I’m thinking of going vegetarian for a while — I’m not going to be as strict about doing it for the whole year, instead taking it week by week. At the end of each week if there’s no reason to go back to meat-eating, I’ll continue with the veggie diet.

Photo owned by Jay Tamboli (cc)

I tweeted my plan (to go veggie) last night to see what people thought and found that I had a lot of vegetarian followers who I can get tips off as to what’s the best meat substitutes or how to get the best balanced diets etc.

Because I’m only doing this as an experiment, I’ll have no qualms stopping and starting eating meat if the situation comes up. If I’m at someone’s house and they don’t know I’m a vegetarian, I don’t want (or expect them) to go out of their way to cook a veggie-friendly meal, and so I’ll just eat the chicken or whatever. If I’m at home and cooking my own dinner or at a restaurant, I’ll choose the non-meat option.

I’ve heard a lot people with stories of having no energy and not getting enough of the nutrients that they need so I’m being really careful that I don’t suffer any adverse effects from this. My Mum’s really interested in nutrition and the like so I should have a good shot at doing this experiment with no adverse affects!

Photo owned by missmeng (cc)

Turns out, the functionality required for the app I wanted (Last.FM background scrobbling) isn’t supported under Apple API, so I’d have to jailbreak (again) if I wanted that functionality. Having had a jailbroken iPhone as well as a non-jailbroken phone, I can honestly say that the amount of hassle caused by it is not proportional to gain, and I bricked my iPhone (saved it though, only just!) on more than one occasion.

The iPhone was already a revolutionary device – but its potential was horrendously limited by the inability to run apps in the background. Skype, MSN and radio applications like 2 FM all worked, but what if you got a call or a text you needed to respond to? Everything stopped, unfortunately.

That is iOS 4′s greatest feature. I can Skype in the background while texting, I can stay signed into MSN as I double check figures in an email and I can use WunderRadio no different to the iPod.

WunderRadio (Link — will open in iTunes on a computer or, awesomely, the App Store if you’re on your iPhone at the moment) is an internet radio application. At €5.49, it’s on the higher end of the scale for iPhone apps but wholly worth it. I’m currently listening to KUWL (cool?), a jazz-only radio station operated by the University of Wyoming.

An example of the type of stuff played:

Link:

I’ve been invited to be part of a panel in an upcoming discussion/debate hosted by the Northside Learning Hub in conjunction with Leviathan and sponsored by NewsTalk: “Can Education Save Ireland?” on Wednesday May 19th in Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick (trivia: next door to where we rehearsed RENT). David McWilliams is hosting the night and there’ll be music from the Brad Pitt Light Orchestra too.

Other panellists include:

Dr. Stephen Kinsella from UL Department of Economics
Dr. Aoife McLysaght form TCD Molecular Science Lab and regular speaker at the Science Gallery
Tom O’Sullivan – Assistant General Secretary of the INTO (Primary School Teachers Union)
Tony McKernan – Secondary School Teacher (ASTI executive, secondary school teachers union representative in Limerick)

It’s a fantastic opportunity for me and I’m really looking forward to it – tickets are a recession-busting €10 for adults or €8 if you’ve a student card. Would love to see some of you there!

Phew, and just like that, RENT is over. What’s really been a whirlwind 4 weeks have come to end with a gargantuan-sized jolt.

We put on two shows yesterday – the matinee audience mostly consisted of close friends and family, a fact which, I think, suited most of the performers. Not only was it our opening performance but also RENT‘s subject matter is sufficiently edgy to make even those who’d 10 opening nights under their belt quite nervous. Our second show was to an almost full, 350 seater house. We’d been through it all once before and gave it our all. The audience (by sheer numbers, I think) were a lot more responsive the second-time round, which helped put everyone onstage more at ease. They laughed, whooped and cheered at all the right parts, which served as a barometer of sorts for the actors – a semi-constant reminder that they were enjoying the show.

The expected post-show big empty void arrived with annoying certainty when I finally woke up this morning. I definitely have a RENT-shaped hole in my life which I’ll have to fill with something else.

I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve been into RENT about a year now. I’m big on changes and moving on, so I’ve decided that this’d be a good time to move on from this section of life – find something new to occupy me. RENT‘s the top-played artist in my Last.fm so that might take a while to shift :)

Also, finishing RENT was my mental event marking the beginning of summer. With 4 days until the calendar Summer starts (and only 5 weeks of school + 1 of exams until actual holidays start), I’m officially allowing myself to look forward to it all now. I’m packing a lot into the 3 months off that I have before I buckle down into 3rd year in school. I’m spending today recuperating from the show last night by organizing a lot of it actually – will go into detail about exact plans when I have complete confirmation :)

In the spirit of summer, I leave you with a summery song!

Yesterday, I stayed at home because I was feeling crappy. I was kept company by Rick O’Shea’s dulcet tones coming from my phone. No, he didn’t call me — I was availing of 2FM’s radio app.

From my phone — yeah. Anywhere in Ireland I have mobile signal I can now listen to pretty much any national radio station.

In The Simpsons episode entitled “Lisa’s Wedding”, which originally aired March 19, 1995, Lisa goes to a fortune teller who predicts Lisa’s true love – in 2010. It shows many popular stereotypes of what the future was going to be like — a flickering hologram of an oak with a plaque that reads “in memory of a real tree”, robots clattering past (although we later see they’re simply walking towards auditions for the Wizard of Oz) and cars hovering.

Of course, we still have trees and cars still need to touch the ground, but that totally doesn’t mean we’re not evolving.

Look at iPods as a prime example — launched in October 2001, see how much smaller they’ve become in just over 8 years.

I think that this is the way technology’s going — smaller and more intelligent. Our phones can now find us anywhere on the planet as well as acting as cookbooks, gaming devices and wheelchair remotes. We can receive SMS updates for just about anything nowadays and even control things like Sky+ with just a quick message.

While I’m sure that we will see some new inventions, I think that a lot of it will be improvements on what we already have.

To quote XKCD — The future’s pretty cool!

Right now, there’s almost a sense of… ‘how’d I manage that?’. Seriously, an entire year without chocolate. 365 days. 8,760 hours. 525,600 minutes.

Was it easy? Yes and no. When undertaking this, how easy you find it is directly proportional to how much chocolate you eat. I ate relatively little – we never stocked that much of it at home so my intake was mainly at parties and the like. That made it easier than if chocolate was always kept in the house and I dipped into that cupboard regularly.

The hardest part was when you were with people and they offer you some. As I’ve mentioned before, people can’t seem to get their head around that you’re not doing this for a specific reason. Explaining “well I was just wondering if I could go without it for a year” doesn’t seem to satisfy them, insatiable things…

Even when Mom’d make nice desserts I wouldn’t feel too great a pang, unless I really liked what she was making, such as toffee shortbread.

Up until about July, I always maintained that I wouldn’t be hovering over a chocolate bar on 1/1/10 at 00:01AM but now I think I just might. My parents getting me chocolate for Christmas may have influenced this decision.

What about next year? I jokingly suggested staying off it for another year; a notion greeted without enthusiasm in most corners. I don’t drink, so I can’t give that up, nor smoke.

Oh the conundrums I have to deal with…

Pity it isn’t at the end of the millennium – that’d be perfect.

Going over on my own (‘being posted’ is Mom’s phrasing) for four days to visit John and Patrick.

Yes, Olivia, I will bring you back some snow. :)

Not quite, it’s actually tomorrow, Sunday, but since the actual Web Awards is on tonight, this post is still valid.

As I tell folks, this blog started in April of last year. I still remember it.. reading the blogs of two hilarious UK friends who are unfortunately no longer blogging, late one Saturday night. I had a blog before that. In fact, I’d had several. They were daily blogs too but I could never do it properly. Having to start every post with ‘sorry I haven’t blogged in y days’ got annoying after a while, especially when those around you (not literally, he was in MIT at the time) are emailing you asking where that new blogpost you promised was. Are promises that you make just to shut someone up still binding?

The blog I set up that Saturday night, I decided, was going to be different. Posting dates would be decided by me, no matter how many one line emails a certain US college IP address sent. Thus, TrustTommy was brought into existance, hosted on the lovingly-fragile Blogger.com servers. I believe posting frequency averaged about once every 2-3 days, and life was good.

That August, I got busy doing real-life stuff, as teenagers tend to do, right? The blog was neglected, almost to the point of a week. I was downstairs one night when I saw an @ reply on Twitter.

@TrustTommy Update your blog.. it’s beginning to smell

Can’t you just imagine the

With love, darling brother Patrick

that followed?

Heh, no. Needless to say I was annoyed. Look who’s talking, Mr. I-never-update-my-own-blog-and-when-I-do-it’s-with-odd-streams-of-*breath*-code-that-you-claim-makes-sense-but-probably-don’t. I replied to his tweet saying that, or something of equal indignation, and then something feverish clicked.

Right, you want personal blogging? Hmm? You want daily blogging? Right! I’ll show you I can do it! I’ll blog daily from now on, then will you be satisfied, eh?

A slightly odd thought process, but I was 14.. and we’re not renouned for crystal clear thinking, are we?

And so I began daily blogging from August 2008.

****

From August to October the blog grew. I used Twitter to meet new friends and having other, non-family people reading me meant that quitting would be much harder.

A blustery September was just rolling into an equally dreary October when I found about the Irish Web Awards. Not having a website, per sé, (there’s also the Irish Blog Awards for folks like me) I’d just be using such an evening to put faces to blog authors and Twitter folks. This was perfect.

So, October 11th 2008 came round, I went to drama class as normal and arrived home, wanting to get a definite answer as to whether I could go or not. Going on my own was, naturally, and understandably, out of the question, and John was reluctant to go. Eventually though, myself and Dad convinced John to bring me and I found myself on one of the old commuter trains to Limerick Junction, headed for the Radisson SAS, listening to The Dresden Dolls on John’s iPhone. They’re a great band, that I discovered that day. Told ya it was a good day.

Now, with a high (300ish, I believe, but I could be wrong.. It was a year ago and I was kinda drunk that night*) concentration of bloggers, twitterers, er ers and other assorted web folks meant that we couldn’t be the only web people on a train bound for Dublin that night. This was before I had my iPhone, so it was up to John to whip out his one and search nearby tweets. And who’d we see?

Conn Ó Muíneacháin! :)

We got a taxi to the hotel and thus began a great night. I met a load of big bloggers and was so impressed at them that as we left, I said to John that I wanted to be like them – and blog properly. My blog was daily, but there was (and I’m allowed to say this, I’m the author) an awful lot of crap on it. I know there’s at least 4 people who would say it’s full of crap recently too – but this was different.

I also decided to move off lovingly-yet-still-really-annoyingly-fragile Blogger. It started with getting my domain and finally I jumped (no, not the shark) onto WordPress. So much better. If we’ve any Blogger folk in the audience, move to WP now :)

So, this is the one-year anniversary of sorts of Trust Tommy starting properly.

Do I get cake?

* Kidding Mom, please drop the saucepan raised in anger.

Disclaimer: Image is not mine. I take no credit. It’s Ken McGuire’s

Dear

Just a quick update to thank you all and to give a few important messages.

- Firstly, from everyone in Cóir, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for the magnificent effort you put into making the second battle against Lisbon such a truly inspired campaign. You’ve been a brilliant, wonderful team. God Bless you all. We’ll be sending a full report later this week.

- This is a grubby win for the elite, driven by fear and bullying. In the three days before the vote, the people were subjected to a media onslaught of Yes propaganda threatening ruin and isolation if people voted No. It was unprecedented and utterly disgusting.

- We succeeded, however, in raising several crucial issues, including, of course, the right to life, and the increased profile given to those issues in Lisbon 1 and 2 will make a big difference to our work going forward.

- In the next five days we need to make sure that every Cóir poster is taken down or we will face VERY stiff fines that we can’t pay! Can you ensure that EVERY poster you put up is taken down please? If you see a poster which you can’t take down please call us on 01 8746858 and we’ll get onto it.

- We’re looking to have a special Cóir meeting on November 1st and will contact you with further details shortly.

God bless

Niamh

Oh dearie me. Whatever about the rest, point 2 stinks of sour grapes – much like the fact that it’s only those who do badly in the Junior and Leaving Cert that bitch how it’s a crap system that puts too much pressure on the students. Lads, if one guy can do well, you all can.

But this isn’t about students – is it? Nah, it’s about Cóir.. big eejits.
_
Found via Suzy – Great comment from Rosemary by the way

December in our house has, since 2004 (is it really 5 years this C****mas?) been lovingly intertwined with the Young Scientist, save for the gap between the time Patrick won it and I reached Secondary School.

Photo owned by kretyen (cc)

For new readers, this isn’t my first Young Scientist. In my first year, I entered it with my project of ‘What are the Issues faced by Children with Cerebral Palsy in Mainstream Education”. It was pretty topical for me because I was a wee little first year in a sea of 1,200 other people. Trust Tommy, which was beginning to gather speed, was used to tell the folks who’d be coming to the Exhibition to pop round to Stand #403 or #404 (can’t remember which now) and also to keep a quasi-running commentary about what was going on, the highlight of which was when I nabbed the helium balloon from the girl in the stand next to me (doing a very interesting project about how Wii Sport Tennis compares to Real World Tennis, by the way) and did a sound recording of me squealing: Hiiiiii! This is Tommmyyyyy Collisonnnn of TrustTommmmy.com.. reporting on…… HELIUM!!

The blog is only bigger today than it was last January, so I can only imagine that it’ll be much the same this time round – people who’d be coming to the RDS anyway, find out that their friendly neighborhood blogger is one of the entrants and pop round to my stand. They get to see what are the issues faced by children with CP and I get to put a face to a name or an 140x140px avatar. Win-win!

Right, 300 words later, I’ve yet to chat about what my project this year is. I’ve obviously still to be approved, but we’ll be optimistic and all superstitious and talk about it anyhow. :)

It’s a bloggie project, of course. :) I had an epic phone call with Bernie Goldbach earlier and have another one lined up for tomorrow.

In short, this will rock :)

Photo owned by WizPip (cc)

providing I get through :)