Smile, you're on Google

One of my favourite things on the internet, apart from Instant Messaging and wikipedia, is Google Street View. I think it's just brilliant. They seem to be going to great lengths to neatly avoid all the places I've ever lived in or frequented, but I've seen those a few thousand times anyway. I've got to admit that I was naive enough to think that everyone shared my excitement, but alas, quite a few people think that posting pictures of their streets online is a breach of their privacy.

I’m not sure what their problem is. Sure, if you happen to be photographed in a compromising situation in a place where you shouldn’t be in the company of someone you shouldn’t be with, then that sucks. But you could argue that it’s your own fault anyway – and what are the chances of someone actually spotting you on Street View? Perhaps it’s just because all the neighbourhoods I’ve ever lived in have yet to be added, but apart from quickly checking out my university and the local supermarket, I much prefer exploring places where I have never been. Chances of me finding someone I know are close to non-existent, never mind the fact that chances of you actually being photographed by a Google car are probably somewhere in the realm of 1:1000000.

As for the privacy issue – Not too long ago, Britain introduced CCTV to most public spaces; we are being monitored by the government 24/7. Two years ago there was one CCTV camera per 14 people, and if anything, that number has increased. According to a recent study, the only countries in the world in which governmental surveillance is worse than in England and Wales are the usual suspects; namely China, North Korea, Russia and Belarus.

Now then – crime. Does anyone really think that Street View is going to make criminals’ work easier? Any self-respecting criminal knows all the affluent parts of their city by heart, and they’re not going to travel across the country because a certain building they detected on Google looks particularly yummy. Also keep in mind that the pictures are neither live nor being updated regularly – judging by pictures of my university, they were taken sometime in the summer of 2008. Street View doesn’t provide any kind of indication whether or not people are home. As far as aiding crime, Street View is about as helpful for criminals as Google Maps on its own, and I have yet to see someone complain about that.

They should all just go back to minding their own business, and perhaps Google should hurry up a little. I want to know what my house looks like now. If they need more drivers, they should just contact the governmental surveillance unit and I’m sure they will know exactly where to find me.

Book meme

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Underline the books you LOVE.

4) Reprint this list on your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

WATCHING MOVIES DOES NOT COUNT!!!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Soon... very soon. Too soon. Before April is up. Whatever you do, don't take 'Revolution to Revolution: British Literature 1640 - 1780' courses.)

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (it took me an eternity to finish too. I read the first few chapters a couple of times, gave up and watched the movies. Picked the books up again and this time finished all three.)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird (because it;s one of those books you just have to read)

6 The Bible (well, sort of... it was a children's bible)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (I stopped reading after Heathcliff or Cathy or someone else wandered over green meadows for the 564th time)

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (again, this is one of those books you just have to read, but Charles Dickens?)

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I'm not quite THAT mad, but I've read a fair amount.)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (it's entertaining, but the later chapters are boring

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I am man enough to admit that I read AND kind of liked it.)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (I don't even know why. I'd probably hate it)

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I started it too. It's the most confusing thing I've ever come across)

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (John Steinbeck is great)

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (of course! Through the Looking Glass too)

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (I've seen the movie, I've read A Thousand Splendid Suns... now I've to read this one too)

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (so what?)

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (don't like him at all, or Piglet for that matter. I only like Tigger and Eeyore)

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I am going to read this if it kills me)

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (yeah... no. Actually, hang on a minute... do we have to read Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility?)

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (I think this may be the most disappointing read I've ever had)

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (I was on a holiday with my family and had finished my own books, so I had no choice but to turn to my sister's...)

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (long long long ago)

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (don't remember a thing, but it was disappointing too)

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (one of my favourite books. I read it last year)

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (I read the first few chapters)

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce (alright, I'm still reading it, but how many people out there can truthfully claim to have read one third of it and survived? There you go. And I will read the rest too. Just give me another year.)

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (about 50 times writing an essay last year)

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (some of them)

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (about 50 times writing an essay last year)

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (sounds nice. And I was wondering why his name sounds so familiar... turns out he wrote On The Beach, which I liked very much)

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

30. Not bad! And I tag the Bespectactled One for obvious reasons.

Writing my memoirs way too early

Ziggy posted a very nice update earlier this year when she turned the same grand old age as me - and so she's not the only one spilling precious details of her life, here's mine.

1987 - I graced the world with my presence in time for tea. Right away I threw everyone into a state of turmoil because I wasn’t the girl everyone expected – but at least I think I was better off than a friend’s cousin whose parents bought tons of pink stuff, only to then realise, way too late, that the child was actually a boy. I don’t think people even bought pink stuff back then, and for some reason we were particularly backward so I’m sure it all worked out fine. In fact we were so outdated that there are only three or four pictures of me between the ages of 0 and 2 – and they’re all in black and white. 

1987 is also as far back as my memory reaches – I remember crawling into the kitchen where my grandmother was cooking. I also remember the awful orange carpet in my room, which must be where my aversion to that colour stems from. Or perhaps not.

 1988 – The only thing I remember from that time is the smell of poppies. They grew near a couple of garages which don’t exist anymore today. My grandfather used to work on his car there and I’d play with my toy cars. (Alright, the toy cars are poetic license; I haven’t got a clue what I played with). Apart from that, nothing out of the usual happened... I probably learned to walk and talk and such. 

1989 – That’s the year a horse nearly bit off my thumb, or that’s what it felt like. Disappointingly, I didn’t even require medical attention.  And I’ll never forget the neighbours’ dog – I remember it as a huge hairy thing blocking the entire corridor, but apparently it only came up to a grown person’s knee. Oh well.

I also had to do some sort of strange exercises every night because my feet were flat – you’ll be happy to hear that they’re beautifully arched today.

 

1990 – I started going to playschool. The only thing I remember from that time is how I ate snow in winter and was told off, so I moved to a different corner of the garden and continued eating. To this day the teacher seems scary to me, even though everyone reassures me she was really nice and actually liked me. That summer we went on a holiday somewhere in the west of Ireland... I’m sure it was very nice as such, but I wasn’t exactly on my best behaviour. First of all I told a local farmer that my grandmother had said he looked like an onion (wrinkly, in case you were wondering), then I fell into a lake from a pier without being able to swim yet, and then I disappeared without a trace on a trip to the city. A frantic ten minutes later it was discovered that I’d spontaneously decided to join a local nursery school class on their way to somewhere else.

I also remember some guy milking a cow. He kept alternately shaking and nodding his head... I thought that perhaps some of the milk was good and some wasn’t, and was quite fascinated by it. In hindsight I’m pretty sure he suffered from Parkinson’s.

 

1991 – That year my grandparents and me moved to Limerick, half an hour away. All I remember of this is arriving late at night and the smell of the car, as well as sitting on some sort of hand woven basket in the bedroom, waiting for someone to help me go to bed. That house is the nicest place I’ve ever seen – I remember every single detail, down to the smell of the curtains and the sound of the light switches. Unfortunately there’s strangers living in it now, so I can’t even visit it. I’m not sure I’d want to anyway.

1992 - I went on my first holiday abroad that summer, and got my first real taste of mosquitoes and the beach there, which seemed to be miles away. Coincidentally I walked past that very same hotel a couple of years later... the beach was really only ten minutes away. However, I also learned my first word in a foreign language then – kalimera - and was rewarded with cookies that tasted so horrible I still remember their taste. Ugh. 

And I got one of my favourite toys – a giant plush huskey called Christopher that was almost as big as me. A friend of my parents had bought it, then felt silly carrying it home so he gave it to me. I also bit into a glass, which in hindsight is quite admirable since it was one of those really thick pint glasses and I still managed to break the glass instead of my teeth.

1993 - That year I started school. On the first day of school my friend and me managed to secure the table right in front of the teacher’s desk. As you see, I started off very promising. That day we took quite a few pictures, very unusual for us, and while we’re all dressed to kill with a nice background my grandfather is carrying a glaringly white plastic bag, for reasons only known to himself. That probably isn’t funny to anyone but me but we certainly never let him live those pictures down and that’s why it’s worth a mention.

  

1994 – Once again, I moved. This time on my own, and in with my parents and older sister. Considering that I’d only seen them once in a while before that, it went surprisingly smooth. So smooth in fact that I remember next to nothing about it.

I also had some infection of sorts and wasn’t allowed to eat sugar in any shape or form for half a year, and only one or two types of artificial sweetener. It was a year of extremely healthy food and porridge without sugar or honey for breakfast every single day.

1995 - That year, my genius was finally recognised. The teacher suggested I skip third grade and move straight on to fourth grade, but I refused and became so worried about the possibility of having to leave my friends that my grades steadily started dropping. Damn, I wish I hadn’t been such a sensitive kid.

 

1996 – One of the most vivid memories of that time is that a friend’s mother or sister had vast amounts of old editions of the Sun stored in their bedroom. Our favourite thing to do was sit in his room and read the scary stories in it. I remember tons of them. Something about a woman who suddenly discovered she had a tick the size of her back attached to, well, her back; a bride farting at her wedding and then being so embarrassed she had a heart attack and died; and just about every freakish kind of death and accident you can imagine. They scared the living daylights out of me. They had very nice Russian snacks though. Russian cuisine is very much underrated.

1997 – what happened in 1997? The only thing I remember for sure was my first sleep-over. In school. I don’t know what the point of it was but it was fun, even though some of my classmates showed off all sorts of tricks and I was very jealous because I couldn’t do anything. Useless child. Apart from that it must have been quite boring... although of course turning ten was a huge deal then.

Life 2.0

In some ways, online life - or even just MS Word - is superior to real life. There are so many things possible on a computer that don’t exist in real life – but I wish they would.  Here are my Top 5.

5. First of all, there are screenshots – more than once I’ve wanted to take a screenshot of something I was looking at. I felt rather silly for obvious reasons, but then someone on bash.org encountered the same problem, so while I may not be in the most desirable of companies, at least I'm not the only one. It's this far down on the list because while they're a lot faster and you would be able to use them anywhere at any time, we still have something very similar - it's called a camera.

4.  Then there’s Undo. I don’t tend to regret things, what’s done is done and I’ll just have to deal with it, but once in a while an undo function would be nice. I dropped something, I said something stupid… one click or flick of a switch and I can start over. And of course, I can get a lot better at it, because I’d have an infinite number of tries. I suppose life would also slow down considerably if everyone undid things all the time, but sacrifices have to be made. Alternatively I wouldn’t mind being the only one with access to those functions. 

Speaking of which, I just accidentally deleted an entire paragraph and can't find an Undo option. This is what I get for praising the internet.

3. Another thing I really miss is a search function. There have been occasions when I was skimming a book or some other text, looking for something, until the brilliant idea to just press Ctrl+F hit me - imagine my disappointment when I realised that real life lacks that function. 

2. We also desperately need an Escape button. No long, drawn-out conversations with someone you don't want to talk to, no awkward encounters, nothing at all that you don't want to happen or that you don't want to be involved in... "Sorry, my life crashed".

1. And of course then there’s the soundtrack. It's less useful than all the other functions, and perhaps Escape is the one we need the most, but I’d dare you to be sad for long if dramatic strings started playing the second something unfortunate happened to you.

To everyone who does not know the meaning of 'sleep'

I'm glad you've got friends, it's great that you got a guitar for Christmas and your new amp and bass guitar are pretty cool too. Congrats too for finally getting laid. See, I understand you being proud of all those things, but is it really that hard to shut up between 11pm and 8am? Is it? I will admit that this place is a step up from last year's not so sound-proof cardboard walls, but investing in some nice thick walls and proper doors wasn't this architect's strong point either. I suppose he forgot that students were going to live here, and that students do not always possess normal people's common sense and courtesy to perhaps avoid loud activies in the middle of the night. I can't tell where those assorted noises are coming from as they seem to be everywhere at once and me deciding to have a word with the people who are responsible for it in the early hours of the morning probably wouldn't be too pretty, so I'll have to address them here.

If you want to make our ears bleed in time for dinner, go for it. I'll even put up with being woken up at 9 on a Saturday because it's bright and warm and you cannot resist greeting the sun with your rendition of Dancing Queen. But stop being a douche and go to sleep at midnight or at least resort to doing something quiet. I'd suggest just sitting down with your laptop or reading a book, but then last year my neighbour's MSN Messenger alerts kept me up. Either way, just be quiet, it's not my fault you're cooler than me. Really, shut up.

Some people just lack the ability to imagine that the world does not revolve them and that other people couldn't care less about how well they can play the same stupid riff fifty times in a row at 2am.

Book survey

One book you’re currently reading: None. I've only got three books with me because they take up a lot of space/weight. I just finished rereading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini though.

One book that changed your life: Angela's Ashes -- Frank McCourt. Like Ziggy said, I'm not all that sure how, but it certainly gave me a sense of history. This is what things really were like not too long ago. 

One book you’d want on a deserted island: Moon - The Life and Death of a Rock Legend, by Tony Fletcher. It's huge, it's a great read, it's full of facts so I'd hopefully never get bored and it's almost like listening to music. And perhaps Robinson Crusoe... you know, get some inspiration.

One book you’ve read more than once: 1984 -- George Orwell

One book you’ve never been able to finish: War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy. Hey, you're supposed to read this once in your life. I've found it online too so I COULD read it if I wanted to, but... um. We'll see.

One book that made you laugh: Dinner for Two -- Mike Gayle. It seemed more like a book aimed at girls, but it was funny. Assorted calculus books would probably qualify too - you know that feeling when you just have to laugh because you haven't got a clue?

One book that made you cry: None. As for most touching... I'll go with A Thousand Splendid Suns for now.

One book you keep rereading: Nunaga -- Duncan Pryde. It's the autobiography of some Scottish guy who lived in the Arctic in a couple of Eskimo settlements for a few years, back when they still hunted for food and their means of transportation were dog sleds.

One book you’ve been meaning to read: I've been meaning to read the Kite Runner too, I've only seen the movie. Now I suppose Ishmael is on my to-read list as well.

One book you believe everyone should read: Shantaram -- Gregory David Roberts. I know I'm late, but if you're as late as me and haven't read it yet, do so now. And every child should read the Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Finally,

Grab the nearest book. Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence: "There is considerable interaction between the CNS and PNS."

On the brink of madness

I don’t really think my belongings are alive. However, whenever I swear at my laptop or remark to a friend that it’s being slow and stupid I am immediately seized by a feeling of guilt. I have to apologise to it, and the next time it doesn’t work right, I can’t help but think it’s sulking because I wasn’t nice to it and it’s my own fault everything’s crashing. Strangely enough, I only feel that way about computers. I’ve been known to be rude to things lying in my way, shelves colliding with my head, doors getting acquainted with my elbow and various items that have left their marks on my knees and shins (it doesn’t always make sense, in my distress I’ve told shelves to shut up), but I don’t feel bad about it. It seems a lot of people regularly apologise to whatever they bump into, but I don’t think those things care very much. It’s only computers that get this special treatment – they’re smart in a way, after all, so who knows what they really think? 

However, I’m not above pleading with cars not to bail out on me now when more petrol is just a mile away, flinging expletives at the sun or clouds, encouraging all sorts of technical devices or expressing my disbelief at taps/fridges/lifts not cooperating. Perhaps some day they’ll all take pity on me and do what I want them to do because I’m the only one who even bothers to talks to them.

Mostly, though, it’s a nice way to release pent-up aggression. If I can’t swear at the guy who just bumped into me but have to apologise to HIM instead because that’s what people do here, that useless &#@&ing hole in the ground that JUST popped out of NOWHERE and dared to trap my foot will have to do. Similarly, living in a different halls of residence last year where we were regularly treated to fire alarms at 3 o’clock in the morning, my frustration was not usually directed at the dimwits who set the alarm off, but the rather more innocent alarms themselves for being so noisy and annoying. 

As soon as I start to think objects are talking back to me, I promise I will call for professional help.