Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Before I start I’m going to state a few things. I’m going to say something that’s a bit out there, a bit controversial and a bit, at first glace, counter-intuitive. But never the less I am going to put the proposition forward.

Private profiles and turning Facebook into MySpace.

There, I said it. It seems crazy at first, after all the point of Facebook is that you are connecting with your existing real world connections and that it isn’t just an open directory of internet aliases.

But the fact is, this recurrent doom that people keep talking about has failed to materialise. They let Leeds Met onto Facebook, nothing really went wrong. They let the whole world onto Facebook, I’m not going to pretend I am pleased about that but it didn’t turn Facebook into MySpace. They added applications and yes they are very annoying, but you choose to list the people as friends that send you the application invites and you can say no. I do. It keeps my profile nice and clean, it’s still Facebook.

Private profiles however, I would argue are doing some damage. What I truely loved about Facebook was that each university had it’s own network and you could pretty much move freely around that network. You could see new people’s profiles, see what mutual friends you have in common, see the connections. Private profiles prevent you from doing this.

This hysteria about keeping your profile private is ruining the Facebook experience and turning Facebook into the jungle of uncommon ground and paranoia that is MySpace. It’s a slippery slope my friends, a slippery slope.

Having had Michelle storm out on me I headed to The Refectory with Jack to grab some food and our conversation left me with a few things to mull over.

As a general rule, I won’t respect irrational beliefs regardless of the discourse. The problem with this is that it generally doesn’t get people to engage in debate with you (with the exception of perhaps Muslims who tend to respond far more to conflict than friendship). if you start being honest about what you think of people’s beliefs they tend to close up and become defensive which means a) you’re not going to get through to them at all, b) they are going to find a way to disagree with you even if you are right and c) may not even engage with you at all.

The alternative approach is to grant irrational beliefs credibility and respect so that, hopefully, people are a little more open to ideas, which, you would hope would eventually bring them round to a rational viewpoint. This has the drawback of having to grant irrational beliefs undeserved respect, to give in to the religious privilege that theological ideas undeservedly enjoy.

So the question comes down to this: can i ethically justify granting unfair religious privilege to irrational beliefs in order to engage with people on a more open level?

I have no money. I actually have way less than no money. And my credit card bill has to come out with that.

So I’m confused. Does that mean I can justify spending £60 on the complete series of Jonathan Creek on DVD?

I finally figured out what was wrong with one of the computers I am currently troubleshooting. The motherboard wasn’t getting enough power. It wasn’t that I had forgot to connect something, it was that my PSU didn’t actually have a 12v power cable. So I ran down to Maplin to get one of these and finally got the machine up and running.

Having managed to install Windows Server 2003 I booted up to find that it defaults to the classic Windows 9x look still (as does Windows Server 2008 I believe). It’s quite minimalist when you start it up, there is a security configuration help file on your desktop and the recycle bin in the bottom right corner. Also the system tray is empty – completely. There are quite a few other querks too such as it still ships with Internet Explorer 6 and it won’t let you change the security levels.

I’ve yet to fully play around with it as a server though so the fun is yet to come.

Having seen a recent episode is the new series of QI I was hugely disappointed. It just wasn’t QI. It was jazzed up, garish and just generally not up to the usual standard. That said having just seen another episode, perhaps it was a one off. Not that the standard hasn’t dropped because I still believe it has but there is at least some hope for it yet.

So, yesterday was the CompSoc EGM. It got quite an impressive turnout of 18 people which is quite an improvement on the AGM which all of 2-3 people bothered to turn up for. The (now) interim committee has made way for Sam as president, Norm as secretary, Martin as treasurer and Kieran as vice president.

So yeah, I lost out on president. Generally due to lack of support, the (to be as of two weeks) level 3 students consisted of myself, Kieran and Maths Chris. Though obviously not being in the room when the votes were cast I don’t actually know what went on. Maybe nobody at all voted for me.

It’s funny, when I was first offered the job as president, I look it relucantly as I had other commitments and was never really a big fan of CompSoc. But once I got into it I threw myself into the role and found myself with a new vibrant attitude towards the society. For the first time I really wanted to be involved in CompSoc, to give it a good future.

I thought I did to be honest. In the month or so we had the interim commitee we got events planned, we got issues sorted, we actually had a committee that wanted to run CompSoc. We had people excited about taking committee jobs. That’s the first time I’d ever seen that happen – the first AGM I witnessed saw people taking positions just because nobody else would do it. Ash wanted to be president everyone else just said “yeah, ok I’ll do it.” The second AGM, well, nobody turned up to it. Then, over summer, we actually had people wanting the jobs for the first time.

Today’s EGM was another apathetic wash-out. Kieran was unchallenged for vice president, nobody at all actually wanted to run for secretary or treasurer really, it was another case of “yeah, I might as well fill a committee place to make up numbers.” Sadly, it’s the same old story for CompSoc.

If I don’t write something I’ll probably end up sat here forever. So I’ll just keep it to this.

How many people hate me?

How many people dislike me? How many people find me annoying? How many people think I’m not a very nice person? An immoral person? Arrogant? Self-righteous? Judgemental? A loser who will never amount to anything? A control freak? It’s intrieging to think about what people are saying about you behind your back.

Science I love deliveries! (Lol, guess which episode of South Park I finally got round to seeing recently). I got two today. First of all, my long awaited pair of 320gb external hard drives. They are the Western Digital MyBook Essential ones which had a fair amount of critics but no more than any other manufacturer and model including my own LaCie hard drive which I haven’t had any problems with in the 3-4 years I have had it.

So far they seem to be doing alright, I plugged in one of them at about 11ish this morning and began copying all my music over to it. It is up to P at the moment (after 4 hours) which isn’t too bad. It’s still going to take a while to finish and come in with a slower time than the last external hard drive I did this with but building in time for the fact my music collection has increased in size since then it’s not going to come in with a much slower time.

The second delivery I got was the networking gear for my new house. We’re wiring it all in which means a switch for every floor including my upgrade to gigabit networking plus a pair of routers, a modem for our soon (touch wood) to be connected broadband and a few other bits and pieces. I haven’t played around with my routers’ config options yet as I want to save some of the excitement for tomorrow (lol, that is probably really sad but I feel I’m perhaps loosing my edge as the ultimate nerd). I can’t wait though as it’s going to be pretty sorted because I picked up some rather good ones.

I love the UK. We’re the only country in the world that can be well known for miserable rainy weather and still have an infrastructure that is brought to a stand still by heavy rain.