to change the way we interact and how we intonate what we say to keep the machine happy. Smooth down a Scottish accent to keep your iPhone happy. Talk like a mid-Atlantic DJ for Siri to figure out that we’re directing them to phone Mam.

Listen to how Siri is pretty condescending to James. It suggests you’re the fool here James, not it.

Everyone is going to have a smart mobile device in the next 5 years and the amount of non-touchscreen interactions is going to increase drastically. So human to machine verbal interactions are going to explode. We have all seen the video of the baby trying to swipe pages on a magazine. What with a world of human to computer chatting?

I got thinking about this piece you’re reading when watching (don’t laugh) Pound Shop Wars when a machine tells operators in a giant stock warehouse to go collect items. They interact with the big machine in the sky and they end up talking in their sleep in the language the machine accepts. The machine does not learn, it does not adapt, you turn for it. The machine sounds like a tape recorder being fast forwarded. It’s far from the computer in Her.


Irony that they then subtitled the workers.

Reminds me of the droids in Star Wars (the shit one):

We have a bit to go however when the same machines have no idea what they themselves are saying:

Interesting few years ahead of us with this. And again with everyone in the world having a mobile companion, it will impact the whole world.

Now if each phone was a mullti-million dollar device… Scary scary scary

Remember when a hard drive from IBM was the size of a room? The above is maybe 10 to 15 years away. Will our language hold to then? I wonder will France, cos it has to be France, put a ban on the Siris of the world?

Ready. Roger Roger.

Fluffy Links – Monday March 3rd, 2014

Monday, March 3rd, 2014

Stevie G has done so much for music in Cork and Ireland. Genuine trailblazer and lest we forget, did a lot for upcoming generations when usually told to fuck off from loitering outside the local Centra.

Giving teenagers and young people a voice is probably the most satisfactory and fulfilling thing you can do in some ways, and it doesn’t seem long ago when myself and my friends were kids and didn’t have that voice.

Snapchat recruitment example. Still not a single college in Ireland using it for recruitment purposes.

Wearable devices already exist. Via Russell Davies.

If the world breaks, you know why it did. This seems like the start of an epic sci-fi novel.

Nostalgia. Sylvain Chauveau does Depeche Mode.

I so want a Garda Cortina.

Ditch college and change the world. This happens to a tiny tiny tiny amount of people. Still. Elizabeth Holmes has tech to run 30 lab tests from a single drop of blood.

They did it. Control your washing machine with your phone/over the web.

Equally usable for cafés, restaurants and other businesses. Ten things theatres can do right now to save themselves.

Krakow – Hilary Hahn & Hauschka