RIP Tom Gilmartin.
Lovely piece in the Irish Times by Miriam Lord today
But when the final report was published, Tom Gilmartin’s story was the one the tribunal believed, because when he spoke of large sums of money going to named politicians, those same amounts surfaced in the myriad of accounts maintained by these paragons.
Have you ever had a song that you couldn’t name? I was at a jazz soul concert in Tallinn months ago and the band played one song that I had known before but hadn’t known the artist of the name of the song. At the time I took a short video of the song but couldn’t make out the lyrics or the name of the song. I lacked the foresight to go up to the band and ask the name of the song at the time. It was only when I was reviewing the photos and videos from the trip that I came across the song again and listened to the video .
I listened to the lyrics and thought they sounded in the following order:
Loving without you
Living without you
Then again, it was sung by non-English native speakers but I thought such a great song couldn’t be that hidden. Could it? I searched Youtube, spotify, 7digital, Amazon but with no result.
Until tonight.
While finding an old Stevie Wonder song, I found that he released a kind of Greatest Hits package in 2000. Â -Â At The Close Of A Century
I went through various songs until I found it. The song that I had been searching for. All I Do.
Spotify Link
You’re welcome. 😉
Just tried a beer called Expresso stout at Adriano’s Bar, one of my favourite places to have a drink in Bern. Nice taste with just the right mixture of coffee and stout.
In transit between Helsinki and Bern. Grey day outside. Riga has a small but functional airport. Found a nice cafe with a spare power socket. Free wifi but it keeps showing adverts every second minute.
Air Baltic seem like the Ryanair of Northern Europe. Sneaky charges for checking in and a couple of staff who have horrible customer service skills. Can’t forget that horrible woman in at the check-in in Vilnius airport that I dealt with a couple of years ago. It was by far the worst checkin experience I have had so far.
 Seth Godin comes up with a set of crucial questions for those businesses that have a website.
I put it here because I want to remember it. Perhaps you will like it too.
Very informative post about how one techie got an iPhone that was in flight mode back to its owner.
Robert Freeman’s post about how he got an iPhone back to its owner.
One of the main points was at the end of how any smartphone owner can help a finder get in contact with you if you ever lose your phone.
If you have a smartphone, take a look at it and think how anyone would get it back to you if you lost it. Why not put your contact details on the lockscreen right now?
iOS users can do this by replacing their lock screen wallpapers (screenshot above) .
Android users go to Settings > Lockscreen > Owner Info (if you have Jellybean).
Settings > Security (if you have Ice Cream Sandwich).
I need to do that myself later. One commenter suggested getting stickers done also. Nice idea.
Some nice suggestions from Petapixel.
Some more suggestions in the comments but I tend to have too many of those apps on my iPhone 4S. I downloaded them all and will play around with them during the week. After seeing the ones that I like, I need to archive off the ones that I don’t use.
Read two great articles on the death of Google Reader this week explaining the bigger picture of why it was shutdown.
Marco Arment in this wonderful post Lockdown contends that Google with Facebook and Twitter is building walled gardens to lock users in. The open RSS model doesn’t fit that strategy.
That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset†it. “Clean it up.†“Retire†it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.
Well, fuck them, and fuck that.
Following on from that:
Dare Obasanjo writes that Google are no longer pretending to be the good guys anymore.
His conclusion:
Google Reader has been living on borrowed time since Facebook and Twitter became prominent. The only thing that has changed in 2013 is that Google’s management doesn’t think it’s worth it to throw a bone to millions of geeks and early adopters by keeping the lights running on the service with its existing skeleton crew. This new Google doesn’t care if geeks and early adopters just see it as another money hungry corporation that only focuses on the bottom line. Larry Page doesn’t give a shit.
Welcome to the new Google.
Buzzfeed actually received an increase is traffic from Google Reader after it was announced. The graphic showing the comparison of traffic from Google+ and Reader is quite illuminating.
I initially used Bloglines to for reading rss feeds but after they closed down, I did examine moving to Google Reader but instead chose netvibes which is free for individuals. I was uncomfortable about handing over another service to an ever smaller number of providers. There was also the fact that feeds are a core part of netvibes whereas Reader was just another auxiliary part of Google.
My advice: Stick to services that are provided by companies where the service is a core part of their business.
