I hate to pester people in their happy bubbles of existence but sometimes it’s necessary to remind oneself how lucky one is to have access to the most rudimentary of things: shelter, food and water. There is no doubt that we take these things for granted.

It’s easy to find scary statistics to put a point across, but often they lack accuracy or are taken out of context. Well, these aren’t such statistics — they’re from the UN’s World Food Programme, and they’re both accurate and shocking:

• One out of four children – roughly 146 million – in developing countries is underweight
  (Source: The State of the World’s Children, UNICEF, 2007)
• Every day, 16,000 children die of starvation (most of them under five). This equates to 1 child every 5 seconds.
  (Source: Food Insecurity in the World, FAO, 2005)

These numbers are beyond comprehension, to a degree, because of their enormity. It’s difficult to fathom. But it’s happening, and you should take it in. This is the world you live in. Face it, accept it, and if, in these facts, you find the impetus to make a change, then great! Even a small change is a great change.

When one thinks of a child, in Western society, she has parents, and they love her, and they would die for her at an instant. They sacrifice years of freedom and financial security to bring her up in this world. This one child will receive so much love and devotion. To think of the absolute devastation this child’s death would bring an entire community is almost laughable in comparison to the absolute silence with which a child perishes in other parts of the world. It means nothing.

Don’t be a coward about it. It’s not too depressing to think about. If you can’t handle the reality of life and insist on living in a bubble of make-believe then fine, but know that the joy and pain that you’ll feel is probably nothing in comparison to both the suffering, ecstasy and bliss that can be felt if you leave the bubble.

Graham Nash said:

Life is not perfect, and it never will be, you just have to make the best of it and open your heart to what the world can show you. Sometimes it’s terrifying and sometimes it’s incredibly beautiful, and I’ll take both — thanks.

Don’t shy away from the world. It’s the real thing. Experience it. Love it. Improve it.

From GiveCamp.org.uk:

GiveCamp was founded by Microsoft Developer Evangelist, Chris Koenig, in Dallas, Texas in 2007. His vision was to bring together passionate developers and local charitable organisations for an entire weekend, and see what would happen.

What happened was more than could have been expected. Over $1,000,000 worth of developer services were donated to more than 150 charities and non-profits over the next 4 years. Since then GiveCamps have popped up all over the USA.

And now, GiveCamp is coming to the UK.

The UK’s first GiveCamp is set to be offering around £120,000 in developer services.

I have never done something like this before so it will be a valuable experience. At the very least, it will provide a bunch of charities the means to do their work more effectively. These charities don’t have the budgets to afford the development of the kind of bespoke IT systems many for-profit entities take for granted.

Two days seems short, but I’m sure a lot will get done.

FYI: GiveCampUK is still looking for a couple more companies to sponsor the event. Let them know if you’re interested.

I purchased an Amazon Kindle just nine days ago and have already completed two novels. For me, this is a notable achievement. I hate to admit it but I, until very recently, was one of those people that puzzled over others’ passion for fiction. I read a great deal of non-fiction online, but books of all kinds have never taken me in like they have others. I won’t make excuses as many do, saying that school ruined my passion for books. Endless analysis of Shakespearean prose didn’t faze me as much as others, but I simply never caught the reading bug.

I can remember reading only a handful of fiction books in my teenage years, few of them worth a mention.

So, I hope I’ve made it clear how much of a feat this really is! A success, for me, and for Amazon no doubt. The Kindle may have been just the low barrier I needed to get started on a passion that already burnt within.

The Kindle itself is lightweight, but not so thin that it feels delicate. Some things that may surprise you about the latest Kindle:

• It has a microsoft-sam-esque text-to-speech function which does become invaluable, especially when trying to figure out how the hell “recalcitrant” is pronounced!
• It can read any PDF. This morning I snapped a quick screenshot of Google Maps, saved it to a PDF, transferred it across, and voilà! I now have a portable map.
• Since it’s 3G enabled, and has an experimental browser installed (webkit), I can browse the internet in most of its glory. It’s grayscale and somewhat slow but who cares! This is meant to be an e-book reader after all; anything in addition to the basic set of e-book-reader features is a huge plus!
• It’s possible to jailbreak it and install your own screensavers, which are left on the screen when the device powers-off.
• It has a built in dictionary. This sounds like nothing impressive but when I’m puzzling over a word, mid-sentence, the last thing I will bother doing is digging out an actual dictionary.
• There are no pages to turn! Less fumbling with pages as you lie on your side and more time immersed in the world your book creates for you.
• The e-ink screen is as easy to read as an actual book (No glare, great contrast, etc.).
• You can play minesweeper!

Like everything that dares to inflict change, the Amazon Kindle is something that shouldn’t really be knocked until it’s tried. Don’t disregard e-books as a passing fad, and certainly don’t disregard the Kindle. Its awesome simplicity makes it disappear in your hands, just as it should: you’re not interfacing with a device; you’re reading a book.

After dropping out of university after a mere two months of a disappointing computer science course, I admitted to myself that I had absolutely no clue as to what to do next.

It seemed that much of my life up until this point had been laid out for me in perfect order, but now a choice beckoned, and I was rearing to put what had passed behind me.

After a few months of debt repayment and soul-destroying IT jobs, I decided to quit and do something oft sold as worthwhile but something I had never even considered before: volunteer.

I wanted to volunteer, although I wasn’t sure it what field nor on what continent. After a bit of research I had narrowed down my search to Asia, and eventually landed on Thailand. The choice of what country wasn’t particularly important to me, I just wanted to volunteer. You could say I was driven by a blind need to do so. I had decided to go to Thailand for three months to teach English.

This was no frivolous excursion either. I will admit that the lure of volunteering abroad is not entirely objectively founded. There’s plenty of work to be done at home after all, and if my intentions were solely altruistic it would probably make more sense, financially at least, to help those already in my immediate vicinity. Alas, my intentions were not entirely altruistic. I was eager to travel abroad, to leave the path that seemed expected of me, to escape the monotonous eight-hour work drill that we, as a society, have become so used to. I wanted to escape. I wanted to discover something new about myself, something that no amount of time at a university, no matter how prestigious or expensive, could reveal.

Upon landing in Thailand, apart from being drained and agitated from the flight, I was in slight disbelief that I had actually gone through with it. I had been told I was more of a dreamer than a doer, so much so that I started to believe it, and so I being in Thailand was quite something to behold. Me acting on my concerns and principles as opposed to superficial wants and intuitions was surely a novelty.

Whatever apprehensions I felt on the day were more than matched upon arriving in Thailand’s poorest region, Isaan.

The first part of my stay was spent in a small village on the Mekong river, bordering with Laos. I spent six weeks teaching English to secondary school students. The school accommodated and fed me, in exchange for my English language and British humour. Much of what appealed to them, no doubt, was something I am unintentionally – white, and therefore foreign.

It feels odd writing about a subject so taboo, but race is a pervasive and relevant issue here. If your skin is of a whiter shade, or if there are any indications that you’re foreign, then upon walking into a Thai village, you’ll discover that many of the locals are quite fascinated by you – not for anything unique to you, but rather the simple fact that you’re foreign.

In the very rural areas, you’re likely to be the first foreigner many of the children have ever seen in real life. They point, they wave, they shy away, and they’re often silenced in curiosity and awe. For some of them, you’re a new skin, hair, or eye colour. For others, you embody the west and much of what young Thai people look up to. When they look at you, they don’t only see these new colours, they see another world – they know little of it so just to gaze at you is novel enough for most of them.

After my six weeks at the school I travelled to Nong Khai where I found Isara, a non-profit foundation that dedicates itself to teaching English & IT, looking after and raising awareness about the environment, and health & safety. As one would expect, they teach English for free. Anyone that wishes to learn English can walk off the street in Nong Khai and learn from English-speaking volunteers.

I first spoke to the founder of Isara, Kirk, when I was still working with another organisation. This other organisation charges volunteers a fee. If you’ve volunteered abroad before, the concept of volunteer fees probably won’t come as too much of a shock. It seems this is the widely accepted status quo and, currently, it is quite a challenge to find organisations that don’t operate in this way.

Just the concept of paying to volunteer was absurd to me when I begun but, after considerable exposure, I began to accept it. This all changed, of course, when talking to the founder and other volunteers at Isara. They charged nothing. This may not seem special but, trust me, such an organisation is a rarity. In exchange for your volunteering they will accommodate you. They only ask for five hours of dedication per week, but most volunteers give so much more than that.

Upon finding Isara, my three months in Thailand eventually turned into six months, and after Kirk requested that Michelle, a volunteer from Canada, and I take part in Isara’s new “Free Volunteer Thailand” project, my trip turned into almost eight months.

There are some things that simply must be experienced to gain the most out of them. Leading a game of Simon Says in front of a five-hundred-strong audience should fall into this category, if just for its ludicrous nature. Until you’ve done it, you can’t quite imagine the absurdity and surrealism of it. Another cherished memory from my first few months was teaching fifty eleven-year-old students the chorus line of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, with added dance moves. Young Thai children enjoy moving around, and saying foreign words, even if they don’t understand them.

Of course, let’s not forget the odd feeling one experiences when celebrating Christmas with one-hundred-plus Thai students in a place so distant from the usual wintery Narnia that envelopes the UK during that time.

Every individual Thai person I’ve met has added to my experience, and I have to say that I don’t think I’ve yet had an encounter with a Thai person that wasn’t at least pleasant. In the depths of the countryside, surrounded by farmland, I will meet a humble family and share a meal of Ant eggs and sticky rice, and in the bustling semi-urban experience that is Nong Khai I will meet so many interesting people on many different paths in life, from a wealthy manager of the local mall, to the woman that wheels out her cart every single day to sell coffee and tea on the street.

Even while celebrating Song Kran, I couldn’t help but notice the little things happening around us, that would probably go unnoticed to most foreigners. The lady in the shop next door to Isara worked throughout the celebrations, probably upwards of fifteen hours a day dedicated to her som-tam shop. This is the reality.

To experience another world’s reality is valuable beyond reasonable measure. It can’t be explained by words, only by the recipient’s subsequent actions—actions that will be decided upon with a great influence from the perspectives gained from knowing another reality.

Heading home will be strange. But it’s not the same home. Not to me. I will see it through a different pair of eyes; alas, probably a more cynical pair of eyes.

Farewell Isara, Nong Khai, Isaan and Thailand! And a huge thank you to all the awesome people I’ve met here. I will be working on my Thai and hope to return some day in the future.

One day I had had enough of something: the job, the routine, the money, the knowing… I wanted to escape. I would look out of the window while working my eight-hour day, peering outside, and my gaze would often shift to a roof wrapped in potted plants, weaving vines and leafy trees. I was on the sixth floor so I had the advantage of looking slightly down on this enchanting roof. I could see, amongst the greenery, a moss-covered bench and a table. In the middle of Berlin amongst keyboards tapping and managers plotting I had found an inner-city personal oasis of an unknown person. It became my refuge. For a few moments every day from then on, I lived vicariously through the imagined presence of this person in their little oasis. The intimacy with nature, within such unnatural surroundings, defeated me in my day. It left me tingling and yearning for something more significant than what I currently had. I needed more of something.

I was young and unsure as to the nature of my yearning, because for my entire life the idea of a satisfying metropolitan, day-by-day, eight-hour-by-eight-hour, existence had been sold to me. It was the light at the end of the tunnel. School seemed like punishment and so naturally I assumed that it was all for something. It was to get my ticket, so that I could get on the train of life with something more than the breath in my lungs. This is what we were told. Alas, one arrives, and realises it was all fiction.

Anyway, as should be well known by anyone who frequents this blog, I am currently volunteering in Thailand. Specifically, I am working with Isara, an awesome non-profit foundation based in Nong Khai.

Let me try and shatter what you think you know about Thailand and put across what I know thus far in a paragraph. There are no blanket statements I can make such as “the food is delicious” or “the people are kind, generous and beautiful” because such things would only be as true as if said of any other country in the world.

Isaan is Thailand’s poorest province — this is where Nong Khai is situated. The average farmer makes around 140 Baht each day, which is about £3 ($5), and considering everything, people from this area seem contented with their lives. Farangs (foreigners, specifically white ones) are almost revered for just being white. The locals find novelty in our white skin, our coloured hair and eyes, our height and our language. Children here are demotivated by the government education system which seems to attract dispassionate teachers because of it being one of few jobs with social security benefits. The children, albeit demotivated, are enthusiastic when inspired and willing to learn when shown what they can become. There are struggles. Uneducated people pollute and abuse the environment and each other. Health, safety and true education come second to saving face and appearing calm and subdued. The people here cover every spec of the spectrum — there are all kinds. There are many farang here too… some older folk, some younger. Some looking for their Thai brides, some travelling, and some staying to help. Life here is cheap for a westerner. Life here is hard for a local. Learning English is a way out, an opportunity to become something more, an opportunity to take the world by the horns and do what you will!

I’m currently working on developing a computer-based system for Isara’s learning center, where local people are invited to learn English for free three times a week. Currently all student records are kept in a paper-based system — this includes details about their progress in class. Moving it to a computer-based system will waste less paper, provide a centralised store of student details and progress, enable querying of the data to determine which students are behind and what topics have been taught, and it will provide a wealth of query-able, filter-able, process-able data that could save many man-hours of paper-fiddling and printing!

It’s still a plan in progress, but the DB schema looks like this thus far (all ‘_log’ tables are for auditing). I am going to be using CodeIgniter, just because I remember how ridiculously simple it made a previous project. If you haven’t, you should try it out!

It insists upon separating your concerns into the traditional M-V-C pattern (Model, View, Controller) and has a bunch of auto-load-able helper classes and libraries. It’s very widely used, so finding help online is rarely a problem (Google is your friend).

Got any tips or stories to share about CI? Please share.

Some photos

One of the buildings at the secondary school I taught at (Thadokkam Wittayakom):

Me helping students with a skit for an upcoming English competition:

A vacant classroom:

A classroom (almost) filled with students:

The School’s English teachers and me teaching the chorus line of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine — including a dance routine!:

This is where I lived for six weeks:

This student was practising for the book-reading element of the upcoming English competition:

Most of the school’s students assembling in the morning:

Another view of the school:

Robin, another volunteer, Ja, a teacher at the school, and I pose with students:

What was it like?

Classes ranged in size from 5 to 50. We taught from the curriculum some of the time, and other times just came up with other things to teach and games to play. The most popular games included Charades, Hangman, Bingo, Simon Says, and Fruit Salad (for the younger ones). Robin, another volunteer from Holland, and I also tutored individual students for an English competition in which they would compete against schools in the district. We ended up getting to the second stage of the competition with both the skit and spelling-bee events. It was so wonderful to work with students that genuinely wanted to learn.

Classroom teaching was also wonderful, but it had its challenges. Many of the students simply didn’t want to be there. English is a compulsory subject for these students, so it came as no surprise that the majority seemed demotivated. The teachers weren’t particularly strict either, and this lead some students to think that they could just sleep through the classes. In one class, a couple of students spread a bamboo mat at the back of the classroom on the floor and fell asleep right there, just as we were teaching verbs and the Present Continuous tense. I found it funny at the time, but it’s still pretty upsetting that some of these students are so demotivated. It’s very difficult to motivate students that are literally years behind their class-mates and see no point in learning English. Many of these students are forced to turn up by their parents. It makes sense, obviously, — education leads to better prospects, but I feel that there is something missing.

The school is situated in a tiny village called Nong Seng. Most teachers stayed on campus during the week and went home for the weekend (few of the teachers lived within reasonable commute distance). They cooked breakfast and dinner for us, and we went out to the local restaurant for lunch. When I say restaurant, please picture a pretty basic kitchen with a few plastic chairs and tables set-up outside. Almost everything you eat in Thailand involves either rice (sticky, fried, steamed) or noodles. The food was delicious although there was at least one dish I had trouble with… namely, the fermented fish (seriously).

We got to visit surrounding towns and other schools. The fascination with “farang” (foreigners) is pretty awesome, especially when you’re on the receiving end. Everywhere we went, “farang! farang”, girls with their camera phones, and people looking at us in awe. It felt odd, and it was a little upsetting. The white skin, the coloured eyes and the coloured hair obviously played into the admiration… but along with it was the typically rich westerner stereotype. The children admired us for the lives they believed we lived back home, which is odd because I came to Thailand to get away from that life. It seems the grass is always greener, no matter where you stand.

So far, my trip has been a success and I am thoroughly enjoying Thailand for its culture, its food and its people. Thailand, like every country, seems to have its baggage, but it’s still a pretty awesome country. I’m slowly picking up Thai too — a relatively simple language albeit difficult to read and write.

Isara

I made many friends in Thadokkam and it was a shame to leave, but I’m sure I will see them again sometime in the future. I recently moved back to Nong Khai where I will be helping another organisation called Isara.

Isara is unique in that they allow you to volunteer for nothing — no money changes hands. This is the way it should be done! It’s a non-profit organisation with absolute transparency and many interesting projects to take part in. It’s a shame I only found out about them after arriving in Thailand — otherwise I would have skipped the other organisation altogether (since they charge about £300 per month — which is a lot in Thailand, or anywhere). Please read more about Isara — if you’re thinking of volunteering in the future, they may be a suitable fit!

Earlier today Isara reached a significant milestone in one of its latest projects. They’ve built a boat that is kept afloat by nothing more than the buoyancy of recycled plastic bottles. Their objective is to spread awareness about the environment and specifically to tell locals not to throw rubbish into the river. Kirk, Isara’s founder, will sail the boat down the Mekong river in a few weeks, stopping at villages along the way and delivering the message. Today, the boat was pushed into the river, and as we all hoped, it floats! You should visit this forum thread to read more about the project. Also, visit the picasa web album to see some pics of today’s event!

The boat launch

Note that the boat isn’t actually finished yet. All remaining work will be done while it’s afloat.

The boat on the river bank:

Pushing the boat down:

Almost there!

Done — it floats!

A view from above:

See all the photos (plus a couple of videos)

I am hoping to stay in Nong Khai helping Isara until the end of February. I’ll try to keep this site updated. Hopefully, I’ll also have time to post some web-development-related stuff too!

Be prepared for mildly offensive rhetoric and inappropriate usage of the ellipsis and exclamation mark!!!

Me in not so many words:

• I think this universe is simply awesome. We’re tiny when everything is put into perspective. Heck, we’re just one form of life, on one planet, in one star system of hundreds of billions of star systems in this galaxy alone (which itself is accompanied by hundreds of billions of other galaxies), and yet some people still have the arrogance to feel that the human race is at the centre of the whole universe and that it was all created for us! Our wonderful yet miniscule existence is aptly covered in this beautifully poetic video from the late Carl Sagan.

• I will always support the path that increases happiness and/or decreases pain, suffering or unhappiness. I also think that what little time I have on this earth should be used to positively affect others’ lives and improve, even to a tiny extent, the abysmal status quo.
• I love the outdoors. I envy people that have jobs outside. And I don’t mean outside on the street cleaning up human sewage. I mean outside in the real world — the places that we haven’t yet destroyed.
• I’ve yet to sit in an office chair that won’t make my back hurt like hell after eight hours.
• I don’t understand how some people can live with doing the same thing every single day. Sitting at a desk, in a cubicle, eight hours every single day. The banality and soul-crushing reality of any job that requires people to do this is sickening. To think that people are so deluded as to believe that they have no choice and that such an existence is all they can hope for.
• I am a rational human, and therefore don’t subscribe to unfounded beliefs in fairies, goblins or gods. If viable proof surfaces then I will be the first to admit I was wrong, but until that day, I get to say that you’re wrong, deluded, and are kidding yourself. I’m a nice guy though, so I will rarely mention it without provocation.
• I get annoyed when people don’t realise the difference between believing that something doesn’t exist and rejecting the belief that something does exist, for it should be apparent that there is a huge difference.
• My favourite comedians of all time are Ricky Gervais, George Carlin, Frankie Boyle and Bill Hicks (watch all the videos!).
• I hate running, but I absolutely love cycling!
• I think modern day advertising and marketing techniques are the bane of western society. Oh, and politicians! And celebrity magazines!
• I didn’t care for the World Cup, and I always find it amusing how people shout at the TV and put flags on their cars when it won’t have the slightest effect on the game itself.
• I’m trying to become a vegetarian. Watch the documentary, Earthlings, and you’ll understand why. It’s not because I think me abstaining from meat will have the slightest effect on the global demand, but simply to retain whatever integrity I still have.
• Pixar made me cry. I don’t know how they did it…
• I’d love to know how to play a musical instrument properly. Preferably the piano.
• I think humans have a responsibility to stop using non-renewable resources, but I don’t think playing the blame-game is helpful. I also don’t think change will happen given the current political and economic powers that be.
• Other movies that have made me weep like a baby include The Stoning of Soraya M, Forrest Gump, The Champ and Pay It Forward.

Opinions about web technologies:

• I think inline documentation, like that made possible with JSDoc, makes code ugly and unreadable. I want to see the code, and that’s all!
• I think heavy UI abstractions like ExtJS totally take away all of the fun, excitement and challenges that should form a central part in any programmer’s role. To me, it looks like a product built for business people, and business people rarely understand the motives and desires of programmers — they only understand a couple of things: profit margins and economic viability.
• I don’t understand Node.js. I really did try, but it just ended up confusing me. I’m not a Linux wizz so installing it was trouble enough.
• I have a love-hate relationship with PHP. Doing most things is dead simple (which is great), but it’s such an ugly language!
• Even after all this time, jQuery is still my favourite JavaScript library. It’s small, intuitive and doesn’t require me to adopt a new programming paradigm!

Okay, that’s enough for today. Comment if you want. If you disagree with me on any of these points, then, GOOD! This world would be such a dull place without such varied opinions and people!

In my opinion, Java’s insistence on a class based approach makes it a fantastic programming language to start with, albeit being quite hefty, in terms of the sheer quantity of available classes. I also liked the fact that most of my knowledge of JavaScript could be applied to Java. There are a few syntactical discrepancies that left me confused, but all the foundation concepts were (more or less) the same.

I thought it’d be fun to port my Pong game over to JavaScript. It was painlessly quick to do actually, and it’s the first time I’ve ever built a game with JavaScript and the HTML5 canvas tag/API. You can head over to the demo to play it for yourself, and feel free to have a look at the source code. It’s not quite as sophisticated as the Java one, I didn’t have time to add cool graphics or a scoring mechanism. And yes, I know it’s the wrong way round – we were told to do it that way!

What I discovered

It’s a frame-by-frame thing

One of my very first revelations was that, to create a game, it’s important to think about everything on a frame-by-frame basis. Every new frame is a fresh slate upon which you reflect the various states represented in your program. The relationship between any two frames depends on a persisting programmable interface that “remembers” previous states.

It all becomes wonderfully simply when you think about it in this way… move the ball one cell to the left, if its position is equal to zero then it must be at the left wall, therefore we can bounce it off the wall! (okay, so it’s not actually that simple – you have to take the ball’s width into account)

It’s a massive contrast from ‘event-driven’ development, wherein you wait for the user to make a choice and then carry out something following that. In the Pong game, I’m not waiting for the user to do anything – on every new frame I simply query the necessary information to make stuff happen. For example, If the left cursor key is currently down then move this (paddle) one cell to the left! (I’m not waiting for the user to press the left cursor key, each frame is being drawn regardless.)

Everything’s an object

In my Pong game, each physical object in the game is represented as an object within the programmable layer, each one an instance of a predefined class. For example, there’d be one Paddle class from which two Paddle instances (“objects”) would be created, each representing a single physical paddle on the screen.

OOP really shines here!

Abstract, but not too much!

Abstraction really is very important, especially when there are tonnes of things that need to be happening at any time. What I actually mean here, is that it’s important to separate out functionality between your methods. This is obviously better:

if ( this.atSideEdge() ) {
    // ...
}

… than this:

if (curX <= halfBallWidth || curX >= worldWidth - halfBallWidth) {
    // ...
}

Although, this is obviously a bit too far:

if ( this.isCurrentlyWithinFivePixelsOfLeftEdge() ) {
    // ...
}

Game development used to be scary!

The idea of it used to be quite daunting. I feel that creating a game of Pong has opened my mind a little more to the paradigms involved in game development. It’s still a bit scary though…

I downloaded Eclipse and the “Java runtime”, only, of course, to find out that I already had about 10 different Java runtimes already installed. I fired everything up and then stopped; I had absolutely no idea what to create… What can I say? The command-line doesn’t excite me! Yes, I know pretty much anything can be created with Java, even hardware-accelerated games, but all the beginner-tutorials out there only show you the monotonous command-line drivel.

I also purchased a book recommended by the University; I believe it’s the one we’ll be learning from in the first year. It’s called “Objects first with Java” and goes into a tremendous amount of (unnecessary?) detail; I haven’t really got past the first few pages. I’ll tell you something about objects; you’re never going to learn squat about them from tutorials or books. Yeh sure, you’ll get an idea about what they are but you’ll never appreciate the abstraction provided by OO language until you dive in.

Now, don’t get me wrong about this whole University thing; I am looking forward to the “experience” but I’m not exactly overly-excited about the impending course material. I haven’t even begun and I’m already finding it dull; I’ve no doubt that I’ll be pleasantly surprised though… I’m sure the first lecture will prove enthralling!

I’ll be honest with you; I’m only going to University because “that’s what one does after school”. Heck, most people go to Uni for exactly the same reason (they just don’t know it); it’s what’s expected of us. You can say what you want about it but essentially, University is yet another device used to extend and perpetuate the status-quo; i.e. us working and the government getting richer. I just can’t wait; out of uni with a load of debts and then into the monotony of a “career”. Eventually I’ll have additional burdens that will require monetary attention and before you know it I’ll be where most of the British upper-middle-class finds itself, paying off debts… living the dream!

Isn’t it amazing, I haven’t experienced any of this impending fate yet and I already have the capacity to be utterly dismissive and totally negative about it all! Here’s hoping the grass is greener!