This is why robots are gonna destroy us….

saw a few of these “meanwhile in…” pics on digg, thought Id add my own…

Check out meanwhile in russia…

I have a few issues with foursquare, not the “I was never loved as a child and used to kill and cut open small animals” type issues, no the ones thats like “oh fuck I’ve been robbed” issues. Want me to explain? Of course you do, otherwise you woulda been smart to quit out page already…

from wikipedia (of course):

Foursquare is a location-based social networking website, software for mobile devices, and game. Users “check-in” at venues using text messaging or a device specific application^[1]. They are then awarded points and sometimes “badges.”

Right, so people get points and badges and other shiney things when they give away their location? Does’nt this mean hypothetically (word auto-correct WIN!) someone could track when a foursquare user is at home (yes they even post where they live) and when they’re away, so they can rob their home or something? Suppose the same could be applied to Twitter and someones home answering machine telling that they’re away on holidays, although it does’nt actively give away their freakin’ location.

In another respect people could play with Foursquare, if a kids parents actively look at their kids Twitter, FaceBook or Foursquare updates just to know where they are and be a “better” parent, a kid could buff saying he/she/it (gotta think of the hermaphrodites out there) are in school/at a friends house/etc. Like I know of people who setup a secondary Twitter or Facebook account for this sorta reason.

Eh I dunno who even reads this stuff anyway?

^_^

Trauma board inside, Halo speed loader with a virtue soft crown, fires at 30bps at a speed of 300fps, fuck yeah…

Well at least she got 10 points…

So its been something I’ve always wanted to do, take skimboarding from the sea to the streets, tho I need had an opportunity to. On Thursday the 19th of November, the Dam in Cork released water at approximately 6pm, unfortunalty that was also high tide and then again that was increased with the massive rainfall we had. So ultimately Cork become flooded.

I had woken up at 7am per usual for school, within 10 minutes we recieved a text saying school was canceled due to flooding, after ringing Ian, we decided to head into town to photograph the damage and also maybe skimboard. I did’nt expect there to be so much water, my first encouter was seeing or rather not being able to see the restaurant in the UCC Glucksman simply because water had covered it!

I spent a portion of the motion helping people with various things, like moving stuff around, it helped as I was wearing my wetsuit (felt like an idiot walking into town in it). After a while we decided to give skimboarding a lash, heres the video of it:

After uploading the vid to YouTube, within 24 hours it had been viewed over 10,000 times! It started spreading across the net, to even a point where my cousins friend who lives in England, who only met me one saw it and emailed me about it! I was also mentioned in the news paper as a “Young student attempting to surf the streets”, as I flew past the chief excutive of the Mercy Hospital during an interview.

I’ll post more as it comes, meanwhile:

• link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w57cbAqYwo8
• link to flickr set of flood: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jameswhelton/sets/72157622717352383/

So somehow me and Enda Crowley (@endac - endacrowley.ie) ended up giving talks at the 2009 Barcamp in Cork (barcampcork.com) on Saturday. It was a brilliant event with talks from DIY home servers to Twitter bots to MultiTouch technology!

While Enda talked about harnessing the awesome power of Automator, the mac automated workflow application, entitling his presentation “Automator Awesome”, he demonstrated how to setup a system in which certain torrent files (eg a new episode of 30 Rock or “V”) could be automatically downloaded when available, automatically loaded into the torrent program Transmission, then when finished converted and added to iTunes ready to be added to a iPhone!

My talk was “Using Hacking/Computing to practical jokes”, featuring how to “SMS Bomb”, Fake the “Blue Screen of Death”, fake the 3 red rings of death on an Xbox 360 and demonstrated the script I wrote to loop opening and closing a cd tray! All of which I gave a “how to” and a case study of when I implemented them in the past! I also upon request told the story of how I ended myself and my friend in A&E after making Hydrogen (which then someone asked when my mother was coming in to talk about how to deal which Hydrogen burns!)

Both talks were broadcast live over the internet!

One of the funnier things I found was that 90%* of attendees were twittering constantly, so it was easy to keep track of where everyone was (like when I had to find Martha Rotter and tell Mike Butler he forgot his cards)!

After all talks had finished, we were met with free wine before we when our separate ways… until next year!

(*Perhaps an exaggeration, but a hell of a lot were!)