Tommy Collison

I recently upgraded to an iPhone 4S, and what immediately strikes you is how good the camera quality is:

I’d wager that for a budget of ~ €500, the iPhone 4S is one of the best cameras you can buy.

The photo itself is the interior of the restaurant in the George Hotel, on the corner of Shannon and O’Connell’s Street. I spent many an afternoon here while studying for my Junior Cert., and it’s become one of my favorite haunts for its attentive and friendly staff; good coffee/tea and comfortable seats.

Something tells me that the “It’s time to get off this couch and get ready to go to work[1], but this book is amazing and there’s nothing I want to do more than stay here and bask in the author’s linguistic genius” thoughts I’ve been having are only going to become more and more frequent as I grow up.

[1] Everyone in my school goes on a week of work experience when they’re in 5th Year — I’m working in Limerick Musical Society, observing rehearsals and making show programs.

Great interview over at 512 pixels with Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper.

Two parts of the interview which I enjoyed, and where Marco and I share similar views:

But once I’m awake, there are things I care about and things I don’t. I’m willing to spend 15 minutes making breakfast and coffee in an elaborate routine every morning because I care about those, but it only takes me about 5 seconds to choose my outfit for the day because I don’t care about that.

…

Text is an amazingly versatile medium. Relative to other media, text has very low production costs, both in authorship and distribution. One person can produce a great essay or even a complete book. It’s much harder to be a one-person filmmaker. And since text as a medium does not have a fixed timescale like audio and video, it can be easily skimmed or read at any desired speed.

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?

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.

“Eccleston was a tiger and Tennant was, well, Tigger. Smith [is] an uncoordinated housecat who pretends that he meant to do that after falling off a piece of furniture.” – Lynne M. Thomas

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.

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?

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.