Fopes and Hears

Final Group Web Project Link

2007-12-07T10:37:00.001-08:00

Updates on Assignments

2007-10-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

Be sure to check out my Third Web Writing Assignment Website
through the link.

+ or - Web Sites

2007-10-04T20:28:00.001-07:00

Here is my favorite website design:

Google Search: its simple, and highly useful.

Here is an example of a really annoying website design:

Rainbow Island: note the cat running backwards in the lower left hand corner.

Also on a side note if you haven't already do check out my Skype Link. Skype is a online phone service that is free for calls between users online, and they are also starting a new pilot program that allows one to charge people for via phone services. I thought it was pretty cool.

My First Google Pages Web Site

2007-09-26T21:56:00.001-07:00

Best Conspiracy Theory Contest

The Internet and Change

2007-09-13T12:28:00.001-07:00

I feel that Bush's vision of the memex has not really been so much realized by the Internet as superseded by the vastness of the internets connections. Bush envisioned a working desk that would be primarily designed for the individual scientist to carry on the personal categorization of information. Our internet today can be this, but tends to be a much more collaborative situation, where minds of like interest come together to form standards of idea, definition and theory. Example is Wikipedia, that is entirely edited by the readers themselves. The internet is getting better at creating useful streams of data.

Google is an example of a one of the better attempts at relative web searching capabilities. The Google programing takes tabs of which links people click the most after searching for a certain word or phrase. But this is a program that uses word and user input, not one buddy sending his links of various books of study to another buddy as Bush envisioned. This is everyone on Google searching for a certain thing creating relevance by shear number of clicks and general viewing popularity.

We talked about in class the loss of social interaction with the internet in terms especially with face to face communication. I personally think we are an ok generation, without the “fire side chats” Hawthorne so cherishes, and I think our children today will still learn face to face communication without falling prey to only being able to type and not to talk. It's pretty commonly known that body language is a huge part of communication, as well as many levels of communication that no doubt go on between one body to another often without the conscious parts of those people necessarily realizing the internal dialogues. People, despite the perfumes and colognes of today, still produce pheromones and smells that on an innate level are linked to memory and certain feelings and behaviors. The harms the internet will do to people will not last more than one generation because the nature of the internet changes so rapidly. I'm sure in five years we will all be talking face to face with webcam phones via AOL Instant Messenger for a nominal fee. On a deeper level perhaps Hawthorne is commenting on the fear that our children will loose themselves without an established social culture. The fact is, that despite any worries he may have, people need social interaction to survive, and so it is completely out of the question that it will go away in the human long or short term future.
The internet is a vehicle of changes good and bad. Like the woodstove that no longer has a friendly licking flame, the internet is the phone that no longer has that friendly dial tone when you pick up your mouse. This is part of our culture, the desire to make things easier in certain aspects. Many would argue they could not live without the internet, and still others will argue that they now waste more time researching because of the vastness of less than useful information now available at our fingertips.

My blog does collaborate with teacher and students with my own personal take on things, and does pull various information from the net to do so. So in some respects it is analogous to Bush's dreamed memex, but I feel like from the tone of his writing that he envisioned a scientific and more definitely ingenious way in which his memex would extend certain fields and relationships. I do not think he envisioned my collaborating with students across the globe for an online class in high school. For me the internet is another technology similar to the telephone or telegraph that should be looked at on historical timescale. Blogging on the internet specifically I think should be studied in context to the history of the printing press, and large scale media versus small scale publishing. In the individual freedom endowed on every bloger as a journalist with possibly infinite readers, I don't think we can see the internet as a threat to social ability. People will continue to be people no matter what ideas people take on about who or what others are, or what traditions should or should not be upheld. In the words of a great communicator people only “Observe, Feel, Need, and Request and no more” Marshall Rosenberg (CNVC site link). The more people that get the chance to experience the personal power of posting a blog, the better journalists we will have. The Internet is what we make it, so we should make it a great and wonderful teaching aid and network of caring users.

Young Men and Computer Games

2007-08-29T13:27:00.000-07:00

My earliest memory of computers was one my dad brought home from his business New Era Computers. This thing ran of MS DOS and although I highly enjoyed the gaming possibilities, I was hopeless with a command prompt in order to reach those games alone. Therefore my earliest memory of a computer is sitting in my Dad's lap having some father son time playing some early game demos.
So when I was in first grade, and half the kids in my class didn't really have a concept of what
a computer was, outside a computer lab at school, I was far ahead in the fun possibilities. Our classrooms didn't have computers until I was in third grade. For me, a computer was a frustrating thing alone, but when you had the right operator, such as my dad, it became a awesome entertainment opportunity. The main game we played together was Hocus Pocus (see link for screenshots).
Hocus Pocus was a side scrolling action shooter, that would let you play the demo for really a very long time. We would partake in the team play way I like to call "button sharing" which means that I would shoot and my dad would move side to side and jump. This was very exciting as I felt I was doing it, although I really didn't have the coordination to do it myself. I'm sure kids in first grade these days have no problem with high speed 3D plane simulations, but remember, Nintendo was only really for teenagers at this point.
Through my adolescence the computer continued to really only be a gaming opportunity. I enjoyed endless demo discs of games and we did learn to type in school. Eventually we got Windows 95 on our home computer, which I think was the first windows version my dad conceded to buy. I never really learned to type fast, and in middle school only barely passed the speed typing test.
I never got another gaming system besides a computer, and so when my friends got me to try a
Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) in ninth grade, I was hooked. I don't care what anyone says, these types of games are the most addictive kind ever invented. They have an aspect of human social interaction between others logged onto these virtual worlds that can have strong create strong emotional addictions. My words per minute in typing went from 18, to 43 in probably a month as a result of this game I played called Asherons Call. I can't however say it was worth the monthly fee of 10 dollars per month that it cost at that time, but It did lead me to a later capability of fast AIM typing that helped my poor social skills improve later in high school. Anyway the whole gaming thing with MMORPG's was bad. By bad I mean I could easily spend eight consecutive hours playing the game. I tied up the phone line most evenings so we didn't get many calls at my house for a year or so. I'm not sure when I broke off from the "Vassal" apprenticeship system and finally quit the game, but I'm sure it was a bonus to my future sanity.
Today I play minesweeper and try to keep it at that. Sometime I enjoy a gaming throwback. I have the innate ability to sit down and beat the high score on any game similar to Brickout or MacBrickout. I do email, and dabble in Facebook and sometimes AIM. I believe that text messaging should cost the same as emailing, and I hope that one day Internet access will become a basic human right along with food and shelter.

Truly Computational

2007-08-28T06:54:00.001-07:00

Hey welcome to my bloggspace. I'm Adrian from Interdisciplinary Studies, concentration Internet Studies. Hence the class, I think the internet has high potential to be applied to social change in the future. Here's one interesting site about a language of nonviolent communication I've seen in action, and works.