The surgery that I had in America last September wasn’t the first time I was in Minneapolis for an extended period of time. In 2004, aged nine, I was there for similar surgery. Looking at the differences between my 2004 experience and the 2010 one is quite interesting. I’ve talked a bit about being emotionally maturer this time around and it really made a difference.

I also recall the first time Mum asked me about the possibility of having surgery. We were in the car and going up to Sligo, where we used to spend weekends sometimes. She told me about this surgery that they do in America that would really help me. She told me how much work it would take and how much commitment would be needed from me. I remember thinking vividly, even as a 9-year-old, that there really was no question about whether or not we’d do it. Would this surgery leave me better-off after it? Yes. After that, there was no doubt in my mind.

Looking back, the 2004 surgery needed a lot more commitment on my parents’ part than on mine, which is probably the biggest difference between the 2004 and 2010 surgery. In 2010, I was older and maturer. I went to the physio and did the work because I wanted the benefits, not because my parents told me I should do the work. It also happens that personal motivation is a much, much bigger driving force when it comes to these things.

Thinking about this also brought back memories of a conversation that Dad and I had over in America this time around. For the first three weeks I was at home after surgery, I’d have to be ‘tied in’ at night, my leg strapped to a foam wedge to stop it bending or moving too far in. Dad would have to attach the wedge, which was quite uncomfortable, each night before going down to his bedroom. I remember talking to him about how uncomfortable the whole process was, and yet how it was necessary.

Each time I had surgery, I knew that there’d be a lot of discomfort, a good deal of pain and a huge amount of effort and dedication required of me going ahead with the surgery. At the same time, I knew that all this discomfort was a) necessary and b) temporary.

The day after coming home from hospital I was given a regime of painkillers. The next morning I took my first dose of painkillers and spend the day in bed. I didn’t feel able to get up, feeling a constant stream of nausea and nursing a killer headache. We got worried that I had caught some infection until we saw that all my symptoms were listed as side-effects of the painkillers. Also, we discovered that we were supposed to take the tablets with food, something that I’d neglected to do. I decided that day that even if I was in pain, I couldn’t spend all my time in bed. I stopped taking tablets after that and worked through whatever pain there was, thinking that well, anything was better than being on the flat of my back.

In the intervening months, I’ve worked on regaining strength, and trying to surpass the level of mobility I was at before the surgery. Whereas before, I could somewhat manage without a crutch, I really need it at the moment. Despite that, there’s a lot to be said for being pain free. While I may be weaker now, I’ve got no pain and that, to me, is pretty much all that matters. As a bonus, I don’t think I’ll need the crutch for much longer.

Pictures: One of me just after coming out of surgery, taken by Dad. The other one is me the day after surgery taking my first, furtive bites, accompanied by a hazy smile. Video is a video blog I did the day I went home.

Auditioning for the variety show brought back a lot of memories auditioning for RENT, which was my first major audition, which I was nothing short of terrified for.

Not only was it my first serious audition, but the constant knee pain I was having meant that I was auditioning while in a full-length leg cast. I was quite unsteady on my feet still, which didn’t fill me with confidence for the audition.

It started with the entire group singing Seasons of Love, one of the main group songs of the show. I loved the song and our 25-or-so voices rising in harmony sent goosebumps up my arms. Our singing began very tentative but it grew each time we sang through it.

After that, the individual auditions began. Richie, our director, tapped me on the shoulder and suggested I go first. I immediately began to get nervous but at least I’d get my song over and done with quickly. I was doing “What You Own” (which I’ve talked about before here), a driving rock duet that I loved. I adored riding on the song’s beat and letting it carry me. The words came fast, tumbling out of my mouth faster than I could think.

“What are you doing?” asked our rehearsal pianist, Eoin. I’d worked with him once before and loved his unassuming, affable nature.
““What You Own” ” I answered. Eoin flicked through the pages of his score and frowned.
“I’m not sure I know this one” he said, looking through the song. My heart sank, I hadn’t really prepared anything else.

To make matters worse, ““What You Own”” began funnily, with a spoken bit by Mark, my character, and then a tough opening verse without much piano. I began singing, my voice shaky and feeling as if my inexperience at this was like a big noisy beacon above me. As the familiar chorus began and the piano intensified, I began to ease a bit, falling into the grove of the song easier now. Better yet, Eoin suddenly called out over the piano “Oh! I do know this one!” We finished the song and Richie came over. We went outside and the next person came in to audition. My head was still spinning — it had ended so quickly and I could still feel the adrenaline coursing through me.

At the end of the day, I got the part I auditioned for, and was delighted. Auditions since then have gotten easier and it’s true what they say, that everything comes with experience.

Do you have any audition stories to share?

A big part of the net for me is documenting. My blog has 1,100 odd blogposts from the last 3 years, with countless pictures, memories and stories. The same goes for all my family, actually. I’m incredibly happy that I have something like Flickr, as it’ll keep my photos safer than I ever could. I’d love to print some of them off someday, to stick up on my walls.

I’ve never been hugely sentimental but I’m very close to my photos. I know some wonderful photographers who produce magnificent shots, but that’s not what it’s about to me. To me, a great photo is one which captures a moment. It’s one which I can use to recall how I felt about a time, or what I was up to.

To give you an example, here’s a shot of my Dad and Patrick playing ‘Slaps’ at my Aunt’s house just after Christmas:

To those who haven’t heard the game, ‘Slaps’ stars off with the two players facing each other like in the photo. Dad then slaps the back of Patrick’s hand while Patrick tries to move his hands out of harm’s way. If he manages this, and Dad’s hand doesn’t connect, the roles reverse and Patrick goes on the offense.

I love this picture because it’ll always remind me of my Aunt’s house and of the whole family being together again.

When I was in First Year, I had a teacher who once said, apropos of nothing in particular, that he didn’t like photos of still life. Pictures, he said, had to have something going on in them. At the time, I disagreed with him, but over the years I’ve come to realize he was right. Well, I think that certainly the best photos have something happening in them.

Relatedly, I really wish that I’d discovered Flickr sooner. I recently lost a good few photographs and videos when an old computer died, and I’ve been kicking myself for not saving them. When writing descriptive essays in English, I’ll often talk about navigating Boston’s public transport system to meet my older brothers. While waiting for a pedestrian light to change, I vividly remember using an old camcorder to pan around the busy Cambridge street, taking in as much of the city as I could. I remember narrating it, too, talking about my journey so far and everything I was looking forward to over the coming weekend. It kills me that the video is lost now, and I’ll never be able to relive that excitement. You could say that I should be looking towards the future and not focussing on the past, but you can’t say it wouldn’t be nice to have.

Honest question here, but is RTÉ Liveline just a show where people ring up to complain, or am I missing something?

I got a couple of replies, all of which agreed that all Liveline did was give people a forum to complain.

From what I can see, the reason for this is that Liveline (and other shows similar to it) deal in strong opinions. They love to get callers riled up and passionate. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the minority or majority, you just have to be vocal to be given a forum.

Photo owned by gjofili (cc)

Take the Rubberbandits. That was a Liveline show with many outraged callers and sure, there were people there who were in support, but only acting as devil’s advocate.

The people who have no problem with the Limerick comedy duo aren’t going to call up a radio show to broadcast their thoughts on the Rubberbandits. “It’s grand, like” is not a strong opinion and Liveline doesn’t deal in anything but those.

I won’t compare the two films too much because I want to talk mostly about the latter film. Based on Phillip Pullman’s fantasy novels, they involve witches, armored polar bears and contain ideas from theology, physics, spirituality and philosophy. It’s a hugely entertaining set of novels full of intricate details and powerful writing. The unfortunate part is that the series is known more for the criticism that it has received and the controversy that surrounds it, instead of the fact that they are fantastic novels.

Pullman has said that neither he nor his books are against religion, what he calls the ‘religious impulse’, but says that the books are more a criticism of organized religion:

But organised religion is quite another thing. The trouble is that all too often in human history, churches and priesthoods have set themselves up to rule people’s lives in the name of some invisible god (and they’re all invisible, because they don’t exist) – and done terrible damage. In the name of their god, they have burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated, and enslaved millions of their fellow-creatures, and done so with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to Heaven for it.

That is the religion I hate, and I’m happy to be known as its enemy.

When he was asked if his books were specifically anti-Catholic, he replied that:

If there is a God, and He is as the Christians describe Him, then He deserves to be put down and rebelled against

When The Golden Compass was adapted into a movie in 2007, the production team faced great pressure from religious groups calling for people to boycott the movie because it was anti-religious. One can see where they’re coming from, with characters saying things like “That’s what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling” and members of the Church in the novel are portrayed as zealots.

It’s a pity that Chris Weitz, director and screenplay writer, bowed to pressure and removed any reference to the Church in the film, so that the ‘Magisterium’ takes its place. Weitz has explicitly said that removing the anti-religious parts of the book were to make the film financially viable in the US. He tried to justify his actions by claiming that religion would instead appear in euphemistic terms, which led to (entirely justified, I believe) criticism that “they are taking the heart out of it, losing the point of it, castrating it…”

Finally, the movie seems to end at a very odd point, different to the novel. The movie cuts out the final chapters because (ugh) the studio wanted an upbeat ending. The problem is that the ending doesn’t really make sense — several plot points are left unsolved. Weitz has said that this was done to facilitate “the best possible beginning to the second”. The problem is, the film was such a flop that no sequels were made. Inside sources agree that the Catholic Church put pressure on New Line Cinema (the studio)

The pity is that the Harry Potter series that got so much attention and money and the best in the business working on their film adaptions, while another, equally good fantasy series got left on the wayside.

We all use Wikipedia, probably daily. It’s the quickest way to find out small bits of trivia like who the President of Ireland during World War Two, or when The Shining was released or who directed the film version

When people go to Wikipedia, they’re simply amazed at just how much information they see there. It undoubtably deserves its subtitle as the sum of all human knowledge — it’s probably the biggest collaborative project undertaken by mankind.

A breakdown of what Wikipedia articles are

Because Wikipedia is so unique and so big, what merits inclusion on this massive project?

That particular debate has been dubbed ‘inclusionist versus deletionist’. Inclusionists argue that you can’t police what gets into the sum of all human knowledge and one thing isn’t more worthy of its place than another article. Deletionists say that Wikipedia isn’t a junkyard and that only things that are notable deserve a place on Wikipedia. In general, inclusionists are concerned with Wikipedia being complete, while deletionists want Wikipedia to be relevant and free of trivia or things not of general importance.

So much energy is wasted in Wikipedia — it’s a hugely inefficient website, in truth — all because of these debates. Deletionists are saying that Wikipedia should only have ‘useful stuff’. The problem with this mantra is that the word ‘useful’ is not only relative, but unspecific (or rather, can mean different things at different times to different people. That’s an awful lot of variables). If I’m lost in Boston, a load of minute info of Boston would be really useful, while, say, a list of nicknames that George Bush uses would be wholly useless. As the definition of ‘useful’ is fungible, isn’t it hard for deletionists to say what should be allowed on the site and what shouldn’t?

For a website that pushes openness and ‘anyone can edit’, it’s surprisingly bureaucratic. A small group of people (administrators) work and govern from the paltry ‘rules’ that they arbitrarily put forward. Take an article that is nominated for deletion. It’s not a majority that decides whether it stays or goes – admins (and others in higher positions) have the last say, and that’s that.

The Onion newspaper: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence

There’s also the ‘Notability’ rule, that articles have to be somewhat notable to be included on Wikipedia. There’s another rule that says that every fact needs to be cited. If it’s cited by a reputable source, does that make it notable? That’s not the only problem, as these rules aren’t even set in stone and no two cases are the same.

Admins are actually to blame for a lot of what’s wrong with Wikipedia — not only do their votes count more, but a lot of them are (consciously or otherwise) blocking out new users with the jargon that the admins consider common knowledge. An admin might be on a talk page and will say to you “hey, WP:BEANS!”.

That sounds (and is) like code. What they’re referring to is a Wikipedia “policy” that says you shouldn’t give examples of how to cause disruption, or ‘stick beans up your nose’, lest someone go and do it. Could that be construed as censorship? If it is, they’re hypocrites, because articles like on vandalism exist. How long until all mention of ‘vandalism’ becomes ‘that-which-must-not-be-named’ and the whole wizarding, er, Wikipedia community dare not speak its name?

Deletionists (and Wikipedia as a whole) can’t claim that Wikipedia is the sum of all human knowledge if they have clauses like Notability. In the same way, admins’ vote can’t outweigh any other users’ if they’re to call it a fair democracy. I’m not anti-Wikipedia or anything, but these are problems and shortcomings that need to be addressed. Wikipedia enjoyed massive growth in the early days that’s slowed down in recent years. People are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with it. Can Wikipedia win?

I’ve had my Amazon Kindle a couple of days now and I can honestly say that the move from book to eBook is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

The Screen

The first that I noticed about the Kindle as I took it out of the box is just how much like a printed page it is. A lot of tech stuff comes out of the box with some cardboard on it, with a mockup of what the product looks like in use, and I honestly thought there was some paper like this on my Kindle. That just couldn’t be a screen?! As it turns out, Amazon didn’t give their baby a backlit screen that the iPad and such has. It has technology that’s known as Electronic Ink. Why? Well, one, it improves the battery life a lot. Apple’s website boasts that the iPad has up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music [1]. The Amazon Kindle has up to 30 days of battery life [2]. Electronic Ink also means that the screen looks like a printed page. I spend a lot of time each day behind a screen and I always like to give my eyes a break when I read a book. With the Kindle, that doesn’t change.

One downside, if you’d even call it that, is that when you turn the page, the Ink has to ‘refresh’ and this leads to a screen flash. It’s hard to describe if you’ve never seen it but basically, when you turn the page, the colours invert for about half a second. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest but some negative reviews of the device mention it as an annoyance.

I should mention navigating menus here too. It’s a pain. It’s slow and laggy. However, this is not your laptop and you spend most of your time reading, not going around the menus. Imagine a book being hard to open. In fact, because I don’t use the wireless (I buy the books on my laptop), my use of the menus is limited to flicking down to my current book and selecting it. Even with that, I don’t often do that, because if I’m in a book and shut the Kindle down, it starts up the next time on my page — bypassing the menu entirely.

You need light to read the Kindle screen, but since books need light too, I hardly see this as a downside.

The Physical Thing

The Kindle is wonderful to hold and use. Lighter than any paperback I’ve held recently, I can it hold above my head lying down (can you honestly say you can do that with your iPad?) or just in my hands. For long reading periods, I tend to rotate the screen and hold the device landscape, as it fits nicer. Furthermore, my Cerebral Palsy affects my left hand as well as my leg, and holding books open for long periods got sore on my hand. The Kindle is a lot smaller, so can be used with one hand or propped up by another book or whatever.

Yep, it reads to you too

A lot of the criticism of the device comes from what you can’t do on it — what? people say, no email? no photos?

I don’t say this much, but they’re actually doing it wrong — they misunderstand what they’re looking at. The Kindle is not “Amazon’s answer to the iPad” — the Kindle is the new book. Can you check your email on your first edition Romeo and Juliet? No, because when you’re reading a novel or the newspaper, you’re switched off. The downside of Apple’s iBooks is that you’re reading them on on an iPad or iPhone, and there’s a big distraction there to check Twitter or your email or play Angry Birds. The Kindle has no more functionality than your paperback and that’s how it should be.

The Store

I should say at the start that I’ve bought no books on the Kindle itself — both of the books that I’ve read (Mark Coggins’ The Immortal Games and Stephen King’s The Shining) have been bought on my laptop and then transferred via USB cable to the Kindle.

I could do it off Wifi but I like not having to navigate much on the Kindle itself. Buying on the go is the only reason you’d pay an extra $50 for the 3G Kindle (well, that and being able to wirelessly send yourself books you buy on your computer when not on Wifi) — I honestly think it’s not worth it though.

Kindle pricing varies a lot — usually from about $.99 to $12.99. I’ve never seen a Kindle book more expensive than its paperback version so I think that you can safely say that you’ll always save money buying on your Kindle, even if it’s only a dollar or two. I myself have made back about $13 of my $139 Kindle purchase thanks to the better Kindle pricing.

Overall

Your original investment of $139 is/will be made up in the savings you make buying the Kindle edition of books, but where the Kindle really shines is in the simple fact that I will read more because I have one. I spend about half my life on trains (about 80 hours in the month of August) but I never read that much on them because they’d have weighed my bag down. I can now have up to 3,500 books in something smaller than 1 paperback, which means that I will take it with me everywhere, and will read exponentially more books. That’s something that, to me, you can’t put a price on, and that even if I didn’t make back the money –that Kindle books were always $5 more than paperbacks– I’d still do it.

It makes you wonder — if you could pay for more stuff like this, eating better, going to the gym more, sleeping better, reading more books or spending more time with their family and so on, would people do it?

The Amazon Kindle is $139 dollars from Amazon. You can purchase the device and the books for it with an Irish credit card. I don’t know if their 3G version (which costs $189) works in Ireland, anyone know?

Any questions about the Kindle? Ask in the comments or email tommyATcollisonDOTie (replacing AT with @ and DOT with a period/full stop).

[1] Source: iPad tech specs page on Apple.com.

[2] Assuming you have the Wifi-only Kindle with Wifi turned off (3 weeks with it on). Wifi + 3G one: 1 months with connectivity off (10 days with it on). Source: Amazon’s Kindle Page

There’s been a lot of talk over the newest addition to the photo sharing iPhone App — both good and bad (Robert Scoble has been pretty vocal, singing songs of praise to the little app).

Instagram is pretty simple app that lets you take a picture and then share it simultaneously on all your social networking websites. The pull of this app (and, I think, 90% of its explosive popularity) is that you can add different filters onto your pictures. Most of them focus on making your picture look nostalgic and vintage.

The criticism that the app has been getting is that some people are saying that we’re damning an entire generation of photo evidence by attaching cheap effects and (quoting the most vocal of the damning naysayers):-

This is an entirely untrue statement. Instagram saves the original photo to your iPhone’s camera roll, along with the filter-ized photo.

Talking more generally, the author of the linked article also says:-

As a society, we have already made a collective sacrifice in photo quality in the name of quantity and convenience. There was a dark period in the late 90s when average photo quality plummeted from the 20 megapixels of film to pathetic VGA, 640×480 (0.3MP) photos. But it climbed, and now your average point-and-shoot has 12MP, roughly film quality. But in the meantime we sacrificed quality again, this time in the name of portability, and we rely mostly on the cameras in our phones.

With these rubbish phone cameras we take terrible photos of some of our most important moments and cherished memories. I am not complaining about composition and lighting here; I’m not a photographer. I am talking about the quantity of meaningful visual data contained in these files. Future historians will decry forever the appalling lack of visual fidelity in the historical record of the last decade.

Again, I disagree.

The advent of the mobile phone, specifically the camera on the back of the mobile phone, transformed photography. We have so many more pictures of everyday life (like the pictures of this blogpost for instance) in the last 10 years than we did the 30 years before that. Yes, we did sacrifice quality for
convenience, but we’re not taking bad photos.

Smartphones are actually pretty decent cameras these days — the iPhone 4, miles ahead of other phones in some areas, lags behind with a meagre 5 megapixels. And even what’s considered ‘meagre’ is changing. 5 years ago the 640×480 (0.3 MP) was all people had.

Mobile phone cameras have a huge advantage over cameras in their instantaneousness. We don’t take our cameras with us everywhere with us (or if we do, they’re in a bag and not readily accessible). Matt Smith (The Eleventh Doctor) summed this up well in the latest Doctor Who series when he remarked that the end of the world was going to come down the screen of a mobile phone (because everyone would be tweeting it).

Getting back to Instagram and its filters, I have to question the other author’s remarks on how “future historians will decry forever the appalling lack of visual fidelity in the historical record of the last decade.“. How will the historians see our pictures? If they have our phones, the original is there. If they’re looking at the pictures we tweet? Well, this is us!

**

History class, 2050.

Teacher: “…and some of the users of this social networking site liked to add effects to the photos that made them look vintage.”

**

We are making history here. There’s no rule book that says the photos we take have to be original and unedited. If there was, the creators of PhotoShop would’ve been lynched ages ago! All Instagram is guilty of is loving too much making it easy to edit these pictures.

So go on, get Instagram here (iTunes store link) and go have fun with the effects.

Being a personal blogger is a lot like being a musician actually: the best of them can use it to make their living but the vast majority of musicians have to have a day job of some description to pay the rent. In the same way, personal bloggers need some other angle to make them interesting enough for the ordinary guy (the Joe Bloggs, heh) to want to read the blog. For this reason, I talk about tech a lot here too.

That probably makes it sound as if bloggers’ primary goal is to get readers. This is probably true of some but not all. I know that I’d still blog if nobody read me, but since that isn’t the case, I write for people. You do too — maybe not when it comes to blogging but maybe in speaking? Do you talk to your mate in the pub the way you talk to an audience?

Photo owned by Incase. (cc)

For what it’s worth, I’ve always maintained that public speaking is something that should be taught in schools (but you probably wouldn’t make a University degree out of it) alongside Maths, Irish or Geography. These are the ways we train our kids for the world — not with trigonometry or studying the Neolithic Peoples. Parents: get your kids into drama groups and the like. We need people who are able to talk confidently to a group.

The thing about Cerebral Palsy (CP) is that it’s limiting. You have to watch what you do and how you do it. It’s something that you have to stay on top or it because it’s a slippery slope if you develop bad habits with the way you sit or something equally mundane. On the whole, it’s largely manageable and with the surgical intervention I’ve been lucky to have, I have a reasonably easy road to stay at the very least walking with a cane for life, which is fantastic.

But the annoying part of CP isn’t the cane or the limited sporting opportunities or not being able to do as much as peers, endurance-wise: to me, it’s the shoes.

When I was very young, I was given Piedro boots, which were orthotic shoes or boots that were designed to be good for disabled feet and easy to lace up (A lot of CP, mine included, affects hand dexterity as well as legs). They weren’t, at least in my eyes, that good looking. I cared how I looked. Not having control over what shoes I could wear pissed me off.

That changed when I went for surgery in the US in 2004 and I was given SMOs, which look like these but only ankle-high. They fit snugly into any wide shoe and I was already graced with big feet (actually a good thing in CP — better balance) so my choice in footwear had increased dramatically.

It was on an old episode of Top Gear that I first saw a pair of converse and I wore little else over the next couple of years. When I was about 15, my knee started flaring up. Because converse had very little support (even with the SMOs) we (my physio & family) thought that these shoes were to blame and replaced them with different, more supportive shoes that I disliked the look of, purely because they weren’t converse.

I thought that was the end of my wearing converse until a couple of days before I came over to Minnesota in September 2010. I had been fitted for a new pair of SMOs in July (my feet have grown a lot and I need better fitting SMOs every couple of months) and was collecting them. One of the questions I had for my surgeon was if this surgery would allow me to wear converse again — yeah, that was actually one of the things I cared most about. I reasoned that the woman who fits my orthotics would be in a good position to comment on the shoes. As I tried the new SMOs on, I asked her about the converse and she said that as long as the SMOs were on, what shoes I wore didn’t matter.

I was overjoyed to break out a pair of cons, I’m not gonna lie.

So yeah, maybe it’s weird (or girly or whatever) to be so caught up about shoes but there you go.