I’m excited! :D

I want 1pm on Saturday to be now, dang it!

Not only will I be starting my 2 week Easter holidays, which rock in themselves, but the specific time refers to when I’ll be starting my weekly class with CentreStage. If you didn’t read about it over the weekend, we’re putting on an end-of-year show in May, which I got a part in. I play Mr. Mushnik in “Little Shop of Horrors”, which heads to UCH on May 20th.

I love acting. I used to want to be an actor when I was all grow’d up, but reality soon caught up with up with me and I realized the impracticality of my meagre dream. Now I’ve got my sights on more manageable career choices, like a journalist or a blogging/online lecturer (not college, Mulley-style training stuff. As a matter of fact, my Mum’s company organizes training courses. They should go into business. Mullison inc. anyone?)

Getting back to the title, (musn’t meander, that’s what rivers do!)  even if I’ve given it up as a career choice, I still adore it as a pass-time, and I’m sure in 2020, when I’m deep in a training course on why we should be blogging, I’ll still be including anecdotes on that time when I was 14 and I starred in a production of Little Shop of Horrors…*

The part I love about these sorta shows (although I’ve never been in one in an acting/singing/speaking role. I’ve been a chorus guy though!) is the rehearsals. Those (warning: here be Thespian-speak) grueling six-hour long periods where you say the same line over again until you nail it, and then it’s time for line # 2. Those periods where you end up speaking with a Russian/Cockney/whatever accent for 6 months after the show finishes.

(Hang on, that wasn’t thespian speak! OK people, false alarm. Break for lunch for 15 and we’ll come back and try Scene 15 act 2 again…)

Back last July I did a 1 week course with the same people, where I ended up playing a psychopathic doctor, which was awesome. But my favourite part of that whole week was the hours spent shut up in a room with my two cast members that we spent messing around, trying on funny accents, making some great friendships, and maybe just maybe, if we get time, practicing our lines… :)

* How this links in with why we should be blogging, you figure out..!

Another day, another TT post. Not much has changed.

So, today was pretty unusual because I had 4 free classes in total. Add that to my epic tiredness this morning and you have one tired Tommy. I think it was the caffine I had late last night. Told you it was evil. I never had had tea before last night, and I can’t see myself having it in the next 14 years either. I mean, one can combat the bitterness by simply adding 3 spoonfuls of sugar (although this apparently isn’t done), but what you’re left with something that doesn’t really taste of.. anything really.

Basically, in one of my free classes, I felt my mind really wandering, and thinking of…

Toasters.

Remember when these were the pinnacle of technology? No, neither do I. Obviously, these probably were the bee’s knees and cat’s pajamas at some point. I don’t know about you, but they’re pretty ordinary to me.

I mean, they’ve been around for decades, so they have stood the test of time. Are they really necessary in today’s society? On the one hand, they’ve been around for decades now and fill up space in the kitchen (or place of work) instead of other, more useful contraptions. On the other hand, they make toast, a student favourite when combined with beans.

One thing I find with all toasters, regardless of model or whatever, is the useless settings. As far as I can see, all toasters have 4 settings:

Where the amount of heating is akin to:

1) breathing on the bread
2) putting the bread in a room which contains a warm radiator

Then you have the other end of the scale, with:

3) it burning
4) it being really burnt

I’m assuming the odd settings are present because you are able to buy different sized bread, thus requiring varying temperatures. Wouldn’t a 5mm thick piece require a different temperature to, say, a Russian Armour Plated, Anti-Personnel Loaf.

However,today’s society, when we have cameras in phones, alphabetti in spaghetti, why is the humble toaster so important and valued more than small children?

Why isn’t there a new and improved and sleeker machine to do it? Can we incorporate a toaster-cum-floppy-drive into Mac’s upcoming desktop?

I don’t know about you, but I’m not getting to sleep tonight, and it won’t be because of tea…

All these quizzing conundrums, my life is full of them!

Ugh, this post is going to take ages to do because I switched to Dvorak, which is a new keyboard layout. For my non-techy followers, dvorak switches around the keys of your keyboard to a new layout.

If you’re like all other people I’ve talked to, you’re probably wondering why anyone would want/bother to do something like this:

1. This is more a personal reason, but because of CP, my left hand is very weak. I know that everyone has a good hand and a bad but mine is especially weak. Dvorak has more commonly used keys on the left while Qwerty is the opposite. Basically, my left hand gets more action (not like that) because the common keys are on the left side.

2. Dvorak puts commonly used keys together. Qwerty was developed on/for the typewriter. one of the problems with the typewriter was that the keys were prone to sticking, so they didn’t place common keys together. When computers were invented, this problem wasn’t an issue, yet no-one did anything.

3. Key combinations are beside each other. ones like T and H or C and H make typing words like “that” or “choose” really nice. Having said that, there are some positionings that annoy me, like K and Y, but hopefully it’s just a case of practicing.

As for speed, on Qwerty I had a peak WPM (word-per-minute) speed of 49. That`s roughly halved since I switched. I’ve been 45 minutes writing this post.

I get really frustrated at this too. Dear family, if you happen to hear screams of anguish from my bedroom, I’m not in pain, I just can’t find the X key :)

Practice practice practice!

Oh wow – it’s almost 8pm and I haven’t done a post yet. The horror.

What have I been up to? I’ve been busy!

This morning, Patrick went back to Zurich, waking me up at an ungodly hour while he was showering. Honestly, who wakes up at 08:30 on a Saturday? :(

Then it was off to CentreStage in town, where we were handed our unofficial parts for our end-of-year show. They aren’t set in stone just yet but they won’t be changed unless there’s a big problem.

Our show is “Little Shop of Horrors”, a story set in 1960’s America, based on a story of a florist’s shop that becomes famous for having a new type of plant – new to mankind.

Our lead, Seymore, has discovered the plant and becomes a huge celebrity, bringing customers to the little shop on Skid Row.

A hugely funny play with some darker themes ingrained in the humour.

I play Mr. Mushnik, the owner of the florists where Seymore works. I’m a cantankerous, cranky old man who gets crabby very easily. Should be a fun part to play.

I’d say we’ll be rehearsing heavily over my Easter Holidays, with the show not eons away. The 10th of May is only a month and a bit away. Might seem like a lot but when you’re rehearsing for a play you have no prior experience with – it goes by pretty quick!

With rehearsals to add to my list of to-do’s over Easter, my holidays are becoming quite busy actually. Dublin twice, having a group of people over one weekend and rehearsals for CentreStage will mean I have quite few “lazy days”. Ah well, they do tend to drag a bit.

Since I’ll be finished up school very soon after the show – not more than 2 weeks, I’ve began to make plans for the summer. We usually go to France and I’ve got an(other) acting course at the start of July, I’ve tried to get stuff to do.

Inspired by Damien Mulley looking for internships, I’ve decided to do the same. This might sound weird from someone who’s only 14 but reading some of the comments on the “Me” post, I’ve come to realise that diversity and being different aren’t important on the net. Doesn’t matter whether you’re tall, small, fat, thin, dark-skinned or light-skinned or anything in between! So, I’m offering my expertise as a blogger and as a teenager heavily involved with all things internet. I feel I could really bring something new to the table as someone younger (but not less-skilled) than people would be used to. Give me a call or drop me an email if you’re interested, or know someone who might be. Deets on my contact page. (Look up)

Recently, internet giant Google decided to take GMaps to the next level and roll out Google StreetView. While GMaps was heralded as being ‘the next big thing’, Google StreetView (GSV) has stirred up some controversy.

Basically – people have been saying that they’re uncomfortable with every street being photographed. What if X went into an adult shop/other embarrassing place, then their image would be on GSV forever and for the whole world to see!

The Luddites of this world – those who don’t like the advances of technology because they fear for a big robot invasion – feel that GSV is a bad idea. “What about our privacy?” they say.

Hand me the can opener for the worms, there.

I’m not entirely sure where I stand on this, so as I write this, I’m unsure of the conclusion I’m going to draw. Let’s just go through and state some simple facts about GSV:

Firstly, all pictures taken by the GSV team are taken from the public roads. i.e they haven’t stepped onto private property to take these, so all that appears in the photos can be seen from anyone driving along. I guess what people are against is the permanency, yet millions of tourists visit Ireland annually, and I’m sure people’s houses get caught in some of the pictures they take, so it’s probably not that. I suppose with Google as big as it is, it could be the simple fact that lots of people will be using this and will see X in his compromising situation.

Getting back to X and his adult store/other-embarressing-place, there isn’t a huge issue here, as Google, being the gentlemen they are (take this as a joke if you wish, I’m easy :P) have agreed to blur out faces, car licence plates, and other embarrassing little whatnots. Not good enough? Of course, with technology as good as it is, it’s now possible to completely remove you from the image. That still not good enough for you? Forgive me, but I’m going to bring in a James Bond solution to this story:

In 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, James Bond wishes to identify an assassin he saw at the baddies’ place. Deep in the bowels of Q’s workshop, there’s an “identigraph”, which is exactly what it says on the tin. It allows you to describe the person in question, with face size, descriptions, etc. and then eventually it runs it against police files to give you a match.

That was 1981. Technology has come a long long way. What we can do now is remove X from the street outside the adult store/other-embarrassing-place and replace him with a completely random person that’s no-one from their picture-taking. It’s someone who Google just created for the purpose of saving X’s dignity.

I was chatting with someone on MSN about this, and we agreed that you do sacrifice some privacy by simply going outside your house. By being in public, you do relinquish the right not to be photographed. With our millions of tourists, you can’t exactly tell or force them not to not to take pictures.

So, we’ve reached the end. In my opinion, this should go ahead, because they’re going to remove anything compromising, and if you do that, where’s the issue?

EDIT ~ 18:58: I’ve been through GSV pretty thoroughly, but what I neglected to mention was the innumerable benefits. Say if you were booking a hotel, sure you can read what it’s like, but if you’ve never been to Shanghai before, how do you know what the area’s like? Is it rough? Are there plenty of facilities around? How far is it actually to the metro?

You can only really acurately answer these questions by driving down the street. Since you can’t do that until you arrive, GSV is a very handy tool for finding these things out.

It’s almost like a public service!

Update ~ 19:56: I showed Patrick this point and he had some points:

* There’s a difference between a tourist taking a photo and GSV making a 3D map of your area.

True – I mean, if I punch someone on the street, and a tourist snaps a picture with that happening in the background, it’s hardly important. Whereas if GSV get it, it’ll be seen by so many more people. This’d be an issue if Google didn’t blur out your face and any other distinguishing marks.

* So, we now have a service that we can search location. What’d happen if we made a service that searches people?

There’d be uproar. People just would not stand for it. It’d be about as successful as new coke

Those who were at the Irish Blog Awards 2009 or those who saw the Blog Awards photos would have noticed that I had a sexy hat.

It wasn’t actually mine. Darren Byrne loaned me it and I never really got around to returning it. He eventually did steal it back next morning though.

Well, recently, I have procured a new and equally sexy hat from a good pal of mine, so I’ve been wearing that all the time these days. I’ve stopped short of wearing it to school though. It doesn’t go well with turquoise and I somehow doubt that sexy hats are part of the uniform. Hmm..

This hat isn’t my first hat though. Neither was the IBA hat actually. Nope, back when John was in hospital with viral meningitus last November, I found a similar hat back then…

Tommy’s hats; a gallery

First up, the cardboard-sick-bowl look, and the bored expression. Going for durability rather than looks, this hat compliments steak or any full-bodied fish those who prefer something custimizable, or simply something that you wouldn’t mind turning upside down and getting sick in.

Secondly, the Indiana Jones look. This wide-brimmed black fedora compliments the blogger, who, mike in hand, likes to leave a lasting impression. If you judge a man by his clothes, this hat simply screams “this is a guy who means business” :)

Finally, you have hat #3, a more reserved version of the Jones look. While the second hat may be very extroverted and generally outgoing, this one is more cool, calm and sophisticated.

And sexy :P

Just sent off a letter to the editors of the Irish Times and the Irish Independent in regard to the whole Eircom scandal and #picturegate. Don’t know if it’ll be published in either paper but hey, you can read it here and at least I know the editor of this blog well and I know for sure it’ll be published anseo :)
__

Dear Madam

Tommy Collison

__

I was keeping it short and snappy in the letter to increase my chances of it getting published but now I can expand on my points a bit.

Firstly, my jibe about Eircom: I blogged about this. I don’t download music, and Eircom don’t provide me with internet, so this doesn’t really affect me, but I’m against it on principle. I mean, we don’t allow dictatorships in Ireland – yet Eircom will happily let people walk all over them and list sites that they dislike.

Eircom are invertebrates.

Second issue I rose was #picturegate. I mean, talk about making a mountain out a molehill. There’s a phrase:

Never wrestle with a pig, as you’ll both get dirty but the pig will enjoy it

By everyone talking about it and it trending on Twitter and the blogosphere going nuts over it, the artist is getting tons of publicity that he wouldn’t otherwise be getting had the gallery just taken the picture off display and not made such a hullaballoo.

First the David Ervine thing in January ‘07 and now all this with Brian Cowen nude in the gallery.

People are tweeting all about it by using the (hilarious) hashtag #picturegate

Qwerks. I haz many

Remember back with 7 things, I mentioned how I’m organized? This is true, mostly. I mean, I always have the right books for class and all, but there is one section of my life that’s never really clean, tidy and organized

My bedroom.

I’m one of those people who feels that their bedroom is their own private space, to be kept however they wish. I mean, the relatives aren’t going to be eating dinner in *my* room, are they?

Apparently, they are, as my Mum disagrees.

OK, I’ll come clean. I’ll turn traitor towards all other teenagers, and I’ll say: I secretly like my room being tidy.

This is for a number of reasons, both practical and not-so-practical, rational and irrational. Practical ones include my-lack-of good balance, which means it’s easy to trip over stuff on the floor. Not-so-practical reasons are basically the fact that I’m slightly compulsive.

It’s not OCD, I don’t have my entire day on a printed schedule. Along with needing my bedroom clean, I also have other stuff that I really need.

I hate sleeping with the door open. It’s not this thing of being scared that the boogy-man will come charging in, (as we all know from our youth that mere doors are not strong enough to contain the monster), nah, it’s just this thing I have. Patrick has it too, whereas John and Mum dislike it, showing what a diverse family we are. It’s so strong, in fact, that say if I’m asleep, and I steal something off John, as I have been known to do. He’ll come looking for it, disregarding the lateness of the hour, and he’ll come barging into my room at 3am, which *he* is known to do, to try and find it. He’ll spot what he’s looking for and then bugger off, neglecting to close the door

I’m left there, dazed and confused, a victim of night-time tit-for-tat robbery. Even then, though, a little independent cog in my brain will be moving.

It won’t be moving, actually, it’ll be whirring, because whirring is what cogs do, “moving” just isn’t cool any more.

So, it’ll be whirring away, and it’ll take a peek outside my head and it’ll notice the open door. A big flashing buzzer will go off in the innermost depths of my brain, accompanied by a big feck-off alarm bell. Now, I’ll do anything to shut that effing thing up, including getting out of bed at 3am and closing the door. The alarm stops, the buzzer will recede into the ceiling and the whirring cog will return to standby mode, just waiting for the next thing it doesn’t like.

So, today was a big day. I gave a 20 minute presentation to my class about blogging, what it is, and why we should do it

I had a big fight with PowerPoint, because I wanted to use Keynote so I could have my Apple Remote to change through slides. I managed to get Keynote fully unlocked on Mum’s laptop last night by getting a serial, but my own computer still wouldn’t let me save Keynotes I created.

So, last night, at about 10:30, I began my Keynote on Mum’s laptop. I got it finished, but it was late, so I forgot to save it. I also forgot to plug in her laptop, and at about 3am last night, the battery was empty and it shut down. Guess what was lost? Yeah, my presentation. Ugh.

So, this morning, I go to school, verify my laptop is still in the office and went to class. Second period was religion which I’m exempt from. I grab my laptop from the office and head to the GPA. My plan is:

To do the thing in Keynote (from scratch), copy it over to Powerpoint and present it.

Sounds simple, but that was when it began to fall apart at the seams, like a cheap pair of counterfeit jeans.

First epicfail was my forgetting that getting Macs and Windows to talk to each other is like getting Bush and Fidel to have a tea party together. It’s the age-old conundrum of the square peg and the round hole. I needed a special connector-doodah to connect my MacBook to the projector of the ICT room. I looked at home and found one I thought would work but didn’t.

Second epicfail was that I thought I had Powerpoint installed on my computer, but didn’t.

I discovered this about 15 minutes before I began my talk. Thank god my mum wasn’t with me, I’d have been clipped round the ear for the language I used, albeit under my breath. I thought for a moment and then it hit me.

Why did I need powerpoint?

I mean, I’m not one of those freaks of nature who put tons of cheap animations in their PPTs, making the message unreadable. I’m not even one of those people who puts tons of text in their slides, preferring to use PPTs for pictures only (visual aids) and leave the talking to the person. All my slides were literally a heading, or an image. In two or three slides it was both, but no other text.

So I screencapped my entire presentation. 25 CMD+Shift+4 ’s later, I had my slides in JPG form. Now all I had to do was make a slideshow of the images and play them on the teacher’s laptop, which hooked up to the projector.

I thought this’d be simple, but it wasn’t. At first I thought I’d be able to simply email the pictures. Because gMail doesn’t allow the emailing of folders (from the web interface, at least), I compressed it into a .zip folder and emailed that. Before today, I would’ve sworn Windows could handle standard .zip files like that. Turns out I was wrong.

I began to email the pictures to myself to access from the teacher’s laptop in a minute when I spotted a memory card on the desk.

* Yoink! *

* Steals *

So, now I had all the pictures on the Windoze laptop, I simply put them on slideshow and waited for my class. I also took out my phone and began a timer for when I began speaking. I wanted people to start their blogs in this class so I couldn’t talk for too long. I don’t like eating waffles and listening to one ain’t so great either.

After settling down the class and turning my phone on silent after an earlier text from Liv came in and made the phone go * PING!*, I began my timer and started talking. I talked for 11:08:92 and questions lasted 08:34:54, and then got the class creating their blogs on Blogger. Not out of some perverse gratitude (I was TrustTommy.blogspot.com for 7ish months) but simply because WordPress.com was blocked. Dang.

So, all in all, my first blogging talk went excellently. To be honest, I didn’t really expect anyone to be massively interested as blogging was never a popular school-yard topic among the 13 year-olds, but I found this class to be very good. Actively engaging me and probing the subject of blogging further than I had planned to go. We went through a lot I hadn’t thought important enough to go through – like copyright.

I don’t know how many blogs were set up today because as soon as they got past the registration stage, the school web filter’s sentries shot them down for being “personal websites”. Authority stopping the progress of knowledge and learning, yet again. (Not blaming the school here. As someone who hangs round with the IT teachers, I found out that they have little enough control over such things. They don’t even have access to allowed/banned sites! Sites (like mine) have to allowed remotely, via filling in a web-form with the censor people)

All in all, a success.