Time of your life

Many people I know complain to me, or just generally, about having hectic lives. They claim they never have time to do anything due to the extreme busyness of their lives. These people come in a range of shapes and sizes, from a variety of backgrounds, and they always seem to have this one problem. Well, today ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to call bullshit on that.

Often, over the last 2 years, I have surprised people by saying that I was an overloaded university student who worked at least 30 hours a week. Somehow this was a sign that I have amazing time management skills, and a high level of commitment. As good as this was for my ego, it’s not even slightly true.

The thing about time is, in this day and age, we have too much of it. Now I’m not talking about the single mothers who work full time… they obviously don’t have time. I’m talking about the university students who live off centrelink, or the bachelors with one job. We have tonnes of time; it’s just that a ridiculous quantity of it is wasted.

Let’s look at a standard full time worker for example: There are 168 hours in a week. Now obviously, people need to sleep. Even if you get an average of 8 hours sleep a night, that leaves 112 hours of waking time left over. Take out your standard full time 38 hours of work, 5 hours of lunch breaks, 21 hours of household activities, and 10 hours of travel every week, that leaves almost 40 hours of free time every week. On average that leaves 5 and a half hours free time every day. Nearly a quarter of every day is therefore, unaccounted for.

These days, with the ability to spend hours watching TV, or sitting on Facebook, it’s so easy to waste gratuitous amounts of time.  Everyone does it, because no one is productive for 100% of their waking hours. It intrigues me, what we could achieve if we used all of our time? What if no time was wasted on distractions, or pointless activities? Either way, the point is, life is not as full as we think it is… we simply have to realise when we are being distracted.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on time… any comments, go for your life below.

Night all,
Your blogging friend, Mitchell.

Adulthood

Hey all,

I was thinking recently about adulthood. I found myself wondering about this last night, as I was flicking through bank websites looking at mortgages, while also attempting to study for my final university exams. While doing this, it suddenly hit me… I am an adult. I may not act like one, or feel like one… but I am. When did this happen? It seemed incredibly far away, infinitely in fact, just a few short years ago. How did it suddenly come out of nowhere?

Of course, this is a ridiculous attitude to have. It didn’t come out of nowhere, you just eventually grow into it; it’s just worrying how scared of it I was. Possibly because I’m not somewhere I wanted to be when I was an adult. I’m still living at home, in a town I’ve lived in since I was 9, and I’m not entirely sure I want to change that just yet.

Where do people get the desire to truly be adults from? Everyone around me seems to be totally fine with the changes that generally come with growing up. They all seem to be moving out, getting real relationships, dealing with rent and bills and extra responsibilities that just seem like too much effort. Where does all that come from?

I don’t know when it’s going to happen, or where it’s going to come from, but I hope I learn to be an adult one day. Although the idea of still watching Spongebob, sleeping with my hotwheels doona, and eating junk food for dinner on a regular basis, sounds pretty decent to me :P.

Anyway, there’s my thoughts on adulthood… any thoughts on the matter… there’s a comment section below… go for your life.

Night all,
your blogging friend, Mitchell.

My iPad review, or why I returned my iPad to Apple after 3 weeks.

Now I admit, I bought an iPad on impulse. I did very little prior research, and I really didn’t consider my need for one (which, as I found out, was negligible). As I found out later, many of the problems I had with the iPad were heavily documented online, and if I had read up on them, I would never have bought the ridiculous device in the first place. Thank christ for Apple’s friendly return policy, or I would have been out $800.

Either way, I bought an iPad for uni, and in my opinion, it failed at being good at uni. There was a handy program that I bought for $5 that I could write notes in…. in the same kind of way I can write notes in Wordpad which I get for free. Actually, that’s not true… Wordpad has substantially more features. Then I paid $2 for a browser that let me use Facebook chat on the Facebook website (because Safari won’t for some arbitrary reason) Yep, I paid for a browser, another thing that I would expect to get for free on a PC (and would also have substantially more features).

I began to see a pattern; I was paying extra to make my device more like a different device that I would have paid substantially less for. Am I the only one who has noticed the stupidity in this? A friend of mine stated, with no sense of sarcasm or irony, “I’ve spent about $1000 on apps, and I’m fine with that”. $1000 ON APPS WHICH AREN’T EVEN PARTICULARLY ADVANCED? FOR AN $800 DEVICE WITH LESS FEATURES THAN A $300 DEVICE?? WTF?

As I started using several apps, I began to realise some more fairly annoying problems that wouldn’t appear on a PC. I had several word processing apps, but if I created a file with one of them, I couldn’t use it with the other without first connecting the iPad to a computer and then transferring the files between the apps using iTunes. This may make sense in a phone, but in a device designed to be used instead of a laptop, this becomes fairly annoying. Also, the lack of flash and java support can be annoying, but I guess forcing people to buy your game apps instead of playing flash games online is another way to corner the market. (They failed at their attempt at censoring though; the biggest porn site in the world re-encoded all their videos to make them playable on the iPad)

Now I admit there are positives to this device. It is very lightweight, has an in-built 3G modem, and has a ridiculously insane battery life, but without a proper operating system or any practical applications, it’s just an oversized, overpriced, inconvenient, phoneless smartphone. At time of writing there was no multi-tasking support, and all video’s had to be changed to .mp4 before usage.

I’m sending back my iPad within the next few days, and it’ll be a welcome change to return to my netbook. It may have no touch screen, weigh 400g’s more, require a $60 300gm battery to give it the same battery life, and need a USB 3G modem instead of an in-built one, but it cost half as much, and I think the ability to actually do anything useful on it makes it the better choice. Now I just have to wait for the HP Slate, maybe that will sell me on this whole Tablet bullshit.

Random thought of the day: Nothing ever goes wrong for me.

Now, in case you didn’t know, I’m a horrible planner. If I planned the Olympics it would be a running race in my backyard with CD’s as medals. So, last year when I planned my epic trip to Europe, I made a slight error. Ok, I rescind that, it was a major error.

See, in my infinite wisdom I booked my flights at the wrong times, and the 2 flights I had to take to get back to Australia were going to be in the air at the same time. Unfortunately, as incredibly skilled as I am, I cannot be on two planes at once. I assume I could cut myself in half and do this, but even in that case half of me would be stuck in Kuala Lumpur… and who the hell wants to be there?

Either way, that’s not the point; the point is that nothing ever goes wrong for me. I was looking at paying an extra couple hundred bucks for a flight change, which was going to irritate me greatly. Time passed, I didn’t book the extra flight, and time was running out. Today however, I received an email from AirAsia. They decided they should restructure all of their flights coming out of London because, well, they love me? Since this might ‘inconvenience’ some people, they decided I should be able to change my flight to one of my choosing, for free.

When I originally booked these flights, the flights around this date were more expensive. This means that my error wasn’t just rectifiable for free…. it actually saved me money. Also, I’d been meaning to change these flights for weeks, and kept putting it off. So you know what that means? Human Error + Procrastination = Profit. Hope that little lesson will help you all out with your lives :D.

Hope you enjoyed my random thoughts.

Mitchell Durward.