RTE Radio 1 launches one their radio documentary archives ever. 180 documentaries there, 400 by month’s end. Some gems in there. Like this one of Eddie Lenihan. They’re also on Twitter and Facebook. You can direct download the documentaries or get them as podcasts.
Mark Zawacki, founder and managing partner of the Milestone Group will be in Dublin on Friday. He’s doing a talk at 10am in the Pearse Suite, (upstairs) Radisson SAS Golden lane (the one in town behind Dublin Castle)
RSVP to stephanie < AT > milestone-group.com
I met Mark when we did the tour of Silicon Valley. A dead-on guy with a huge amount of experience. Well worth meeting him and getting his perspective.
About the talk:
Milestone Group has worked with more than 50 companies crossing the Atlantic (both directions). Mark is going to share his experience and successes. Mark has developed a unique framework called The 20 Stress Points of International Expansion, which looks at all the stakeholders (investors, executive management, partners, employees) over a period of time and what the traditional challenges are as startups expand and grow out of their home base. This is a very informal and interactive session with lots of Q&A.
If you want to go then RSVP to Stephanie Graybeal.
Posted in business, irishblogs | Comments Off on Attn Biz people: Mark Zawacki talk in Dublin on July 3rd, 10am
I get the feeling more and more that our brains operate with their own rhythm that can differ quite a lot from person to person and the various aspects of life can get in the way and change the rhythm to a less natural one. Everyone has their own natural pacemaker and for some, it goes wacky and they need an artificial pacemaker installed to tell their heart “this is how you should be ticking”. What if life is like some overbearing artificial pacemaker?
Maybe our natural rhythm is jazz or hip-hop or trance. It’s like you hear a sound from a band and within a few seconds everything clicks into place and you’re in synch with them. That pacing has always been there, it’s why it fits so well. Many of us go from artificial structure to artificial structure in life. From school to college, to work, fitting into a pattern made by another. Working for my self the past year and a bit, doing what I want, when I want to do it, I started falling into a different pattern, my soul’s song got stronger the more I turned off the music of the world around me. How in fuck’s name can you be good in business or life when you are tied to a 9 to 5 lifestyle? Fun is 24/7 and business creativity can be spread over that too.
And with my change of working and living came new ways of thinking and while not a calm, a natural ebb and flow resulted. I could understand things more, I appreciated new things and all the time enjoyed a different sanity. From what I can tell, artists are solitary in nature. They create on their own; they compose music, paint, draw, code as individuals. Creativity is solitary, displaying of it, is not. Allowing yourself to think, not squeezing your brain to perform will get other parts of the brain to start working and interacting. Genius business people are the mavericks; they are the loners, the people away from the crowd. It’s not a circadian movement they have going on but I wonder are they the ones that are letting their inner song through?
My soul detoxified by removing elements, doing things for fun, breaking out of grooves my brain was forced into. Maybe this is like people who don’t know they have allergies and when they address them, they feel better and are better. I attended a voice training workshop in the Gaiety school of acting a while back. It was a full day event and most of the day was spent on how to breathe. For most of us, it was how to change how you breathe and use muscles in a different way. It really was a fascinating course and I learned a lot. One of the things we did was finding your “natural” voice. Through various exercises you can find the sound that sits best with your body and your vocal chords.
It’s like a sleeping pattern, it took me a while to find mine and eventually I was getting 9-10 hours a night and felt like I was a ninja during the waking hours, able to shape the world around me. I’m now back to 6-7 hours and my rhythm is out of whack, even when I can lie in, I wake too early and wake with my brain racing. My creativity is hampered a little but business needs must. For now.
Are the best dancers the ones who learn all the steps or the ones who feel the dance and know what happens next? If finding your natural voice is about breathing and about using muscles differently, then maybe finding that rhythm is about knowing your brain and body and massaging different parts back to functionality. Eat healthy, brain healthy, less sugar, more fibre, read fact, love fiction, learn the Alexander technique, write and write and write. Do a day of silence where you don’t read, don’t use a computer, turn off the phone and don’t talk. Don’t take notes. Let all the thoughts bump off each other. This is probably best done in seclusion. Einstein worked his ass off in his lab/office but that was raw manufacturing in a way, it was when he escaped from those places that the eureka moments happened. Exercising like walking or running or for Einstein, cycling, got one part of the brain to work on the mechanics of the body and then the brain went off and experimented with the data he had gathered.
If our brains are in constant data gathering mode and are also working from the hymn sheet of someone else then it’s going to be hard for us to be creative. I think everyone has the potential to be creative and to think differently and add value to things we encounter in daily life but we can only do that when we find our natural state. Reading books is bad if you are never in a state of not reading books or rather, letting the brain alone to digest things in its own peristaltic state. That goes too when you are bashing out work, creative or not. Good business ideas can possibly be cranked out; great business ideas need to be contemplated. Einstein may have cracked the nut on relativity in a flash but it took him 6 weeks to figure it out properly.
Edit: Originally written in pen on a train then typed up. Composing on computer and editing took three hours.
Last week a few food and drink bloggers were invited out to the offices of Edward Dillon and company, who look after Hennessy in Ireland. This was organised via Brennan Sabatini (warning music plays). The meet and greet also extended to sampling some of the variations of Hennessy as seen below. We tried Hennessy V.S., Hennessy V.S.O.P., Hennessy X.O. and Hennessy Paradis. We got the history behind Hennessy and how the various cognacs are made. Hennessy then asked us for feedback on how they market and as people in the blogging and online media space, is there anything they should do. Feedback was given.
Very interesting to hear that Hennessy in America is consumed mostly by African Americans and Hennessy is references a hell of a lot in hihop songs. Oh and by volume, not per capita, Ireladn is 4th biggest in world for consuming Hennessy.
So what did Hennessy get out of this, 5 people who may now consider ordering Hennessy based cocktails? Or them telling their readers? Perhaps. Still negligible audiences compared to print or radio though. Getting to know people who spend all their hours in this new medium might be a good thing though. I heard it has a future this internet thing. For the bloggers, they got to sample a small amount of booze but they also got new content for their blogs. They also know a little bit more about their subject area which is probably the biggest benefit. Cognac making and blending is to me at least, highly interesting. I do wonder what the next step after the various meets and greets are though. Will consumers eventually design products they want and so become part of the customer care and product design teams?
Kids Tunes is an Irish run website/store that sells albums you can play for your kids. Some run of the mill stuff and some pretty awesome ones like the kids album from They Might be Giants. Tge singer from The Presidents of the USA apparently has an album out too.
Nike has attracted the largest community of runners ever assembled—more than 1.2 million runners who have collectively tracked more than 130 million miles and burned more than 13 billion calories.
Kiss – God gave rock and roll to you II, it has it all. Guitars, perms, leather, aircraft hangars, crosses, slow motion, spoken word, explosions and tongues.
Bless. When you do a Google search for Mulley or Damien Mulley, Mary Crotty PR have ads running.
Good for them. I clicked on the ads too to see their site. I hope they have set a sane daily budget as if everyone that Googled my name clicked on the ads, it might cost them a lot over the space of a day and week. Also, because the keywords damien and mulley are not on their site, they pay more per click then if the words were there. Add my details to your landing page! I’m here to save you money! (Edit: Daily budget was hit it seems)
I like this page on their website. This image on the page says they take pride in perfection:
It sits just under this image about how image is important:
A mobile broadband dongle costs anywhere from €15 to €20 a month. Over 12 months that’s €180 to €240.
So for about €470, you can record HD video, edit it and upload it to multiple places. For basic video without bells and whistles, it’s a cheap and handy rig.
Suzy has some initial thoughts on the new civil partnership bill that the Greens are lauding up. They’re even marching in the Dublin Pride parade today. It’s just one more self-hammered nail in the coffin of the Greens. All social philosophies can be made toxic once a few planning laws get through. Despite Dermot Ahern saying the topic is now ended and gay couples will not get one single thing after this, the Greens are saying it’s a stepping stone, they’re still living in the same delusional world where the electorate are idiots, children in Crumlin Hospital are in no need of care (sad that they march with the gays today but not the parents of kids in Crumlin) and everyone and their warts have fast broadband. Keep forwarding those supportive emails around the office lads, that’s all that matters, not the pain you directly voted for. Stockholm syndromed Judas cunts.
The Indo yesterday has a piece on the disaster that is the Metropolitan Area Networks project. I was also asked to stick my oar in. Delighted they left in the “rings of fibre bit”.