Charity begins at the Record Store... [Dated 23/04/07]

Hey, slightly old topic, but last week, the Wright Stuff raised the issue of the usefulness of big Charity Concerts what with one coming up to raise funds and awareness about global warming. This concert follows the historical Live Aid, and the ones that spawned off that, like Live 8 recently.

They came to the conclusion that not much awareness is raised, generally ppl go to see their fave bands etc, and well money is raised, which is one good thing, but it's almost subtle charity as the crowds haven't bought the ticket for the cause but rather the chance to see their bands/groups/musical artists that they like. They raised the point that ppl will only remember the bands they saw, rather that the good work they did raising money for the cause of the day. They also raised the point, that unless the charity event is grossly publicised celebrities don't want to be part of it. Once again further proving that their is no such thing as a selfless act, as the celebrities are only interested if they can make a PR gain.

Now, I'm not attacking those that give a lot to charity, I'm sure your efforts are appreciated, but for a lot of people, charity is buying a charity single for Red Nose Day or Comic Relief etc. I guess the point I'm trying to make is it's not really charity if the donation has to be forced out of you by purchasing a single or a red nose etc. Also, the people that patrol the pedestrian areas of city/town shopping centres are also ppl trying to convince you to part with your money for a good cause. To stand and wait, and then chase you down as you walk past, making everyone feel uncomfortable hardly seems charitable. You can actually see clear paths forming as ppl make wide arcs to avoid being harassed.

As I've probs blogged before, in conversation with my Nan, we got chatting about the ease on which our country, along with many others, gave aid for the tsunami disaster. Now i'm not saying it's not a tragedy, but again agreeing with a point raised on the Wright stuff about these charity concerts, that maybe aid should be given to those suffering in our own country. They went on to say how celebrities are only too happy to do the trendy charity thing, and go help out a village of children in Africa.

Moving onto something lighter, and again conversing with my Nan, and someone she knew who came out of Uni wanted to do Law, to which she approached a number of solicitors. They rejected her applications, saying that she should do some volunteer work to help boost her CV. That is pretty sick, that you she should perform tokens of goodwill volunteering, for the sole purpose of boosting her career oppurtunities. I'm sure if she did some volunteer work, that she would feel good doing her bit, helping out people. Maybe i'm losing focus, but I've argued in the past, that there is no such thing as a selfless act. It's very difficult to prove, and people try to come up with instances where such a thing exists but I am sceptical. I guess with doing the volunteer work that ppl want to receive recognition for the good work that they do, I know I do. Thinking back to my time spent at Uni, and I had the oppurtunity to join Warwck volunteers. Again, I'm sure a lot fo ppl did this to bolster their CV, and also satisfy this feeling of needing to help, and that's fair enough. But that should be enough, but people can, and did advertise the fact that they spared some of their time by wearing clothes with the Warwick Volunteers logo.

On a tangent, I have still not uploaded these blog posts to the intermaweb - last night I got caught up trying to get videos and the like to stream to the 360 with questionable success. the problem lies in that the 360 can only play wmv files thanks to the Microsoft machine. That means either converting my video files to wmv, or as I started to investigate the problem deeper, use thrid party software to transcode the videos "on-the-fly". I will look into that a bit more, but I used this encoder program to turn a video into a mpeg which teh 360 can read, but when playing the video on the 360, it seems incredibly laggy, missing whole chunks of video at times, making it unwatchable. IT's weird cos I have a dedicated line between the 360 and my PC, so their shouldn't be any traffic on it, plus when configuring Media Center, one of the tests concluded that the network speed of the connection was sufficient to stream to the 360.

We'll see, but in more important news, I should find out if I have an interview with Midland Computers in Telford, I'd like to think they would at least consider me and give me an interview so fingers crossed.