I spent nearly an hour on Skype with Conn Ó Muíneacháin in Ireland this morning. The topic: minority languages in the social network space. I was sick as a dog all weekend, and while lying in bed had a lot of time to ponder our college’s next move in regards to providing telecommunication services through the medium of Hawaiian. While Conn has no specialized training in language perpetuation or sociology (nor do I), I felt that he is very much a kindred spirit in his desire to be able to use his language in as many daily contexts as are…
iPhone Supports Hawaiian Diacritics!
A colleague of mine showed up to work with an iPhone, so the first thing we did was to check if its email program supports Hawaiian characters. He already had it set up to check his .Mac account, so he sent himself an email from GMail which used the Hawaiian keyboard that ships with OS X. A few moments later is showed up on his iPhone, with the diacritics showing in both the subject field as well as the body text. Amazing! We haven’t found a way to generate the ‘okina and kahak? on the iPhone, but at least it…
Hawaiian Social Network Quandry
One of the blessings of being away in Ireland for nine months is that it will give me some separation and time to think out the future of our Hawaiian language technology initiatives, such as Leok? (our Hawaiian language intranet system built on FirstClass), Ulukau (our Hawaiian digital library) and the use of the Ka Leo Hawai‘i archives (about 700 hours worth of interviews with Hawaiian language speakers conducted in the 1970s and 1980s). I have been wavering back and forth as to whether or not it is worthwhile to us to continue using FirstClass, or move on to some…
Cell On The Way
So after a few days of researching our cell phone options, I ordered an unlocked Motorola V551 for our daughter to take with her to Cornell and hopefully use in Ireland as well. It’s GSM, and from what I can see AT&T/Cingular has much better coverage in the area of Syracuse than T-Mobile, as it does here in Hawai‘i, so we’ll get a pay-as-you-go plan for her until we leave. The V551 came out more than two years ago and probably doesn’t make as much of a fashion statement as some of the razor style phones, but its feature list…
Wireless In Eire
I am reluctantly educating myself about mobile phones, the various network types, what works and where, and all of those niggling issues that I’ve been avoiding. I actually had a Verizon plan for a while – our son was graduating from boot camp in Oklahoma in 2002, so we decided to get one to coordinate a rendezvous with my sister who was driving down from Minnesota, and made a two year commitment. It was one of the most miserable two years of my life. As our daughter is preparing to spend a week at Cornell University (N.W. New York state)…
TwitterGrams – The New “Push”?
I’ve been following Dave Winer‘s experiments in TwitterGrams with some interest for the past week. He put a web interface on the service which allows people to post small (under 200k) MP3 files, and have them delivered as “Tweets”. Just for fun I made a short sample from Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole’s What A Wonderful World and posted it. It immediately showed up in my podcast area in iTunes, and a tweet showed up in Twitterific. It occurred to me what a great tool this could potentially be for music promotion. It’s the new “push”. Fans of a musician become their Twitter…
Thinking Ahead…
We’re still over two months away from relocating to Ireland for the next two semesters, and I’m already planning my first rendezvous with the Irish blogging/podcasting community. I’m very much looking forward to meeting some of these folks who I have been following for years. Still getting very confusing signals from the folks at UCC. The latest communication from immigration to the Int’l Student Office is that my wife and daughter cannot stay for the duration of my school. Bernie says this is wrong, and I hope he’s right. I put a call into the Irish Consulate in S.F. this…
Twittering Your Life Away
I final got around to exploring Twitter recently, wondering what all the fuss was about. While it seemed interesting, I didn’t care much for the web interface and was much happier with it when I discovered Twitterrific. I thought it would be much ado about nothing, but I guess it depends on the quality of the people you follow, and how much you value their random synaptic discharges. You can follow my tweets here. I’ll try not to be too boring.
Apple’s iPhone Coming… On My Birthday
Do I want one? No, thanks. I still don’t care for cell phones; they’re wireless umbilical cords. Besides, I doubt if they will work in Cork for a while. 😉
Sign O’ The Times
Unless given a reprieve by Congress, many independent webcasters will be run out of business soon. Many podcasters, who largely do it for love and not money, seem to be running out of gas. I’ve been struggling to even get out the farewell podcast I promised months ago, and have been debating whether or not to simply not do it. I was a bit surprised to learn that my buddy Scott is also ending his MacHelpMaui podcast, noting “this is just too much like work.” I agree. He featured a lot of Hawaiian music in it and won fans for…