Happy 7000th Day

A few weeks ago, alot of bloggers talked about Wolfram Alpha, stuggling to find its usefulness. Some even went as far as listing pointless joke questions to ask the powerful yet young computational search engine. Things like “What is the meaning of life?” dont belong in this engine. What is both interesting and fun at the same time are often the simplest.

I typed in my birthday, “18 April 1990″ into WolframAlpha to find that the date was 6999days ago. Tomorrow I turn 7000 days old. Or 1000 weeks. Or if you really want to be boring 19 years old and 2 months.

Some other info about that day 7000 days ago:

• sunrise : 6:31 am GMT/IST
• sunset : 8:39 pm GMT/IST
• duration of daylight : 14 hours 8 minutes

I also learned that I have the same birthday as Conan O’ Brian, and America Ferrera (Ugly Betty).

So you see, Wolfram Alpha may only be for mathematicians and idiots for now, but you can get some use out of it. Just dont ask “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

It’s been a while

So its been about 10 days since the last post, mainly due to the occasional outburst of anxiety about the summer exams of first year. They concluded on Tuesday with Social Media. Overall I’m pretty happy with them, even though I probably shouldn’t be. So lets catch up shall we?

Music

I had written a post about the upcoming single by Green Day – Know Your Enemy – and while I like it, I think it cant be appreciated fully until you hear it along with the rest of the album. They have previewed 7 tracks on their website and they’re all quite amazing. It’s sounds like such an ambitious record, with some of the most complex and diverse pieces of music. Some Lennon, some Queen, and (for some reason) a little Linkin Park. All this coming from a band whose name stems from a day of smoking weed. Huh. So I got a ticket for their show in October.

Sport

As a person from Limerick, I was devastated to see Munster not so graciously fall to pieces in the Heineken Cup Semi-Final. Leinster were the better team though, and as much as I’ll hate to admit this I will support them in the Final. Also its going to tear me apart to see Barcelona and Manchester United play in the final. My childhood team, versus the team I’ve secretly supported for 3-4 years… Oh well, at least it wont be disappointing for me at the end of May 24th.

Coding

Now with the exams over, I can focus om designing some good sites. I have a couple clients already, mixed in with a site I have a few ideas for. For designers.. thats all I’m saying. Also learning a bucket load of jQuery and PHP at the moment. If you have any good sites for me to expand my knowledge, please leave a link in the comments

Now I must go. My splitting headache is calling for sleep, and I don’t want to disappoint.

Mobile Internet Finally

So I hooked up my phone to my laptop and I can now connect portably to the internet wherever I go through my Nokia N95 without the need for a dongle or a third party accessory.

Right now I am travelling a reasonable 70km/h on my way to Clonmel for another day of lectures. This route will be more productive and less tiresome, now that I have a connection.

Nokia are even polite enough to ask what carrier I’m on, so they can retrieve the exact settings I need to connect. O2 Ireland can be seen below, along with Oman Mobile.

My last few phones I’ve attempted in doing this task, and it’s either been unavailable, or extremely difficult to get it to work. Nokia have finally gotten this right, and its been a long time waiting for many of us.

All I had to do is install the Ovi suite and connect my phone via cable and set the mode to “PC Suite”. I haven’t tried bluetooth tethering yet, but it should be the same process.

The speeds aren’t terrible either. They are faster that my secondary school’s download speed when I was there, so I guess I cannot complain!

RTE is avoiding Popularity

Pat Kenny may be stepping down from the Late Late Show , but have the people at RTE had a look ahead to actually see who could replace him? Well there’s Gerry Ryan, Ryan Tubridy, Miriam O’ Callaghan, and that’s about it.

When the Late Late started in the 1964 it catered for the youth of that generation. Little do they realise that that generation is gone, and that there are serious amounts of money to be made in the younger generation today. Isn’t that the whole reason why the presenters are getting pay cuts, because they don’t have enough?

This is yet another example of why it pays to make quality shows. Why would any advertisers pay for a 30-second advertisement spot when there is nothing the people watching the show want. And why would anyone watch a show which isn’t any good? It doesn’t make sense to me.

If my assumptions are correct and RTE actually want to make some money, they should hire someone who is actually worth it. Someone who can spread conversation throughout Ireland. Someone who is funny, and appealing to all age groups. Someone like?

• Dara O’ Briain
• Tommy Tiernan
• George Hooke

Any one of those people would make a good presenter. Kevin Coleman has a blog post, with a poll contemplating Pat Kenny’s replacement.

But why stick to the same format? With a new presenter could come new ideas. How about two presenters, or even a guest presenter. A live twitter stream running off of a TV with everyone using the #LLS hash tag. The possibilities are endless.

The most depressing part of all of this is they’re going to pick Gerry Ryan, and there is nothing we can do about it

Excuse my absence

Hey guys. As you might have realised. I’m behind on my Design a Wordpress 2.7 Theme, and for good reason. I am in the middle of assignment season and I’m getting close to the exam time of the semester. Right now my eyes are glued to PowerPoint Presentations and Word Documents, trying to study the Boot Process of all major Operating Systems.

Another reason for my tardiness, is due to the fact that I want to create the best tutorial, and I need to figure out what sort of design to use for the template.

So while you’re waiting why not have a look back at some of my previous posts. And subscribe to my RSS Feed while you’re at it too