This is the website for our final project:
www.appstate.edu/~sw58429/final.htm
Monday, December 15, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
The Communication Factor
It's not so hard to imagine a world that grows more and more disjointed every day. How has technology changed the way we communicate and interact? We are a generation that would rather email than place a telephone call. We would rather take our time to get our wording just right. With the world at our fingertips, we have to ask ourselves, what is the cost of becoming internet savvy?
Every single day when I wake up, I open my search browser and I check my favorite pages. I check my facebook, my campus email, my gmail, ESPN.com, and finally the weather at www.booneweather.com. I'm so cut off from the real world that I don't even think to go or look outside to check the current weather condition, I look to the internet for answers to these formally simple questions. Does it look like it might get warmer today? For this question I just look on the internet, not out of my window.
The internet is a creation of man to connect people to people through electronic means. The internet also stores mass quantities of information, to be access by anyone and any given time. Vannevar Bush had some interesting ideas for his time when he wrote in 1945. "The Memex" is an imaginary machine that can store mass quantities of information in microfilm. "In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely. Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things. "(Bush) Bush's vision for a knowledge machine came true in a sense. It's not in a single desk and it isn't stored on microfilm, but knowledge is now sorted and put on an internet server, somewhere...
The innovative spirit that Bush utilizes in his writing is evident in all of our lives and even this blog. Humanity as a whole will always continue to develop technology until humanity is destroyed by the robots they created. After that, the robots will continue to develop technology. But robots aside, the focus of this blog entry has roots elsewhere. There was a time in our development as a society, after the primitive accumulation of capital and before the invention of the light bulb, where a big concern was heating ones home. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “Fire-Worship” in 1846 and in his lengthy piece on the positives and negatives of domestic heating he brings up interesting points the still are true today. When heating of homes expands from a single fireplace to multiple sources of heat, does this not separate the family that these multiple heat sources keep warmed? There was once only one place for a family to be together and share every waking moment together, now this is not true. The same can be said about the internet. The creation of this device puts information at your fingertips at every waking moment. Families can communicate over their preferred messaging service instead of talk. They will chose to “lol” instead of share a hearty laugh. “These barren and tedious eccentricities are all that the airtight stove can bestow, in exchange for the invaluable moral influences which we have lost by our desertion of the open fire-place. Alas! is this world so very bright, that we can afford to choke up such a domestic fountain of gladsomeness, and sit down by its darkened source, without being conscious of a gloom?”(
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Early Computer Use
My mother had got her personal computer in September, 1987 when she was seven months pregnant with my sister. I have no idea what she used it for at the time, I was two. But when I came of age at around four or five, i played some select video games on it. Frogger and Space invaders mostly. The screen was black with yellow graphics. The hardware was originally white, but it faded yellow with age. We had it until 1995.
It was weird that we had a PC ahead of the curve, but failed to update until after the curve. I had a year-long project in fourth grade. It was about the State of North Carolina. For each aspect of the state, we had to write a paragraph to a page. We needed a write up on how the state motto came about. "The General Assembly of North Carolina adapted the motto......." blah blah blah. I'm twenty-three now, and details from when I was ten are sparse. I do remember though we needed illustrations on each of these pages. We had a word processing program on that old machine that did come with clip art. I remember when I wrote my page for the State Tree, the dogwood, that I used a piece of clip-art of either a pussy-willow or a little bit of cotton. After crudely inserting this into my paper, I highlighted it pink in hopes that it would pass as high-tech and get me a good grade. It did not. Little did I know, there were those in the class that printed their project, not on a dot-matrix printer, but on one of those newfangled laser printers that their families had probably purchased specifically for the project. I put a lot of effort into that project and I was okay with my b-minus.
An interesting side note to the story above, when my sister two years my junior had the same project from the very same teacher two years later, we had our new computer and she excelled with a similar effort but a better grade. I could've been mad, but I wasn't. Good for her I thought.
With our new family computer in 1995 came a service called America On-Line, lovingly called AOL. At first, I only had restricted access and the only good sites I wanted to go to were the ones for my favorite television network, "Nikelodeon." The site has come a long way over the years. After a few years of tinkering around that site for thirty minutes a day or so, I asked my mother for more access, access that was granted for age fifteen and up. I was a thirteen-year-old with the access deemed appropriate by AOL for fifteen-year-olds. OH YES!
With the new access I could Instant Message and contribute to chat rooms. The one I remember frequenting the most was the chat room for Raleigh-Durham age 25-30. I know what you're thinking and no, I never gave my proper age and location to strangers. I had no intent on meeting those weird old people. I did enjoy reading about the nightlife of nerds in my local area. They all new me as SAW4685432, a thirty-something computer programmer from the Research Triangle Park. They thought that was my phone number, it was not. There was never anything x-rated. The most daring thing I ever saw was people describing what pajamas they wore as they watched the popular television sitcoms Seinfeld or Wings. Man, they loved Wings. Every time I entered the room, I would receive a "cyber-hug" from my friend feisty2love. She would type ((((SAW)))) and I would type (((feisty))) right back. I found it endearing. Years later, when I actually turned 15 and was too old for such things, I emailed feisty2love. I told her the truth. How old I was and how I really was just observing them, responsibly of course.
It was weird that we had a PC ahead of the curve, but failed to update until after the curve. I had a year-long project in fourth grade. It was about the State of North Carolina. For each aspect of the state, we had to write a paragraph to a page. We needed a write up on how the state motto came about. "The General Assembly of North Carolina adapted the motto......." blah blah blah. I'm twenty-three now, and details from when I was ten are sparse. I do remember though we needed illustrations on each of these pages. We had a word processing program on that old machine that did come with clip art. I remember when I wrote my page for the State Tree, the dogwood, that I used a piece of clip-art of either a pussy-willow or a little bit of cotton. After crudely inserting this into my paper, I highlighted it pink in hopes that it would pass as high-tech and get me a good grade. It did not. Little did I know, there were those in the class that printed their project, not on a dot-matrix printer, but on one of those newfangled laser printers that their families had probably purchased specifically for the project. I put a lot of effort into that project and I was okay with my b-minus.
An interesting side note to the story above, when my sister two years my junior had the same project from the very same teacher two years later, we had our new computer and she excelled with a similar effort but a better grade. I could've been mad, but I wasn't. Good for her I thought.
With our new family computer in 1995 came a service called America On-Line, lovingly called AOL. At first, I only had restricted access and the only good sites I wanted to go to were the ones for my favorite television network, "Nikelodeon." The site has come a long way over the years. After a few years of tinkering around that site for thirty minutes a day or so, I asked my mother for more access, access that was granted for age fifteen and up. I was a thirteen-year-old with the access deemed appropriate by AOL for fifteen-year-olds. OH YES!
With the new access I could Instant Message and contribute to chat rooms. The one I remember frequenting the most was the chat room for Raleigh-Durham age 25-30. I know what you're thinking and no, I never gave my proper age and location to strangers. I had no intent on meeting those weird old people. I did enjoy reading about the nightlife of nerds in my local area. They all new me as SAW4685432, a thirty-something computer programmer from the Research Triangle Park. They thought that was my phone number, it was not. There was never anything x-rated. The most daring thing I ever saw was people describing what pajamas they wore as they watched the popular television sitcoms Seinfeld or Wings. Man, they loved Wings. Every time I entered the room, I would receive a "cyber-hug" from my friend feisty2love. She would type ((((SAW)))) and I would type (((feisty))) right back. I found it endearing. Years later, when I actually turned 15 and was too old for such things, I emailed feisty2love. I told her the truth. How old I was and how I really was just observing them, responsibly of course.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
First entry to check this thing out
I've never had my own blog before. I never dabbled in the world of live journal. Thought it was stupid when i was younger. I thought that people could just ask me what was going on in my head. My friends already knew, they didn't need to read it online.
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