Inspired by this post.

I miss the times that were meant to be closed,
but you let me in.
I saw and shared, and enjoyed those times you had,
you spoke to me.
I spoke to you less, and waited for you to reply,
you still haven’t.
Those times were amazing and I won’t quickly forget,
but I will miss them.
I will miss far worse than that, I will miss those moments,
with you.

I was talking with a friend, Sinéad (She’ld crucify me if I forgot the fada on the é ), about what advice we’d give to our younger selves. I wrote:

1. Don’t let them move you somewhere without Dublin Bus, or stay near Dundrum… the shopping centre will make everything worthwhile.
2. Think about things less and just ducking [sic] go for it. You’ve nothing to lose.
3. Buy lots and lots of APPL stock!

OK, the last one was a bit of a cop out… not really any use to a child with just pocket money. I will stand by the Dublin Bus thing… it’s the best form of transport this country has ever seen, despite the fact that I would be complaining about it if I could use it.

The first one is the most important, and yet one I follow least myself. I’ve become a lot more free over the past two years. This year on holiday in France I went into Paris alone and didn’t text my parents once… I know that doesn’t sound like much but to be fair I’m 17, was going from the suburbs on the RER (wonderful system, infinitely better than anything we have over here… even Dublin Bus ) and have never been in a foreign city alone before, so it was a big deal for me. I wouldn’t have even gone to Dublin without texting them when I got there, and when I planned to return until the summer of 3nd year (CTYI reunions make you forget you have a life outside In a good way! ). I think if I had followed that advice younger I would have more friends now, not that I don’t have friends, but going by this post you can get a rough idea of how I feel about that whole topic. I regret a lot, and much is stuff that I probably still wouldn’t change even if I went back, I’ll never know but I’ld like to!

Confidence: Chin up and smile! What advice would you give yourself?

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Fast forward a few months I’m talking to just about the only good friend (and I use that somewhat lightly) Aine whom I speak to fairly regularly and I ask her. She says that I’m “over-opinionated” and can be seen as arrogant, which I guess I can when talking to my own age group really… or probably anyone. Anyway, I asked her to clarify and “everything is an argument” with me. I had never really thought about this before. I mean, I hadn’t ever noticed me doing it but yeah, I’m pretty sure I am argumentative. My biggest problem is that I have no idea when or how or why I do it, it just happens at the time. How can you solve something that just happens. It’s like telling a cow not to eat grass, is that possible? Also, how the hell would it even be possible to stick with something like that? It’s hard enough trying to change without trying to change people’s existing opinions of you too. I am going to try, but fuck it, when you’re a bit of an outcast it’s hard to even bother. So what do you think world? Can I change myself? Can I change other peoples’ opinions of me and how’s the best way to do it?

At the moment, the majority of governments have a system in place whereby companies own any ideas that they come up with, this is copyright (in this I am including a copyright spectrum, including patents). This is a very complex because to own a thought is to own something that does not in fact physically exist (an abstract idea). It is assumed that this encourages creativity because it allows the producers (in a capitalist system) to gain (often monetary) from their work by limiting what other people can do using their work (to grant someone license to use their idea, usually money is the gain).

This system of copyright is fine when you have a large number of people who have equal power to enforce their copyright (as should technically be possible in a democratic and free society), however, in our current society it has been weighted in favour of the richer producers, as they are the ones who can afford to pursue the people who have violated their copyright. This causes an inequality which means that essentially copyright only exists for those who can afford to maintain their copyright on an object, and normally results in a one way street in terms of free movement of intellectual goods.

There are however areas where creativity is stifled by copyright law. I feel one area that is affected massively is music. Music is, at the moment at least, controlled by record labels who are out to make money hand over fist. This is of course normal in a capitalist society, profit before anything else. Unfortunately this means that anything that can be grabbed onto as theirs will be and they will attempt to profit from it. Now, as we know, music is funny as it has a profound effect on humans emotionally and physically. We also know that music has been around since time in memorial, this means that really the ideas behind music have to have been around a long time before we “discovered” them. The unfortunate thing about this is that how music evolved was something to the tune of (pardon the pun) person creates song, person sings song to group, group learns how to sing song, song gets changed due to both intentional interference and Chinese-whisper effects, song gets changed (mixed in with other songs) but passed down indefinitely. This is essentially what we would now refer to as sampling, ie. using a musical pattern/idea in one song and playing with it to make a new song. We have never in history (until the practice of copyrighting became mainstream in the US in 1790 when the US government instated a copyright law) had a scenario where people were actively stopped from improving upon other people’s works. Now, I’m not debating here about “illegally” downloading files, just sampling but I feel that preventing people from taking musical ideas is all out bad.

Here’s a song written by a YouTube user roughly on this topic:

People who complain about the lack of privacy on Facebook are often just misguided as to what Facebook is. Facebook is by it’s nature a public medium, unfortunately people don’t seem to understand this. Yes, you can choose who your friends are (to an extent), but with those selected people you share anything you do on Facebook and an apparent lack of privacy only becomes an issue when you forget this.

People don’t seem to get the fact that you are not Facebook’s customers, you are it’s product. Your information is what it sells to keep itself alive. It needs you to make money, but it’s rewarding you (call this payment if you will) by allowing you to use its service without paying a penny. If you want complete privacy then you may as well leave the internet now, everyone here collects data, because that data is valuable to a multitude of people in terms of advertising and figuring out generally what you want. Which is important, because when the machine knows what you want, it can make more of it!

If you don’t want your friends knowing you’re against abortion don’t join the group. Simple as

Now, it may seem a little selfish or vain that I want to know that they’re doing so but it really is not the case. I would suggest that if they are pushing me away I should know because the last thing I want to do is go chasing them up via email thinking that your app has failed on me when they’ve actually just blocked me. On top of this if the email goes ignored I’m going to continue emailing until I get a reply because I don’t know that my email hasn’t failed. Interesting, both of those happen with amazing regularity! Admittedly (and I know this will appear in comments) it may be that I should know if they’ve blocked me or not by the way I was acting, but sometimes I just don’t read situations well enough to understand that I’ve done something to upset them, and I would put an example here but that person is still blocking me and I really don’t want to annoy them!

Now that you’ve read this hopefully you’ll understand why it’s important to let people know when they’ve been blocked, however I hope that I will get some other views in the comments too!

Thanks,
Ben

Recasting of the Leaving Cert with less emphasis on rote learning, a greater focus on producing nimble and flexible graduates with a variety of foreign languages, and a new concentration on raising standards in maths and science.^[1]

To be honest, he is the only person I’ve heard speaking some sense on the matter. He has put forward exactly the problem with the education system in Ireland, the fact that the largest focus is on rote learning of things that will be relatively useless in future, like quotes out of Hamlet. Of course, how could we expect anyone in the department to know any better or even have the power to change anything if they did? They haven’t grown up with the internet as I have, but they live with it every day. Yet they appear to be unable to understand that this is what a normal day consists of for many people across the world. The internet has made rote learning unnecessary to an extent. Don’t misread those words and think that I am suggesting that we don’t need to be able to spell, have a decent vocabulary and do mental arithmetic because I am not. But I for one don’t need to know Hamlet quotes off hand, or even know something more practical like physics definitions off hand, because in the time it takes me to remember it I could have gotten a definition, complex or in simple English, from a reputable source on the internet.

To go with this rote learning, we’re afraid of failure. I watched the particularly amazing speech “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity” from TED 2006^[2], and I think he brought up some very valid points. We are, well I at least, am afraid of failure. It’s drilled into our minds from primary school that if we don’t sit down and focus on our studies that we will get nowhere in life. I don’t know about others, but certainly when I was a child I thought all homeless people were the ones who had dropped out of school at an early age and just couldn’t get along in life because of it. How was I to know the truth? This is how the world was portrayed to me.

Now I am older and I am left in a state of confusion as to whether the Leaving Certificate is just an obstacle in the way of me getting on in life, something to be seen as a means to an end, rather than an education. Of course if this is what’s portrayed as failure by society and the education system I am going to avoid it at all cost, but it was never the entire truth. I think there is no greater demonstration of this fear than the rather odd behaviour of Leaving Certificate students coming up to exam time. They can’t be seen on the streets at all, they’re all locked up in their rooms studying frantically.

More importantly the fear is most probably exacerbated by the fact that this exam is the product of up to 14 years of your education. It determines how good you have become at playing the system, how many Hamlet essays you have learned off, or whether you happened to remember that particular physics definition at the right moment of the exam and not 20 seconds after you’ve sealed the paper in that officious looking envelope.

The final issue that I will highlight in the system here is the Department of Education itself. Every time something negative happens they just bury their head in the sand. They even bury their head in the sand about problems before they arise. It often occurs that schools look for guidance from the Department on an issue and they Department will just fob them off and say it’s up to the board of management in a school to decide on these matters, despite the board of management seeking guidance. This is endemic throughout the Irish government and various semi-state/former semi-state organisations.

I think an ideal would be a complete overhaul of the education system, from junior infants to Leaving Certificate. Unfortunately this change would be so massive that the whole culture of those in the Department of Education would have to change, and that’s not going to happen over night. More so, it would possibly devalue the current qualifications of people who have sat and will sit the Leaving Cert, which would include me and be overwhelmingly negative. There is no quick fix, but going forward we need to change.

I will get around to posting my solution to this at some stage, but I have to work through it completely first to ensure there are no gaping holes!

[1] — O’Flynn, Sean. “How Ireland dumbed down.” Irish Times 6 March 2010. 12 March 2010 <http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/0306/1224265696868.html>.
[2] — Robinson, Ken. “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity.” TED 2006 Feb 2006. 12 March 2010 <http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html>.

So up until now… I’ve been born, moved from Manchester, England to Ireland, been through primary school and have survived this far into secondary school (currently in fifth year, for those of you who managed to miss the homepage). I started learning PHP in 2004 and loved learning it. I’ve been continually developing my skills ever since.