4 out of 5 Doctors Agree

That my other blog helps fortify your bones.

Not really, but with 74% of all statistics being made up on the spot you’ve no way of double checking my claim. I’ll have to come back to this blog later, but until then I’ll be updating that one more regularly since it’s linked to my Flickr account already and I’ll be posting pictures at least semi-regularly. Mostly frisbee pictures, but I’ll hopefully start finding more time to take pictures of other interesting things. If I’m ever feeling intellectual or anything I’ll be sure to head here, though so keep that RSS rolling.

Below is a picture I took at the park across the street from my house about five or six years ago when we got three inches of snow in a few hours.  I think that has to be one of my favorite memories of living in Irving.  I don’t know if I’d enjoy 20 inches of snow every year as much, but I certainly wouldn’t mind getting nice amounts of build up on a yearly basis.

 

Finally My Final Final

It’s been quite the semester and I think that for me it has culminated nicely in the form of my video final for this class.

This weekend we made that grueling drive up I-35 to Denton to play in the annual Jingle Bell Hell tournament and a good time was had by all at most times. While we really could have done without the wind, we had a good time and our team really progressed by leaps and bounds from our first game Saturday morning to the time we left having won both of our games on Sunday.

This was my first tournament back from knee surgery and I think that I personally started playing with a bit more confidence each game and even got off three clean throws between defender’s legs.

While we didn’t win any trophies or ribbons, the fruit of our labors was a fortified sense of camaraderie really shines through in the video we made Saturday night while hanging out and relaxing between tournament days.

Enjoy!

 

A “video killed the radio star” reference? Seriously?

I think video has surpassed audio as far as web 2.0 prosumer content thanks to YouTube.  While you still can’t tag a certain instant in a video or directly quote it through an excerpt clip like you can text blogs, YouTube makes video blogging a two-way street by allowing viewers to instantly reply by capturing video online directly from their webcam at home.  No fuss, no mess, no Windows Movie Maker.  I think this development actually hinders the evolution of audio blogging because I’m sure a lot of people prefer the visual medium to audio because it adds a dimension of personality to the content they’re taking in.  I hope audio catches up.

 

Everything Nice?

ChicaDeaLeah argues that “Posting with Passion: Blogs and the Politics of Gender” by Melissa Gregg in  Uses of Blogs diminishes her to a statistical girly-girl blogger, but I think that it does the opposite.  I think what Gregg is arguing is that there is more of a balance and a method to the madness of female bloggers than they are given credit for, and even though there are certain stigmas that come with being a female blogger, there is more being done every day to do away with these stereotypes by bloggers from all different walks of life.  Just because you may like bunny rabbits, arguably one of the cutest animals found in nature, doesn’t mean you can’t be concerned with health or finance, or politics, you know, those “masculine” subjects.  It may seem the opposite, however, because there seems to be such segregation of genders online with certain websites being seen as a “no girls allowed” boy’s club, and others being a safe haven for women online.  I think a solution to this would be blurring the lines between the two kinds of blogs seen as male and female and instead ordering things by their category, not their author (thank you Mr. Foucault).  Who says that the guy sitting next to you on the bus doesn’t like bunny rabbits more than Leah?  I think this is what Gregg is really trying to get to, and I know Leah knows that there are important women bloggers and give the female author of the article a second read and a second chance.

 

I Know Exactly Where Everything Is

I was sure I had posted this, but logging in told me I had an unpublished draft.  Whoops.

Weinberger argues that the internet and all of its content is miscellaneous mostly because we’re running out of ways to specifically classify everything. I say that the internet is specific because everything is so specifically classified. The internet is one big mess in your room that your parents claim they can’t even walk through for fear of being sucked in: it’s full of anything and everything and if you’re not careful you’ll step on two week old pizza, but amidst all of these things you know the order to your piles of clothing in descending order of cleanliness and which sandwich has only been sitting there since this afternoon and is still safe to eat. A bit less than a fifth of the world is online, roughly the entire population of the world in 1850. That’s a lot of minds to appeal to, yet everyone seems to find exactly what they’re looking for, why? The third order of things. The data about data that allows someone to Google purple monkey dishwasher and come up with 171,000 results in a matter of 0.18 seconds. Just because sites are boiled down to this minute category, it doesn’t make them miscellaneous, I think it may do the opposite and make them even more relevant for the few people that want to find their old t-shirt at the bottom of the third pile from the door.

 

Derrida. We meet again.

I think what Derrida is saying in “Paper or Me, You Know…” is a continuation of what he argued about the book to come.  Paper isn’t dead, just like the book isn’t dead.  When someone is an author, a writer, a typist, anything, they are out to get control of “the screen.”  A writer puts on paper what he wants you to read in the order he wishes it to be read and this is not a concept that changes with an emergence of new formats and media as the world goes “paperless.”  Sure, there are varying degrees of importance of a sheet of paper, from toilet paper to a signed and notarized business document, but paper is still a part of our world, and will remain so long after sheets made from trees are gone.  Just the computer screen serves as our paper, because even though we can layer windows on top of one another, we are still only reading one side of one page in one dimension.  Even if the text is in strange format, that does not mean that it is doing something that cannot be done on paper.

The book House of Leaves is a great example of an author wanting to control the screen that is paper.  Text runs up and down the page, goes wherever it can, with this method used as a device to manipulate the readers to do things they had never had to do before with a book and thereby flexing the muscles paper has now and will have once every word you read will be linked to something beyond it.  Even if it is linked to thousands of things, one can only see them one at a time,  so in essence all new technology allows us to do is sift through information faster, but not in any manner different from looking at paper.

 

It’s not like we’re paying to access the internet or anything…

It’s pretty much accepted that when you sign up for any sort of internet service, be it 56k or 30/5 Mbps fiber service that you’re not actually getting the 30 megabits per second out of your connection right?  Why is that?  If internet providers claim that you’re not getting anything near what you’re paying for because there are too many people using the internet, isn’t it only fair that they not promise such extravagant speeds?  It’s certainly not a hardware issue because pretty much every ethernet port is rated for at least 10Mbps and most standard connections don’t go beyond that, and if they do and you’re a subscriber of a super-speed ultra fast connection, your computer probably has a 100Mbps port or a 1000Mbps connector so you should be able to handle all the bandwith your fat pipe provider claims.

Yet the people on the other end of the line claim that some users wanting to get the most out of the connection and get, God forbid, the vaunted 5Mbps down and 2 up out of the connection they’re probably shelling out 50, even 60 bucks for are the problem with your 5/2 connection really only being 1.5/768 AT MOST!  So what do they do?  They see themselves as a great bartender in the switch and tell you you’ve had enough of that internets for today, you can’t have no more!  They block ports, not to prevent illegal downloads and the like, but so can’t enjoy the connection speed they’re paying for because if they do, their system doesn’t have enough bandwidth to spread around.  It’s like that scene in It’s A Wonderful Life where there isn’t enough money in the bank for everyone to cash out at once and everyone gets angry, except not even Jimmy Stewart could calm us down if push came to shove, we’re paying for internet, if the people on the other end are overselling, maybe they should take all their profits and update their hardware to keep up with the demand, not claim that they can’t update without jacking up the price.

On top of this, the bigger boys, the ones with the lines, want to tell us that since they’re running the lines, they’ll be running the show.  As we all know, when someone with pockets that deep is running the show they’re only looking to make their pockets deeper.   This is where Net Neutrality comes in.  The line holders don’t want everything on the internet to be seen equally, they’re looking to gimp what you can see and how fast you can get it.  How is this going to happen?  Corporate sponsorship, of course!  If the government doesn’t get their heads out of their butts and puts in some preventative measures through neutrality legislation, the internet will soon go the way of the ham radio, or old opinion pamphlets, two concepts the internet has brought back to life: self-broadcasting, and self-publishing.

Where are the smart mobs when you need them?

 

Foucault That

Foucault’s “What is an Author” seems to tangle with the notion of an author being something of a creation of the reader’s mind more than something that dictates the work that has been authored.  If you go to a book store and look for a book you’ll most often find that they are grouped in a first order by genre, then by author instead of by subject matter.  Would you ever think of going to Barnes & Noble looking for IT in the evil clown/demon section?  NO!  You’d ask where they keep the Stephen King.  Foucault basically wants to find out why authors are set apart from the rest of humanity and what purpose an author really has.

With all the functions he presents the author as having and the many hats an author may wear, I don’t see why he thinks the author function will be phased back out and will no longer be the big issue for readers that he sees it as being now.  It seems to me that we are at a point where we want as much authorship as we can get, if nothing else to know where to trace what we just read to and, if need be, place blame where blame belongs.

 

Polarizing Copyright and the Jumping Frog Jubilee

Even Mark Twain had a problem with copyright laws.  While his stance didn’t go as far as a perpetual copyright, he did want a copyright that was secured through the life of his children.  I think something along the lines of what we’ve got today would suit the man just fine.

 He noted on more than one occasion that the grandkids should fend for themselves, but for Twain and his daughters, he sought to combat “the pirates.”

The “pirates” Twain referred to were publishers who would profit from his works that would be popular long after his death so the “immortal” publishers could benefit from his work while leaving his daughters out in the cold.  From the Ars Technica article, I think Twain would object to what the government is doing with copyright laws today.  The seemingly never-ending expansion of copyrights is taking away more and more what we, the public in “public domain,” can do with anything made by anyone.  Next thing we know people will come out of the woodworks and lay claim to the lineage of Virgil or Homer so they can expand copyright laws further and make money off of being born, which seems to be the entire purpose of this “rich get richer” concept of the modern copyright.  I think we need to pull back the reins on our politicians who are answering to none other than the the al-ighty -ollar to help everyone benefit from works that have compensated their creators many times over and have had a good run without worrying about all the crazy copyright laws that limit you from doing anything with anything.

 

Written By…

Just because the internet doesn’t have a spine on which to put an author’s name, it doesn’t mean people won’t care who is doing the writing.

Andrew Keen fears that the mutterings of a wise man will be worth no more than the mutterings of a fool.  This is where “experts” such as Keen should go back, do some more research and update their opinions.  As Rheingold thought, freeloaders and worthless contributors will be sifted out and the very same “YOU” that Keen talks about being both creator and consumer also acts as judge, jury, and executioner.  Sites such as Digg allow the consumer head of the two-headed YOU! monster to collectively deem created content viable or garbage.

While Keen thinks that consumers creating their own content and driving attention away from the main stream media is actually hurting the content that they so consumeratley crave, it is, in fact, doing the opposite and creating new content that is more in tune with its audience.  The web is, in fact, a machine and the machine is growing and, some would argue, approaching singularity as the machine melds with YOU! and is growing and sustaining itself through the million eyes constantly watching it, constantly shifting and sharing perspectives, which is where Keen is wrong.  Consumers are not killing the grand, great idea that was the internet, consumers are growing with and expanding what the new web is.

While people still try to give merit to a monkey scratching its butt, there are those in the collective YOU! who will not give merit, and these people tend to overshadow those who continue to aimlessly wander through the web.  Wikipedia rolls on due to YOUsers policing the site for bad content and giving merit to the voice of the wise man over the fool.  Andrew Keen should open his eyes and have a look around.  Maybe he’ll see the world for what it is, not for what he despises it as.