I have been using computers for a a few years now. I generally have been fine with how the keyboard except for the frequent typing errors I make. But there is one thing about the keyboard that really irritates me, that is the Caps Lock key. I’m sure everyone has accidentally hit that key many times which can get irritating if done frequently. But quickly on a more positive note about the key before I start my rant, I do like how it makes an LED light up when it is on. Sounds simple and stupid but in my opinion, that is the only good thing it does, no matter how useless it is.

Why is the button right under the tab key and just above the shift key. Now I speak for myself here but those two keys are ones I use pretty frequently. I always end up accidentally hitting that key and start typing later on and realize that I have it on so my text is in caps. By the time I realize what I have done, I then have to erase the word and type it again which is annoying. Sometimes it even happens randomly in the middle of a word when my typing is sloppy and I miss the ‘a’ key. Half the word is in caps which then I can’t be bothered correcting it so I just let it slide (that is when chatting.)

I don’t see why they couldn’t have it with the keys I don’t use, like the home and insert and end keys. I never use them but I’m sure there are uses for them and that some people do use them. The good thing is with those keys, if I was to accidentally hit them, they probably wouldn’t do too much anyway, only scroll the page up or down or something else insignificant. Why don’t they put all the lock keys together in a out of the way part of the keyboard. The caps lock can spend its time right beside his cousins, the scroll and number lock.

Honestly, how often is it that you actually use that key? Why would you want to type a hole sentence or paragraph in caps? I’m sure there are instances but I really do think it needs to be moved out of the way. When I type out a word, or in a less likely case, a whole sentence, in caps, I hold down the shift key. Yes, it is a little discomforting to hold hown the shift key for that long but how often are you going to do it for it to be a concern, probably never.

Yes, I am aware there are ways to disable or change that button to do another function but why should I have to do something about it? I think it should be there responsibility to stop me, and other people, from accidentally hitting that key making me end up typing in full caps. Do you know what would be even better, removing that button completely from existence. Everyone has come across some twit on the internet that types in full caps. What an attention whore! Well removing that button would stop a lot of that, or at least slow it down. If I was one of those guys doing it, I wouldn’t bother holding the shift key to type out a paragraph in caps for attention. I think they should move, or kill that key. Do computer users, and the internet a favor!

Well last time I tried to post, this time last week, something when wrong. I can’t explain what happened and never got round to re-writing the post. I  decided I would take a week off from blogging and in that time school has ended, study hasn’t started, life continues and I think its a holiday. This is going to come back and bite me in the arse, mark my words.

Tuesday was the last day of classes. It was a good day actually. Surfing the internet first period in ICT because I had long finished the assessment that at least two thirds were still trying to complete. Then I had a period of absolutely nothing. Then my final period of 2007, Electronics. Yet again I just wandered around, somewhat pleased with myself for being the only person to complete the course with two periods to spare. Then someone came along and managed to finish aswell, just in the nick of time. Two out of thirty of so people doing electronics actually completing the course in time is an extremely low number. Then it was lunch time and home time.

Prizegiving was also that night. I hadn’t expected to get anything because I have been extremely slack this year and hadn’t achieved very much to be honest. Anyway, I managed to slip in to get a certificate. Surprised me. Wasn’t happy to be there though, would have preferred to be home watching Heroes, Prison Break and Chuck instead.Managed to fit them in the night anyway so I was pleased.

Generally through the week, the TV shows, podcasts and video podcasts stack up for me to watch in the weekend. Since I have been home, that hasn’t happened. I have many hours free and I try to find ways to fill in the time. I should probably be studying instead of checking things off my media list, I’m afraid that the next two and a half months are going to be long, very long. I should probably spend that time watching some of the TV series I have downloaded and stored somewhere else to watch later.

I am running out of ideas on subjects to post about so if anyone has any ideas for me, *cough* Peppery *cough*, they would be greatly appreciated. I can’t wait for November to end so I have that free time to myself and school and exams out of the way. Next year, my final year, is going to be a strange and tough year. I don’t know whether to be scared or happy about finally leaving school.

Music, it is powerful. Everyone listens to music, everyone connects to music. Music is a very effective tool that the media use to hook us. It recently struck me and got me thinking about this that a familiar tune or song can trigger something in the brain to make us think about something else.

One thing is a theme song of a television series. Yesterday, a song that is the theme of a television show my family watch, except me, was on television and it instantly grabbed their attention. They though there was something on television about the show but really it was just a song being used over the top of something else. I found it strange that something as simple as a familiar piece of music can grab someone like that.

After thinking about it, it clicked that I myself do something similar. Whenever I hear a song that has been on one of Apple’s iPod advertisements, I instantly think about the iPod. This is similar for other products but Apple really has me. This is the whole point, they want their product stuck in your head and by using popular, catch music to a greatly done advertisement, they have you hooked.

This also applies of my favourite television show, Heroes. They played a song on the advertisement with a song I hear regularly on the radio and whenever it plays, I always think about Heroes. I don’t care about the song, I don’t listen to the song, but the song triggers my thought, which happen to be my favourite show, Heroes.

Music is a very powerful tool, especially in the media and marketing of products. It can trigger a thought or a memory of something we have seen. Used in a smart way, can really sell a product, whether it be an iPod, a movie, or a television show. This is the media.

Today was a strange and boring day at school. This is the last week and all that we do is study before the end of year exams. Three of my subjects that don’t have exams at the end of the year, we are finishing off the last parts for it. In Electronics, I am finishing my tone generator plus amplifier circuit and packaging it. In ICT, I am doing a website assessment. It is stupid, we have to make a stupid little webpage using frontpage. Honestly, no one is ever going to use this so I see no point at teaching it.

The strangest thing that has happened in a long time is a teacher walking out of the class. There was a discussion about a text we read in English and the class started to break into a debate like talk, well until the teacher got fed up and walked out saying that we can teach ourselves. This is not a good thing because we need a teacher to help us or else we aren’t going to do as well in the exam. The class is silly, why did this happen. I suppose next English period is going to be rather awkward, I’m not looking forward to it.

Procrastination. Noun. Defined in the Wiktionary as, the act of postponing, delaying or putting off, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness. This word is a pretty good word to pin to me. I don’t like doing work. I like being on my computer. If I can avoid doing something I will. If I can be on my computer instead of doing something else, I will also. The only time I will actually do something that I want to avoid is if I get rewarded.

One thing that I have been putting of is studying for exams. I hate exams. I hate studying. I’ve actually never studied in my life before because I always put it off. This year is the same, three subjects, I need to study or else I will fail. Even if I do study, I will definitely fail at least 5 papers. I have put off studying every year that I still have to learn the ability of study. Everyone else is studying and mastered it years ago, but not poor old procrastinating me. I’m going to suffer for my laziness

Another thing I have been putting off is this blog. One reason is because blogging means I have to think which means I have to use my brain. I don’t want to have to think about things, I want to rest my brain ofter a long hard day of lazy. You may have noticed that I dropped the posts from daily to every second day. This was because of two reasons. One, I was too lazy to write every day and decided I would much rather skip it every second day and have ten minutes longer to watch a TV show. The other reason is that it is really hard to think of something to blog about. I can’t believe this blog is still going to be quite honest. I would have expected it to die a long long time ago. If this blog survives with regular updating after the new year, I think I deserve a medal.

Speaking of TV shows, I do not know why I download 23 or so TV shows a week. If I was limited to how much I could download, I could easily round it up into the half a dozen or so shows I must have, but because I have an unlimited amount of usage, I end up downloading a big amount of content each week. Why do I do this? For entertainment? To give me something? To make my boring life go faster? Or is it to give me reasons to avoid the stuff I don’t want to do, in this case, homework, study, dealing with issues and my family. Honestly, half of the shows I download I could do without, there is a lot of crap on TV.

This problem I have with putting things off is not going to go away. Its been with me for too long to just disappear. It is in my nature to be lazy and put things off. Procrastination is going to lead me to fail, but hopefully when that time comes, I can put off my failure by doing something else.

This morning when I woke up and started up the internet, the unusual looking Tumblr Dashboard shocked me. What had happened to the Tumblr dashboard I had gotten to know and love? Its gone and has been replaced with something better (I hope.) I really like the new dash, it is more simple to use than the old one. It is also much easier to differentiate my own posts from the posts of my followers.

Posting is still easy as ever with the same icons and functions that it always has, with the exception of the added Audio functionality. I personally wouldn’t use it but its nice to know that the option if always there if I ever wanted to use it. They have also added some advanced features to it such as dating your posts and also add tags to posts. The tag functionality isn’t quite finished and doesn’t do much right now but it will be extremely useful for searching and browsing in the near future.

Moving the friends and followers off the dashboard was a good idea. Now they are on their own individual pages. The icons are bigger so you can actually see the faces of your friends and followers and it is not in the way for the dashboard and not slowing down the page loading as well as wasting bandwidth. It would be nice though if we could still see the number of followers on the dashboard too, just like the number of friends. Another thing that would be nice to do is have the option to hide or show friends posts in the dashboard. This could remove clutter if you wanted to go and find or edit one of your own posts from a day or so ago without having your friends posts making this a little harder and time consuming.

Channels is something new they have added into Tumblr. I didn’t quite understand the feature at first but now I think I get it. Channels are a way to share things with a group of people, and its private. Only people in the channel will be able to see the content. They are going to expand the functionality of this feature by adding multi-author tumblelogs and the ability to make it public. This is another feature I’m not sure I would use but if I found a use for it, I would definitely use it as I really love the Tumblr engine.

They have reconstructed the Theme editor. I personally am not fussed over the new editor and prefer the old, simple one. Previewing the theme has been made easy and its much better than the old preview. I think its great that they have added some user created themes (from Bill Israel and Cameron Hunt) to the theme library. These guys have made amazing themes and I believe that its wonderful their works of art have been discovered and have been added. Off to the side now, the theme editor is the only place on the whole site that I managed to find the old Tumblr flower logo. I really liked that logo and would like to see it put back, and for it to become the favicon rather than the ‘T’ that is currently there. The Tumblr flower would look much better there in the tabs bar.

But now is the part of the post where I talk about the things lacking and things that I believe would make the service better. I have to do it and creative criticism is good because it helps a service grow into something good. I only have a few gripes about Tumblr, one is the fact that none of the advance features are in the bookmarklet. I use the bookmarklet for 99% of the posts I make on Tumblr, it would be nice if I could click a link and it would expand the advance options so I can tag and date posts right from there instead of going to the dashboard and editing posts to add tags and such.

On the topic of tags, when the feature is fully enabled and search and browsing via tags is usable, Tumblr should have an easy way to tag older content. At the moment the only way would be so scramble through the dashboard looking for your posts and editing them. For a lot of people, doing it this way would become impractical due to the fact that they have made thousands of posts and editing them all to add tags would be a nightmare. Also having your content mixed with others just makes the task more daunting. What is going to end up happening is people won’t bother to use the tag feature and a lot of functionality will be missed. Somehow, make an easy tag system for tagging posts without any tags so you can make sure any great content isn’t lost in the giant archives of the Tumblr.com.

There are a lot of other things under the hood and small changes that I haven’t felt the need to mention. I wish I had someone to make a new custom theme for my Tumblelog so I can catch up and have Yum9me’s Scrapbook v3 and can have a nice makeover like the main site. Anyone who is moderately interested in this service would be insane not to jump on board and at least give Tumblr a go. It is one of the web services that I love the most on the internet and I am very excited to see it grow and grow and grow. Another great update from the people at Davidville and best wishes on your next projects and Tumblr v4