Of The Ordinary

I regret many things that I haven’t done in my life. This is mainly a result of me being awfully lazy and not bothering to get up off the sofa or in front of the computer, which just happens to be what I have been doing for the past four hours.

Unfortunately I am cursed with a good memory. It might be handy sometimes but it does mean that I get flashbacks from when I was as young as three of me doing things that I regret now and even being too afraid, shy or nervous to do thing, which leaves a lot to be desired. This leaves a constantly unfulfilled feeling. Perhaps this is why as we get older we tend to be less able to remember things that have happened in the past.

I am writing this because my school produce a play each year with Transition Year and 5th Year students and I got the opportunity to audition for a role in the play with the promise of a backstage job if I didn’t get an on-stage roll. Now I really regret not auditioning, I am pretty confident that had I auditioned I would have gotten a part in it but alas laziness got the better of me as ever. Admittedly it was made harder by the fact that I was unable to get alternative transport home the day if the auditions but I should have at least approached one of the teachers involved and asked if it would be possible to get an audition at an alternative date. Alas I was too lazy too do so and therefore didn’t get a part.

Now that rehearsals are in full swing and all the backstage jobs are fulfilled and as usual I really regret not doing it now that its too late. You would think I would learn from past experience but no, again I have missed the boat and bitterly regret it.

By the constant appearance of questions on Yahoo Answers on what to do I have concluded that other people must face the same dilemmas I face. I also concluded from the answers that most people are also indecisive and most likely lazy too, or at least this is what I hope is true. In my research for this post, merely by searching for web pages on Google, I have seen many people speaking of their regrets and their misfortune due to laziness.

I do wish that I could go back and change the series of events that happened and not just the auditions either, there are many situations that I wish had not happened and would change with the opportunity but I guess if this was true everyones life would be perfect and we would not be at such a seemingly advanced stage in the evolutionary cycle as so many inventions have come from the misfortune of their inventors.

I do however think that I can eventually overcome this by persisting in everything I do. I hope to achieve this before the end of this school year because going into 5th year I will need all the willpower to do work that I can and there is no place for laziness in the years coming up to an exam.

We all seem to have an increasing portfolio of internet services that we use daily from email to social networking. With all these accounts online that have to be accessed even when you are offline personally there needs to be somewhere to store all this data and this data is stored on servers. A side effect of all your info being stored on someone else’s server is that how do you know who owns your data, who is authorised to use that content and more importantly who can authorise it. I was reading through the terms of service of a few social networking and media sharing (eg. photo sharing) and none of them gave you full rights to ‘your’ files and information stored on their services.

So who owns your info and controls access to it? Well at the lowest level the company/people who provide the service, they have almost full access to your data. Then above them there is their service provider, called a carrier, they control access to the company your data is hosted with so if they want something invariably they will get it. Then at the top level you have the main service providers IANA (who controls IP addresses and VeriSign (main DNS servers), these guys can cut access to almost anyone, of course that is almost never going to happen because they would need a very important reason to cut access but ultimately they are under the US jurisdiction and as such are subject to the US government.

As a result of this I will conclude the people who own your information is not you but the US government. And yet no one has been disconnected in that case for anything by IANA and VeriSign so its not likely to happen to anyone else, but be careful about who is watching your information!

You’ll see it on the side of trucks, branded items like pens. Most businesses have email and websites now, but nothing annoys me more than when I see a business that has a domain name but an email address like my-company@random-isp.com. These are the companys that don’t realise that there is such a thing as email forwarding. There is now a brilliant free email service called Google Apps. This service allows you to combine all of your services in one great package. All of google’s services like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Pages for all of your collaboration needs. If you own or are in a company that does this please ask you boss to have a look at this post!

I am really interested in robots and that whole side of technology. Will robots become humanesque servants which will fetch drink, food or anything else you desire? And what about if they become more dextrous, will they replace humans in manufacturing making things cheaper but making people lose their jobs? I don’t think we have entirely considered what may happen in future and what effect it will have on society. It is a bit like oil companys paying for resarch to not happen in alternative fuels, they don’t want it to happen so that they will not lose out on the money they currently make. Hopefully any jobs would be changed into some way to make sure people weren’t left unemployed.

I recently have become disillusioned by the fact that sport is regarded highly as a talent. Why is it that physical activity (eg. Football) is seen to be a better talent than IT skills? In the Irish economy at the moment there are not enough people with degrees in IT, so why are those who foster their IT skills early called lazy? I am particularly annoyed at the fact that even Irish dancing is considered a better talent. A teacher spent a whole class talking to two students in class about irish dancing and how much it costs. Well ask me what all of my computer equipment costs and it’ll end up at least three times as much as their dresses. So next time you are thinking about a geek, just think of the talent behind the front.

Today I had to finish about 7 days work (actual days not spread over that) in about 4 hours and failed miserably. Why did this happen, I hear you ask. Well, it’s because I am lazy. I am a lazy git who cannot be bothered to leave the TV to do five minutes work, instead leaving it until the last minute! I am now tired, angry (at myself for being so stupid) and still not finished my work! This work is a maths folder with hundreds of 3 variable simultaneous equations in. They’re easy but take a long time. This wouldn’t have happened had I have just done as told each night and done the stupid thing, it would have been done and dusted, but I am lazy.

From now on I am going to attempt to make like a Nike commercial and “Just Do It!” This way when it comes to the deadline I amn’t panicing like a headless chicken!

Today my fears were confirmed, some of the teachers in my school are completly insane. The fire alarm went off during the school. Panic did not ensue, we all just walked outside and merged at the designated assembly point and formed into our groups. Then the fire alarm in the main building was switched off and classes returned to class. Unfortunately I was outside in the prefabs where the fire alarms refused to stop sounding. So what did the teacher tell us to do? No, we didn’t stand outside and wait for the alarms to be switched off. We went into the prefab and started class, despite being unable to hear anything.

I don’t think this a problem confined to my school. All over Ireland people seem to ignore fire alarms when they go off. We seem to take the attitude that someone will go around and call into your classroom or office shouting “FIRE! ALL OUT!”. Unfortunately this is far from the reality and we should evacuate the classrooms or offices immediately. Even if the fire alarms do go off out of fault from time to time.

During the summer I was forced into a situation where I needed to get a cheap phone fast on Pay As You Go. Thankfully O2 and The Carphone Warehouse had the perfect phone for me at the time, the Motorola W230. It was just €29 and had the ability to call and text people.

Now that just isn’t enough for me, having previously had a Sony Ericsson K530i phone on the Three network, being able to access the internet using Opera Mini at dirt cheap prices (about 14c per MB compared to 14c per KB on O2) and Windows Live Messenger for free was sorely missed. So now I am planning to get a Nokia 6288 on the Three network to get that connection back. Twitter 24/7. My parents were a bit reserved about this, they are of the opinion that mobile phones are for calling and texting.

I wanted to know if you agree with them, or are modern phones not really a phone rather than a communication tool which can email, tweet, blog, read rss and many other functions? And what do you use your phone for? Tweets, blogging, email, to-dos, memos or anything I missed?

Last week I had to give a presentation to my Biology class with ideas for our Green Schools committee, for this I made a nice PowerPoint presentation (of course, using OpenOffice). The presentation contained three slides which I thought covered the topic well, particularly as we only had ten minutes to present it and most of it would go to questions.

We got a chance to rehearse thirty minutes before the event but when my teacher saw how few slides there were she got a tad annoyed and asked “Is this all?”. I tried to figure out how to respond because teachers are tricky beings and seem to have a smart comeback to everything. I responded, admittedly it was probably in a defensive tone, saying “That’s how I was told to do presentations, with each slide just outlining the points.” And here is her comeback “I know your interested in technology, but making presentations is my job!” This statement annoyed me a lot! Her job is to teach not to make presentations. So I wish to pose you 3 questions:

1. Should presentations just outline the points or should you put most of what you want to say into it?
2. Is a teachers job to teach or is it to make presentations?
3. Am I just a moany git?

I am very interested to hear some responses to this. Please leave a comment!