Childhood?

I was born in London in 1990 at 8pm, a fact that I only know as my mother missed Coronation Street as a result. I don’t remember much about the first couple of years of my life, this is probably because I was happy, although it would make more sense that it was because I was unhappy and blocked out my past as a result. My second year alive doesn’t make up any prominent memories, I’m sure I was happy as I’ve seen photos of myself running around parks with a harness on, attempting to escape my happy childhood. My sister is 12 years my senior which meant that for the first decade of my life I was surrounded by teenage girls, perfume and electric reggae rave music. I was happy back then because I had no worries and the world was still being nice to me.
When I was about six, my twenty year old cousin came to stay with us for what turned into a year. He was my idol for that year; I followed him around and tried to be like him anyway I could. He worked on building sites and was the essence of cool. I came to the assumption that I needed a denim jacket like him as this was the source of his coolness. I got a denim jacket and soon became cooler than he, as I realised my idol was sleeping on my mother’s couch and infringing on my cartoon time at 6am on Saturday mornings, by being severely hung over and not enjoying the pyrotechnics involved in creating a power rangers megazord.
I remember being happy when I was about 9, I wasn’t the most popular guy in school and using my childish mind decided that to be popular I needed to do what the most popular person was doing. That person happened to be a girl and as a result I took up trampolining, a “sport” unlike any other. I attending trampolining class in my local sports hall, my first mistake was in choosing to do trampolining. I was the only male in the class except for the trainer who resembled James Brown. When I first attempted to jump, it was horrific. I fell into the well placed soft mats beside the trampoline straight away. Well it was fun for the week I went, but I didn’t see it as a sport and would just do whatever unacceptable jumps I wanted. After that I was asked to leave as my jumping skills weren’t up to scratch and I was holding the class back.
Another time I remember being happy in my childhood was when I did Russian Judo for a couple of months. I was about 13 and had been in secondary school for a year when my Russian friend who was being bullied started doing judo to learn how to counter his adversaries. I decided to join him and in doing so, added to my list of bizarre pastimes. I enjoyed judo as it enabled me for an hour a week to fight with other people in the class and not get into trouble, which appealed to me when I was 13. On the other hand the judo I was taught was all in Russian so I just had to follow what the others were doing and copy their mistakes. I did learn 3 words of Russian during my Communistic defence classes which I think will forever be scarred into my brain, Da, Neit and Vodka.
I feel childhood is one of the few times in life where time doesn’t matter and everything makes us happy, whether it’s Russian judo or denim jackets. With age comes added responsibility and stress, none of which are as fun as trampolining.

I found an article about passwords and how they are often easy to guess and with some programmes they can be cracked in a short amount of time. A company has developed software that reads the way the password is typed, things like the speed and difference between typing the keys is measured and where the person is situated in the world. This would prove to be very difficult to simulate from someone trying to hack into their accounts. This creates an additional layer of security which is well needed in today’s world.

The typing pattern is different for every person so copying this would be impossible which makes the technology great for companies. If the person decided to log in to their account from a different computer the technology would ask an additional question. The technology is really for strengthening already good passwords for big companies like banking companies and ones with sensitive information.


http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23008/

The Nikon S1000-pj

The Nikon S1000pj is a camera that has a projector as well as a screen. Only recently the screen on my camera was cracked and whilst at a gig the other night I saw a girl with a cracked screen too, which probably ruined her night to some extent. So this camera has a projector, the camera projects the photos on to a wall to a size of 20x16 inches which is pretty impressive. The camera also has a focus tuner on the top so you can adjust it and don’t have to stand a certain distance from the wall. This camera also solves the problem of having 10 people huddled around a 3 inch screen on the back of a camera, which has been a problem since the beginning of digital cameras.

It is the first camera to do this and is in the record books as a result. It is about 450euro and has 12.1 megapixels, great slideshow capability, and 2.7-in. high-resolution LCD monitor. The camera also has something called Scene Auto mode which is where the camera automatically selects the appropriate scene mode depending on what is in your photo. There are also five options that reduce blur and the Smart Portrait System and a Skin Softening function that reduces blemishes of up to 12 faces in the shot. Smile Timer releases the shutter automatically when the people being photographed smile, there is also a blink proof function that takes 2 photos and saves the one where the eyes are open, red eye is altered before saving automatically also.



http://www.dpreview.com/news/0908/09080402nikons1000pj.asp

What to look for when purchasing a laptop or computer?

The first question when deciding on a computer for college is whether to buy a desktop or a Laptop. I can’t imagine any students recommending a desktop aslaptops are so much more convenient, for instance I am doing this report in my living room with the laptop atop of my lap as the name suggests. So like most students you have decided to buy a laptop for you course, there are tons of different makes and varieties to choose from so depending on your course if it’s something arty, a Mac is probably the more suitable, but most people pick a system that they are more comfortable with, usually the one they grew up with in school.

The most important factors when buying a laptop are CPU, memory, hard drive, battery life and a definite need for college is to have wireless network connector, as it’s the easiest way to borrow the internet. Students often don’t have a lot of time, so when they get on their laptop they try to do as much as possible. At one time they could be uploading photos to facebook, syncing their iPod, have an internet modern attached and maybe their phone is plugged in somewhere too. So I’d say the number of USB ports is very important to students today.

Hard drive space can be a problem with laptops, there often isn’t enough memory and it can be difficult to upgrade or add additional memory. As a solution to this, a number of my friends have external hard drives, these also serve as backup in case files are lost or damaged. So the space on a hard drive is important, it’s measured in gigabytes and around 80GB is standard.

The CPU of a laptop is also very important and it affects the speed at which the laptop runs programmes, a bad CPU and it could take many minutes to load Windows, I’d recommend an Intel processor. RAM is important when trying to run more than one programme on your laptop; I’d recommend a RAM of about 2GB. Most Laptops come with Windows Vista or the new Windows 7 as an operating system; these contain programmes like Word, Excel and internet explorer.

Finally I’d recommend Anti-Virus software, Norton is the most popular but you can download free ones online that work very efficiently too like AVG for example. There are more customisable internet programmes like Mozilla Firefox and Safari that I prefer to Windows Internet Explorer. I hope this helps with buying a laptop.

This was quite a week.

So this week began by going out on monday night. Due to the strike every student in Dublin was out and town was packed. Copious amounts of 2euro alcohol were consumed in Bondi and I woke up on Bill's floor considerable less clothed than I had been when I left my house 36 hours earlier.
Tuesday ended up being the day Myself, Billiam and Megan went to the National Aquactic Centre, this turned out to be great fun, I learnt how to dive properly after beating the aforementioned in races.
And on the third day I rested.
Thursday, I was given a ticket to the Arctic monkeys which was amazing, I've liked the band since they released their first single and the gig did not dissapoint, they played all my favourites and the opening band The Eagles of Death Metal were very good too.
Then came to Friday, I hadn't been ice skating for a year but it's one of those things you never forget how to do like riding a bike or biting the inside of your mouth. I started skating when I was very young, but for the first time I realised how much it would hurt if i was to fall. I'm somewhere around 6ft and the ice is quite far away at this height, so what with it taking me about 2 seconds to actually hit the floor and the amount of momentum that would build up I decided to take it easy on the ice and spent most of the time watching others fall and smash into walls.

Here is a short film I made with two friends to get one of them into film school. He still owes me.

These are links that I have found very interesting the first is about the stanford prison experiment and the second is an authors website whos books are very interesting also.

http://www.prisonexp.org/

http://www.gladwell.com/bio.html

Karaoke, Doctor Parnassus and The Hills

This weekend was a strange one. It started off with coming home on friday and watching The Hills for the first time, I've given everyone the excuses for this such as it was the only thing on tv and the ntl was stuck on mtv but to be honest I just wanted to watch the show that has gripped every female in the world. About 4 hours later I was up to date on the timeline of events that had led to Heidi getting married and Kirsten and Lauren not being bessies anymore, but more of this later.
Later on friday evening i went to karaoke, which I learnt I'm very bad at half the way through a Flight of the Conchords song. Other than my poor attempts at Karaoke the night went well and I passed out the next morning after consuming a small amount of vodka watermelon.
I went to see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus on Saturday which was alright, the more I think about it, it's a film I really doubt I'll ever own on DVD, what I'm trying to say is, I wont be paying to see it again. It was spoiled by my friend telling me that Jack White of The White Stripes and The Raconteurs was in town and that he was giving a lecture on philosophy in Trinity, I'd have loved to see Jack White and spent the beginning of the film thinking of ways to get into the lecture.
Sunday Evening came and I quickly found myself watching the Hills again. Which is ok.

The image search results for Karaoke were crap so i decided against adding a photo of a microphone.