Spring Harvest is a huge event based at Butlins Minehead and Skegness over a period of three weeks in the Easter Holidays.

There’s still time to book! For more information check out: http://www2.springharvest.org/micro/

The simple answer which I give to a whole multitude of questions.

“Why are you becoming a nurse?”, “Why do you dress like that?”, “Why won’t you do this with us?”, “Why are you going out with a German?” … I could go on.

At the end of the day, why shouldn’t I do these things? Why should I conform to what other people think I should do, or be? The simple answer is that I shouldn’t – and I won’t!

The day that you or I, or indeed anyone else changes because of someone else, or because they want to conform, is the day that they stop being individual, unique and interesting. It’s the day where they just become another person, with no “story” behind them, nothing that makes them, well, them.

I’m not sure what’s worse in life, the fact that we all seek to fit in, to conform to others standards, to be the person that others want us to be – or the fact that people actively encourage others to conform.

I know I’ve rambled, and this post probably doesn’t make much sense, but if its any consolation, I know what I mean.

The policy of “apartheid” was brought into being by South Africa’s National Party in 1948, and involved the segregation of Blacks and Whites throughout South Africa. This situation led to a campaign of “civil misbehaviour” by the ANC (essentially, citizens broke the law and caused trouble with the aim of disrupting the running of South Africa). It also eventually led to numerous deaths and disappearances whilst it was enforced.

There were a number of names given to this period, and personally I feel that the name “baaskap” – which means domination – was the most appropriate, as that’s literally what the apartheid was – domination of the Black South-Africans by the Whites who saw themselves as better, and banned the Blacks from all sorts of activities, even from being able to own farm-land. Domination sums up everything that the powerful whites wanted to achieve from this situation.

There were other names that were used to describe the apartheid also, one of them being “co-operational existence”. Personally, I feel that giving the apartheid this name makes it sound like some sort of scheme to encourage equality or peace between two groups, whereas the ugly truth is the complete opposite – where one groups dislike and prejudice led to the ill-treatment and segregation of a race of people, for many generations, and for little reason.

One other name for the apartheid was “separate development” – which whilst being true in the sense that when segregation occurs, you HAVE to develop separately – is also a very glorified version of the truth in the sense that the name glosses over the appalling nature of segregation and its effects on the people of a nation.

If you take a moment to think about each name seperately, you begin to get an idea of how something as simple as a name, can completely alter a persons view of something…

Fin.

*ahem*

OK, I promised to write a quick post on my views regarding the new look Facebook, and so here it is! Pros, Cons and a quick Conclusion. I’ll be writing a more in depth post about what this new Facebook does, and why it does it, sometime before Monday…

Here goes!

PROS

• Obvious thing first: The new home page is a vast improvement over the old version, offering access to more information without having to change page, by selecting items from the tabs on the left.You are able to access Messages (formally known as Inbox),  Events, Photos and Friends from the side tabs, which load their respective content in the middle of the page (where the News Feed normally is).

  Further down is a tab for applications and games (as there is no longer an application tab on the notification bar).

  Having the main applications accessible on the home page means less time loading pages, and more time being able to view the content that you logged on to see.

  

  Tabs at the Side of the Home page.

• The Facebook Chat bar now only takes up the room that it NEEDS to.Having moved the applications tab and notifications menu, all that’s really left on the Chat bar is, well, chat. With this in mind, Facebooks designers have redesigned it so that it only takes up the room it needs to, and is docked to the left. This is particularly an advantage to people like me, who have a rather small vertical resolution (I’m using one of those newfangled 16:9 aspect ratio laptops – as opposed to the more common 16:10), meaning I can see more without scrolling.
• And my final Pro point, tabs at the top of the page (next to the facebook logo) are now the new home of Message previews, Friend Requests and Notifications (more on the notifications tab in the Cons section…) – and for the most part are an extremely convenient way to quickly check your messages and requests on facebook.

Cons

• Notifications… and boy, this is a big one in my book. I like to be able to tab into Facebook from whatever I was doing in another tab, and be able to know instantly whether or not I have any new notifications.In this new version of facebook, I can’t! If you aren’t already at the very top of a facebook page, you now can’t see the Notifications bubble like you used to be able to until you scroll up … maybe not the end of the world, until you take into account how un-obvious it STILL is when you find it…

  

• And finally, the search bar… I like the fact that facebook are really trying to push search in the new look facebook, however, it does seem a little… oddly placed. I’m not going to bother putting in a screenshot of this, all I want to say is that to me, having search in the right hand corner made sense, as all major browsers also have search in the corner… nevermind!

Conclusion

Facebook have made a great deal of changes, and in my opinion, have brought about a great change to facebook in general! From reading the pros and cons above you may have noticed that my cons are rather niggly small things, whereas the pros are actually big, and that’s actually true of the design in general – it’s more of what people want, and less of the things we don’t!

Nice.

Oh, and to those complaining – think about this: if facebook don’t change, someone else will do it better, and then we won’t use facebook. Remember myspace?

So, yesterday the inevitable happened. We all knew that it was going to happen sooner or later, and yesterday it did. Apple have announced thier latest device, the so called Apple iPad was revealed.

Billed as the device that’s better than netbooks, yet not as powerful as a full notebook – the Apple iPad has a 9.7 inch capacitive display, and runs on version 2.4 of the iPhone Operating System.

So, what do I think about this new “magical device” (as Steve Jobs put it)?

Well, my take is twofold.

On the one hand, the Apple iPad is everything that Apple want it to be, a great handheld device, that is not only capable of consuming media through its onboard ability to handle music and HD video through iTunes, and its position as a truely first rate internet browsing device – but is also capable of creating content, through the new iWork suite of applications, which promise to turn the iPad into a multi-purpose device, rather than the one-trick pony it may appear.

However, that’s exactly my problem with this device. To me, it feels like a half hearted attempt by Apple to create yet another device that people feel the “need” to own. In reality, what actually is it? It runs the iPhone Operating System, which yes, has its perks – for example the ability to run each and every current iPhone application currently in the App Store – however with the Operating System comes the problem.

The iPhone software is notoriously limited in what it can do, for example – it can’t multitask (at least, Apple cripple it to be so), and that’s the real kicker here. Apple have given the iPad a 1GHz processor, which is, again in el Steves words, “screamingly” fast – so why insist on holding the device back?

I think a lot of people will be dissapointed with the device in the sense that it doesn’t live up to the hype, but the fact of the matter is that NO device could live up to the hype which the iPad achieved before launch. I think the truth of it is that I, like many others, were hoping for a device that ran a REAL operating system, and could do the things that I’d been hoping for – think MacBook sans keyboard and plus touch amd you’re getting there.

Rather than buying an Apple iPad, I’d rather be buying a tablet from these guys: http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook

It’s 2:01am on the 21st of January 2010, and I am very, very tired.

If I’m honest, half the reason that I’m even writing this post is to help me stay awake instead of drifting off – which seems rather likely!

As I write this I am sitting just outside of Stansted Airport, on a freezing cold, metal bench. I’m on said bench partly as the cold is keeping my eyes open, but probably more because I’ve run out of other places to sit!

On another note, I think I may have just set some record or another for the amount of times someone has paced around stansted airport in 2 hours, could someone look it up and let me know? That’d be great, cheers.

Anyway, I suppose I’d better go, checkin opens in 2 hours and until then, costas looking very tempting.

My last post was essentially me talking about how I wouldn’t really be posting much in the near future, and this post is sadly much the same!

In a few days I will be flying out to Germany for a week, so won’t have the opportunity to blog. Or tweet. Or anything at all really!

Now, I hate sounding like a stuck record, so I don’t want this post to just be me saying, hey, I can’t post for a while, and instead I’m actually going to write about something proper!

As I just said, I’m going to be flying in a few days, and I happen to be very excited – mainly, because I happen to be a very large, quite ugly, child.

I’ve only flown properly 4 times in my life, and happen to LOVE the atmosphere in airports. For me, it’s just an adventure!

I guess one of the reasons I love airports is the fact that the people you stand in queues with for yet another hour of your life are complete strangers to us. Sometimes we have short, awkward conversations with these people, “delayed? typical!” – and yet the very same person you just tripped up, again, could be on the other side of the world in a few, very short, hours time.

Thinking about this then gets me wondering, I wonder what it would look like if every person I had ever seen left a bright line behind them on the earth as they walked? Would they turn the world into a glowing mass, or would they simply remain on our island, briefly venturing out, but not too far?

Oh, and I also like planes
In all seriousness, there’s nothing more amazing than looking at Britain from 20,000 feet.

Stay safe,
Chris

Very quick post just to say that I won’t be able to blog much for the next couple of weeks as my laptop has completely given up the ghost.

The wannabe geeks from PC World (seriously, who employs people like these?) inform me that my motherboard has probably fried itself silly which is nice, and confirms my previous belief that my laptop was getting far too hot in general use sitting on my desk – especially as the first thing I noticed when I turned it on for the first time was how damned LOUD that thing was!

Anyways, back to the point. I’ll be trying to blog every so often using my blackberry if I can, so I’m sure you’ll all be hearing from me sooner rather than later!

Talk to you all soon!
Chris
x

Another Day, Another Month, heck, even Another Year and I still haven’t got into vlogging in the big way that I’ve been promising myself for the last couple of years now.

Sure, I dabbled in it a couple of times, and then managed to cause a little controversy by making a video criticising the BNP (who knew they had so many supporters?), and then by publishing a video showing the death of Neda (an Iranian woman, killed during the struggles following the 2009 election in Iran).

This year, it’s going to be different. This year, I will FINALLY start vlogging, and I’ll do this properly – I promise!

Below is my, admittedly rubbish, trailer, and I hope to find you all following when the time is right! (And if you’re wondering, the “Right Time” is Mon – Fri from the 1st February 2010).

When the time comes, all criticism will be appreciated and acted upon! For those wanting to sneak a peek at some of my old vlogs, check out www.youtube.com/chrismgallen

Thanks for reading guys!