Not that we haven’t known that for some time but it was recently drilled home to me on my flight back from Madrid last week.
My son Enrique has asthma. He got quite bad with it earlier this year when we were in Spain and a Spanish doctor prescribed a cough suppressant called Expectu to help him sleep.
When I was in Madrid, my wife asked me to get another bottle of Expectu to bring home. So far, so good. Except, the bottles for sale in the pharmacies were 200ml and you can only bring bottles less than 100ml onto the plane (I only had hand luggage).
What did I do? I asked the pharmacist to decant the 200ml of Expectu into smaller bottles (in dreadfully pidgen Spanish!). He obliged and poured it into four 75ml bottles. I put these bottles into a clear plastic bag along with my deodorant and toothpaste fully expecting to be stopped at the airport.
Not a bit of it. Going through security, the guard took out one of the four bottles, checked the volume of it and, satisfied that it was less than 100ml, replaced it in the clear plastic bag!
Fantastic! For all you aspirant terrorists out there making liquid bombs - decant the bombs into small bottles if you want to get them onto the plane and you are sorted (oh, and just in case you thought I was serious, here’s why you should save yourself the trouble of trying to make a liquid bomb)!
The One Laptop per Child project aims to put a laptop computer within reach of far more children than today.
One of the architects of the project, Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte, said that:
It’s an education project, not a laptop project.
When it was begun, the project seemed extremely fanciful but at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen one of the prototype $100 laptops was demo’ed.
It wasn’t the fastest laptop I have ever seen but it worked and in the photo below you can see it browsing the BBC’s website.
This will be a fantastic move forward when these laptops finally are delivered. However, several obstacles remain. Ireland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world and I can’t see our government committing to spend $100 to but a laptop for every child in the country. If Ireland wouldn’t do this for her children, what hope have the children of poorer countries?
Then, where do kids in poorer countries get electricity and Internet access, even if they do somehow get enough money to buy a laptop?
I’m sure I’m not the first to ask these questions and there may even be plans in place to address them. I certainly hope so or this plan will fail at the first hurdle.
I’m in Barajas airport (Madrid) awaiting my flight back to Cork. The presentations I gave at Reboot (Copenhagen) on Thursday and Remix (Madrid) were really well received. I got lots of very positive feedback and invites to speak at more events which is the most positive feedback you can get!
By some bizarre coincidence, my accommodation ended up being in the middle of the red-light district in both cities which afforded me the chance to compare the two!
Sex seems to be a night time only experience in Copenhagen. The girls working in Copenhagen didn’t appear on the street until after dark whereas in Madrid it appears to be always-on affair with the women offering their services at any hour of the day or night.
The women in Copenhagen were also far more assertive than their counterparts in Madrid! They tried to chat you up as you passed by and were very slow to take no for an answer!
The most obvious difference between the two was that in Copenhagen the girls didn’t match the stereotypical image I have of prostitutes. They were wearing sweatshirts or jumpers and jeans primarily. In Madrid, they were much more halter tops, micro-minis and 6-inch heels!
Of course part of that has to be down to climactic differences but some of it has to be cultural too. It wasn’t that cold in Copenhagen, nor was it that hot in Madrid!
Technorati have overhauled their site completely. Some of the changes are great and some we could do without, frankly!
The best change is that they have drastically sped up the site. I dunno did they add more servers or simply optimise their queries (I suspect the latter) but the site and particularly searches are now running a whole lot faster.
The next great change is that they have moved the blog searches to a page of its own. You can now find blog searches at s.technorati.com. The searches return relevant results and make subscribing to searches a whole lot easier than heretofore.
On the downside, on the main Technorati page they have a scrolling bar of tags along the top - make it stop! I thought we had killed of the Marquee tag people!!!
Overall, the new design seems to be getting the thumbs up from most reviewers. This can only be good as with the rollout of Google’s excellent Blogsearch tool, reasons for using Technorati were becoming fewer and fewer.
Enrique Luis Raftery Carnicero, my younger son, is one year old today.
Happy birthday Enrique.
Over the last number of days I noticed my Firefox (on Mac) was getting increasingly unstable. It was freezing completely after being open for random amounts of time (but generally not very long!).
I had recently installed a couple of new Firefox extensions so I was blaming them. However, uninstalling them made no difference.
Today I think I found the culprit. I had about 40 tabs open in Firefox (in three separate windows). I scanned through the tabs and closed all the tabs containing Silverlight content and since then, Firefox has been rock-solid.
Looks like there is still a ways to go with Silverlight and Firefox on the Mac.
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