McDonald's predicts an amazing future for the League of Ireland!

Youtube view count not always reliable!

Ministerial Launch of Irish Offshore Training Capability

SEFtec NMCI Offshore Ltd (SNO), a public / private joint venture between SEFtec Global Training Ltd and The National Maritime College of Ireland (NMCI), was launched on the 17^th December 2010 at the National Maritime College, Co. Cork, by the Minister of Enterprise, Trade & Employment, Batt O’Keeffe.
This venture is a shining example of how to bring together state of the art public infrastructure, in the form of one of the world’s most advanced maritime colleges, with private enterprise’s expertise in not only offshore training, but in the design, manufacture, installation, commissioning and service of training simulators for the global maritime industry.
The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, Batt O’Keeffe TD, who launched the public-private joint venture, said it would support jobs and the growth of the Irish offshore exploration and wind energy sectors.  ‘The future is bright for the partnership we are announcing here this afternoon. The maritime sector is a diverse and developing global industry that requires huge levels of skill and technical capability,’ said Minister O’Keeffe.

Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation Batt O'Keeffe speaking at the launch of SNO. Picture: Pascal Ungerer

Focused on supporting the successful and sustainable growth of the Irish offshore exploration sector, SNO has successfully secured the approval of the Offshore Petroleum Industry Training Organization (OPITO) for its programme of courses. In a sector that is completely focused on safety, OPITO has become the global industries focal point for skills, training and workforce development.
“SNO is very proud to have achieved its OPITO approval this year, the approval came about in a phenomenal time frame and this wouldn’t have been possible without the combined efforts of both public and private joint venture partners. This will mean that we can service not only the growing needs of Ireland’s offshore sector, but train for the global industry as well”                Conor Mowlds, Managing Director SNO Ltd.

Colman Garvey, Co-Owner of SEFtec, Conor Mowlds, Managing Director of SNO, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation Batt O'Keeffe, and Darren O'Sullivan, Co-Owner SEFtec at the unveiling of the OPITO plaque at the SEFtec NMCI Offshore joint venture launch at the National Maritime College of Ireland in Ringaskiddy. Picture: Pascal Ungerer

SEFtec, an Irish SME with a global focus, commenced trading in 2004 and has quickly become one of the world’s leaders in the provision of offshore simulation equipment. Based in a state-of-the-art facility in Cork it has diversified its activities from the design and fabrication of offshore training simulation equipment to training and already operates an OPITO centre in Kazakhstan.
The NMCI, a public private partnership between the Cork Institute of Technology, Vita Lend Lease and the Irish Naval Service was opened in 2004, represents a €60 million investment by the state in maritime training, and is one of the world’s most advanced maritime colleges.

Delegates on the OPITO approved BOSIET - Offshore Training Course, at the National Maritime College in Ringaskiddy using the Helicopter Underwater Training Simulator, HUET systems are used to simulate a controlled crash landing by a helicopter onto water. Picture: Pascal Ungerer

The future aim of SNO is to break into the offshore renewable energy sector, with the development of their Offshore Wind Energy Safety Training course (OWEST) ear marked for further development.  The OWEST course currently involves Helicopter Winching Techniques, Life Saving Appliances and Vessel Abandonment which is key training for anyone working on or near Offshore Wind Energy Sites.

For further information visit www.seftec.ie or www.nmci.ie

Web Navigational Structure

Web Navigational Structure

4 Principles of Good Web Design

Making a website is not hard, making a user friendly website now that is a challenge! 

The 4 design principles of making a Website are proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast.  In order to understand these principles properly we need to understand;

How users interact with Web sites?

Eye tracking software shows how users are able to follow website design.

The Proximity here on the Fly Fishing Tackle UK site is very good as all the elements that relate to each other are grouped together.  As you can see here there is no odd spacing and all the space on the site is used very well.  

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Alignment can significantly affect the usability of the site and it can enhance or detract from the appearance of the site.  It is important to remember that a site that is lined up well will create a calm secure feeling.  Lack of alignment is the most prevalent problem on the web pages.

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Throughout the site you should repeat certain elements that tie all the disparate parts together.

Repetition elements that unify the entire site are:

• Navigation buttons
• Colors
• Style
• Illustrations
• Format
• Layout
• Typography

The repetition on this site would be the colour, shape of the buttons, thickness of lines and font.

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Contrasting elements guide your eyes into the page, create a hierarchy of information, and enable you to skim through the vast array of information and pick out what you need.

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Exploring the anti-social side of social media

A Los Angeles based journalist is taking part in an exhibition where she will live in a shop window for a month with social media as her only contact with the outside world.  She will be in the glass box for the entire month of November with Twitter, Facebook and Skype as the only ways to communicate with the outside world.  The rules of this exhibition that she has had to skype members of the press that are outside the window just to do an interview.  She is undertaking this challenge because she is sick of going out to dinner with friends that are constantly on their smartphones.  She is worried that people are just accepting all these forms of social media as the norm now and don’t even stop to think they might be bad for you.  The 3 things she misses most about the outside world are coffee, hugs and fresh air.  Prior to this challenge she has said that she had an active social life—both on and offline.

This initiative is all a part of The Public Isolation Project.  The Public Isolation Project consists of two symbiotic and simultaneous art pieces–Joshua Jay Elliott’s An Examinable Life and Cristin Norine’s The Future of Socializing.  An analog analogy of the contemporary experience of living in the Internet age.  

You can friend her on facebook, follow her on twitter, follow her blog and I’m sure she will be happy with the contact.

How to make 500 million friends...and alienate people.

 

So who exactly is Mark Zuckenberg?

If we learn anything from “The Social Network,” it is that there is no right or wrong answer.

Be it good or bad, “The Social Network,” certainly has caused extreme reactions.  Universal scepticism greeted its launch, which is a far cry from the Oscar buzz that now surrounds the film that has achieved a seemingly unattainable approval rating of 97% on the revered film review website “Rotten Tomatoes.” 

The movie follows Mark Zuckenberg, the only person in the world more socially awkward than the characters portrayed by Michael Cera, in the early years of what is now the most trafficked social-networking site on the internet. 

Aaron Sorkin, creator of “The West Wing” and “A Few Good Men,” based the screenplay for the film, in part, on Ben Mezrich's book “The Accidental Billionaires - The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.”  Like the film, the book is a self-confessed fiction fest. 

The film traces the story of Zuckenberg and Eduardo Saverin, Zuckenberg's close friend at Harvard who was the sole investor in Facebooks’ infancy.  When the company began making serious money, Saverin was edged out by an offer he couldn't refuse.  The movie is centred on a series of legal proceedings and flashbacks that involve the company’s co-founders.  It is a dialogue-driven piece, sprinkled with a little humour about the worldwide phenomenon that is Facebook.

Zuckenberg is your quintessential nerd, known in his Harvard days for reciting lines in public from his favourite eight century Trojan war poem “The Iliad.”  Mark is a student of the classics and his personal motto is said to be Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, loosely translated as, “Maybe one day we’ll look back on all this shit and laugh.”  I believe Mark would do exactly that if he ever got a chance to see the film about his life that he half-heartily tried to stop it in production.  Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin doesn’t seem to have any affection for Mark as he paints him as an abnormal, off-colour, peculiar person that can’t seem to form a lasting relationship with anyone he meets.  Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuckenberg, doesn’t seem to think much of him either, as he is being quoted as saying he researched Asperger's Syndrome, which is a form of autism where suffers have high levels of anxiety and confusion, for his portrayal of Zuckenberg.  Zuckenberg has never had any form of this syndrome and it was merely the actor taking creative license to make the actor more interesting and weird with little regard to the facts.

In one particular scene that annoys me, Zuckenberg is seen acting like a spoilt child, who was just told global warming destroyed the summer season, as he is sulking in a meeting with an ad executive and in another scene he is doodling with a scornful look on his face while he is being sued for millions by his best friend.  It should be pointed out here that this is the man who donated $100 million of his own personal wealth to Newark public school system, one of Americas’ worst school systems.  This is the sort of philanthropy that we normally only see from the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and certainly not form a spoilt brat; frankly, it’s great to see someone so young as Mark to have such a compassion for his fellow man.  The cynic here could point out that he made this donation a week before the release of the film as a smoke screen as the film doesn’t portray him in the most favorable manner. The donation could also be aimed at counteracting any negative stigma that could arise from his newly acquired lofty position of 35^th in the Forbes’s rich list.  Upon closer examination you will see that this donation was months in the making.  The only reason he went public with his donation was because the heads of the charity convinced him to do so in order for them to obtain a slot on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” where she announced to the world, “You wanted to remain anonymous and we talked you into coming on here." 

What really frustrated me about this film was we were lead to believe that if these guys just got laid more often we would never have had innovations such as Napster and Facebook – both of which are depicted in the film as being the reaction / over-reaction of a nerds attempt to overcome some unrequited love or failed relationship.  It is true that Zuckenberg did set up the site facemash.com  following his girlfriend breaking up with him but it is entirely untrue that his motivation to set up facebook was to become popular so she would take him back. 

In fact, he had a new girlfriend during the entire timeframe of the film and he wasn’t the hopeless loser that was jealous of his best friend Eduardo Saverin love life.

Here she is...... not bad :P

I believe that even if Zuckenberg had cooperated with Sorkin in the making of this film that not much of this film would have been changed as people don’t want to watch a film about a socially normal person that is down-to-earth and has lots of friends.  I feel that no matter what he was going to portray him as a “human stairmaster”, a frantic mess of a human being, as his girlfriend described him the first scene of the film.

So it's a shamelessly biased account, as well as a seductively plausible one.  What do you expect from a film based on the memories of those who claim he cheated them on his way to becoming a billionaire and backed up by transcripts from their lawsuits against Zuckenberg.