Aug 292009 Tagged with , , — 0 Responses

the real cost of college

At a time when most people are complaining about fees, loans and grants, i’m more concerned with the time college is going to cost me…

Clock
Creative Commons License photo credit: CameliaTWU

I drive up and down daily to college. In total, i’m the car for about 2 hours per day, every day. That’s 10 hours per week instantly gone.

Class hours vary. If lecturers are all in (which you can’t take for granted), i have about 26 class hours per week. Sounds good, but in reality it’s not.

Having 2/3/4 hour gaps between those class hours is not good. Because ‘home’ is a 2 hour round trip for me, i have to stay on campus which would be fine if  i was guaranteed internet access, a table and a power socket. But again you can’t take that for granted.

So out of a typical week, i’d estimate i lose roughly 30 hours of productivity every week purely by attending college. Including those 26 class hours,  discounting weekends and allowing 35 hours for sleep (7 per day), that leaves me with about 29 hours for myself every week.

During summer, i get about 8 hours sleep (40 mon-fri) and have quite literally the rest of the time to do whatever i want… so i have 80 hours in total to work (if i absolutely wanted/needed to).

So when i go back to college, my free time will decrease by about 51 hours from Mon-Fri. Add in projects / study / college related work etc… and that free time decreases even further…

Having said all that, i am looking forward to going back and nobody is forcing me to go ;-)

Aug 282009 Tagged with , , — 0 Responses

coolest remote control car EVER

Yesterday, whilst on the hunt for an alarm clock, i came across ‘Rovio’ on firebox.com. This is hands down, the coolest gadget i’ve seen in a long time. I can definitely see this replacing security guards and cutting down on costs if used cleverly.

rovio

It’s basically a remote control car with a camera on it. However, it also has in built wi-fi which allows you to control the car online – from anywhere. So let’s say i’m away on holidays for a week…

Assuming i have my netbook with me (or even my phone), i can log on and control Rovio’s movements around the house. I can also take snapshots, video etc… and have them sent to me automatically by email.

A more practical use might be in a business environment… management could have a few of these little guys roaming around the office floor keeping an eye on staff and doubling up as security.

Or, these little guys could replace security guards – they have in built microphones and speakers so you can hear and see what’s going on from the comfort of your swivel chair and desk and talk to people if necessary. Rovio also has a built in LED light for night time roaming.

To cap it all off (and this is the genius bit) they can even charge themselves! They have a base station which is plugged in to a socket and that has a GPS – like system built in to it which enables Rovio to go back to base whenever it gets low on battery!

At £250, it’s not cheap, but it’s definitely an impressive piece of kit… watching children, video conferencing, seeing who’s at the door, seeing who’s in what room… the uses are endless!

Aug 272009 Tagged with , , — 5 Responses

theleavingcert.com get’s pimped out

Yesterday i spent a bit of time working on theleavingcert.com. It was actually the first site i ever built back in July 2006…

theleavingcert screenshot

Initially i just used dreamweaver and static html… i then switched to joomla and made it in to more of a community site and these days it’s running on wordpress as a blog. It’s no coincidence that once it was moved to wordpress, traffic started picking up from search engines.

Anyway, i said a couple of days ago it needed to be less generic and more niche. So i added a new theme and made a few changes. The theme is called ‘Bold’ and it’s produced by elegantthemes.com. I’m a member there and at $19.95 per year, it’s worth signing up.

A few months ago, i agreed to dilute my share in the site in return for an additional writer / content, so this year theleavingcert.com should start to dominate the whole ‘leaving cert’ niche. I’m not entirely happy with the current theme and set up, but i’ll continue to tweak it and add new features until i’m happy.

Big, chunky, bold, ‘idiot proof’ designs are very much in these days and that’s what i wanted for theleavingcert.com so i revamped the logo too, purely to compliment the theme. On a sidenote, it also struck me how easy it is these days to completely transform a website in a few minutes….

theleavingcert.com logo

One click installation of themes, plugins, controls panels etc… really makes the process smooth and quick. I’m no stranger to building websites, particularly wordpress based sites so not only has the software and interface improved drastically over the last few years, so too have my own skills and the speed at which i can do things.

Aug 262009 Tagged with , , — 0 Responses

don’t forget about task.fm

Today i got an email from Anthony Feint, founder of task.fm telling me about his site;

I’m writing to introduce you to a relatively new productivity app – Task.fm ( www.task.fm ). Task.fm is an extremely simple reminder application that sends sms, email, voice call and twitter reminders. What makes the app unique is its natural language recognition. Instead of users having to manually enter dates and times, the user instead only needs to enter something like “remind me about the Meeting with bob next tuesday at 10am via sms” or “pay the water bill in 2 weeks”.

I get the odd email of shameless promotion, but in this case i’m glad Anthony got in touch as task.fm looks like a really cool, useful service. I’m always on the hunt for useful / productive applications and sites that can improve my lifestyle in some way and task.fm is one of them.

task.fm

It allows you (in a nutshell) to add reminders to your account and have them sent to you (or a group) via email, twitter or sms.

Up until now, i’ve always used google calendar to email me important reminders, but task.fm has definitely carved out a niche for itself by using twitter and sms along with email. It’s free to sign up, free to use.

The only difference between free and pro accounts is that free accounts are limited to 15 sms reminders per month and you also have a limited contact list, whereas pro accounts have unlimited sms & contacts. So unless you’re a big sms fan, the free service will do nicely.

I’m a big fan of to-do lists and reminders and i’d love to see a decent desktop application in this area… hopefully task.fm will continue to evolve :smile:

Aug 252009 Tagged with , , — 0 Responses

general round up

I’ve decided theleavingcert.com needs a revamp. It needs to be simpler, more creative and less generic. I have a theme in mind for it and i’ll be busting my gut to throw it all together this week.

dogs
Creative Commons License photo credit: dave watts

theleavingcert.com is still one of my largest / most succesful sites so it deserves to be properly looked after. This coming school year i also hope to increase the content and get my thinking cap on to come up with additional features and competitions.

Once this revamp is out of the way, i’ll be working on BeerChief next week. It may not be ready by the time i start back to college, but at least it’ll be well on the way to completion. Lucky.ie is turning out to be a great venture and i want to keep up the great start we’ve made with it, so we could well be rejigging it or trying to squeeze more content out of ourselves.

Wifi Mapper needs more content and time… so does Charity Bypass although i’m not sure i can fit them in to my schedule any time soon.

iwantideas.com looks after itself – it’s getting decent traffic and it’s community driven anyway so that takles the pressure off me. I’d love to dedicate more time to it though too at some stage.

I’m happy with my own blog for now, but i’ve run in to a major problem with the lifestream plugin so i’ve had to disable it temporarily (the site was down for a few hours last night whilst i was tucked up in bed, oblivious to any problems.)

Nothing really gets past me – i’m well aware of the flaws with every single one of my sites including this one. They are all works in progress but so long as the work is continuing and the plans are in place, i can never be too hard on myself.

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