Archive for the ‘General Rambling’ Category

It’s been a while since I ‘moved on’ from grammar school, and the various things I was involved with in it. It will mostly be a time I can look back on with pleasure and, some bits at least, with pride. One of those things is Model United Nations, which I was involved with for each of my seven years at school, and they then took the considerable risk of letting me organize it for a year, which went, predominantly, without issue, I hope.
For those of you who have never encountered MUN I feel your pain – you’ve been sadly deprived. I’m not saying it makes you a better person. Quite frankly I’m sure it’s made me more confident and bold than I was before I started, and someone like me probably shouldn’t be allowed such qualities. Basically it’s all about debate. A (normally large) group of pupils have a debate, with each one attempting to accurately portray the views and beliefs of a particular country – just like the real UN, except they’re much less fun.
Here’s the bit where I’m going to get all speechy (eat your heart out Alistair Campbell).
In a world which is increasingly connected, increasingly diverse, and increasingly complicated everyone needs to know how to work together. We need to learn how our actions affect others, and young people need to learn how other people’s views, beliefs, and opinions need to be heard, understood, and respected. MUN guides these young people towards such a greater understanding, whilst remaining fun, and providing other useful ‘life skills’ like learning how to properly construct an argument, and how to be really quite sarcastic. All right, so the last one might just have been me, but it’s useful when you’re chairing a debate between the United States and, well, anyone else.
So, my reason for my mini-rant? It’s more to remind this year’s senior MUNers at my old school what they’re working towards, as well as gloat slightly, knowing that they’ll never quite replace me. I wish them well as they work towards a conference which will, I am sure, be very different to the one I was responsible for. It also seems appropriate to thank the school – Methodist College Belfast, for supporting the conference throughout my time at the school, and making my Hallowe’en half-term that little bit more… eclectic.

So, just a little over a month ago I left the drumlined countryside of County Down, my family, and the vast majority of my friends to go to Scotland to seek scientific enlightenment, or as normal people call it, to go to university. So, it’s been a month, and I guess quite a lot’s happened, and my brilliant plans of blogging once a day and taking a photograph every day are sadly, if unsurprisingly, consigned to that increasingly large heap of ideas which never reached fruition.
So far I’ve discovered the pleasures of being crushed on a subway platform during the morning rush-hour and how four minutes means ten when it comes to waiting for a subway train. I’ve found out what a nice place Glasgow can be in the sun, and how miserable it can be in the rain.
So, anyhow, that basically brings you up to date on what’s happened to me, and now to allow myself to write lots of wonderful accounts of daily life.

I’ve never really understood why people should want to feel a million dollars… I mean, assuming we’re talking US Dollars, which each weigh 8.1g (thanks Wikipedia) then you’re going to weigh over 8 tonnes.

So, I’ve managed to hammer out a few ideas about what I can actually do with a blog, and why I’m maybe not getting anywhere with the one I’m doing now. My conclusions thus far:

• You can’t be too sarcastic – blogging is all about being vaguely offensive.
• You can’t do comic timing on a blog – until I develop a special notation for jokes, I’m guessing jokes are out.
• A nice pattern to the titles is fun – Like the way Friends episodes were always “The one…”.
• Being rude is fun – especially towards people who are reading your blog.
• Talking about maths and science isn’t fun – this one came as a blow.
• Being personally identifiable from your blog is probably dangerous – so I’ll need to start carrying pepper-spray, or learn not to hit like a girl. Probably a good idea anyway though…

• Bullet lists are cool

So with all that learning done, I think it’s probably time to go and start writing my new, sarcastic, rude, and clever blog.

Oh, and, you might like to know, the puppies are still being noisy and trying to eat each other (puppies are also fun).

I have nothing to write a blog about. I guess that much is evident. After all, so far it’s mostly been a combination of my wild and incomprehensible ramblings about computers and whatnot, or else puppies.
So far I’ve reached a couple of conclusions:

1. I can’t write about my life – it’s not very interesting, or to put it another way, the most interesting thing that happened to me today was discovering that iPods have no off button.
2. I can’t write about computers, because it’s boring.

So I need an idea for what to blog about, or, failing that, a life, please…

Or The Benefits of data sharing

I know I sound like a complete technophobe when I talk about computers, which I’m not – I think. Computers are still really stupid. I mean, there’s a program for email, for browsing the internet, for taking notes, and for organizing photos. These programs have no connections – my email program has no idea that I did visit a website which has sent me a confirmation email, and so it treats it as junk and puts it away in a folder wit various tempting offers from Nigerian business men. My photo program might very well know who’s in a photo, but since it isn’t linked to my address book, it can’t give me their email address easily, can’t link me to their Facebook account, and can’t do anything clever.

All of this sounds abstract, but the thing is, my mobile phone can already do quite a lot of these things, but my more technically advanced computer cannot. There are lots of rather clever things a computer could do if all of this information was linked up as well; it would be far easier to find information, and it would make developing applications much easier, and it would make switching to a different piece of software an absolute breeze, since such a system would force all data on a computer to be held centrally in a database.

Hmm. Well, anyway, that was an exciting post, wasn’t it…

I happened today to stumble upon what is possibly the most famous and lasting idea one of my favourite writers came up with: the “Three Laws of Robotics” – the idea that at some point in technological advancement humans will create robots which are self-aware, and created with three unbreakable rules hardwired into their (positronic) brains. They read somewhat exactly as so:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

A pretty useful idea really – after all I’d rather the robot which is going to be the first thing to succeed in tidying my bedroom didn’t turn murderous and kill me for leaving an odd sock under my bed. But the thing is, in a way we do already give a group of people the ability to conduct extreme measures for the good of the public. So I’d like to hope if humanity ever develops a self-conscious politician like Asimov’s robots they’d be given some hardwired instructions, something like this:

1. An elected representative of the people may not injure a constituent, or through inaction allow a constituent to come to harm.
2. An elected representative must obey any orders given to it by constituents, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. An elected representative must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Okay, so those are pretty poor. But they’re better than the ones which politicians seem to follow at the moment, which go more like:

1. An elected representative of the people may not injure its party, or through inaction allow a business of interest to the party to come to harm.

Well, okay, that’s just a waffle; obviously I know we’ll never be able to hardwire politicians into being decent people – we’ve just got to hope some of them are.

Just unloading some madness

I remember a couple of years ago there was a television programme which aimed to teach – let’s say rather uncouth – young ladies how to hold teacups, and how they should address a member of the Royal Family. The most distracting thing about this programme was the etiquette trainer, who looked like a female Ian Paisley, somewhat ironic.

Right now I’m staring at what is probably the rudest thing in my house – and I’ve got five cats. Considering how much time most people use computers, whether wilfully or not, it’s quite appalling that nobody seems to have ever taught them manners. The rude response which you get when you try to put a file onto an already full disk, “Cannot complete, Disk Full” or something along those lines is about as civilized as what I’d expect to have barked at me by an angry drill sergeant.
The problem isn’t limited to everyday computers. All of the big supermarkets now have these self-service checkouts, always commanding you, with the same voice, to place items in the bagging area. There’s never a please, or an “Excuse me, I need you to place your items in the bagging area, thanks”. Come on, for the thousands of pounds these things must cost to install and develop you’d think they could have a selection of voices; one would be selected at random when you use the checkout. I’m thinking Joanna Lumley and Morgan Freeman would be a good start, but some regional variants would add a bit of interest to what is otherwise an uninteresting, and often insulting process.

So, computers, you need etiquette training; Channel 4, I think I’ve found you a replacement for Big Brother.

For a while now I’ve wanted to use Linux. To be honest, I’ve wanted to swith over entirely to it in some ways, as a matter of principle as much as anything else. The upshot of all this was that I bought a magazine with a live CD distribution of Kubuntu. That’s to say I bought a CD which would run it without needing to be installed on my computer. I tried it, liked it, but found it a bit slow – not only was my computer at the time slow, but Live CDs work out of RAM, and are only as good as its speed. My experimenting with Linux went on like this for a while, but it’s never come to fruition.

Yesterday, however, was to prove a day of minor discoveries. I’ve toyed with the idea of using a virtual machine to run Linux in, and when I got my new computer a month and a half ago, I decided to download VirtualBox, which is the software which does all sorts of fancy things to allow you to run a computer inside another computer. Where is this entry going? I hear you ask. Well, there’s no bread in it, and I have no intention of including Sammy Wilson either…

To cut a (very) long story short, I am now running two operating systems, on the same computer, at the same time. Pretty useless, really, but it looks clever, and keeps me idealogically happy.