MSN Servers are down

I hate it when theres an outage on Windows Live Messenger…

Theres this totally awesome chick I want to talk to and it wont let me login!! :’(

IRONMAN Taupo 2008

Just had to link this in here, my mate Joff Rae just came into work and uploaded it – great work and hes an awesome cunt!

Ironman was a great event this year, excellent work and congrats to everyone tho competed.

Are existing educational systems obsolete?

The Internet is currently the most powerful tool mankind has ever created next to that language itself. People can communicate with one and another, instantly – via text, sound & video! But is there a flaw in the way our society uses the internet to its advantage?

Are we actually using the internet to advance our own education? Are we using the internet to make it easier to learn? Are we accessing the internet to learn?

There seems to be a flaw in the way the education system globally treats the internet. Is information static as higher learning organisations want it to be?

Is the internet being used as the tool as it’s coming to appear itself to be?

No.

Today millions of students in Universities around the world, purchase thousands of dollars on text books, they neither read or require. A large poportion of these people use laptops but never get a chance to use them for education, they only have a chance to use them to compile papers to receive credits and their certificate, degree or masters.

Are Universities unable to keep up to the adoption of online resources such as open education schemes that produce the highest quality information, up to date and ready online for use by these exact same students?

Why isn’t it time for the education systems to apply themselves to internet the way the rest of the world has?

I believe its due to the large amount of collaborative information, updated and improved daily that the universities cant track and doesn’t want to rely on. Instead of students buying books required for the class, students can download the books free and easily read through the information that is relavent to his degree without requiring the increased presure to his study of buying books he’ll never read at all…

I don’t think Universities are adapting quick enough, the adoption of the internet into collaboration, reading and submitting documents to the teachers should be imbraced!! Lowering course fee’s and allowing lower income people to become educated and qualified in a skill or field alot cheaper than expected using traditional methods.

Imaging a university graduate acheiving his certificate, degree or even his masters, without purchasing one text book. He only required his laptop and the internet.
With class collaboration on group projects using online resources such as Google Docs where students can collaborate on a single document. Where classes have the power to create websites, collaborate to produce information on a Wiki, thats the combined learning and education of everyone within that class that inturn could be accessed by others in that class in other Univerisities around the world.

The internet is no longer a place for students to cheat and plagerize content, the internet is now a place to develop content with other students.

We need to change the way information is accessed, We need to rethink the way information is accessed. Information is collaborative, the internet is collaborative, we need to rethink the internet. The internet was an idea, we need to rethink that idea is used.

Universities are where that education takes place, if Unversities are education and if they are where the people think about that information is contributed to by students who once were educated there, why should education stand still and avoid the internet and the accessability of that exact same information?

Information is no longer static, online information is changing, education is changing, education is information, if education cant change and the way the information is accessed and used is - education no longer is solitary, education is collaboration, collaboration promotes education…

D1NZ

14th-15th March is when the D1NZ – Round 3 is at the Taupo Motorsport Park & for a strange reason I’m quite interested in attending one of the days to check it out.

After watching drifting on TV, learning more about cars and stuff – what I love the most is the drifting skill of the drifters!!

I hope to grap a heap of pictures and catch up with some mates who are more motorheads than me.
Should be a good turn out, I’ll post pics in my flickr account, watch out for them on the side bar!

Linkroll

Over the last few months I’ve collected a long list of top websites, I’ll list a few more later in a few months.

• Scribd – Easily share your documents online using the iPaper interface.
• PicMarkr – Free custom image watermarking.
• picnik – Free online image editing web application.
• FotoFlexer – pretty advanced digital photo editor.
• splashup – Desktop image-editing power in a web browser, going where you go.
• picli – Share photos and creative work online!
• popurls – popular urls to the latest web buzz
• .docstoc – find and share professional document.
• swiftmob – Easily create mobile style sheets and WAP websites!!

I really love, PicMarkr and Scribd!! Those have to be my personal favourites – but the three image editing applications are pretty useful! picnik and splashup are the two best!

Child Abuse 50’s Style

Here I am watching this discusting tv show called “Evacuation” that forces 6 boys and 6 girls to live in a house 50’s style. The point of the show is to live as WWII evacuaees would have done back in the war.

This show is just another peice of 3rd rate programming that just shows how much people are willing to push the repeated idea of show content there is of the past, WWII.

In an era where children were seen and not herd, programs like this serve as nothing but as a horrifying reminder to the many children who actually lived this and are forced to relive this when its imposed on them as entertainment on TV.

Catch22 with the IT Industry

Last night I got shit from my best mate Bevan. He was going on about me having no qualifications and how I’ll never succeed in this life without qualifications in Computers.

I find this frustrating!! Its a weird dichotomy the world doesn’t enforce qualifications on people on the IT industry because of the fact its dominated by people without qualifications who know more about computers than even the “qualified” ones…

Where I work, there is a “Qualified Computer Technician” – I have his job. Hes just another staff member basically because with his knowledge, skills and general attitude he isn’t a computer technician, he just likes to play with them and he does know things but not enough.
Its frightening the amount of knowledge he knows, or well the lack of it. I seriously mean that.

I have no qualifications and yet I out class him in every field possible. He has no little to no skill in working, Windows maintenance, computer repair and maintenance, basic areas. Even the structures of Operating Systems! He has little to know knowledge of burning methods, he thinks that if all the files sizes on a failed burn are the same as the originals on the hard drive, the files are fine – ignorant to the fact that [10101] is 5 characters, if a burner badly burns them as [11100] it still counts up to 5 characters?!

Qualifications in the Computer industry are the most confusing things there are! Because you can be qualified and yet have no real knowledge and experience in Computers at all! Yet the people who do have the real knowledge and actual experience with them get attacked for not having qualifications but still have most times a better chance at winning the positions that the qualified people do.

My mate Bevan attempted to make the comparison of me having no computer qualification to the fact the fact that I have no drivers licence or the fact that electricians need to be qualified to do the job, which is insane because the fact that even though I am unqualified, I have the technician position where I work which a qualified computer technician did have and also who doesn’t even come close to the level of knowledge, skill and experience that I do being unqualified.

From an unqualified technician to others out there, Qualifications in the Computer Industry aren’t a guarantee that the person actually has the experience and firm knowledge of what they are qualified to do. 9 times out of 10, the unqualified computer technician actually know more and more highly skilled than alot of the qualified computer technicians.

Service Pack 1 for Vista is out!!

Yep, after all of this waiting, Service Pack 1 for Vista has been released.

Announced on the Windows Vista Blog, this should clear up alot of problems affecting people at this moment.

Download Link: 1

Employment abuse of children

Children can’t wait to grow up, they cant wait to be taken as an equal. They can’t wait to leave the challenges that come with being dismissed as a child.

On Target tonight, there was a story of these two girls who are contracted by Deltarg by a local manager who found a bunch of dump junk mail in an alley way on their run and without asking the children, fired them instantly but who was found out to offer their area of delivery to the girls best friend before all of this happened.

The girls being 12yrs old have no protection under the law and Deltarg has no policies in place to protect the girls. 

One of the junk mail distribution services Deltarg, is currently the biggest “employer”of 12-14yr olds in New Zealand.

It’s part of growing up, your first job is usually nothing, something you’ll never want to do again – junk mail runs… Whats worse is when this job is paying you barely nothing for the amount of work you do and the company who employs the supervisor who gave you the job provides no protection against you being treated unfairly and immorally!!

I find this appalling that children are being given jobs a fair amount of labour and are given little to almost nothing in the way of pay. Junk mail runs have never had a history of being the better paying jobs but it should never have a history of treating children like modern day slaves, this is the time of their life where they are learning that if they work they will get paid – they should never have to learn that just because they are kids they are completely unprotected and can be treated like shit and that the people who are doing it are going to get away with it because they are children and since there isn’t any protection for the children the supervisors who hired them for the junk mail runs will get away with it, because its lawful and the company has no policies to avoid their supervisors abusing children in this manner.

I believe everyone should get paid for the amount of work they do, if a child or teenager does an adults job, they should get paid an equal amount of pay as any other adult doing the same job.
If a child is doing a job, they should at-least get paid a decent amount or get youth rates.

I remember the riots in France, where youths all over France went out in protest and into riots because of the proposed law that made it easy to instantly dismiss youths from their employment for any reason they see fit, giving the youths with no rights at all.

Children all over the world work at low paying jobs as a start and what they don’t need is the degradation of being abused and treated like slaves with no rights so they get the message that children are here to be used and abused and there’s always more on the way so don’t care.

We need more ethics when it comes to children doing jobs, they should be paid a fair amount and not be raised to think that just because they are children, people can get away with that kind of behaviour and treatment towards children.

We aren’t going to give jobs like truck drivers, technical assistants or motel cleaning jobs to children but children have no concept of that, to a child a giving them a job of delivering 100 leaflets is awesome because it’s something they can do and they are getting paid, its their job and its their responsibility they’re doing their best and they know they can’t do the same job that their parents do, but its what they can do.
What are we doing to the children of any generation if we teach them that the job they are doing makes them less important than anyone else?
What will they think when they have the confidence to go for bigger jobs like checkout assistants and cashiers and shop assistants?

 

7days!!

I’m banned from 4chan!! I was banned 4days ago.

I can’t wait to get back in and start posting. Until then my life will be utterley bored, I think I’m addicted!