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U.S. troops occupying a position near Manila during the Spanish-American War.

I got this in my email today and though: eh? What’s going on?

It was a daily email from Britannica online with a few examples of “On this Day” through history for the 24^th of April.

Bricannica Online have opened up their content to bloggers and web publishers so they can reference and link to content related to their posts. I read about it on TechCrunch at the weekend, so I signed up.

The content of the Britannica site is wide and good quality, but doesn’t reach the the staggering amount of content to be found of Wikipedia, their main rival. The layout of the pages are also visually very nice.

Unfortunately they don’t allow you to embed pictures from their site on your post, only a link, which I guess is fair enough. Pictures would eat up bandwidth at a rate of knots. I was going to link directly to the above picture but copied it into Flickr instead.

Anyway, here’s the link to the article on the American Spanish War of 1898:

Spanish-American War

Unfortunately, you will only be able to read the article posted here as the rest of the site remains subscription only, unless of course you are a web publisher or have a blog. In which case, I’d recommend signing up here.

If you’ve got a Nokia N95, or any other phone with a 2d barcode scanner, open it up, point it at this barcode and you’ll be brought to this blog on your phone’s web browser. You can generate your own barcodes here. You could generate a code for your phone number and print it on a business card.

Thanks to Eamon for the tip.

When most people ask the question “how do you become a good sales person”, they are looking for techniques, tricks and methods. But as Seth Godin points out, there’s no way of creating a sales technique that fits every prospect. Or even most.The best advice I was given was to listen. To listen and try to recognise the person you’re taking to. Listen to what they’re saying they want. Then you’ll be able to find the message that will communicate what you want them to hear.

Yesterday I reinstalled Windows on a 4 year old laptop that I donated to my girlfriend about a year ago. It had gotten way too slow so I thought a fresh install would give it a bit of a spring in its step. I went through the routine and even got to install the updates only to find that half the HDD was taken up with old files! I’m going though the whole thing again, but this time, I booted from the CD. An important step if you want to format the HDD. I had to go into the BIOS and change the boot order so CD came before HDD. Simple, but if you don’t know you have to do it, it could be a bit perplexing when you look for the format partition option in Windows Setup only to find it’s not there. 

So if there’s nothing to say then just write. Something will glimmer through from the swamp of useless thoughts that go to make up my mind and my personality,(oh God!) Another day and one too many Saturdays spent working in a short span of time. I think a Saturday off to me these days feels like a holiday. I’m starting to forget that it is something a awful lot of people take for granted.. I will soon again too. Watch this space..
Well, I’m off to Ireland tomorrow for a few days. It’s a voyage with an agenda. I don’t actually make many of those, unless you consider answering the call of hedonism an agenda!
Anyway, it’s a job related thing. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Spain is getting hot now. Madrid is just at that point where its hot but not too hot. You are still constantly reminded by the hot air that you must pay respect to the dangers of the heat but it’s on the cusp and its divine. I like it like this, any hotter just isn’t compatible with emotion. Tips the balance in favour of discomfort.
All the jet set have taken to Marbella this week (according to the droning Corazon tv they pump out in this country (think big brother with makeup and you’ve got an idea of Spanish TV (The George Orwell one, not the program of late..)).
As usual I am keeping a broad eye on technology over the net, I would tell you some highlights but there’s so many others that do it just as well and not wanting to look like a “me too”, I’ll leave it to them.. Check the links on this page.. There’s more to add.. I was looking at Russell Beattie’s page and he reports earning well over 1000 dollars last month on Adsense, Google’s add program. That is astounding. I have to wonder how he does it. I noticed that his page comes very high in search results on a HUGE number of topics. I find this astounding. I don’t fully understand Google’s page ranking system but I know it has a lot to do with links to and from various pages. The more links and therefore referrals, the higher the rank. Of course you could be linked on another page but if no-one clicks on it, it will diminish the rank.. But I’m wondering whether there is anything to having links from your page to help your ranking. I truly cannot see why, but maybe I’m thinking too narrowly. The reason I bring it up is because of 2 posts of late on Russell Beattie’s page where basically all he did was post a load of links to other popular sites. With a bit of a description for each.
Ok.
This will be chalked as flexing the blog muscle as the good man Russ puts it. I really have to consider some content to put on this page.. I’m not about to rewrite Ulysses after all.
Oh, I noticed that if I Google this page, the link on Irishblogs.ie comes before the actual page! It just shows I’m not updating this enough. I have 3 hours before I go home from work so I may actually get constructive and post something someone out there may like to read.

sharm9, originally uploaded by LoopDiLoop.

I was just looking a photo stream on flickr by someone called LoopDiloop. Got there via irishblogs.org. He has some pictures where he’s in Egypt. Actually the photo taker could be anyone but the subject was a man, a very Irish looking man and that’s what got me thinking. Here I am in Madrid, merely a stones throw away from Dublin and I feel like it’s far away. I feel like I’m separated from it somehow. Then I see these pictures of an Irish guy in Egypt and all I can think is that his Irishness envelopes him. There’s no escape from it. Not that one would want to escape from it but here’s this guy from Ireland who got it together to go all the way to Egypt, where he’s experiencing something I’ve never seen and becoming more worldly by the minute and all I can see is that he’s Irish. He is a lot farther away from home in those photos than I am and I see Dublin in his eyes. It makes me feel closer to home. Almost humbled to think I ever really left. Even if I do speak a different language here and have become partial to a pigs ear while sipping on a beer.
I think I just got a splash from a bachelors walk puddle.

I could swear I can feel it soaking into my trouser leg.

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A fine Workmate of mine, originally uploaded by Conall.

Working at night in Vodafone so that all you fine folks in Spain can have fully operational mobile phones.. Jose Manuel Garcia Reganya.

This is a photo taken at a Belgian bar right beside Plaza Mayor in Madrid. It was the Sunday of San Isidro so the place was a mix of church goers and the usual weekend crowd of people having fun. What you can’t see, to the left at another table, is a semi comatose young fella holding his head up with the edge of a table, painting the floor (and his shoes) a lovely shade of yellowy green.

Originally uploaded by Conall.

Being a civil servant in Spain can do strange things to a man..