Oxegen (one of the huge European music festivals) have released a free iPhone app. It’s currently number one in the Irish app charts, and seems to be instilled with the stuff of magic. Stuff that a few years ago, we were only dreaming would be possible.

Starting from the basics, this app provides a checklist of things to bring to the festival. You can tick things off as you pack them, which is a useful feature. moving to the slightly more complex, it incorporates artist twitter feeds and an RSS feed from the festival organizers. It also provides live traffic updates throughout the weekend, for those who aren’t camping. Then things become cool.

There is a fairly standard map built into the app. It can locate you using the phone’s GPS, and shows you where the stages, campsites, places to get your beers cooled and so on can be found, and direct you too them. You can turn your iPhone sideways, and see everything in Virtual Reality mode, for those you are useless at even iPhone assisted directions. You can also, in a blindingly simple yet stunningly obvious move, tag where your tent is, and your iPhone will show you the way, even late at night.

Another “Holy Shit It’s 2010″ feature is the Interactive Event Schedule. You tell it what bands you want to see, and it informs you of any overlapping performances. Sure, that’s ordinary enough. HOWEVER, just before the bands begin their set, it uses push notifications to inform you, and can then show you to the correct stage within the time needed to get there. That’s pretty awesome.

I have, however, saved the best for last.

Since Oxegen is such a huge place, it is very easy to loose your friends. The app can help out with that. Heading into the Settings area (strangely inside the app instead of in the iPhone settings area) you will notice an area to turn on “share my location”. If you do that, once the festival starts, it will show your friends (connected through facebook, at the moment, and you can choose only to show specific ones) exactly where you are on the festival site. Updated in real time. On the map. Now THAT’S magic. The one possible worry I have over this feature is that some smart thief somewhere might be able to work out where iPhone users have pitched their tent, and may have a night time visit. I’m not sure how well they protect the location data.

I will be at Oxegen from this Thursday, so if you are going and want to say hello, feel free to track me down. Send me an email/comment or something.

Anyway, this app got me thinking. What other “The Future Is Now” things can we take for granted right now? Every time I see a 32gb my jaw drops. These things are about the size of your thumbnail, and look at how much data can fit on them! The Microsoft Courier was another of these Future Tech products, but sadly never got past the R&D stage. It would have blown the iPad out of the water.

Can you think of any other pieces of tech that make you feel like we are living in Star Trek?

Tags: app, festival, iPhone, Music festival, Oxegen

It seems that in these recessionary times, the best way to get hits to your blog is to not only use buzzwords such as “Recessionary Times”, but to get angry about something. Really really angry. However, it seems that a lot of people get angry about the same things at the same times, so this “anger factor” sort of looses it’s effect when 6 of the blogs in your feader (like reader and feed mixed up, you see. This is why I get paid the big bucks) are all complaining about some shite like NAMA, Peaches Geldof getting dirty and naked, or some corporate paid-to-post makeup blog winning Best Blog in the 2010 Irish Blog Awards. “Oh!”, they wail; “The banks are taking our monies, Peaches didn’t do it with me AND some more organized blog then me won the Best Blog! It’s all one huge big conspiracy!”

So, dear readers. I have decided to get angry about something in this blog post. Really angry. Fuming, one might say. But what to get angry about?

Well, there is always the matter of how, according to Greenpeace (let’s ignore that it’s them for now. Easier to get angry about it that way),  “US oil company donated millions to climate sceptic groups“! Shock! Horror! Clicking on the rather uninformative headline, it gets WORSE! “Report identifies Koch Industries giving $73m to climate sceptic groups ‘spreading inaccurate and misleading information’”! Did you fucking read that? DID YOU? BIG OIL COMPANIES ARE PAYING PEOPLE TO CLAIM GLOBAL WARMING IS A SCAM! Oh! The humanity! How could they do this to us? You know what it is? It is all this socialism coming into the world!

Which brings me to my NEXT thing to be MOTHERFUCKING RAGING about, and that is

OBAMA!

How dare he get to spend time looking at awesome things like Captain America’s shield, the Tardis and THE MOTHERFUCKING FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE when he has an entire nation to turn into a socialist state? And make abortions a national sport? And for god’s sake, why the hell is he creating more bike lanes? Madness!

Which brings me to another thing;

Crazy fucked up religious shite masquerading as actual science!

So there is this program where a bunch of people take the Shroud of Turin (this piece of cloth which SOME people claim is the one that Jesus used when he was being crucified. Because the FIRST thing I would use to send a message to the human race, upon my crucifixion, is a piece of cloth that I bled all over) which is at this point widely accepted to be a fraud and have submitted it to “painstaking and technical” technology to create some sort of 3D image of our Jaysus Lhord nd Savier. “Well, ok, Cian”, you might say; “You don’t have to watch the bullshit Christin channels on the telly. Just watch a secular program about eating babies and providing healthcare!” WELL, FUCK YOU, MISTER! This show is going to be on… Wait for it… THE HISTORY CHANNEL! History comes from the greek word ἱστορία – historia, meaning “inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation. You know what ISN’T history? Some superstition about some man who made the entire population of the world sinners so he could come down to earth (being his own father, of course) and kill himself so that the sins would be forgiven. Come ON, History Channel!

Right. So that’s me done. Now I just wait for the hits to come flying in, right?

Tags: climate change, global warming, Obama, religion

As an atheist, I often get asked what I think of Christmas. What do I think of this shamefully consumeristic celebration for the birth of a non existent ‘son of god’? How can I possibly celebrate Christmas without being a damn dirty hypocrite? And I answer thus.

How reader, much of Christmas is Christian?

Well Cian, it is a time of love, the giving of gifts and the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, our savior sent to clean up the mess his daddy started by throwing us out of that garden.

WRONG, deluded reader! Christmas has next to nothing to do with Christianity. Let’s outline why.

Firstly, the date. 25th of December. Why do you think it is that date?

Because Jesus was born on that date?

Bullshit, kind reader! Think over the story presented to us in the Bible. Shepherds watching their flock at night, traveling for a census and such. Shepherds don’t watch over their flock at night in the dead of winter. They would not live through the night. Or at least catch a nasty cold. And anyways, traditionally, shepherds watched over their flock during Spring and Autumn. And no self respecting ruler would call a census for which thousands of people would have to travel for days during the coldest time of year. That’s just silly. As for the birth itself? Totally didn’t happen then, if it happened at all (but don’t take it from me! Read this article by a group of religious people who have looked far too deeply into this.) And the Stable and animals are not even mentioned in the biblical accounts. Only the manger is.

Ok… So maybe the birth didn’t happen on Christmas. But how about all this giving gifts to celebrate him? How about the tree to symbolize his birth, and the ever-present love of god?

Well, kind reader, let me continue.

It is fairly well known at this point that many of the Christian holidays are actually just Pagan holidays in disguise (Seriously. Rabbits? Chocolate eggs? Encouraging sex between unmarried couples?). When early Christians first tried to convert other people and remove their celebration of other gods, they pretty much failed. Hard. So they decided to keep the Pagan festivities, just change the story slightly. After all, December 25th was the data Pagans believed the sun (son?) was reborn, due to it’s being the Winter Solstice, the day with the least hours of sunshine. So that’s why the day was chosen.

As for the tree, decorated trees were around LONG before Christianity decided to claim them for their own. The Pagans again, you see. They believed that ever-green trees (like your average Chrimbo Tree) had a little faerie in them, which is why they stayed green, even in the deepest darkest winter, when other trees would loose their leaves. So while they didn’t take them inside, they decorated them with little shiny pieces of metal, and brought any fallen branches inside and decorated their houses with them.

So Christmas isn’t Christian. It has simply been hijacked by the Christian Church. It wasn’t even celebrated as a Christian holiday until Pope Julius I decided to announce it as Christ’s birthday in the year 350.

In the end, I do take the two weeks off for Christmas, I stuff my mouth and I love giving presents. I think of it like this. If only Christians can have Christmas, then only Vikings can have Thursday. And that’s just silly, right?

Tags: christmas, religion, Science

Let’s be honest. Global warming sucks. And if you are one of the idiots who refuses to believe that it exists, I want you off my website. Now. It wouldn’t do to have advertiser think my audiance are science deniers.

This year’s Blog Action Day topic is Global Warming, and I did a fair bit of thinking about how Global Warming is tied to us in the New Media space. Here is what I came up with.

1) Your recording studio will become even more unbarable. Think of the heat that builds up at the moment, then add a few small degrees kelvin to that. Youch!

2) If you serve a heck of a lot of data every week, as a lot of new media addicts might, chances are you are releasing a metrick buttload of carbon and other emissions into the atmosphere. Those servers don’t cool themselves, you know!

3) Think of all the energy required to charge your computer, phone and camera. That likely ain’t helping matters.

4) The FAILWHALE will become increasingly uncomfertable in his newly warmed sea, and thus will make more appearances in places he is not wanted.

So there you have it. There is nothing that you can do to stop consumption of carbon requiring items, and not live in a cave surviving only on fruit and raw vegtables. So just be smart in how you do use it.

Tags: blog action day, global warming

So I was lucky enough to get a ticket to Ze Frank and Jonah Peretti’s talk at the Science Gallery entitled GO VIRAL from the wonderious Darragh Doyle, one of the friendliest people in the Irish Blog space. And trust me. They are a friendly bunch, all in all.

So, I head into the Science Gallery to meet Alan Costello and Darragh, and get stopped by an official looking man in a white suit with what seems to be a metal detector. He asks me to please stand up against the wall, and starts scanning me, beeping every now and again. He then shines a bright light into my eyes, and begrudgingly says “Please walk this way, sir”. I head into this clean-roomesque tunnel, to be handed a face mask, a little baggie containing the programme of events and a little microchip which the white-suited person behind the table claims will begin to flash if I contract an infection spreading around the exhibit center. if I get this infection, I must move immediately to the disinfection area on the second floor. I am also instructed to avoid any people with flashing tags. Next to the disinfection area there was a map showing all the various connected tags. Quite interesting stuff.

So it was a weird day. What can I say?

Anyway, soon after all this, we started filing into the auditorium to see the big show.

It started off with Jonah Peretti giving a talk on his website, Buzzfeed along with his various forays into viral media, including accidentally becoming the spokesman for an anti racism movement along with an anti sweatshop movement. One of the highlights of his talk was a simple demonstration of viral activism in the real world. Mormonism. The idea behind this being that since every single Mormon must spend two years of his/her life converting others, the religion spreads like wildfire.

Many other interesting topics were brought up by Johna, such as Big Seed advertising, his foray into viral marketing with the Huffington Post and his various theories on advertising, such as the one of Mullet Advertising. (Business at the front, party in the back!)

Once Jonah was done, Ze Frank, self professed fame whore, came on-stage and started speaking on the 8 moments which made him realize much an emotional effect he could have on people over the internet. I’m not going to go through all the moments here, but check out his site for more. You might loose a few days in there.

Oh, also, I bought some Chlamydia.

Tags: Alan Costello, Jonah Peretti, marketing, Science, Social Media, Viral, Ze Frank