Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Friend or Foe???
In my assignment I have to either go with Nathaniel Hawthorne in his thoughts that the internet is evil or go with Vannevar Bush and think it is the best thing in the world. I can't really go with either man but if pushed hard I would probably go with Hawthorne.
The internet has some very good things to offer the world, but at the same time it is not so universally offered. One thing the internet can't boast is cheap. I pay about $60 a month for high speed DSL hook up. Which is a complet rip off. On top of paying $720 a year, I go out and buy a new computer. Now I donot fit the average american that buys an $800 computer every two year, I have managed to make my old computer last me close to four years. That is $7,200 spent on internet hook up over ten years plus the cost of the computers another $4000 which equals $11,200! I could buy a pretty decent car for that.
Another fact the internet boasts is information. I believe that there is too much information and this is worse for us more than ever. We live in a wacked out society where any information that can be found on someone can be used in some hanous way to hurt them. On the internet today without too much work you can find just about anything about a person that you want. Go to the county website where the person lives and you can see the morgage and deed to their house. Then go to the zoning site and you can see the floor plan to the very house you now have a copy of the deed to. How is any of this information helpful to any normal person? For the most part it isn't, but somebody out there will find a way to use it to do something bad.
The internet is on the verge of making americans lazy...wait nevermind it already has. Nobody ever leaves the house anymore, we can do our grocery shoping, clothes shoping all online. Hell now we can even meet the love of our lives on the internet, why should we ever leave our houses? We can find all kinds of information online today about any topic we can think of, the only problem is that we have no idea whether it is real information or if it has been put up there by some pysco. Before you had to go to the library and look up all your information in a book that was published. So you atleast new it was read by one profecional...the printer. Then depending on who published it and how many people said something about it you could determine the legitamacy of the content with common sence. But the internet anyone could say anything and then say that whoever agrees with them. There is very little way to determine if they are telling the truth or not.
I also believe that the internet is killing the english language. I have for many years refused to used any of the slang chat words like lol or a/s/l. I see more and more comercials on tv using these slang terms for advertisements. These advertisements always start out the same with an explenation of what the acrinym means at the bottom of the screen, but the other day I saw an advertisment for a cell phone company that didn't give any explenation. I believe this is destroying our ways of communicating. In the far out future will there be some Shakespear writing a new love sonnet "Romeo! Romeo! WTF Romeo?" I don't find it cute or romantic or particularly easy to read or write.
Another problem about the internet is it is killing our ability to talk to eachother face to face. Yes like 3 in every 8 marriages was started online, but 4 out of 8 end in divorce. You can meet as many people as you would like online, but if you do not develop the social skills of talking face to face then how are you going to sustain any of these relationships that you are starting up? you can't. Everyone is too afraid to talk to the person sitting next to them because they are affraid of being rejected. GET OVER IT! Our grandparents had to meet like that, our parents also and for the most part most of my generation will have met most of their friends like that. But what about the generation after mine? Will they be able to deal with eachother face to face. Is this the end of boardroom meetings because everyone is scared of the boss saying no. When two people get in a fight, will they go to seperate rooms in there house so they can log onto the internet and fight in a private chat room? How will they express wheither they are being sarcastic? WILL THIS SIGNIFY YELLING, or begging in their conversations? Will we keep developing acrynms so we know what we are trying to say or will itallics become the new BOLD? Either way I think its a crock of shit. People need to learn how to talk to eachother and get over their timidness.
In the end I know it may sound like I hate the internet, I do not. I just believe that people need to chill out on it. It is not magical, you will probably not be able to find the elixor of life or your soul mate. I do not believe it will bring america to its knees, but it is not helping us either.
Friday, September 7, 2007
Pink Floyd-TIME
PINK FLOYD-TIME
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but youre older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought Id something more to say
Home, home againI like to be here when I can
And when I come home cold and tired
Its good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells.
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but youre older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought Id something more to say
Home, home againI like to be here when I can
And when I come home cold and tired
Its good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
My First Computer Experinces
I can’t really remember too well anything from my early childhood, especially enough to give details about. So the best I can do is give a basic time line of what I can remember. Also please excuse any facts that I might have out of order, I can’t really put any dates on anything except for when they relate to school.
I believe the first real memory I have of playing or using a computer was probably when I was between the ages of probably six to eight. Now remember I can’t remember exact dates so this memory and the next could actually have been backward in real life. But as I remember it, it was that my parents bought a home computer , it was that it was big and clunky and had a color screen. They were proud of that color screen. The only thing I remember about the computer was that my dad and I used to play a flight simulator game called Pacific Strike. We had a joystick and everything for it. But the thing I remember most was that to play it you had to exit out of the windows system and bring up DOS and run a command prompt to start the game. When it started it ran a little run screen that looked a lot like late ‘80’s run screens that were all one color and had the words that were highlighted in a chunky fashion and you had to scroll up or down with the key board to select a command instead of buttons. Other than that about all I remember is that you could never really see your enemy target to well because of the lack of colors the screen had.
The next thing I remember was when I was probably eight or nine, and was playing Oregon Trail. I would have never remembered playing this if you hadn’t of mentioned it in class. But I was probably in third or forth grade and we had it in our class room. The only thing I really remember was that it was a black and orange screen and that I always ended up killing my party. I remember that you could choose to either ford the river for free or for a certain cost you could either hire a ferry or build a raft and float your caravan across. I was always the thrill seeker when I was little so I would always try and ford the river unless it was obvious that it was way too deep. That’s about all I remember of it.
After that my dad probably spent all of his life savings on a digital light board for his concert production company. Now he wasn’t the first in his field but he was one of the first of the very small companies to do it. We had to of spent a good couple of weeks trying to figure that thing out. I remember it came with a book to run it that rivals most textbooks on thickness. But he and I through trial and error managed to somehow get that big old clunky thing working. Now I look back and think of how much things have changed over the last ten years. When he was designing a stage for a client we used to build scale replicas of the actual stage out of either foam board or just wooden dowels and it took a good two days to build just that, then he would have to bring the client into his office and show them. Compared to today where my dad builds the whole show on a 3D drawing program with the scale stage and the light show already timed and put into place. He just burns it onto a CD and sends it to his client across the world and when they load it they can walk in using their mouse to their potential stage and look at it from every angle. We used to also have to run a lot of the gobos and lights by hand on a light board using two or three people not including any of the sound guys. Now my dad can run everything without any help on his own using computerized already programmed lights and sound.
The last big computing event I remember that has any significance was back in either late ‘96 or ‘97 and that was when my family got our first AOL account. My dad still to this day uses the same freaking account. I started up my own under his and started learning how to talk in a chat room. I remember a commercial for something they showed a kid talking to another kid in a chat room and it was the first time I ever saw one. And for some reason I got the impression that you could see exactly what the other person was typing as they typed it on your screen and I thought that it was so cool. I thought that was how chats worked up until this point when I joined my first chat room and to much dismay you could only see a line after they typed it and press enter. But all the same it was my first experience on the web. Now I never really went online for anything else, mostly because there really wasn’t much else on the web. I don’t think I really started using the internet until probably late, late ‘90 early ‘00 as a way to look anything up.
I believe the first real memory I have of playing or using a computer was probably when I was between the ages of probably six to eight. Now remember I can’t remember exact dates so this memory and the next could actually have been backward in real life. But as I remember it, it was that my parents bought a home computer , it was that it was big and clunky and had a color screen. They were proud of that color screen. The only thing I remember about the computer was that my dad and I used to play a flight simulator game called Pacific Strike. We had a joystick and everything for it. But the thing I remember most was that to play it you had to exit out of the windows system and bring up DOS and run a command prompt to start the game. When it started it ran a little run screen that looked a lot like late ‘80’s run screens that were all one color and had the words that were highlighted in a chunky fashion and you had to scroll up or down with the key board to select a command instead of buttons. Other than that about all I remember is that you could never really see your enemy target to well because of the lack of colors the screen had.
The next thing I remember was when I was probably eight or nine, and was playing Oregon Trail. I would have never remembered playing this if you hadn’t of mentioned it in class. But I was probably in third or forth grade and we had it in our class room. The only thing I really remember was that it was a black and orange screen and that I always ended up killing my party. I remember that you could choose to either ford the river for free or for a certain cost you could either hire a ferry or build a raft and float your caravan across. I was always the thrill seeker when I was little so I would always try and ford the river unless it was obvious that it was way too deep. That’s about all I remember of it.
After that my dad probably spent all of his life savings on a digital light board for his concert production company. Now he wasn’t the first in his field but he was one of the first of the very small companies to do it. We had to of spent a good couple of weeks trying to figure that thing out. I remember it came with a book to run it that rivals most textbooks on thickness. But he and I through trial and error managed to somehow get that big old clunky thing working. Now I look back and think of how much things have changed over the last ten years. When he was designing a stage for a client we used to build scale replicas of the actual stage out of either foam board or just wooden dowels and it took a good two days to build just that, then he would have to bring the client into his office and show them. Compared to today where my dad builds the whole show on a 3D drawing program with the scale stage and the light show already timed and put into place. He just burns it onto a CD and sends it to his client across the world and when they load it they can walk in using their mouse to their potential stage and look at it from every angle. We used to also have to run a lot of the gobos and lights by hand on a light board using two or three people not including any of the sound guys. Now my dad can run everything without any help on his own using computerized already programmed lights and sound.
The last big computing event I remember that has any significance was back in either late ‘96 or ‘97 and that was when my family got our first AOL account. My dad still to this day uses the same freaking account. I started up my own under his and started learning how to talk in a chat room. I remember a commercial for something they showed a kid talking to another kid in a chat room and it was the first time I ever saw one. And for some reason I got the impression that you could see exactly what the other person was typing as they typed it on your screen and I thought that it was so cool. I thought that was how chats worked up until this point when I joined my first chat room and to much dismay you could only see a line after they typed it and press enter. But all the same it was my first experience on the web. Now I never really went online for anything else, mostly because there really wasn’t much else on the web. I don’t think I really started using the internet until probably late, late ‘90 early ‘00 as a way to look anything up.
Monday, August 27, 2007
first blog
Hi, my name is Mouse. I am currently a CIS major but in the process of trying to figure out what I really want to do. I grew up in an "artistic" family that has given me many opportunities for weirdness. I basicly grew up on a tourbus going to thousands of shows and have been all around the world adventuring life. My favorite website is my fathers for his art and for his bagpiping because we are Scottish.
ART
BAGPIPES
MOUSE
ART
BAGPIPES
MOUSE
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