Little Becky - The Young Irish Prank Caller

This Friday's blog I wanted to start with an "oldie but still goodie" audio clip. It's an audio of a young (8 or 9 year old) Irish girl making a prank call requesting to demolish her school. This dates back to early 2006 (can you believe it's been almost 4 years?), but many have not heard it, and those who have are sure to enjoy it all over again.

Rebecca Barry from Dublin Ireland is widely known as "little Becky." She was made famous with some of the prank calls she made for Dublins’s 98FM breakfast show. Show hosts Dermot Whelan and Dave Moore discovered her when she was just 5 years old and singing at her Dad’s office Christmas party close to the radio station. They consequently invited Becky to sing on their Christmas show, and started doing so from then on.

The prank calls started when Becky and her mother would go to 98FM's studio to record the calls that will be played the following week. “I sit in a room with my mam and talk to people on the phone. I have earphones on, and Dermot and Dave tell me what to say in my ear if I get stuck.” Says Becky to Irish Times journalist Róisín Ingle.

Little Becky has called a demolition company to help demolish her school, called a zoo, one about a driving test and a few others. Searching online, you can even find reports of her calling a wedding planner for help marrying her cat and dog, but the wedding planner refused to give permission for the radio station to air it.



By far, her most famous one is the demolition company one you can hear above. You can find this particular audio clip all over YouTube, but John T Edwards' site appears to be the source of her internet fame. It's also where you can find many of little Becky's prank calls, and even her TV interview on Irish TV show.  ▣

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Comic - Lady Luck

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Weird Houses Around the World

I've come across many pictures of houses and buildings with unusual and even weird & bizarre architecture. I'm posting a few of them here, but the links after the images are definitely worth checking out.

Can they even buy flood insurance for this place?

What happens here during hurricane season?

Who's the small house (bottom left) for? And is there living space through the rock (there are no windws!)?

I'm hoping this is a cropped photo and underneath that ladder there's a ledge or something. Still, that's one hell of a workout to get up to the house. How do you carry groceries up there? Ummm, furniture?

I know this isn't a house, but I'm curious to know what would happen if the occupants were to hear branch crack.

Someone isn't worried about global warming. And what about turning on any source of heat?!

Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

This adds a whole new meaning to the phrase "tree house." Something is ironic about the fact that they seem to be growing flower up there.

Although this is not architectural in nature, this one (original link here) is my favorite. Isabelle de Beaufort and Bernard Ramus created a maze in Cordes-sur-Ciel, France with a house hiding inside.

I urge you to check out other unusual, weird and bizarre houses and buildings from around the World here and here.  ▣

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Shrinking Long URLs with Bit.ly and J.mp

The URL shortener space is getting increasingly crowded, with a ton of new and existing companies bringing their offerings to the table. A few come to mind like: is.gd, tr.im, cli.gs and TinyURL. Although not yet for public consumption, Google has even launched its own service called Goo.gl. Google's launch comes on the heels of Facebook having quietly launched its own URL-shortening service called FB.me. Heading there in your browser simply takes you to Facebook's home page, whereas sharing links through Facebook's mobile site will shorten them for you using a shortened FB.me URL. Surprisingly, I've not seen much from Facebook about their new service.

As usual, I digree.

The one service I've failed to mention, and the one that I use the most ... the focus of today's article is bit.ly. Actually, I use the bit.ly powered j.mp, which's two characters shorter. J.mp ("jump") is in fact bit.ly but with a shorter domain name. You can learn more about it here. And in a World where every character counts (especially on the likes of Twitter), j.mp with the power of bit.ly is the best all around URL-shortener (IMHO, of course).

Although I use bit.ly's j.mp domain, I will be referring to the parent company, bit.ly, from here on.

Besides the basic functionality of shortening URLs, it also provide feature for URL analysis. You can track number of clicks, locations, referrers, time of clicks for any bit.ly URL without having to register, login or install any software. Bit.ly also offers customizable URLs, tracking, 301 redirection and a mobile version among many other features.

Bit.ly is trying to stay ahead of the competition with products like bitly.tv (more on that in a few) and bit.ly Pro, which currently allows a limited set of beta users to create their own branded short URLs. In essence, white-labeling the URL shortening service.

Bitly.tv displays a collage of the most-linked videos (through bit.ly) of the moment. Users can also sort by the top videos from the last day or the last two days. The site looks really slick and is well presented. When you click on a video, a light-box pops out, which plays the video as well as displays a variety of sharing options (Facebook, Twitter, e-mail) and shows a live stream of tweets about that piece of content. The live stream is especially compelling since you can see what other people are saying about the video as you formulate your own opinion.

In addition to powering Twitter (replacing TinyURL), bit.ly is baking into its Web service the Yfrog picture-sharing service made by Imageshack. Yfrog competes with other Twitter-friendly image-sharing services such as Twitpic. Imageshack is what power all of ahmadism.com's image hosting needs for free. For users who want to create easy short links to images they upload from their computers, the integration with Yfrong will be a bit of a time-saver. Also, users will get the real-time click through data from their images on the bit.ly site.

Bit.ly also announced on its blog that Google Reader and Typepad now generate bit.ly links natively.

I'm sure I've only revealed a few of bit.ly's offerings. For example, I know that bit.ly provides a very neat API. If you’re as API driven and like to automate the tasks around you, you’ll be happy to know that there is a new open data table that can shorten URL’s using YQL.

But let's go back to the stats feature for a minute. Did you know that if you put a + (plus) sign at the end of any bit.ly URL, it immediately goes to the info page for that link, displaying all those juicy stats, as opposed to the link itself? For example, for url "http://bit.ly/8ifP7w", open url "http://bit.ly/8ifP7w+", this will redirect to "http://bit.ly/info/8ifP7w" and show all the statistics for this shortened url.

With all this talk about shrinking long URLs, and being a cynic & a skeptic, made me want to see where some of these shortened URLs go before I click on them. Enter a bookmarklet. If you know me, you shouldn't be surprised at the introduction of a bookmarklet.

Get Long URLs

Simply drag the "Get Long URLs" link above to your browser toolbar. Alternatively to dragging and dropping, you could right-click the link and click "Bookmark This Link" in Firefox (my browser of choice), or "Add to Favorites..." in IE. Of course, IE will present you with some blocks to running them, which's why most serious-net-browsers do not use IE.

Short URLs generated by URL shortening services say little about the landing site but this bookmarklet can rewrite all short links on a web page so you know exactly where those links are pointing to. Once bookmarked (in your bookmarks), and you're on a page that that has a shortened URL (like a Twitter page, an email, etc.), click on the bookmarklet and it will convert all those shortened URLs back to their source giving you visibility to the destination.

Do you use a URL shortener? Which one? Tell us in the comments.
ahmadism.com is not affiliated in any way with bit.ly or any other URL shortener. This article was written solely out of experience with the various tools.  ▣

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The Circus

Today, I wanted to share a story with you. This inspirational story is not my own, but it's amongst the many I've come across. Many of the others are commonly heard, and I felt that this one is often not. I hope you find this to be an inspiration & a good start to your Monday, your week perhaps even a story to set the tone for the year.


Once when I was a teenager, my father and I were standing in line to buy tickets for the circus. Finally, there was only one family between us and the ticket counter.

This family made a big impression on me. There were eight children, all probably under the age of 12. You could tell they didn't have a lot of money. Their clothes were not expensive, but they were clean.

The children were well-behaved, all of them standing in line, two-by- two behind their parents, holding hands. They were excitedly jabbering about the clowns, elephants and other acts they would see that night. One could sense they had never been to the circus before. It promised to be a highlight of their young lives.

The father and mother were at the head of the pack standing proud as could be. The mother was holding her husband's hand, looking up at him as if to say, "You're my knight in shining armor." He was smiling and basking in pride, looking at her as if to reply, "You got that right."

The ticket lady asked the father how many tickets he wanted. He proudly responded, "Please let me buy eight children's tickets and two adult tickets so I can take my family to the circus."

The ticket lady quoted the price. The man's wife let go of his hand, her head dropped, the man's lip began to quiver. The father leaned a little closer and asked, "How much did you say?"

The ticket lady again quoted the price. The man didn't have enough money.

How was he supposed to turn and tell his eight kids that he didn't have enough money to take them to the circus?

Seeing what was going on, my dad put his hand into his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill and dropped it on the ground. (We were not wealthy in any sense of the word!) My father reached down, picked up the bill, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me, sir, this fell out of your pocket."

The man knew what was going on. He wasn't begging for a handout but certainly appreciated the help in a desperate, heartbreaking, embarrassing situation. He looked straight into my dad's eyes, took my dad's hand in both of his, squeezed tightly onto the $20 bill, and with his lip quivering and a tear streaming down his cheek, he replied, "Thank you, thank you, sir. This really means a lot to me and my family."

My father and I went back to our car and drove home. We didn't go to the circus that night, but we didn't go without.

Author-Unknown  ▣

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