sinéad's lifestream

I’ve spent the last 6 months with my head buried deep in research – the effect of which is that my brain has grown tired of reading. Believe me, when you’ve been reading and synthesising thousands of words a day this can happen. I’m burned out and I can’t seem to convince myself to process the written word (unless perhaps it’s 140 characters). I have reader’s block and graphic novels are about as close I’ve come this month to reading anything substantial. This is unfortunate considering I’ve managed to accumulate 10+ new books since the New Year that I’ve been too busy to read.

I’m not going to force it though, I think I just need a break, but I get bored far too easily slumped in front of the TV. I’ve just been in need of an alternative form of stimulation, but rather than allow my mind go soft, I’ve been enjoying aural and tactile stimulation instead – through podcasts, photography and putting the pieces together.

Podcasts: Every day I’ve been listening to “Stuff You Should Know” from howstuffworks.com – which are exceptionally easy to process because they make you feel like you’re listening in on someone else’s conversation rather than being lectured to. I can close my eyes and let the words sink in, my brain is softly soaking up what it finds most interesting and finding this aural input a wonderful break from concentrating on words on a computer screen. These 20 minute conversations have covered a wide variety of topics and I’ve been enjoying learning about subjects outside of Psychology and Technology for once.

Photography: I’ve wanted to take up photography as a serious hobby for many years. Now I’m finally starting to action this desire. I’ve taken 100’s of photos in the last few weeks, some of which are on my Flickr. I’m finding this a great source of relaxation, especially when combined with a long walk – Two weeks ago I walked for about 3 hours through the beautiful Portumna Forest Park, it’s been the most relaxed I’ve been all year. We just walked and walked, not looking at our watches, just snapping anything of interest or beauty to us. I can definitely see myself doing this more often.

Putting the Pieces Together: I’ve always enjoyed solving problems and working with my hands, but recently this has also been a great source of frustration for me. There’s always been a ticking clock, a deadline more important and distracting. So one of the first things I found myself doing once college was finished was buying a new desk, because I finally had the time to put the pieces together. (In retrospect, the comfy new desk would have been handy during my studies…) I really enjoyed the simple act of creating something from all the pieces and I’m sitting at this now with a small sense of pride. Following this I couldn’t resist picking up a Chinese 3D wooden puzzle when I saw them in George’s Street Arcade last week; my bookshelf is now home to a Tyrannosaurs Rex.

Both photography and putting the pieces together are simple acts of creation that require a person to conceive them. Without you, it’s just a scene or a set of instructions and pieces sitting idle. They are actions that require some focus and put YOU firmly in control. I find myself calmed by this. I imagine other people would too. Perhaps you’re feeling the impending doom of the recession and/or that you have no control over what happens to you, my suggestion to is that you try to relax by doing something physical that will lead to creation. If you prefer art, paint a picture, put it on your wall and let it remind you that you’re capable of being in control, of being that volatile element in your own environment.

Sometimes, our minds just need a break, and not just from reading.

Over coffee yesterday Darragh pointed out that he didn’t “Do the Flickr thing.” and I tried to explain why I thought he should. For someone that takes at least one photo a day and posts it to Twitter via a mobile photo sharing site he could greatly benefit from having somewhere like Flickr to permanently store and share his photos.  If it’s interesting enough to tweet then it shouldn’t be allowed to get lost and unshared after the tweet has washed away in the stream.

I myself have been using Twitpic to post the occasional interesting photo from my iPhone, but only when I’m on the move and I usually post these same photos to Flickr at a later date. Recently I’ve had much more free time to take photos with my “real” camera, and many of these photos are now on Flickr. Sometimes I’ll post a favourite photo to my blog and then link to the rest (rather than posting all of them as a long blog post). The reason I do this is the ability to tag, edit, archive and view stats – but there is so much more to it than that.

Flickr allows me to have a space online independent from my blog, my twitter, and my social networking. I have control on how they are displayed and archived (and can be as meticulous about this as I need), I can tell stories that go with the images, I can make notes to focus your attention to something special hidden within, and when I’m feeling nostalgic I can go back and review my own photostream based on tags I’ve created (see my tagcloud here). I can upload the well taken photos, and the badly taken ones too – if they say something that should be retold, they belong on my photostream.

However, what I really want to do with Flickr is share my photos, and see yours too. Today for instance I checked up on David’s travels in Beijing, Rory’s travels in Japan, I also met John’s gorgeous family, laughed at the bizarre mannequin Steph spotted, day-dreamed about Killiney Bay and wondered about the mind of an artist. Flickr can be a wonderful sneak peek into the lives of people you know and even strangers you might one day meet.

At the moment I only have 56 contacts (compare this to the almost 300 people I follow on twitter). I want more.  I want to follow your interesting lives, I want to comment on the things you’ve done and places you’ve seen. Almost every day I login to Flickr and check my contact’s uploads, the same way I login to Google Reader to check my RSS feeds – the difference is, photos can tell a totally different story, and can share the stories we don’t have the time to tell. Many of us lead busy lives, leaving us with not enough time or patience to blog as regularly as we would like, photoblogging is a taken a bit too seriously, but Flickr is a great way of sharing your life online without too much of a time or energy strain.

Plenty of bloggers that I read regularly will occasionally post their photos, but I always wonder about the photos that weren’t “good enough” for a blog post. Also, some bloggers are far better photographers than they realise and it’s a travesty that their incredible photos can disappear, lost in their blog post archives.

If you’re reading this and use Flickr add me. If you’re reading this and you post photos somewhere else, open a Flickr account and let us follow your life, taking a peek with each new upload.

These things usually start out with “I don’t normally do this” but to be honest I liked getting tagged, not because I want/need things to blog about, but because I think it’s a sweet thing to be thought of. Besides, sometimes you learn new and interesting facts about people from a simple meme.

This one involves the number 8, which for the Chinese is a lucky number – because it sounds similar to the word which means “wealth” in Chinese. Not at all like the number 4, which sounds exactly like “death” – I learned this many years ago when I worked in retail, Chinese customers never wanted a phone number with a number 4 anywhere in the digits. Always found that interesting. In some Asian countries there isn’t even a floor no. 4…

This is the 8 things meme…

Eight things I like:

1. Photos.
2. One to one conversations.
3. Really strong coffee.
#. Working with my hands.
5. Learning new words.
6. Solving a problem.
7. Thoughtfulness.
8. Dancing in the kitchen.

Eight things I did yesterday:

1. Got on a train at 7am.
2. Participated in a student showcase.
3. Had lunch with a good friend.
#. Felt bipolar.
5. Talked to a stranger.
6. Thumbed through 100’s of comics.
7. Put together a Chinese 3D wooden puzzle.
8. Laughed so hard I got a stitch in my side.

Eight things I wish I could do:

1. Go into Space.
2. Go Whale Watching.
3. Write a novel.
#. Swim every day.
5. Live in the City.
6. Be my own boss.
7. Remember the lyrics to songs.
8. Have a conversation with my grandparents.

Eight things I don’t like:

1. Personality being used as an excuse for negative behaviour.
2. My groundhog days.
3. Materialism.
#. Nightclubs.
5. Cut and paste personalities.
6. Accidentally drinking cold coffee.
7. Not being taken seriously.
8. Not knowing what’s going to happen next.

Tagging… Curlydena, because she’s new to my rss feed (and twitter!) and I’d like to learn more about the Curly one.

At least he didn’t slice and dice me…

Here are the rules:

1) Put the link of the person who tagged you on your blog.
2) Write the rules.
3) Mention 6 things or habits of no real importance about you.
4) Tag 6 persons adding their links directly.
5) Alert the persons that you tagged them.

1. My alarm is always set for 6.45am but I don’t get out of bed until 7am – it’s a fake 15 minutes extra sleep, or sometimes I just lie there listening to the radio thinking about what I’d do if I had the day off.

2. The first thing I do when I get home from work is go to my desk and press the ON button for my radio – which is always tuned to PhantomFM and doesn’t get turned off till around 10pm.

3. I always get a Metro in the morning, despite knowing that it’s total drivel. I save it for lunchtime to give myself a break from the computer and I always read my horoscope, just so I can scoff at it.

4. The only personal items on my work desk are a “Word Origin of the Day” calendar and an uneaten candycane stuck between some pens in my organiser.

5. It still surprises me when a friend says “I can’t imagine you with long hair”, like I’ve forgotten they’ve not known me forever.

6. I can’t stand the smell of bananas, and it makes me gag to look at them when they’re black.

Tagging Noel-y Pie, Stacey Face, Smiley Eily, Will Knott, Phil and Tommy.

I really liked Jentertainment’s one, especially the part about Elephants – it’s her first meme!

I’ve always felt like there weren’t enough hours in the day, more so in the last two years because I’ve managed to turn myself into a raging workaholic. Working 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, going to college on Saturdays and spending countless hours each evening writing a thesis will do that to you. My plan had always been to educate myself into a better paid, more stimulating job. Now that I’m coming to the end of my Masters and with the recession wreaking havoc with the country I’m confident that this plan won’t work out. I won’t be becoming a passionate career person any time soon.

I’m being a realist.

This isn’t pessimism. I’m trying to be realistic, and I’ve taken something extremely positive from this realisation. I might not have more money in my pocket, but I’ll have so much more time. Time to re-read the books on my shelf. To be creative, to write, to take 100′s more photos. To lie on my bed listening to music for hours. To spend evenings with my friends and not worry about missing out on a night of college work. To chase a whim and embrace an opportunity. To volunteer my time to a cause that needs bodies and minds. To learn new skills, and teach my own.

I don’t need money to do these things, I just need time. Soon I’ll have a lot more of that, and I’m grateful for the consolation prize.

Irish Blog Research 2009, Survey Closes

Thank you to everyone that filled out my research survey. The response rate was double what I had hoped for and I’m really looking forward to analysing the data. Thank you so much to everyone that posted links to the survey on their own blogs, who retweeted it on twitter and emailed it to their friends. Thanks to Sabrina Dent for all her great ideas ideas (that definitely worked!), to all my tweeties that helped pilot study the survey and thanks to Irishblogs.ie for highlighting the research for me.

As Promised, Prizes at the end of the Rainbow

The winner of the first €50 voucher prize draw is Claire of Gingerpixel Photography.

The winner of the second €50 voucher prize draw is Barry James of Redbird Property & Maintenance. Who also has, quite possibly, the best twitter picture I’ve ever seen.

I’ve been following Stephen Fry on twitter, much to my own amusement, and to celebrate reaching 50,000 followers he is running a very Fry like competition, it’s wonderfully complicated and devilishly playful.

“L=50 in Roman. The best tweet containing exactly 50 Ls will win. All tweets to contain the tag #L and none to exceed 140 character limit SF” (link)

The Roman numeral for 50 is L, so the task is to use 50 letter Ls in one 140 character tweet. Quite the challenge. Directly after the tweet posted by Stephen Fry someone else in my stream posted a link to the Ryanair baggage story from this week and thus my first attempt was born.

Ryanair left my leather luggage in limbo with little likelihood of lawful retrieval. Lovely challenge #L

Unfortunately, this only contained 15 letters L. After much consultation with various online dictionaries I found a few prize words with numerous Ls, callipygian being my absolute favourite. Somehow the tweet evolved into a completely different monster and thus, my final tweet reads like a little story that could have been taken directly out of Stephen Fry’s autobiography.

Parallel multiple syllabic callipygian lads.Willfully polysyllabically lulled.Lawful release?Little likelihood.Lullllllllllilllllllllloo! #L (link)

Translation: Numerous young men with beautiful bums, sitting an equal distance apart from one another. They have a taste for syllables, and allow themselves to be calmed down by words with many syllables. Their release from prison very unlikely. “Lulliloo!” cried Stephen, joyfully welcoming them.

If you’re interested in entering the competition, it’s open to entries until Saturday the 24th of January at midday. Also, the twitter user ghijklmno has created a great utility to double check your entry. You can track the competition entries using the assigned hashtag of #L. The majority of them make little sense (not that mine does!), but I’ve found a few creative, witty and interesting entries. Looking forward to seeing which vocabulary genius from the twitterverse wins this one.

Pat Phelan has been giving away some amazing prizes this week, has raised €1222.00 for the Cancer ward at Crumlins Childrens Hospital and has been busy encouraging the donation of old mobile phones to the Jack & Jill Foundation.

He also made Christmas come early for me yesterday with the delivery of the mystery “nice prize” I won. I had joked on his blog that “This could make the FIRST interesting unboxing video” but I was far too excited to do so. Considering that the mystery turned out to be a lovely little Flip video camera I decided I’d film a quick little video to say thank you. It really *IS* an easy little thing to use, and within 5 minutes of opening it I had the 1 minute .avi file on my computer and ready to upload to youtube (that was the part that took the longest!). You can find my cringe worthy video here (as always with youtube, best viewed in high quality mode).

Following on from Pat’s give-away, Damien Mulley has another competition, in association with a supporter of the foundation. Anyone that donates one or more phones will be entered into a draw to win some more gadgey goodness. Everyone has old mobile phones, so why not put them to some real use? There is even a freepost address you can send them to:

The Jack and Jill Mobile Appeal, Freepost, Ratoath Road, Finglas, Dublin 11.

Just put the phone and charger (if you have it) into a jiffy bag and pop in the post. It couldn’t be simplier. I asked everyone in the house to fish out their old phones (pictured above, along side the Flip camera on it’s tripod) and I’ll be posting them after Christmas.

Niall Kitson from PC Live! does a “Blogger in Profile” feature every month, Alexia Golez and Anthony McGuinness have gone before me and the December issue was my turn. So, here is an unedited (thus far longer, because I can’t shut my mouth) version of the Q&A.

You decided to study bloggers and their readerships for your post grad. What have you learned so far?

At the moment I’m still in the preparatory stage of my research. What this basically means is that I’m reading almost every single piece of literature already written about blogging, knowledge sharing and the social psychology on the internet. That last one is probably the one that stands out the most because blogging can be extremely social. Blogs have this amazing potential to offer social support, friendship and positive interactions through feedback from readers. Blogging has genuinely had a  positive impact on many bloggers lives, because feedback can serve as an acknowledgement of your thoughts, emotions and sense of self. Then of course there are the bloggers that blog to share their knowledge, instead of their lives. Sometimes this is done because of the positive effects upon reputation and sometimes it is a purely altruistic act. It’s fascinating.

Right now I’m looking at the possible cultural differences in blogging practices. The reason I’m looking at this is because I’m curious as to why blogging is huge in other countries and yet seemingly low profile here in Ireland. Though, I do believe in quality over quantity, that is to say that  the majority of Irish blogs are either very well written or incredibly entertaining. It has been suggested that poor broadband penetration is a key aspect as to why the adoption of blogging has been slow, but today over a million  Irish Internet users have access to a broadband connection, and we have become a nation of social networkers, photo-sharers and you-tube watchers It’s simply not a valid argument any more. I’m hoping my research can shed some light on the matter.

As a community what do you think of the Irish Blogosphere?

The Irish Blogosphere isn’t the first online community that I’ve interacted with. Over the years I’ve been a member of numerous web forums and long ago even usenet groups. The biggest difference, for me, was how quickly I began feeling like a member of the Irish blogging community. With other online groups it took months of interactions online before I started feeling like a member of the in-group. No heckling of the newbie occurs and there are no obvious exclusive cliques, though there are members that would be thought of more highly that others. Flaming is very rare. There are debates and discussions, but it rarely gets personal, which is something that can turn many people away from web forums – that fear of being ostracised. The thing that stands out for me about the Irish blogging community is their ability to offer support to one another without hesitation. Be it technical, informational, or even emotional.

Your writing demonstrates a real creative streak but you keep your content factual. Have you been tempted to post some fiction?

Any student of a Psychology will tell you that the biggest lesson you learn in college is to write objectively, and to always be able to back up any argument with valid and reliable facts. It can be difficult to separate my academic self from my writing, and if I post an article that in essence is my actual opinion on something, I will always back it up with solid facts. Maintaining a high level of quality and keeping with the theme of my blog is important to me, this is one of the reasons I don’t post articles on a daily basis. I have, however, tried to incorporate a few personally orientated posts, and I find this quite rewarding in itself. More recently I’ve been channelling my own creativeness into a separate blog project, related to poetry and photography. It’s not unnatural for bloggers to have more than one blog and I have done this to provide myself with a separate, non-serious vehicle online.

Are blogs really breaking the web?

Blogs might not be breaking the web, but I certainly don’t think they could be considered a replacement to websites or even wikis, as a source of information. The software behind blogging is temporal in nature, articles are displayed in reverse chronological order, so the first blog post an reader sees is the most recent one and navigation usually relies on moving backwards through these time-stamped entries. Blogs are great when used as a companion to a website, but relying on a blog to post articles that should or could be re-read, and would have context no matter what year or month they are written in, can mean that they don’t get re-read and instead get lost inside archives. However there are exceptions to this rule, and having a very well designed blog can counteract this. Relying on standard blog templates or free blogging websites such as Blogger.com is not the way to go, unless of course you’re planning on writing a diary style blog.

In the field of cyberpsychology whose work would you recommend to a friend?

The two subjects that are most interesting to me, that relate to the combined field of Psychology and Technology e.g. what is now referred to as Cyberpsychology, are the social Psychology of the Internet and Human Computer Interaction. The researcher who has had the most influence on me in both of these subjects is a Dr. Jennifer Preece from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Much of her work highlights the importance of good usability and design to facilitate the creation of successful online communities. She has also co-authored numerous books related to Human Computer Interaction, a subject that is concerned with making technology more usable and accessible to everyone – something I feel very passionate about.

For anyone interested in the field of Cyberpsychology I can also recommend the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, published online four times a year, many of the research pieces published can be freely accessed and offer many interesting insights into online behaviour.

IADT offers both a certificate in Cyberpsychology and an intensive Masters program. These courses are open to individuals with no background in Psychology, and cover areas ranging from e-learning, to online addictions and therapy. I can’t recommend the course enough, and think it would be great for anyone working in all aspects of the technology sector. It would also perfect for graduates of Psychology or Psychiatry that wish to learn how to apply these fields to our modern technologically bound world.

There’s a big emphasis on the importance of public speaking when you’re studying in college, despite the fact that you don’t often get the opportunity to speak in front of anyone else but your classmates. Which is something I had to do on Saturday morning to a mixed crowd of 1st and 2nd year M.Sc Cyberpsychology students, and lecturers who were there to grill and grade.

I don’t suffer from anxiety or panic when it comes to public speaking. Admittedly, I get nervous, palms do sweat and cue cards get shuffled compulsively. But after the point of introducing myself I often feel like I’m having an out of body experience, like I’ve no control over what’s happening, my mouth is a tap and words are dripping out, fast. On Saturday I felt this more acutely than ever before, despite the fact that I’ve presented at a conference to twice as many people and just recently presented a report to the managing director of a company (and his posse of suits) I was hoping to work with.

The experience I had on Saturday consisted of my mind tricking myself into believing I had completely fucked up the presentation, that I’d skipped slides and mumbled incoherently. But on the outside, according to those who watched, I was cool, calm and collected. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have believed them but then I was reminded of the presentation we did last year. As with all our college presentations they are filmed for the external examiners. The video of last years presentation was shown in the Psychology lab a few weeks ago, watching it I felt like it was a different person on the screen. The girl on that video was an alternative universe me, knowledgeable, confident, calm and capable of handling the most difficult of questions.

I’m my biggest critic. I feel like I have to be, because I know that the people who love me could never point out my flaws for me. So despite my supposed calm exterior whilst presenting, afterwards I always feel like I could have done better, and that I should have been more in control. I think that’s an important thing to share, because I know so many people freak out over public speaking, especially when their time slot is straight after someone that seemed so confident and together.

No one is immune to the pressure that comes with public speaking, some people are just better at hiding it.