Final Project

Here's the final group project, centered on the Flickr licensing dispute. Thanks for reading.

Click here.

Portal and 2001: A Space Odyssey

Third Web Writing Assignment

Shazam!

Technology and Society

Vannevar Bush and Nathaniel Hawthorne had two visions of society assimilating technology, and it's tough for them to be any more opposite one another. Whereas Bush had grand ideas for a scheme in which people would use in their every day to improve their condition of life, Hawthorne feared that as technology became more complex the basic constructs of society would slowly be eradicated. So where do we fall, then? Does the internet, including this blog, help our society, or hurt it?

In my opinion, Hawthorne was being a bit paranoid. This kind of paranoia is not uncommon even today. It's natural for people to fear change, especially in this day and age where things can change so rapidly. But not everything brought about by change is necessarily a bad thing, and I think it's important to be brave enough to embrace change and be prepared to accept both the improvements and the consequences, and to react appropriately to both. MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are among the most visited websites today in the United States, and none of them would have come into being without fairly drastic developments that have, in turn, changed the way we do many aspects of our lives.

Bush's "memex" conception was primitive in design but his ideas in its organization and his methods in its categorization are not hard to find in today's most popular tools. He described and more or less directly inspired the creation of the modern workstation and hypertext technology. In addition, his paper As We May Think predicted many other technologies such as personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and even online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia. At the beginning of the eighth section, he says

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

This describes, nearly exactly, how Wikipedia and other online wikis operate.


Of course, with all the helpful, amazing, and just plain neat things the Internet has brought, there are plenty of ill effects to be felt. The most obvious is the plethora of computer viruses, worms, and Trojans which are surprisingly easy to get ahold of unintentionally. One of the more sinister aspects of the Internet which is harder to spot is the presence of stalkers and other predators, which consistently make headline news and most likely influence most the fears people have about the continued growth of the role of the Internet in society. These are serious threats, and should be treated as such, but with education and some preventative techniques these risks are far outweighed by the benefits.

In the Air Tonight

So here's a bizarre commercial for some sort of chocolate. When I first saw it, I thought it was just a video of a real animal set to music for humorous effect...but as you'll see, the tone of the video suddenly changes quite dramatically.

Early Computer Encounters

The first computer I remember using was the one my dad brought home from his work when I was less than 10 years old. I'm fairly certain it was an old IBM, and even though I'm sure there were more advanced computers around at the time, this one ran DOS. The most exciting aspect for me, other than playing around and printing things off WordPerfect on the Dot Matrix printer, was the video games.

WordPerfect in DOS

The games came on floppy disks, which were aptly named at the time because they were huge, and made of a material which bent easily. When they were inserted into an external drive which would read them, one had to navigate to A:\ and then run the executable (usually game.exe or something similar, the disks had instructions printed on them).

8-inch floppy disk drive and diskette, with 3.5-inch disk for comparison

Some of the games included on the various disks my dad had were Q-Bert, a bomber-type game, a variation of Star Trek-type game (i.e., controlling a space ship to battle aliens), and a base-defense shooter type of game. I found myself mesmerized with these games, and with the computer itself; even at an early age my mom was always to remind me not to spend too much time on the thing.
In elementary and middle school however, I was exposed predominately to old Macs, running OS 6 and 7. In elementary school I had fiddled with the computers enough to be the "go-to guy" if ever a computer locked up. My usual solution involved pressing the three key sequence (control-pretzel-power, if memory serves) on the keyboard to manually reboot the system.

Screenshot of Mac System 6

Along with the usual dose of Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, and Need For Speed in the games department, I was introduced to the then-new iMac in its various colors throughout middle and high school. Personally, I couldn't stand them - the entire computer was built behind the monitor! But I did interact with them on an almost-daily basis and my interest in computers and their uses was solidified, and the rest is history.

Original iMac

Suddenly Everything Has Changed

Hello world!