Dennis Deery

Growing up in southwest Wisconsin, tornado watches and warnings were a constant feature of summer life. As a little kid, I can remember trips to the basement to wait out the storm, and when I got a little older I got to join Dad on tornado watch for the local volunteer fire department. I can still vividly remember the night the tornado hit Barneveld, Wisconsin, and the phone rang in the middle of the night calling for ambulance volunteers.

Our 11-year old niece Heather has been playing violin professionally with The Clauson Family Music Show for the past couple of years. Quite an accomplishment for such a young lady, but this past weekend she topped it. Heather, along with dad Steve and mom Vicky went to the Country USA Music Festival in Oshkosh. They got to see Alan Jackson, Carrie Underwood and a number of other big name performers. But Steve emailed the highlight of the weekend:

One of the things we had to adjust to when we moved to Ireland was taking our own cloth shopping bags to the grocery store. Why? Well, Ireland levies a €0.15 tax on plastic grocery bags, so every time we forgot to take our own (a lot, at first), we had to spend 30 or 45 cents to buy plastic bags. We’ve since gotten in the habit, and so no longer have to buy plastic bags, and thus no longer consume more scarce natural resources for both making the bags and then disposing of them.

Social media is big in the tech business these days. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Twitter are just some of the companies at the forefront of using the web to connect us. Blogs count too. Just what is it? According to Wikipedia, “Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives.” Got that? Don’t worry, nobody else does either. Assemble 10 tech consultants in a room and ask for their definition and you’ll be presented with 15 different explanations.

This past weekend we made a visit to County Cork to check out the little village of Cobh. Kathleen has a group of students visiting, so her helper on the trip, Dana, joined us for the day. We had been to Cobh for a brief visit shortly after we moved here, but decided it was worth checking out again. We’re glad we did, as we found much more to see on this visit than the last one.

Dyson, the company famed for a very expensive vacuum cleaner, has a new product called the Dyson Airblade. They aim to revolutionize the hand-dryer market. It’s hard to believe there’s room for innovation in a market like that, isn’t it? And yet, they’ve done it. I recently used one of their dryers in a public bathroom at a convention center in Dublin. It works, and we all know that’s unusual for a forced-air hand-dryer.

The Wisconsin Historical Society has long held sales of photos from their archives, generally in a once- or twice-a-year sale in Madison. I’ve gotten several gems from these sales in the past. But now they’ve moved their sales online, and in the process greatly expanded the items available. The pic to the right is the first Wisconsin State Capitol in my hometown, Belmont. Click on the pic to get your very own copy!

Wonder where your federal tax dollars go? A freelance graphic designer by the name of Jess Bachman has designed a poster that shows in simple form the breakdown of the federal budget. It’s a great example of graphic design being well-used to present a ton of information, and it’s a simple way to envision what the federal government is spending your money on. Check it out.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by the editor of Start magazine, a free arts and culture monthly published here in southeast Ireland. He was doing a story on a series of lunchtime concerts being held in St. Iberius Church in Wexford, a beautiful 300-year old church. He searched online and found the photo above that I had taken on a visit to the church, and contacted me to ask if he could use it.

This past weekend Kathleen and I were in Dublin for a couple of events. We managed a short visit to the Street Performance World Championship in Merrion Square. Though we didn’t get to see much of the show, we did see part of the final performance by the Space Cowboy, who won the competition for the second year in a row. The Space Cowboy is from Australia and actually earns a living as a street performer.

The Wisconsin Arts Board has come out with a new study showing the impact the arts have on local economies. According to the report, “in 2005, Wisconsin’s non-profit arts industry generated over 15,000 full-time jobs and $61,840,000 in state and local government revenue. Cumulatively, the arts contributed $418,055,786 in total economic activity.” The Wisconsin Arts Board hopes to use the report’s findings to improve public funding for the arts in Wisconsin.

“Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.

http://www.dataplace.org/

Our good friend Laura has been busy helping to organize a meal in a wheat field on Washington Island. The meal was held to launch a summer of culinary events at the Washington Hotel. The Hotel was involved in the return of wheat-growing to Washington Island, which has been a fantastic rural development initiative. I had the honor of handing the Washington Island folks their honorable mention award during Wisconsin Rural Partners’ Top Rural Development Initiatives award ceremony in 2006.

[ Click to buy from Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1416534652/irishroseconsult) A couple of months ago we stopped in the town of Wexford on a Saturday when their book festival was being held. Author Colm Tóibín was doing a reading, but we were unable to stick around until he was up. I found a couple of his non-fiction books, Bad Blood and Sign of the Cross, purchased them and left them to be signed and mailed to us.

The University of Wisconsin has created an online digital collection displaying all Blue Books since the the very first in 1853. The Blue Book is the almanac of Wisconsin state government. This is a great resource for history buffs, and includes many old maps and photographs. It’s also a fine demonstration of the power of the internet to make public resources more available to people. State of Wisconsin Blue Book Collection

Wired magazine’s web site has an illustration showing gas prices around the world. From a low of $0.17 in Venezuela to a high of $6.65 in London, there’s quite a range. Gas prices are always a hot topic for us here in Ireland - we’re currently sitting at $5.92 after a recent rise. Thank god the island is so small, we don’t do nearly the driving we did in Wisconsin!

Have you got all your important phone numbers stored in your cellphone? Have you forgotten every phone number you ever knew because it’s programmed into your cellphone? Do you have those numbers backed up someplace? Probably not. If you lose your cellphone, or you run it through the washing machine, or it dies some other horrible death, you’re going to lose those numbers. We had a close call with that recently in the Deery household, so I was happy to learn about a new cellphone backup service from a company called ZYB.

“At 10:14 EDT, CBS affiliate KOTV (Tulsa, OK) reported that a lightning strike had caused a fire at an Oklahoma refinery–sparking a flurry of excitement among energy traders and boosting U.S. crude prices 40 cents.” Does it really make sense to base so much of an economy on such a volatile market? With the oil market in such unstable shape, we’re really just waiting for the disaster that shoves things over the edge.

A company called Meeting Tomorrow is offering the service of delivering projectors and other audio-visual equipment for use in meetings and presentations. They can do same-day delivery for many locations. When you’re done with the equipment, pack it up and FedEx returns it for you. Having struggled with less-than-ideal AV setups for presentations all over the country, I think this service is going to be a big hit.