Trust Tommy

I first set this as a thread up over on Youth Discussion, but I began thinking about it more and more and decided I had a lot to say on the subject.

Public Speaking should be taught as a compulsory subject in school. Patrick, ma bruvver, started this idea first, but now that I’m giving blogging presentations and even internships, I realise just how important being able to communicate well is.

This is going to sound so like an angsty teenager, but so much of school is geared toward getting you through the Leaving Cert, and not toward life *outside* and *after* school. I mean, trigonometry is all very well, and will most likely come up in all major exams, but after that, unless I specifically choose a career that involves trig, I can’t see myself needing it.

More of what is taught in school should be helping you prepare for when you’re out in the wide world. They should be teaching you things that you’ll be using (regardless of career) when you’re 40.

In closing, it’s a really timeless skill to be able to communicate well with people – everyone should be able to do it, and it’ll stand to them.

FINE Gael European Election candidate for Ireland East has said that An Taoiseach Brian Cowen learned all he knows about economics ‘as a child playing monopoly’.

Fine Gael European Election candidate for Ireland East, Senator John Paul Phelan, compared Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, to a child playing monopoly and accused the government of ignoring all the warning signs.

Addressing followers as his campaign was officially launched by party leader, Enda Kenny, Senator Phelan said, “How could they be so short sighted, so deaf to the warnings? Then it struck me – Monopoly. Brian Cowen must have learned all he knows about economics from playing monopoly as a child.

“Ignore the utilities, forget about transport, raid the community chest, take a chance and get out of jail free, build as many houses as you can and then some hotels and you win the game.”

Link to original article

A forum for people (roughly) between the ages of 10 and 20, to come onto and they can swap opinions on things like films or books. They can interact with other people (roughly) the same age and just generally socialize.

Because of our world today, we obviously have to be careful of adults masquerading as kids. I’m thinking of ways of combatting this. I suppose just don’t allow the exchanging of personal information at all. A mantra of ‘this is a place for you to exchange opinions, not personal information’ should be adopted, and then constant supervision after that to make sure it’s enforced.

Anyway, enough explaining. I have the forum hosted here, at http://youthdiscussion.com.

I also have a wider plan for it, but that again depends on whether or not it gets off the ground. Anyway, that won’t happen until July either.

So, as a favour to me, those who are youthful in age, please head over to the forum and register, and start discussing stuff, those who aren’t youthful, passing the word would gain my thanks :) I created a retweet link for it here, if you’re so inclined.

Link to the forum

I caught Questions and Answers last night, because Damien was on it, and they were talking about Facebook privacy, which is sufficiently techie to garner my interest.

In what soon became apparent to be The Dermot Ahern Show, named because the man got about half the total screentime of the show, they talked about general current affairs, and I may have slightly tuned out here, content with watching people’s reactions on the awesome liveblog they had going.

My ears perked up, however, when they mentioned Facebook. One of the audience questions, and the one I’ll be addressing in this post, is:

Do you think facebook users who’ve made personal details readily available waived their rights to privacy?

My answer is: Yes

Those who have only begun reading the blog won’t remember one of my posts, which carries the same sentiment I share when it comes to this: it’s Phones in School

Here’s the part I feel is relevent:

The moral of the story is that whether or not you agree with the rule, or it’d be your rule were you in charge, while you’re in that school, you have a responsibility to follow their rules, even if you disagree with them.

That’s it exactly.

By using Facebook, you’re agreeing to abide by their rules, and if you don’t agree with them, you shouldn’t use the site. There’s none of this ‘oh but it’s only this rule….’ malarkey, you either follow all their rules, or you don’t use them, there’s no middle ground.

If you’re in Lidl, Dunnes or Superquinn, you’re not going to bring the Weetabix up to the counter and say ‘I want 37 in this pack of 36 Weetabix’. You just don’t do that. There are 36 in that packet, you can’t change that! Okay, FB are on about privacy, and I’m on Weetabix, but the moral is the same: it’s laid out a certain way, it’s not up to you to change that to suit your own needs.

Also, let’s look at what privacy FB has at the moment, as it’d be unfair to say there was none. Facebook, like most social networking sites, they have two profile settings: public and private.

Public means anyone can access your info, including (if you put it up) birth year, phone number, orientation and marital status.

Private means anyone who you’re “friends” with can access your info, including (if you put it up) birth year, phone number, orientation and marital status.

Now, you may think that by putting your profile, you’re protected, however: have you ever accepted a friend request from someone you didn’t know in real life, or hadn’t met recently?

I’ve always maintained that blog comments are very flimsy, as you’ve no proof whatsoever that the person is who they say they are. I could make a comment on someone’s blog saying I was ‘Barack Obama’, and if I had an official looking email address, how’d you know it wasn’t him, and was me instead? Obviously, I wouldn’t take him, I’d take someone more plausable. OK, you could try an IP check, tracing it back to a location, but if I was actually in Washington D.C, and had made the comment from somewhere within, say, 2 blocks (to use the american unit of distance :P) of the White House, how’d you know?

It’s the same with Facebook, you’ve absolutely no proof people are who they say they are, unless you meet the person and ask them: Are you on Facebook, and did you add me?

Now, because of that, people with malicious intent now have access to your details, through no fault of Facebook. It’s like you leaving the door unlocked in your house last night and trying to sue the door company for being robbed.

I’m not trying to scare people away from using Facebook, I’m merely advising caution:

Don’t use it if you’re paranoid about stalkers and the like, as anyone can really see what you put up, no matter what your profile’s set to.

Before we go, isn’t privacy relative? One man might think putting a surname on their site was just asking for trouble, while others have their entire address. Even taking myself as an example, in my first ever blog, I didn’t use my name, I went by a pseudenom, “Eoin”. Now, I use my full name without really thinking about it!

Alanis Morissette – Not as we

Haunting

So, the people behind Tweetie the Twitter iPhone app released the desktop client version today. Download here

Oh wow.

I never really liked Twitter desktop clients because I ran over the API limit about 15 minutes into the allotted hour, so I always stuck to the web interface, finding it perfect to my needs and lacking nothing. Best of all, I could press ‘reload’ as many times as I wanted and it could take it.

But, being trending on Twitter, I guessed I might want to take a look. Someone I knew had a demo too, being a top secret app developer (I’m making it sound so glamorous :P) and he said it was epic, so I said now that it was available for us normies to get, I might as well take a look.

If I had to describe it in one word, it’d be Streamlined. It’s such a mac app. Everything’s so fantastically fluid. Moving between menus is one swift and slick movement. During the Renaissance, the style of churches changed from being sharp and spikey to being more streamlined, with curves, and rounded edges. Tweetie is like that.

Another example of lovely and streamlined is how they handle TwitPics (photos integrated with tweets):

Usually when I’m reviewing something, I’ll have some gripes with it, but I cannot honestly say there’s anything I’d change. You can even view people’s personal info, like update numbers, following counts and the like. Nice. One of the few ups to TwitterFon (another client for iPhone) in that sense

So, in closing this lickarse review, the main point about this is that it’s superbly streamlined with no cost to the general features ever Twitter client should have. If you like having groups, stick to TweetDeck then. Gothic is the operative word for that client ;)

So, in closing this lickarse review, Tweetie is a lovely, functional, happy-go-lucky Twitter client that looks great. Go for it.

As I’ve gone through my school life, I’ve always tried to be as similar to all the other kids as I could, trying to fit in. Recently however, I’ve taken to be more accepting of my differences, and embraced them.

Firstly, I started using my cane in school, for getting around the corridors. I can honestly say I expected more of a fuss with it, and I was going through my explanations as I walked into school with it, but no-one batted an eyelid. Literally no-one. Not only did nobody raise an issue with me having it, they didn’t even say a thing about it.

Well, oner did, but that was only to (jokingly) ask to borrow it to beat some students :P

Apart from that, it went completely un-noticed. I found convenient places to put it in class even.

For Geography, Business, History, Spanish, Maths and ICT, my desk borders the teacher’s desk, so I can lean it against them, and for all other classes I can just fold it up and stow it in my bag! Did I mention nobody notices it?

Secondly, I have started bring in my laptop on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, which are the days I have Business. I just can’t handle doing accounting on paper any more, and when the teacher suggested I use Excel for them, I jumped at the oppertunity. It’s much better! When I make mistakes (as I’m known to do), I merely press the delete key, and I can re-enter the info where it’s meant to be. Perfect!

I was originally going to wait until we had some more members to post about this, but then I remembered that you can’t have members without publicity, so it’s a bit like the chicken and the egg in that respect.

It’s something I’ve had in mind for a while now, but I’ve only got around to creating it now.

It’s a Youth Forum.

A forum for people (roughly) between the ages of 10 and 20, to come onto and they can swap opinions on things like films or books. They can interact with other people (roughly) the same age and just generally socialize.

Because of our world today, we obviously have to be careful of adults masquerading as kids. I’m thinking of ways of combatting this. I suppose just don’t allow the exchanging of personal information at all. A mantra of ‘this is a place for you to exchange opinions, not personal information’ should be adopted, and then constant supervision after that to make sure it’s enforced.

Anyway, enough explaining. I have the forum hosted here, at http://youthforum.fairtopic.com/forum.htm. I hosted it on one of the free forum providers purely because I don’t want to put money into it just yet in case it doesn’t get off the ground. If, after say, a month, it looks like it has potential, I’ll register something like YouthForumEire.com and redirect it over, possibly even hosting it myself.

I also have a wider plan for it, but that again depends on whether or not it gets off the ground. Anyway, that won’t happen until July either.

So, as a favour to me, those who are youthful in age, please head over to the forum and register, and start discussing stuff, those who aren’t youthful, passing the word would gain my thanks :) I created a retweet link for it here, if you’re so inclined.

Link to the forum

EDIT 17:25 Well, it took off way better than I could hve imagined, and I took Barry up on his very kind offer of setting me up with a domain. We’re now live over at YouthDiscussion.com, thanks Barry!

Edited all the links in this post, too

Taken from the BeeBeeSee:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is offering the chance to spend a day with her husband Bill in exchange for help paying off her campaign debt.

The offer was sent to supporters of Mrs Clinton in an e-mail from her former campaign manager, James Carville.

Mrs Clinton owes $2.3m (£1.5m)from her run for the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency last year.

Original Article

Bah, this woman is just made of fail. I’m sure we’ll have crowds of people who’ll say that she must have been smart enough to run for president. Wrong. Anyone can run for president if they have enough money. It’s a sad truth. Still, that’s not to say they’ll get office. You do need more then dough to actually get in there.*

On a related, but still relevant point, the next time someone says women are good with money, you can say that Clinton, still, to this day, owes $2.3m (£1.5m) from her run for the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency last year. I mean, I’m a guy, and I only owe my folks a few quid, how hard can it be?? :)

She was just too caught up in winning that she did stupid things. For example, when talking to the media at a press conference, she stated that she’d been named after Edmund Hillary – famous for surmounting Everest.

Sounds good, right?

Hillary (the climber) conquered aformentioned (<3 that word) mountain in 1953. Clinton was born in 1947, making her 6 when Everest was climbed. Before that, Hillary the climber was a beekeeper, virtually unknown, without any merit to his name.

* face palm *

Not only does she have those debts today, but Barack Obama helped Hillary clear some $10 million in debt owed to vendors who served her campaign for president. When she finished her campaign, she owed 22.5 million dollars in total. That’s more money then I’ll see in my lifetime!

Basically, this post isn’t actually all about lambasting Clinton, I just found it funny that she’s resorted to selling her husband to pay debts.

* Case in point: the bush administration

I have some weird dreams, but this one takes the biscuit. It’s also not the first time I’ve had this particular one.

This happened when I was older, and I’d managed to procure some monies.

Basically, I either rented or owned (couldn’t make out which) a big huge open space which I changed around. In the centre, there was aga (outside, weird, I know) with a bunch of armchairs, much like my kitchen.

Running around that centre area was, wait for it, a race track. Yeah, just like Forza Motorsport 2.

Am I predicting Blog Party 2020? It certainly sounds cool!