I’m 23 years old but inside I still feel like I’m 15.  growing up I spent great amounts of time dabbling in one field or another.  It was great, I had all the time in the world, I could do what ever I wanted.  Alas this was not the case, and now I find myself staring into an unknown future with all the things I want to do with my life, rushing through my head like moments flashing before the eyes of someone about to die.

Time goes so fast now… It seems like only yesterday that a day would last for ages.  I got 1 day of work today and it flew by.  I got home from a 9 hour shift last night, then what felt like 2 hours later I looked at the clock to find that it was infact, yet another 9 hours of my life that had disappeared.

The point in this post isn’t to moan about the lack of time I have and to cling to my 15 year old boyhood like a 2 year old clinging to his favourite T-shirt.  The point is the value of time.

We only have so long in our lives to make of it what we will.  Among the deep recess of my mind, I’m thinking that the only things we can do with our lives that have true value, are the thing that contribute towards the betterment of the world.

If what I spend my time doing is not contributing towards a better world then it is devoid of meaning and can only be motivated by selfishness.

This is all very simple to me.  I desperately want to travel the world and explore every bit of it, and enjoy and wonder at the beauty of cultures and nature.  To climb mountains, venture deep into what remains of our forests and jungles, spend time with people from all countries and enjoy the qualities they emenate forth.  My reason for saying this is that these desires could sound selfish, after all, I’m not feeding starving children in Africa or stopping the bloodshed in numerious countries. But lets think for a minute about the value of how we conduct ourselves, behave and ineteract with one another.

When I’m at work I could be uninterested, apathetic, and uncaring.  But how much more valuable and enjoyable is it to engage with others, to work hard and to try and contribute towards the happyness of people around me.  If a child is afraid on the equipment, I can hold their hand and work with them to give them confidence and courage.

These simple attitudes are what I believe puts meaning into our lives, and contributes towards a better world, and thus makes our time valuable.

When I look back on my life as I lie close to death I will be greately unhappy if upon reflection I feel I have not achieved these small things.

Thinking about all this helps me prioritise all the stuff I want to learn and do.  If I realise a project I want to work on will only really benefit me, then it comes naturally that I don’t really want to do it.  I can then get back on track with projects I’m really interested in.

I want my work to offer some learning or insight, that another human being can benefit of.

Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.

(Baha’u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah, p. 259)

Filed under: life musings by kiamo
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I was reading about matt painting last night, looking at Tim Warnocks work and how he does it, and decided to experiment with it.

A lot of it is photo manipulation, getting the referance you want for your final scene, and painting in other parts you want.  Mine is pretty crap, but I appreciated the experiment so I thought I’d blog it up anyway.

Filed under: Art by kiamo
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Merry christmas all!

I was watching some tv shows about space on tv earlier this evening.  Inspired this painting of a girl gazing at a nebula.

I needed to work more into it but I was getting a bit tired of it.  I enjoyed getting this far though :)

Filed under: Art by kiamo
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Recently I changed my hosting over to another provider I use for another website. No reason to pay for 2 lots of hosting.

From what I’d read it would be as easy as just copying over the old sql database and html folder from one host for everything to continue working.

Unfortunately it wasn’t quite that simple and I wasted many hours of trawling the web, forums and editing away at my database tables for solutions. No joy.

I wanted to get to work on the other things I’d wanted to do this week so I decided to just install a blog platform and start again. This time I installed wordpress, which I’m really appreciating. It’s rather awesome, and also seems MUCH more friendly if I need to change my hosting or something.

I’ve given a good few content management systems a proper run for their money now and wordpress is looking to be the best. Gets my recommendation for blogging if anyone else is trying to choose one.

Filed under: Uncategorized by kiamo
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I wanted to peek around the Iphone SDK, but you cant unless your on an apple mac.  So I decided to see if I could get osx leopard running on my dell xps m1530.

Lo and behold after many hours of googling, and reading I am now sitting on my bed typing this in osx Leopard 10.5.5.  It was no easy task getting it to the usable state its in today, and it still has issues.

What currently is NOT working:

-Internet(cable)
-shutdown/Restart/Sleep (this is caused by the nvidia drivers and means I have to manually push the off button once the computer has finished its shutdown sequence, not a big issue)
-sound in via internal mic

What currently is working:

-Graphics Card
-internal wifi(via Dell Wireless DW 1390 mini pci-e)
-Sound out(headphones and internal speakers)
-Speed Stepping(This is a cpu function that optimizes power use on the cpu)
-updates from apple
-fingerprint scanner
-integrated webcam
-Keyboard and Touchpad

Edit: Dual screens is working now too [happyness]

The lack of a working mic is the most annoying thing, backed up closely by the failing ethernet port.  Perhaps with time I’ll get these problems sorted out too.  Though it doesn’t look likely for the ethernet as someone has to actually make a driver for it.

I’ve never really used macs before, not since around… 1999 ish.  And they where pretty old computers even for that year.  Boasting 32megs of ram this was pre pretty apple days and I quickly concluded that I hated these computers.

Since then I’ve never really had a reason to revisit the mac.  Until now, and I have to say, I’m liking what im finding a lot.  My next computer might actually be a real mac! *SHOCK*

osX Leopard is fast, stable, secure, smooth, and a lot more customizable than I’d thought.  I’d had the oppinion that macs take control of your computer for you, a notion that caused me much unease.  However I’m happy to find that this is not the case, and in fact, windows is worse in this respect.

Hang on, just for the record, while I’ve always mainly used windows, I’ve never liked it.  I might have expressed a little bit of enthusiasm or excitement apon a new windows release, but this is due to my conclusion that windows was the best of the worst, and the optimistic hope that maybe MS where going to make it fast, and stable, and secure, and pleasant to use. Windows seems to move forward in some of these areas some times, and moves back in others.  All in all it seems to just be staying just as bad as its always been but progressively making the UI more revolting to look at.

I’ve often dabbled in linux, and liked what I’ve found, its got great things going for it, but its lack of software, and ease of use really lets it down.  I dont mind getting out of my depth in technology and code and general geek stuff, but sometimes I like to come up for air, and while after a few months in linux you start learning how to swim, the only way seems to get you deeper…

osX is built on unix, which is what linux is built on, and it was a damn good idea, because the unix platform is clearly the best for stability, security, and speed.  Its just better, flat out.  So mac have taken that, greatly enhanced its software support, and ease of use and delivered pretty much exactly what I wanted.  In the last place I would look for it.

It’s still early days though, I’m sure I’ll find annoyances.  But so far osX is totally winning!

Filed under: geek by kiamo
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