Of all and yonder

Tweets + spam = spweets

2010-08-13T19:58:00.000+01:00

People are like sheep and have no brain. Granted, not all otherwise I would be one of them. But you can find all these sheep people loitering in one place: on twitter. What a bunch of twits they are. Maybe you understood by now that this post is not going to be about the praises of Twitter.

Can anyone tell me what is the attraction of Twitter? People just post random, stupid and useless short messages: I am eating a sandwich, just bought this or that, feeling bored now. No wonder they feel bored if they rely on Twitter to entertain themselves.

Contribution of Twitter?

What is the contribution of Twitter to society? What can we gain from it? I struggle to find answers. Someone can disseminate their message quickly and efficiently to the general public. But is there anything worth saying that will interest most people and in such few words? If it’s just a small group of people, why not just email them? Most people won’t find anything you have to say interesting, unless you do or you are someone famous.

Followers follow me
Enter Sarah Brown and Britney Spears, famous tweeters. Sarah Brown, as the wife of the previous UK Prime Minister, got a large number of ‘followers’ as they are called. What has she done? Hello, she is NOT the Prime Minister. And who cares if she is drinking wine or not? Well, it seems many people care. Get a life, you sad people.

How about Britney Spears? She’s supposed to be good at music, isn’t she? Well why not just give her a microphone or buy her CD? She’s not going to sing on Twitter, is she?

Recently there was an article in the news, the more conventional type, about how some celebrity followed a ‘normal’ guy from the UK whose few tweets were about cleaning his cupboard. Overnight, that ‘normal’ fellow became a celebrity on Twitter and gathered a large number of followers. What, just because he had a celebrity following him? Get a life again you sheep.

It seems if a few people, or a critical mass head onto a website, especially followers, everyone else will follow like sheep. Now marketers spam Twitter like there is no tomorrow because everyone is on there and they hope people will see there message.

Who are the sheep?
Well, the funny thing is that I don’t personally know anyone who uses Twitter. Sure, most of the people I know have Facebook but not a single one of them neither follows anyone on Twitter nor even has a Twitter account.

So who the hell are all these sheep then? Maybe I cried out too loudly and there are no sheep. The only sheep left on Twitter would be these marketers following each other, marketing their products to each other and following the celebrities when they get bored with their stuff.

Keep twittering sheep!*

*My deepest apologies to sheep of the grazing kind who can’t tweet (yet).

Getting your priorities in life right

2010-08-03T09:35:00.007+01:00

Life is a learning curve. You start as a helpless baby unable to walk and talk. You go to school, you learn your trade. If you enjoy the academic world, you might carry on after school and go to university for 3 years. You come out of the education system at 21years old then, having spent around 16 years in a learning establishment. The hardiest might go on for a 2nd degree but this is where the water becomes murky.

Educational steps
When do you leave this cocooned world? When do you go out there in the real world to earn a living for yourself? University studies are not compulsory, in fact, continuing at school after 16 in the UK is not compulsory but advisable. If you go on to university, do a first degree and then a second, when do you stop? Is the second degree really going to be useful or are you delaying the inevitable – that of going out there and earning a living?

After finishing a degree, shouldn’t one be expected to get a job and settle down? Find a partner, get married and start a family? Move on to the next logical steps in the learning curve? It is now about learning responsibilities, learning about parenthood and then passing down to your children that experience in life that you have accumulated and that was passed down to you in turn.

Holding on to the past
Too many people out there are just grown-up children; kiddults is the new term. Some have no priorities and go where the wind blows them. They finish university, hang out with a partner for a while, party all over the place, move from job to job and when they get close to their 30s, they decide to go back to university again. They already have a first degree and instead of moving forwards, they go back to their easy, cocooned world.

When you leave university at 21, it’s great: you have your whole life ahead of you and a solid education behind you. But if you start university again when you are approaching 30, you are not progressing in your life. This is especially true if you have a spouse who is working and already supporting you financially. Your spouse may be looking ahead to the future and a family while you are looking backwards and going back to university for a second or third time instead of following the next logical step in the progression of your life.

Time is relentless
What you don’t know is that the clock is ticking. By the time you come out of university and get that ‘proper’ job, you will find out you have wasted your best years and that you are fast approaching middle age. Is that the time to start a family? Would children like to have elderly parents?

A large age gap is irreversible and sometimes means that children and parents are unable to form a close bond. The generation gap and diverging interests are just too far apart. A lack of fitness at an advanced age also translates into an inability to play sports with your children and have fun with them, leaving you sitting on the sidelines. By the time you retire, your kids will just be starting out in life as an adult and you may well never see your grandchildren.

Don’t delay what you can have now. Life can pass you by and then one day you will suddenly realize you have accomplished nothing in your life. Act now. You only have one life to live.

Andy loves gossip

2010-06-21T12:45:00.000+01:00

Andy at school who loved gossips on other kids who got in trouble but when he got in trouble for smoking in a classroom, he never uttered a word about it.

Andy was a boy at my school who loved gossips and gossiping on other kids. He would actively propagate the latest mishaps to befall them and glee with pleasure when learning about a new one.

As he entered his teenage years and left boyhood behind to experiment with manhood, his love of gossip did not cease. However, his first few steps into the forays of manhood started with experimentation like many others, especially if part of the wrong crowd. Andy did not really mix with the bad boys, he was not one of them. In fact, he was quite friendly, as long as you were of the average type – not in trouble nor a geek.

His teenage curiosity led him to try out smoking. I never saw him with a cigarette at his lips, after all, smoking was expressly forbidden within the schoolground and I didn’t see him beyond. However, I learnt about it in a big way when the gossip rounded on him to spread the news that he was caught smoking in the classroom. Gossip being gossip, it could all be untrue but his last chance of keeping his reputation intact was shattered when it was announced the next morning during school assembly that a kid had been caught smoking inside the classroom and that it was reminded to everyone that smoking was expressly forbidden at school

As Andy had never been in trouble before, at least as far as I knew, I wanted to learn more about it, perhaps in a way to delight at his downfall. So I asked him what happened and if it was true that it was him. Andy being Andy, when his was at the centre of the storm, he suddenly lost his tongue and all his glee and never uttered a word about it. His sudden silence about this sort of event confirmed everything for me. If it was another kid, his tongue would have been working overtime to spread all the juicy details to all and yonder.

Man in a suit in a train

2010-05-17T07:40:00.002+01:00

A man in a suit is not always the best behaved.

I was traveling by train the other day. When I entered the carriage, I went to sit at one of these desks. There sitting opposite me was a well-dress man in a sharp charcoal-grey suit and shiny shoes. He was reading a newspaper and had a cup of coffee and an empty banana skin next to him. He also had a bin just behind him to throw away his shit.

After I sat down, he made no attempt to move his empty cup and banana remains out of my way, even after I pushed my way in somewhat. Sir seemed too engrossed in his paper. And it wasn’t The Sun by all means. A while later he finished reading and put his paper away, leaving his rubbish still on the desk. It might well not have been his but when his stop came, he got up, picked his litter and finally dumped it in the bin.

I could say that at least he threw his rubbish to the bin instead of leaving it behind like so many people. But he also should not have left the desk strewn with it even though others were also using it. Did he own the train? Was I invading his personal space which he had to mark with his banana in my way? Wearing a suit does not mean well-educated and well-behaved although one may have had a lot of money spent on education.

Habit maketh not the monk, something for me to remember.

The Chaos of transport

2010-05-01T20:40:00.002+01:00

The other day it was raining, I was in a packed train and the ceiling was leaking. Fortunately not on me. Oh, and did I say the train was not moving?

Train travel is very expensive in the UK yet its price reflects in no way the level of service. As a commuter, you will fork out a lot of money for an expensive ticket only to be provided with a regularly delayed and appalling service. What with the poor state of the engineering industry in the UK, it's no surprise it has come to this.

We all know how sensitive trains are to the weather. Snow falls on tracks and trains are stuck. If it’s windy, it’s too many leaves on tracks and trains are stuck. If it rains, the tracks are flooded. If it’s too hot, tracks buckle. Even when it’s sunny, I’ve heard that trains have to go slowly because of the glare or reflection of the sun off the rail into the driver’s eyes. They must be the most disable people on earth!

What other option does the commuter have? Travel by car, by bus? Not much better. Traffic jam, road rage, expensive parking…. If your commute is long and you take the train, at least you can do something during this time, for example read the paper. If you are driving or stuck in traffic, you can only keep your eyes on the road and make sure you don’t get too close to the car ahead.

How to restore menu toolbar in Firefox

2010-04-05T15:37:00.001+01:00

Just hit the ALT key.

Long answer:

I was fooling around in Firefox and unchecked the visible toolbars under View > Toolbars. The options are the Menu toolbar, the Navigation toolbar, the Bookmarks toolbar and any other toolbar you may have added. I started from the bottom of the list and hid the bookmarks, navigation and last of all the menu bar.

That left me in big trouble because the View button had disappeared and I could no longer access the View > Toolbar options underneath in Firefox. What to do? No way to fully browse the internet. I did a quick search online using the key terms in this post's title to find out the way to restore the menu bar in FIrefox. after all, if you can hide it, you can unhide it. Unfortunately, either I used the wrong search terms or Google is not as good as we all thought and I couldn't find a solution quickly enough on the first page.

I picked a link on the first page about a Firefox addon to hide the menu bar (is that necessary?) and in it, it said to press the ALT key to restore the menu bar. Close to desperation, I tried just that although this was supposed to work specifically for the addon but hey presto, my menu bar was visible again.

After clicking pressing the alt key, don't forget to go back to View > Toolbar and tick the Menu toolbar because if you check the View Bookmarks toolbar instead, as an example, the Menu bar will disappear again. Although by now, you will now how to make it appear again using the keyboard. Once again, I'll repeat it because it is so nice and reassuring to know that: press the alt key to make the menu bar reappear in Firefox. At least this works in the latest version of FF (3.6.3 currently) and on Windows XP.

So if you happened to have been in the same situation as me, I am writing this posst in the hope it will appear high up in Google if you are ever making such a targeted search.

Digital movie downloads

2010-03-20T19:36:00.001Z

I recently read someone’s blog post about the challenges of downloading a movie in Windows Media Player format. The movie in that format was not compatible with iTunes, PSP or Zunes. Adobe Air and a snooping Digital Copy Manager that reports on your activities both had to be installed as well. In brief, whoever came up with that didn’t make life easy for you.

Unfortunately, this sort of behaviour happens all too often in other spheres followed by a lack of complaints or action from those on the receiving end. Some companies may offer very poor delivery services; maybe others call you home time and again for one of their surveys; others impose restrictive use on the products they sell. A good example for this case would be the DRM, Digital Rights Management, to stay on-topic. It was initially used to prevent people making multiple copies of CDs they had legally purchased.

While I can understand that the manufacturer wants to protect its assets, in many cases, these restrictions were too heavy and people have rightly protested against them. In many cases, they win.

So today, instead of just accepting your fate, or being resigned to losing out, go out there and complain actively. One person might not make a difference but if enough join and hit a company where it hurts most, change might happen.

So Molly, instead of just being resigned to this ‘restrictive and intrusive DRM’, go out there and vote with your feet.

It’s time to turn active.

Why flaunt it when you don't have it?

2010-02-28T17:04:00.004Z

Why flaunt it when you don't have it?

Gabourey Sidibe might be a talented actress and she should stick to acting.

Also read for fun a couple at it under the moonlight.

Bus toys

2010-02-22T20:54:00.001Z

How buses nowadays are made of plastic and also more expensive. Old buses were all metals and also had more space inside.

Have you ever noticed how modern buses are now made mostly of plastic inside? Compare a new bus and an old one, maybe from the sixties. These old buses had metal seats, frames and so on inside. They also had few furnishings, making the buses spacious.

New buses not only have turned towards plastic fittings and seating but seem much more crowded inside. Where is the world going?

Engineered myth

2010-02-13T18:50:00.005Z

To stick to the thread of recruitment, this post will discuss the engineering industry, another faker.

Bosses of engineering companies are always complaining about the lack of qualified engineers in the UK. They could be right. At universities up and down the land, engineering departments are only surviving because of the influx of foreign students who pay a premium to come to these cold wet shores. Where are the natives? Certainly not in the engineering departments. They are a rare breed there. Why? Do they know something that foreign students don’t? After reading this, you might think so.

If you graduate with a good engineering degree, you should think that you will land yourself a job in that profession without too much delay. After all, engineering bosses do complain about the lack of qualified engineers, and you are now qualified. Beware, you’ll be in for a surprise.

What these bosses really mean is that they want everything ready-made brought on a plate to them. They seek experienced engineers above all. And worse, they are not prepared to take on new graduates or inexperienced but qualified engineers. Somehow, they are under the impression that anyone who graduates from university does so with a bagful of experience under their arms.

Reality check: a university is a place of learning; a workplace is where you get experience. If bosses are not prepared to provide experience, they are preposterous in asking for it! Who else will provide that? Where else?

Work placement I hear you suggest. A good solution. Except that they are over-subscribed. Employers this time prefer qualified staff instead, otherwise they will only let you make tea.

Some call it voluntary work and really pay you no penny. If you are the independent student who doesn’t want to really on mummy and daddy’s bank account, you gotta work for yourself and the summer holidays are a great time to do that. How can you pay the bills then if you are going to work for free? Are we really back to slavery with free labour? Fortunately, some are clamping down on this practice. The mighty University of London has decided a while ago to stop advertising unpaid work across all of its colleges and universities unless the employer could justify why it needed this free labour. Way to go.

The recession only intensifies this problem – preposterous bosses demanding experience or free labour. These practices were established well before the current financial crisis made many experienced professionals redundant.

Engineering graduates end up working in other sectors which appreciate their numerical and analytical skills better and also pay better – banks, like them or not, are one of them.

So engineering bosses, where are your qualified engineers? You are right, not so many here; you kicked them all away. Now you are having to rely on foreign workers who qualified and got their experience abroad.

Ready-made, once again…

This is my 2 cents to debate.

Employes who fake it

2010-02-07T16:39:00.000Z

As the recession keeps its stranglehold over Britain, it’s not just customers who like a free deal. Employers want their freebies too and in a desperate attempt to get it in desperate times, their resort to dishonest tactics.

It is more and more common for employers to ask applicants to produce a short presentation during their interview. If the presentation is about the company itself, then there is nothing suspicious. But if the company is asking applicants to produce a presentation on the very work they do for a client, then maybe you should start asking who benefits more from this. Especially if the employer goes underground afterwards and never gets back to any applicants or suddenly decides that it no longer needs to hire anyone.

Is it because the so-called employer had 10 different presentations full of ideas from hopeful would-be employees and it found it had suddenly plenty of material to work with for that client?

Even before the recession, employers were in the habit of not replying to applications, unless they wanted to invite someone for an interview. But they used to get in touch with the interviewees afterwards to let them know whether they were successful or not. Times have changed.

Nowadays many don’t even bother contacting interviewees if they are not going to hire them. Bolder ones ask for a presentation and original ideas on the very work they do and for clients who pay them. If they are in a creative industry, they get free ideas; why hire someone then? Next time they don’t know how to go about their own business, they will do it again and call for a new round of presentations under the excuse of recruiting.

Watch out for those who fake it, guys!

Under the moonlight

2010-01-31T22:40:00.001Z

This is not going to be a romantic post despite the title. But there is romance involved. For others in the story. According to their interpretation of it at least.

It was a bitterly cold winter night at 11 pm and I was cycling back home. I had gloves and a hat on me but the cold was till biting me in the face. Sitting on my well-oiled bicycle, I was gliding smoothly down a path with a wide grass verge on either side. It was very dark as this path was not lit and the only light came from the stars and the full moon. There was just enough light for me to see a few meters ahead. I didn’t have any lights on my bicycle so I was cycling slowly.

It was very quiet at this time and out-of-the-way place and even a little scary because of the darkness and bushes and trees further away where anyone could be lurking in the shadows. In front of me and to the right of the path, I saw movement in the grass. There are often foxes coming out at night so I thought it was one of them. It was too low on the ground to be someone so I wasn’t scared.

Then in the full moonlight I saw a pale face, just like the full moon, looking back at me. I never stopped cycling although I had slowed down in case I hit any fox I thought was responsible for this movement. As I approached even further on my bike, the pale face under the moonlight took the appearance of a white smooth bum attached to a body. That body was that of a young man or boy partially undressed under whom was lying another body well alive! It seems despite my silent approach, I had disturb some activity in the grass.

I carried on cycling at the same relaxed speed and didn’t look back. They must be desperate I thought, as the cold spread over me even more.

An elusive hairdresser

2010-01-30T22:11:00.000Z

How long have you been here? Where do you work? What do you do at work? Are you married? Kids? Grand kids? Ok, I made up the last one – I don’t even have kids yet but the only hairdresser I could find locally was probably the most talkative and curious. What will you have for dinner, she asked. I just had my lunch I replied. Do you like shopping? I prefer to do it online, I said, thinking about an article on men’s shirts and internet shopping I had just read.

My search for a hairdresser started shortly around Christmas and New Year when I decided to have a hair cut. It had been several months since my last one but since my last haircut was very short, I was not to be confused for a girl yet! My last haircut was also DIY.

Never would have thought that finding a local hairdresser would prove so hard. Actually, finding them was easy, finding one that was open was damn hard. Ok, it must be because they are all partying hard during yuletide, I told myself. One week after New Year, I resumed my search. One place looked still boarded up. I much later found out that there was another hairdresser just next to it that was open but at that time both were closed and one permanently. The next hairdresser was open but looked quite expensive and the person inside put me off with her attitude. Move on to the next one then. Next one looked frozen shut like it was not going to open anytime soon. I found another one on the internet via yell but it seemed to be a virtual hairdresser as I just could not find it on the street. It was supposed to be right on a round-about! Sounds like a Harry Potter novel to me.

I must have visited around 5 local hairdressers until I found an open one. All the others were shut. Maybe they open just for summer here! When I entered the only hairdresser open for business, the warm water vapour inside cause steam to form on my glasses and I just about saw a huge dog followed by a smaller one jumping at me. I also heard them barking very loudly; fortunately for me I recognized that they were not barking aggressively but rather welcoming me noisily. I asked for a haircut only to be told I needed an appointment. Damn, it’s getting harder and harder to get my hair cut here. I nearly resorted going down the diy route. I said I would call to make an appointment, thinking, yeah right!

But I did call and make my appointment. Somehow not finding a hairdresser made me more determined to get my hair cut by one of them rare breed. My appointment was for the next day and I turned up to find I was the only one there. Well, having an appointment does have its advantage then. But surprise, surprise, the two dogs were still there. And I thought they belonged to a customer who came to have her hair done yesterday. No they belonged to the hairdresser it turned out. At first I was ok with them, a nice distraction but I realized that having scissors held close to my eyes with a huge dog jumping around In a small cluttered room is not a good combination. An experience I will certainly not put myself through again.

Back to basics

2010-01-28T12:33:00.000Z

I was recently reminded of my maths teacher back at school. Well, I had more than one, so I thought about all of them and how they shaped my interest in their beloved subject. I extrapolated this and thought how maths teachers shape the interest of all their students in this subject, and more often than not, their lack of interest.

It didn't start on a good foot for me. Back at primary school, I found maths difficult. That's not to say that I wasn't good at it but I had to put in a lot of hard work and the answers and concepts didn't come by easily to me. My teacher didn't help much either as she used to pile a lot of pressure on us on getting it right and understanding ideas and logic at the first explanation. Nevertheless, I managed to keep my head above water.

Move on to secondary school. I don’t have any particularly outstanding memories of my maths classes at the beginning so I guessed I did alright but my next teacher was a nightmare. A bully really and I dreaded his classes. Maybe he dreaded teaching me as well because I certainly did not let him get his way with me. I won’t go over this but needless to say that his approach did not inspire me to like his subject.

Come the next teacher. He is the one who changed maths for me from a dull subject made up of dead numbers to a lively subject easy to understand. His explanation made maths seem very easy to me and I would understand the first time about trigonometry and other topics. I then enjoyed solving problems as quickly as possible and I especially remember obtaining 100% in a small test, something that had never happened to me.

I will never forget this teacher. He didn’t have a great personality, able to inspire others nor did he try to befriend his students. He just taught maths. But he did it damned well and made it look easy and fun. I had a tough teacher after him but that didn’t matter anymore because I enjoyed the subject from then on and no teacher would be able to change that.

The final exam at school was supposed to be difficult but I had a lot of fun flying through it and finishing with spare time when I know many others can’t even finish it.

I don’t want to brag too much about how good I am so I will tell you about my artistic skills. Or the lack of it rather! It could be that I am simply not good at this like most people but to stay on topic, I never had arts teachers who made that subject appear interesting. None of them really taught me how to paint. They would just ask us to paint something, to draw something or to create/assemble something. Then give us low marks. No arts teacher ever taught me arts.