Archive for September, 2007

Right now, i’m in computer applications class, probably doing some exercise in MS Office and saying to myself ‘come on, challenge me’. I’ve scheduled this post thanks to wordpress timestamp. At 11am, i’ll be heading home to end week #1 in college – you gotta love the short fridays

My biggest fear going to college was that it would be too easy, i’d already know too much..

Obviously for the first few weeks that will be the case as everyone gets to grips with the terminology and software they’re using.. i’m pretty experienced with a lot of the stuff we’re using multimedia and application wise, but like i mentioned in an earlier post, you always pick up one or two little things, even if you think you know it all – that’s the biggest mistake you can make – going into exams/course complacent and expecting an easy ride.

I’ve already seen enough to know that the year will be far from easy.. it will be challenging and i will develop my skills.

Which of course, is a good thing. I want to learn new things, be challenged, be working..

This is also an area i love so i still cringe at the thought of calling it ‘work’ as it sounds so boring/uninspiring.. most people bring energy/enthusiasm to their hobbies or social life, whereas i’m the opposite – i invest that energy and enthusiasm into my work, my sites, my ideas..

Anyhow, one week under the belt and i’m still unphased.. i’ve had to re-jig my sleeping schedule, but apart from that, there hasn’t been much change in my life.. you’ll see this blog hasn’t suffered, and the quality of posts hasn’t suffered, so i guess i’ve managed to slot a full time college course into my life without making any real sacrifices

Check out this bad boy;

A portable car battery jump starter, powerful air compressor and a blinding light.. if you guys ever need a jump start, you know where to come

I ordered it off ebay for a total of €45 which is nothing.. So now i can leave all the lights on in the car and not have to worry about the battery dying. Hook this baby up to the main car battery and it’s like the kiss of life

I’m also going to have some fun with the air compressor

Next time someone asks me to blow up a kids swimming pool or those inflatable beds/toys, i’ll gladly take it on

You’re stuck behind a lorry doing 55mph in a 60mph zone. Clear road ahead. If you overtake, you’ll break the limit. You risk being caught by a speed trap, getting fine or penalty points etc..

But most of us do it anyway. Now the safest way to overtake is to spend as little time as possible on the wrong side of the road so by speeding up, you are in one way, driving safely. But of course you break the speed limit – all be it temporarily.

Another scenario is walking across a road or running across to get the other side.. if we fall or slip, we’re hit by a car.. but it saves time and energy perhaps rather than walking down to the pedestrian lights a few hundred years away..

We all face these types of situations.. the bending the rules to breaking point type of situations… where we know we’re doing wrong, but do it anyway (digging ourselves on digg another example )

Ironically, it’s the guys that bend and break and test the rules that you’ll find are the most successful. They say rules were made to be broken and when you think about, they are.. rules are set only after they’ve been broken before they’ve been made (if that makes sense!).

Say i park my car in a parking lot, parking horizontally across 3 vertical spaces, but i have 3 tickets on the car.. that’s being greedy, but can i be fined/clamped? I don’t know to be honest, but if i did it often enough and other people started doing it, new rules would be brought in to prevent it. So i’m forcing changes to be made..

And doing that is good. Because you’re challenging laws and create new problems for people… ultimately, you’re improving the laws and rules for everyone by challenging and breaking them..

Think about it.. if we had no laws or rules on the road, it would be chaos.. if we had no rule breakers or benders, we would have no democracy/freedom of speech and so on..

So by all means, break the rules, stretch them, bend them and test them out.. you’ll more than likely be much more knowledgeable and successful because of it. Never be afraid to experiment and chance it.. that’s how the most successful businesses/people came about.

‘Alan’ raised an excellent point in a comment in one of my earlier posts about grasping any opportunity you can get to meet new people/form friendships..

photo credit: just.Luc

I do enjoy meeting new people, but at the same time i don’t like to be tied down by them or having them let me down.. given a choice between going out clubbing with a big group of people, or staying in and watching a dvd with the girlfriend, i’d chose the latter time and time again…

That’s because i prefer ‘quality’ time rather than general chit chat, which doesn’t really interest me. They say you could count the number of close friends you have on one hand and it’s true. The likes of bebo/myspace etc.. are just links to people you’ve met or know.. i doubt everyone has 16 best friends or whatever number of thumbnails is displayed on the friends section..

Anyway, on to the positives and negatives of social networking (online & offline)..

The good and the bad

As you can see, my blogroll contains links to blogs i enjoy reading and people that i’ve met in some form (through comments, emails, forums, digg etc..). Most of those guys are quality bloggers, some already high fliers and some just starting out..

Some link back to me, which is great as it’s a you scrub my back, i scrub your back situation and works for everyone.. we both get traffic, an added incoming link etc..

That’s all rosey until i decide to change the content of my blog to porn or offensive stuff Now, i’ll lose links, lose respect and trust and have to meet new bloggers/people. What i’m trying to say is that placing trust in friends, particularly those you barely know, is a dangerous game, but it has to be done in order to extend/develop networks.

It’s the same in real life.. if you call and agree to meet up somewhere with a friend and he doesn’t show, that’s a dud relationship.. respect is lost there as is trust etc.. so you’ll think twice about meeting up again.. or you’ll think twice about relying on him for something, perhaps on a subconscious level…

But at the same time if you never meet up with anyone, you’re never going to add more ‘quality’ friends to your core network.

Conclusion

Networking is something we have to do in order to simply live.. it would be tough to live life without any friends/boyfriends/girlfriends/bosses/workmates etc.. in fact, it would be impossible. We can control how many friends we have, but there’s always that small core of people that you know you’ll go back to because you can trust them and you know them.

The bigger that core, the more successful/happy you will be in my opinion. Just like in the online world, the more active and open you are towards people, the more contacts you will make.

• A blog is basically a diary.
• A diary is basically a personal day to day summary of someone’s life.
• A life is of course unique in some way/shape or form.

So why then, you’ll ask, are there so many blogs out there that no nothing but clone/replicate content? The short answer is money.

It’s always easier to steal/copy/pull content than it is to create it yourself.. creating content is hard work.. doing it daily or on a consistent basis even harder.. the fact there are so many splogs (spam blogs) shows you just how many lazy webmasters/bloggers there are out there

But a blog is all about YOUR opinion, your life, your thoughts… that’s the reason blogs were created in the first place.. it’s difficult to sustain blogging on a daily basis, but at the same time it’s very easy…

Go to Digg, forums, news sites, youtube etc.. and you’ll find a goldmine of information all waiting to be reviewed/linked to/talked about and that’s where you and your blog come in.

Some people might call that re-hashing old news, but if you take the time to review, analyse, give your honest opinion etc.. on a video or a news article, then that, imo, is unique content.

I mean, journalists basically take news and put their own swing on it, and bloggers do the exact same thing.. provided you don’t simply link to a video/picture and leave it at that, content is all around us, it’s up to us to make it unique…

Of course, truely unique content is stuff like my college posts – nobody else can create that content as it’s unique to me… This post is also what i’d regard as truely unique content as there’s no links or articles to base the post on..

Although it may seem boring or stupid to you, most people enjoy unique content like that rather than the links and latest news repeated over and over..