Fee. Fi. Fo. Fum.

David got it in my head that it looked like the woman in the picture was a giant peering out at the man on the cherry picker. The college was installing three large banners at the college as a teaser campaign for the new branding work that is being completed. The college is one of the organisations on the Innovation By Design programme; the programme I helped create and manage at the Centre. It was nice to catch the unveiling in action. I'd love to know the student's reaction to seeing this hanging in the main lobby when she came to class.

Help. I need a blog post.

So, for the first time I am making a double post between the Design Innovation blog and Verticalbones. My assumption is that few of you actually use the sidebar links ->, so if I truly find some interesting things around design, I should probably post them here as well. It takes time to maintain three blogs so I believe I've earned the right to pilfer some thinking and finds.

Tell me if I am completely off-base or not. Also, I can probably say some things here that I can't or wouldn't on the work blog.


I was completely taken by the whole "packaging" of the Help Remedies brand. Smart. Irreverent. Sustainable. They even offer help for those of you who are just bored or horny. Love the t-shirts.

Ambient Intelligence Chapter

I suppose I'm a geek at heart, or at the very least, I acknowledge my inner geek. I was programming BASIC on my Atari home computer shortly after I owned my first bike. I have suffered gadget envy. I lived with MIT students when going to school at BU in Boston. I would have quit my job at Crayola if the MIT Media Lab had an available spot during our visits there.

So perhaps it makes sense that I did draft a chapter for an upcoming book on Ambient Intelligence. My chapter will stick out like a sore thumb among the other chapters drafted by research scientists at innovation centres throughout Ireland. Keep in mind, this is an academic publisher, and my approach was much more paper than essay. If any of this sounds interesting to you, have a read, and let me know what you think.

User-centred Design and Development of Future Smart Systems: Opportunities and Challenges (PDF, 218KB)

AOL now on gMail

I have been working on a service design workshop and have been looking for an exercise that a call centre might use for training. A real moment of truth in any service is when it goes wrong and you look for support. So I figured, why not find out who has one of the best call centres and ask them for an exercise. The AOL Broadband contact centre in Ireland won Best Overall Contact Centre in 2007, along with Best Manager, Best Centre and a slew of other awards. When I went to their contact page, I HAD to chuckle to find their HR team is using a gMail account for email. Priceless.

What are you doing over there?

My main responsibility at the Centre for Design Innovation is to create programmes to help Irish organisations use design more effectively. What does that entail? Here is a PDF transcription of a presentation I did last May in Brussels that introduces the Centre and the Innovation by Design programme I developed.

It isn't all pints and sport over here. Really. I mean it.

Lost and found

Well, the good news is that I've learned a lot about making nice bootable backups of my MACs. The bad news is that I didn't have one in place for my work laptop (which really had the most current data of all my machines). It's not going to happen again and Gabe and Lisa have airtight backups at home now.

Considering the cost of drives these days, you may want to ask your boss or IT department if it is more affordable just to have a Firewire drive on your desk. I suppose there are information theft issues, but I question how any restore process could be as seamless.

Interlink (or Interstink as I've referred to them) lost my laptop from Sligo to Dublin. Apparently the shipping label came off the package??? Anyway, Mactivate has my machine, I'm just waiting to hear what data can be recovered.

Stop what you're doing. Backup.

After you finish reading this post, back up your computer. Stop what you are doing and just consider what would happen tomorrow if all your data disappeared. Not only your data, but all that time you spent customising your machine exactly the way you'd like. All those photos. All that music. All that time installing programs.

Actually, I'd recommend cloning your machine to a bootable external drive. Cloning your machine allows you to get everything back in a similar state, as well as being able to boot from your backup and continue working. Not worth €130? Think again. I'd pay that several times over to have all my data back.

For you MAC users out there, I've learned a few things in last couple of days. 1) Make sure your external drive is HFS+ formatted. Even drives that come from Lacie may need to be formatted correctly to be recognised by programs like Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper. 2) If you're on an Intel MAC, you'll need to be sure that your partition scheme is GUID, if you'd like to boot from it. Disk Utility will tell you that and allow you to change it. 3) Intel machines can boot from a USB or Firewire drive. PowerPC can only boot from Firewire. 4) Don't forget you can turn your computer into a Firewire drive by holding down the "t" key when booting. Even if your System Folder isn't recognised, you may be able to copy your files. 5) Apple won't sell you a replacement drive for your laptop. You need to send it away to an approved technician. (There are only two in Ireland.)

Stop what you are doing. Go buy an external drive. Backup. Use software that runs automated, scheduled backups. Here's a good list for MAC.

Work?

The beauty of having clients in Ireland is that in many cases something like this is right up the road. That takes the sting out of a company visit, wouldn't you say?

The office

So, this is where I spend the majority of my days ... not so bad. Lisa oversaw the design of the space for the Centre for Design Innovation. There are three enormous orange dots cut into the carpeting. The carpet comes from an Irish company, Tretford, and is made from goat hair and other renewable resources. No new carpet smell either!

I was finally given a shot in the arm to take a few pics by Libby over at Carton LeVert. They worked on the wonderful branding and are entering the whole package into the European Design Awards. Wish us luck. That would be an incredible honor and kudos to be recognised. (I'm getting used to switching my s's for my z's.)

I've had the pleasure of painting my office spaces the last several times, and this was no exception. For those of you that know me, the ball seat is gone, upgraded to a Swopper chair. Active seating that doesn't roll away. Those square pouf chairs are from Quinze & Milan. For those of you working under fluorescents, you must upgrade to daylight-balanced tubes. We had these at AOV and they make for better color representation and do away with sick building syndrome.

Practice what you preach ...

Viking necklace

The picture isn't too hot from my mobile phone, but over lunch today, the Archaeology department shared a rare recent find. It was a glass Viking necklace, probably 1000 years old, that was discovered in the back of a cave in the Burren. The original glass would have been a pale, transparent blue, though it reacted with the chemical composition of the soil to turn more iridescent. It can be pretty cool working at a research university!

Back to work

My Christmas holiday began on Thursday the 21st of December and today was my first day back in the office. Take a page from this book. I actually had a longer vacation than my son (by two days).

One year in the States, I actually received e-mail from my boss ON Christmas Day. Typically I would work the week between Christmas and New Years since I had taken up my vacation (typically two weeks) at another time of the year. The time between Christmas and New Years doesn't even count against the five weeks holiday I get.

A mentor of mine summed it up once by saying "happy people make money" and I feel well rested, balanced and refreshed coming back to work. This is life in proper proportion with work. I can only see upside in this equation and can't comprehend what benefit the Centre would have gained by having us work through the holidays. We will still make a sizable impact on an entire country without sacrificing our lives in the process.

Coopershill

The Centre is wrapping up a glorious weekend hosting design promotion professionals and consultants from Europe and the US. We had the privilege of entertaining the group at Coopershill House. The O'Hara family's hospitality was second to none and the 5-course dinners were spectacular. Have a look at the history of the house and family.

We cancelled two other potential venues to be at Coopershill House, and even though I'll personally never be able to make a reservation in Sligo again, the stay was worth it.

Wiener or warrior?

Getting settled in at London Gatwick airport for a long layover before the final leg of my trip to Florence. Wireless Internet. Bluetooth headset. MacBook Pro 17".

Wiener or road warrior? Vote today.

Flying in Europe may be cheap, but it takes three flights to make it to the airport in Florence. When we take our holiday in November, we'll make a single flight Dublin to Pisa. Today however, I fly Sligo to Dublin, Dublin to London, London to Florence. Italy twice in four weeks ... I'm not complaining.

Sign language

I remember watching a TV show when I was kid called Real People. One of my favorite segments was when they showed funny signage, like a No Dumping sign against a PortaPotty.

This sign may have been too racy for the primetime show, but I couldn't believe my eyes when we were checking in for a meeting in Donegal today. What are they waiting for? Fix the sign! (Disclaimer: I debated about posting this on the blog, so if you have no sense of humor, are easily offended, or both, don't click to enlarge the picture.)

Do I have to go?

You wouldn't think twice about travelling to say, Orlando or New York in the States for a business conference. In Europe a conference usually takes place in another country. So, after never being to Italy, I get to go to Florence twice within one month for holiday and the SEEdesign event.

We are inviting a group to Ireland for our own event and I visited Castle Dargan as a possible location. However, Toby (the boss) is friendly with the family that own Temple House. No worries.

120 km/h

Yes, I have driven 120 km/h on the N4 on the way to work. However, that was the strength of the wind gusts last night from the remnants of Hurricane Gordon. (For my American friends, we're talking 75 mph.) Couldn't have come at a worse time for Ireland as they are hosting the Ryder Cup and rain has been pelting the practice course the last several days.

It's bright and sunny today. We have moved into our 4th office and apparently last stop before we move upstairs to our final digs in the ITSBIC. (That will be us on the third floor, far left with the lights on.)

Back to Dublin

Into Connolly Station and back in Dublin for a two-day Innovation Forum pulled together by Enterprise Ireland. We had a fantastic dinner this evening in the main dining hall at Trinity College. What a setting!

Dublin by train

I had expected to leave Dublin a lot more inspired, but it just came off as another big city. After two business meetings I did get the chance to walk around Grafton Street and visited Habitat for the first time.

I took the train from Boyle to Dublin, which is about a two and a half hour ride. A same day return costs 22 Euro. I did plan on taking the train from Collooney Station which is closer to my house. However, I couldn't find the train station, panicked, and drove to Boyle. I had expected the train station to be posted but Ireland does still function better if you have lived here and already know where you are going.

They pulled a good pint in Connolly Station before I caught the train back. Watching the sun begin to set over Lough Key on the drive back to the house from Boyle, I whispered to myself, "Dublin got nothin' on this."

Fishy knowledge

Remember the Salmon of Knowledge post? There is a sculpture of the salmon outside the entrance to IT Sligo that I walk by every morning. It is featured in the current logo of the school. (We may be taking part in a new branding campaign for the IT.)

New students were back on campus today following the published results of leaving certs (roughly equivalent to SATs) and the announcement of college offers.

I had a bad flashback to when I was working at WTBU and had my first on-air interview with a local Boston band, Heretix. I still have the tape of the interview and the band basically tortured me on the air. I guess it really didn't matter since we were just an AM carrier station at the time and no one heard it. Still, I took the DJ role pretty seriously. Hopefully I won't have those dreams tonight of waking up for final exams and realizing I hadn't been in class all semester.

Working from home

I had the opportunity to work from home today. I have to admit I was a bit tempted to jump into many of the house projects that were lurking in the background ... but I resisted. I realized my new work laptop doesn't even have a modem. So, to add insult to injury, I set up a shared Internet connection over dial-up. It may soon be faster to hand-carry packets back and forth.

Lack of competition within the Irish marketplace is an issue, specifically within industries like telecom. I am experiencing firsthand what it is like as a consumer to be waiting on Eircom who has little motivation to speed along my satellite broadband order.