Tommy Collison » Me

Viva La Vie Boheme

Tommy — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:37:46 +0000

I found this photo this afternoon on Facebook, and it brought back a slew of good memories from April 2010:

It’s a snapshot from Centrestage Youth Theatre’s performance of RENT, where I played geeky filmmaker Mark. That’s me sitting on the table with the striped scarf and the enormous grin. We’re in the middle of La Vie Boheme, a funky, joyous celebratory love-song to all things Bohemian. RENT was when I realized that not all musicals were old and abstract — they could be catchy, edgy and topical, and they could really ROCK.

I remember hearing this line:-

ALL
To faggots, lezzies, dykes, cross-dressers too

and thinking: “this is a musical?!” You wouldn’t hear that sort of sentiment in Gershwin or Sondheim.

Getting up onstage and pouring my heart and soul into this amazing show remains one of the best and most fulfilling experiences of my life.

MARK
“Anyone out of the
mainstream”…
is anyone in
the mainstream?

The Zone

Tommy — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:21:00 +0000

If you read Fast Company’s article about Stripe and scroll down to near the bottom, you’ll see Patrick working at his desk. He is, I believe, in The Zone.

The Zone is a mental state where one is most productive. Coders, writers, chess-players and others will all know what I’m talking about. It’s when you get “wired in”, all extraneous thoughts disappear. Your computer/pen and paper/chess-board become your thoughts; the very reason you know you exist — for that time, at least.

The Zone’s brother is The Spot. I find that I can get into The Zone easiest if I have a dedicated place to do so — somewhere that exists exclusively for me to get in The Zone. This is my Spot:

My Spot is my desk, and has some specific traits:

A Computer: I do all my schoolwork on my MacBook Air, and so it makes sense that this would be at the centre of my Zone. Evernote, Pages and Safari are at my fingertips while iTunes plays in the background
Music: This is how I block out real-world aural distractions like hoovers and radios and people on the stairs. Everyone is surprised that I can work –do my best work, productivity-speaking– to music, but I find that it actively helps me concentrate. The only time I can’t have music playing is when I’m using link method, when I swap to using a white noise generator. The music and noise are played through the speakers on the desk if nobody’s in the house, or Bose QC 15s otherwise.
Something to drink: I’ve become a big fan of sparkling water in the last few months — Lidl selling 75 half-liter bottles for less than €20 is an advantageous circumstance of which I’m currently taking advantage of. A drink also serves as a 30-second break, when I can rest my eyes and hands and stretch my neck.
A relatively clutter-free layout: Only what I really need is out on the desk — the rest gets relegated to a drawer or the floor.

The Spot faces the doorway, because I’m an incredibly jumpy person to sudden noises and touches, so I hate being snuck up on. The Spot also has a nice view if I rotate my chair 180º.

Overall, the Spot exists to facilitate easy and quick passage to The Zone. It’s a familiar area. It’s created around patterns, repetition, structure and efficiency, and that’s supremely comforting.

Valentine’s

Tommy — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:46:56 +0000

↳ George Angus: Are Writers Too Jacked-Up About Grammar?

Tommy — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:27:14 +0000

I tend to be more forgiving to the average person screwing up a loose/lose proposition. Writers, however, do not get a free pass on this one. It’s like an accountant not knowing the difference between subtraction and division. It’s like a pilot not knowing the landing gear should be down for landing. And while the consequences of poor grammar cannot be equated to a pile of aluminum on the runway, in terms of professionalism and advancing a writing career the implications are the same.

I agree with Angus on this one — I’m a ferocious grammar Nazi while I’m writing stuff like essays and articles, but I’ll slip into shorthand (“thx” , “wilco”, tho”, etc.) for SMS, AOL or Twitter DMs. (An observation that a grammar-obsessed friend of mine once shared with me went something like: “I’m there writing a tweet and I’m just over the 140 character limit, and I’m like: ‘shit, which grammar rule do I have to break in order to send this?’”)

Writers and English teachers have no excuse for poor grammar, though. To me, the severity of the consequences of an English teacher having poor grammar are somewhere in between those for writers and those for airline pilots, in that students could pick up bad grammar habits and (mis)use them in exams, costing them marks and potentially a grade.

Wanderlust

Tommy — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:00:00 +0000

While joking around with a friend, I decided to check out the Greyhound timetables, just to see what they were like.

The result:

A 3-day journey, taking you through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio[1], West Virginia, Philadelphia and New York.

Admittedly, I’m choosing one of the longest possible routes, but there’s something nice about the idea of a 3-day-long bus journey. It’s a sort of coming-of-age thing. I have this hugely romanticized ideal of the Greyhound passing through Middle America. There’s light harmonica music underscoring the journey. The bus driver is a quiet man with a hard, chiseled face. Life-long friendships with people from far-off places are forged. The only thing these unfamiliars have in common is the fact that they’re on this bus. It’s almost something out of a Hollywood movie tagline: Two strangers find friendship in the most unlikely of settings — connection in an isolating age.

Jesus Christ, I can spout some awful quasi-artistic crap sometimes.

Either way, it’s an experience — it’s unlike something you’ve ever done, or are likely to do again.

Keeping this in the back of my mind for now…

[1] Summer in Ohio, anyone?

Method of loci

Tommy — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:56:31 +0000

As a student, improving my memory has always been something I’ve been interested in. Even before S02 E02 of Sherlock, I’d been working on similar methods to try and learn off material for school.

The method used in Sherlock is a variant of the “method of loci” (a.k.a. the “link method” and “memory palace”), which is one I’ve been concentrating on too. It involves using a mental map of somewhere (your house or city) and attaching items to be memorized to already-familiar icons on your mental map.

Currently, I’m learning off some character details for Paul in the Irish short-film “Cáca Milis”. Here’s how:

Instead of using my house, I’m using the walk between our rented apartment in Minneapolis to my favorite bookstore/café downtown. While relearning to walk, I made the journey innumerable times. Refreshing myself of the specifics using Google Street View, I set about attaching my Irish to Nicollet Mall.

I begin my exiting the lift and taking a left along the tiled floors. There’s a middle-aged, blind receptionist behind the desk. (fear dall, meanaosta). I say hello, then take a right and exit the doors. Passing the flower arrangements, I take a left onto Marquette Avenue. The pavement is hugely cracked here — I think my expeditious transition from wheelchair to crutches was influenced by the bumpy sidewalk, so it sticks out in my memory. While here, I meet Rex, the dinosaur from Toy Story. He’s positive, trusting, talkative and friendly (gealgháireach, muiníneach, cainteach, cáirdiúil). Passing him, I hang a left at the intersection onto 13th Street. I’m at the parking garage for the apartments, with its big door that you’d try and sneak under if it was open, as a short-cut into the apartments themselves. The door is rough and abrupt, but there’s no malice in it (tá sé tuatach borb ach níl aon mailís ann). I take a right onto Nicollet Mall and pass the bus-stop, which gives free rides uptown at certain types of year. There’s a dog waiting on the bus, he’s got asthma and takes his inhaler out (asma; analóir). Up a block, I pass the church on the corner of 12th & Nicollet. The sign outside says that the sermon is innocent, and that the priest trusts you, and knows that you mean no badness in you (saonta; iontaobh; dochar).

Memory experts say that making it a little bizarre (the slightly-anthropomorphic garage door, Rex, the asthmatic dog) help things stand out in your memory more. As can be seen from the picture, I had a couple more landmarks I could’ve used, but I didn’t need them in this particular instance.

It’s a hugely effective memory technique — I learned that off in about 4 minutes. Closing your eyes and visualizing the specifics also helps to boost your powers of recollection.

Blog Comments

Tommy — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:23:59 +0000

There’s been a good bit of debate recently with regards to whether blog comments are a good idea or not. John Gruber, Marco Arment and, most recently, Matt Gemmell have all made good points in favor of turning comments off entirely.

Of course, I recognize that the blogs of all of the above are more-frequented and of a higher standard (and standing) than my own little corner of the internet, but their discussion has got me thinking.

I’ve decided to turn off comments on the blog here for a little while. My reasoning:

1. Of all the people out there who visit my blog, I’d wager that less than half of them read to the end of whatever post brought them here. Of that minority, less again will bother to read the comments (or even check if there are any). A tiny minority will take the time to actually leave a comment. In terms of me getting feedback or opinions on my writing, e-mails and Twitter messages (both @replies and DMs) are used much more than comments.

2. Comments create both a burden of moderation and of a timely response on my part.

3. Most crucially, comments allow anonymity. They allow the separation of your persona and your opinions. That’s something you can’t do in real life, and it tends to bring out the very worst in people. I’ve got my fair share of nasty comments on this blog, and each time, I couldn’t trace the author because of the nature of comments. I don’t need to be dealing with that, so this is a big part of turning of comments. It should be no problem for the moderate commenters among you to drop me a quick e-mail or @reply, and it’ll (hopefully) keep out the worst of the vitriol. (The anonymous vitriol, anyway — the rest of it, I don’t mind).

If you want to give me feedback or agree with me or tell me that what I wrote was completely wrong for X, Y and Z reasons, I’m not a difficult person to reach. I’m on e-mail a lot (tommy@collison.ie) and on Twitter (@tommycollison) most days too. Better yet, why not write a response on your own site and link me to it?

She Was Hurricane

Tommy — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:46:04 +0000

In my experience, writers of young-adult books can be entertaining and funny, but are rarely poetic. You read Maya Angelou or Markus Zusak if you want poetic prose; but the likes of Phillip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Robert Muchamore or William Golberg —all undeniably good storytellers in their own right— don’t have that same clever grasp of the English language that is a joy in and of itself.

Or so I thought.

Enter, John Green:

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”

– Looking For Alaska

A young-adult author with a poetic grasp of the English language. Must go off and read the whole book now.

Briefly Weighing in on the iPhone Mute Switch Debate

Tommy — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:46:53 +0000

Recently, an iPhone alarm disrupted a Philharmonic performance.

The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.

The event has sparked a lot of debate about the behavior of the iPhone’s mute switch.

To offer my two cents:

At present, if you mute your iPhone, there are only two functions which will cause it to make noise: the countdown function and the alarm in Clock.app and starting a song or video playing. Calls, texts, Facebook notifications et al. get relegated to just a vibrate.

It’s essentially split into user-generated actions and non-user-generated actions. I told the phone to start quacking at 7am, I told the iPhone to make a noise when 32 minutes had elapsed. The same cannot be said for texts etc., and that’s why they get muted.

Marco Arment sums it up pretty succinctly:

It’s a typical design problem: it can’t be heavy and light and big and small. Neither decision will satisfy everyone all the time or cover every edge case: if Apple implemented Mute in [all cases], millions of people would be just as irritated when their scheduled alarms didn’t wake them up.

I’d also like to briefly disagree with Jim Biancolo’s suggested rectification: “I’d vote for silencing everything when you mute the phone, but pop a warning if you mute the phone with alarms pending” — it would be useless for those of us who flick the mute switch without taking the phone out of our pockets.

I think that the Philharmonic faux-pas is an edge-case, and that the mute switch’s behavior can and should be left as is.

Alarm pro-tip: Don’t set a song that you like as your alarm tone, you will end up hating the song.

Brief Update

Tommy — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:52:59 +0000

School’s going well. Christmas results came back this week and showed me where I’m doing well and where needs work. I decided recently to drop Physics in favor of Geography. I’m not a Science-y person, and I doubt I’ll do anything in college that’ll require a Science subject. At the moment, I’m considering English/Media/Writing courses, but nothing’s concrete right now. It doesn’t need to be for another 10 months at least, either.

I’ve hit the ground running with regards to study — which doesn’t leave me with a lot of time for much else. I’m reading a couple of pretty good books recently: 1984, The Luzhin Defence and Empire of the Sun (which is actually our English comparative novel). I’m also toying with a couple of short-story ideas that may come to fruition when I’ve got time to devote serious attention to them. The summer, probably.

In other news, I’m doing a lot of drumming and playing a good bit of chess. Both activities are wonderful as a break from studying. Drumming has a physical aspect to it as well, which is exactly what you need after sitting at a desk for hours on end. If you caught my recent essay, you’ll know how much I love it, and one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to get good at it, competitively.

It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks recently — lots of change, lots of growing and maturing. Exhausting, confusing and sometimes difficult, it’s ultimately manageable and everything’s pretty good.

And if you can say that, I don’t think you can complain about much else.