Tommy Collison

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?

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.

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.

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.

I don’t know how much of a problem lichess.org/ has with spam in the chat windows of ongoing chess matches, but I got some pretty weird messages during a game earlier:

I’m telling you, Apple has some great music taste.

If you sleep on it; sit on it; type on it or use it for more than two hours a day, you should get a high-quality, comfortable one, to the best of your ability and budget. I say this with regard to quality-of-life, referring to:

• Beds
• Mobile phones
• Chairs
• Laptops
• Backpacks
• Headphones
• Shoes
• Keyboards

Anything else you’d add to that list?

3am.

I love the night. It’s peaceful. I’m the only one awake, nothing to bend to except my own will.

I always think that empty houses —houses that have furniture and food and a Christmas tree; houses that are obviously lived in yet are currently almost devoid of life— belong in an episode of The Twilight Zone. They’re so eerie in their stillness.

The house is currently devoid of life except for me. I’m standing at the kitchen table, listening to whatever the latest Essential Classical Music album I’ve most recently got my hands on. I’m poring over a chess board, a book of Capablanca’s games opened beside it.

I love this. I love the night.

(If you’re interested, the game is a 1901 game between Corzo and Capablanca. The former has just played 14. Qxb6, swapping queens. White eventually loses the match after some surprisingly good tactics from the then-12-year-old Capablanca.)

(If you’re one of those readers who doesn’t like it when a blogger breaks their mould, you might not want to read this. I get sentimental.)

I usually try and do one of these posts on New Year’s Day. If I’m organized, I’ll have done it the day before and I’ll have set it to auto-post at 00.01 on January 1st of the New Year. However, I’m not organized this year. I rang in the New Year with a group of people who’ve become my closest friends over the last month. It was one of those moments when creating new memories was more important than documenting or reflecting on the old ones.

2011 was a pretty good year for me. I came home from America after major surgery and continued my upward spiral of improvement. I start 2012 walking independently with minimal pain and no outstanding problems. I also did the Junior Cert. and came out of them with a set of grades I was ultimately satisfied with. I don’t discuss my relationships at length on this blog, but they too had their place in 2011.

I probably say this every year, but I feel that I’m a wildly different person than I was this time last year. Experienced shaped me and taught me new things about myself and others. I learned.

Here’s to 2012 — I’ve got big plans.

• Phoenix
• Scala and Kolacny Brothers
• Peter Gabriel
• Coldplay
• Sunset Rubdown
• Green Day
• My Chemical Romance
• Counting Crows
• R.E.M.
• All Time Low
• Original Cast Recording of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
• Deadmau5
• Amadeus soundtrack
• Kraftwerk
• Los Campesinos!
• Arctic Monkeys
• Adam Pascal