posted 2009/07/11 at 20:34
Coming from the early days of the Internet Age, I'm used to basing my e-mail addresses and other contact information off of my real name (sean@..., sshannon@..., seanshannon@... and so on). Back when I first went to Antioch, my e-mail address, as was all students' there, was based off of my real name, and I couldn't request it be changed to firedancingspirit@... or something like that. When Dad was first able to access the Internet through his old CompuServe account, his address was based off of his CompuServe ID number, which was about as easy to remember as a phone number, without the convenience of area codes. Although the age of vanity e-mails soon came, I guess I'm kind of old-fashioned, and I kept picking e-mail names -- and the domain name for the .org -- based off of my name. More than once I've had people tell me that they'd think someone as imaginative as I am would come up with something more creative. I guess maybe now that I'm in the work world (or at least as close to "the work world" as academia ever gets), though, maybe it's a good thing I stuck with identifications that don't carry any potentially risky baggage.
As I've written before, though, this comes with its fair share of risks. My Yahoo! Mail account is based off of my real name, and it's the one I tend to use whenever I don't want to give my .org e-mail address out for fear of getting a lot of spam. This was before the spam filters on my server and my computer became better than those on Yahoo! Mail, though, so I'm having to rethink this strategy. Unfortunately, I've found that having such a "simple," easy-to-remember e-mail address on Yahoo! Mail means that many other people will also give it out as their e-mail, either accidentally or on purpose. Honestly, I'm beginning to expect it's more of the latter, as my Yahoo! Mail account is quickly becoming unmanageable from all of the spam I'm getting. Even with as much of it as the servers filter out, maintaining that e-mail is becoming more of a hassle than it feels it's worth to me.
Perhaps the worst spam of all I get on there is the political spam. At least one of the organizations I get spam from is because of my own actions -- a particularly beligerent Democratic recruiter coaxed that e-mail out of me in 2004 trying to get me to support John Kerry's presidential bid -- but I also get a lot of junk mail from Republican and conservative and Christian groups that I know I never signed up for. (I'm also on the mailing list of this one Democratic politican in Virginia for some reason.) Ironically enough, that e-mail address is also the same address I use for the political e-mails I want to get, so I have to sort through the e-mails I get from Ralph Nader and the Green Party as well, and Yahoo! Mail sometimes flags those as false positives for spam. (For those of you who were on Obama or McCain's e-mail lists during the campaign, I don't know if you're still getting e-mail from them or not, but Nader's been sending regular e-mails continuing the push for a single-payer health care system.)
The biggest punch line in here, though, is the content of the e-mails I get from all the various political organizations. Setting aside solicitations for donations -- a necessity of our political system in its current incarnation -- my Green and Democratic e-mails are pretty much all about substance, trying to inform me on various issues and get me involved in them. On the other hand, many of the Republican and Christian organizations that send me e-mail also try to sell me stuff, ranging from life insurance to miracle cures. Some organizations send me more sales stuff than political stuff. Ultimately, all politicans are salespeople, trying to sell me on their vision of how the city or country or world should be, but when you use an ostensibly politically-minded organization to try to get me to buy these material items, it just strikes me as absurd. Unfortunately, given the current state of American politics, it probably doesn't seem so absurd to most of you.
posted 2009/05/12 at 16:32
After getting my Wii last autumn, I played it a fair bit, especially after I got Wii Fit for it. (Like with my dance games, though, I really don't think of Wii Fit as "playing a video game" because for me it's exercise.) As much as I don't like using my Gamecube controller to play Virtual Console games, there's no denying that the downloadable games were one of the main selling points of the system to me. I've bought more than a handful of Virtual Console and WiiWare games, whereas apart from Wii Fit, the only packaged game I've bought for my Wii so far is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Not only are the downloadable games a lot less expensive, but they've been a lot more fun for me as well.
Unfortunately, video gaming just isn't as enjoyable for me as it once was. I hardly played any video games at all from February through April -- this included breaking my use of Wii Fit, much to my chagrin -- and my systems are, quite literally, collecting dust in a corner of my room right now. After ending this past semester, though, I fired my Wii back up and downloaded a few new games, most notable Dr. Mario Online Rx. Dr. Mario wasn't exactly my favourite puzzle game when I was younger, but it was definitely up there. I've really gotten back into it -- I've had some games go close to two hours long -- but at the same time I've tried playing online, and I keep getting slaughtered. (Worse yet, when I am about to win games, quite often my opponents disconnect, rendering the game a draw.) I know that I should expect that my video game performance should degrade as I play games less and less -- I've blogged about this before -- but for some reason there's still a part of me that feels sad, and sometimes gets irritated, over this fact. Even if video games don't matter that much to me any longer, it still bothers me that I'm not that good at them. (Not that I was ever in any contention to be a video game champion in my prime, but at least I was a lot better then.)
What I've found myself doing lately is gravitating towards videos of people playing video games on YouTube. In addition to just watching people play through the games, I've become fascinated by tool-assisted speedruns, or TASes, where players literally slow the game down frame-by-frame and exploit every bug in the game to run through a game at superhuman speed; they're quite astonishing when replayed back at "normal" speed. I've also enjoyed videos where the players add their own commentary, although, like so many other things, Canada seems to have cornered the market on quality in this regard, with Proton Jon and Azura being the two who entertain me the most.
At the same time, though, the fact that I've been watching people play video games more than play them myself makes me wonder about how I've changed these past few years. Although I still play video games, it seems that by focusing more on watching these videos, in a way I'm kind of saying to myself that my video game-playing days are over, and video gaming is something more for "other people" to do now. Granted, I have much more serious things to worry about than video games now, but it wouldn't be that hard for me to make more time for video games if I wanted to. I don't want to, though. I've found many other things I'd rather do than play video games, and while some of them are quite enjoyable (stop snickering), most of them aren't as meaningful to me and my past as video games are. It seems like everywhere I look, I find more evidence of how I'm changing as a person, and although I know that change is a huge part of life, I still want to fight it, especially as I'm watching the trees I played on in my childhood be cut down day by day right now. I guess it's only natural that under these circumstances, I'm pining for other things from my childhood right now.
Labels: internet, videogames
posted 2009/04/28 at 19:34
One of the things that has made it easier for me to put off posting to the .org is the fact that hardly anyone else I know seems to post very often these days. I've subscribed to nearly every blog I follow in the Google Desktop Web Clips app for Google Desktop on the side of my desktop, and over the past year or so I can't help but notice that so many blogs that were once updated two or three times a week are now updated only once a week, if that. Granted, a lot of these people now use Twitter, as do I, and I make it a point not to go a day without tweeting, but things are different for me because I'm a writer, and I can't very well market my writing skills without writing more often than I have here for the past four months. Now that my winter classes are over, I'm going to try to get better at posting regular updates here.
However, as I was thinking about how rarely I see a blog update on the RSS feed on my Google Desktop, I couldn't help but think about how rarely I even use Google Desktop any longer. I like having the time and temperature on my desktop at all times (I auto-hide my taskbar so I have more desktop space), but right now those are the most useful parts of my setup. I used to use the built-in MP3 player, but when I started using last.fm I had to switch to Windows Media Player because last.fm doesn't support the Google Desktop player. (Winamp once fired Bonnie, and Apple products are right out for me, so don't try to get me to switch over.) Worse yet, the Google news feed has only been sending me stories from ESPN.com for the past couple of months, and most of them are days if not weeks old. Given that I don't make much use at all of the indexing feature of Google Desktop, it seems to be a real waste for me at this point.
What makes matters worse is that I'm using an older version of Google Desktop, and I'm guessing that switching to a newer version might correct this problem. However, the new version of Google Desktop on the Google Desktop site only supports 32-bit Windows, and I'm running 64-bit right now. I don't understand why Google wouldn't choose to support 64-bit Windows, and why they would just drop it like they have when older versions of the software used to work fine for me. I'm used to seeing this kind of behaviour from other companies -- Hewlett-Packard refuses to release a Vista driver for my old scanner, so I'm stuck having to buy a new one some time soon -- but this isn't the kind of behaviour I'd expect from Google. Google Desktop was a great product for me at one point, and I feel like it may yet be of some use to me, but right now it's just taking up space on the right side of my desktop and not really being that useful. Maybe I should just get rid of it and start visiting the blogs I like manually; it's not like they update that often these days.
posted 2009/02/03 at 20:22
I don't really advertise the fact that I keep pages on MySpace and Facebook. Yes, I put the links on the sidebar of my Website, but I don't talk about them that much because I don't have a real interest in "recruiting" new "friends" on either site. The only real reason I have accounts on them is because some of the people I've met over the years have taken to them so much that messaging them on those Websites is often the only reliable way I have of getting hold of them. I've dressed up my pages on them a bit, but that's mainly because I know that potential employers and clients might see them, and I figure it's for the best if I have something that looks nice. I've had a few strangers get hold of me through there, reconnected with people I knew long ago, and even had a number of my students friend me. (They even stay friends after they get their final grades, too, so I must be doing something right there. Either that, or they're all really lazy.)
However, several months ago I began to have ex-classmates from the private school I went to start to friend me on there, which put me in a bit of a dilemma. I have said repeatedly that I believe that school messed me up in more ways than I can count, and I still feel that way; a visit back there in 2002 for a University of Toledo commitment (on a Saturday, so I didn't see any old teachers or anything like that) was very troubling for me. The treatment I received there, from administrators, teachers, and students alike, was beyond intolerable, and I honestly believe that everyone there knew that they could get away with treating me like crap because my parents weren't as rich as the other parents, so we couldn't outlast them in a lawsuit. The wounds from back then have dulled in pain, but I doubt they will ever fully heal. Thus, hearing from so many of my old classmates from back then was not exactly comforting to me at first.
That being said, the classmates who have gotten in touch with me were not people who treated me poorly, at least not once we got to high school. They scorned me at times in high school, but, well, it was usually because I was acting like an idiot, so I deserved it. We haven't really messaged each other beyond the friend requests, but I wouldn't be opposed to talking with them over the Internet. Face-to-face encounters might be too awkward for me at this point -- I'm never going to any reunions -- but I guess that maybe now that all these years have passed (more than I care to think about), I'm finally able to put things in context, and I can do a better job of separating my feelings about the school and my time there from my feelings about them. I'm not going to make the first move to initiate conversations with any of them, but I guess now I'm not as opposed to talking with them as I once was. (Maybe one of them can get in touch with the school and tell them to stop sending me snail-mail addressed to "Mr. Sean Shannon." Better yet, maybe they can get the school to stop sending me mail, period.)
There is one thing that bothers me, though. I did a lot of really dumb things when I was there, albeit things that people my age tended to do. (At that school, though, you were never supposed to act like a kid, even when, you know, you were a kid.) Those of you who remember my Internet experiences pre-.org know that I did a lot of stupid things back then, and even in the .org days I've still managed to act like an idiot at times. I like to think that I've learned how to act better, but there are times when I wonder about that. Sometimes I think that maybe I am still the same idiot I was back then, and I've just learned to hide my mistakes better. Even if my old mistakes have been forgotten by the people I knew back then, or if those people have the decency not to bring them up, I still worry that if I ever meet up with them, I'll just make some new mistakes and things will go back to the way they were for me in my hardest years at that school. I've gotten past the point where I'll care that much about what they think of me, but if I do something like that, then I'll feel like it will be confirmation that I really haven't changed in the years that have passed, and that I'm still the same idiot I once was. That's why I'm probably going to remain passive about contacting them, at least for now.
Labels: internet, personal, toledo
posted 2009/01/30 at 15:49
One of my biggest worries as Yahoo! has continued to garner more and more bad press relating to their financial situation is that I would lose access to their services. I doubt that a situation would come up that would result in all of Yahoo!'s services simply ceasing to exist, but I do worry that their services would get folded into another, inferior service. (For example, I worry that, if Microsoft ever buys Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail would be absorbed into Hotmail, which I find far clunkier to use.) I don't want to say that my experiences with Yahoo! have been perfect over the years, but I've been using so many of their services for so long that it would be supremely difficult to move over to another company's services.
Unfortunately, the move has already begun. A few weeks ago Yahoo! announced it would be selling its Launchcast music service to CBS. For a few years now I've been a subscriber to their Launchcast Plus service, which makes their Internet radio services far more robust than their free offerings. I spent a very long time getting my Internet radio station customized just the way I like it; it still plays too much Simon and Garfunkel for my liking (I like Simon and Garfunkel, just not that much), and when CBS takes Launchcast over, they're going to discontinue the custom radio stations. In all honesty, I haven't used the custom radio station so much lately because I tend to need a certain genre of music at a particular time (new age, folk, etc.), but on the whole my station was a great place to turn to when I just needed music, and I even directed some of my students to the station when they asked me for recommendations for music.
In order to make up for the upcoming demise of my Launchcast station, I've started a last.fm account. I started moving my CD collection to my computer over the winter break, and as much as I don't like listening to lossy MP3s, I guess that the compression doesn't really bother me unless I'm paying particular attention to the music. (Believe me, these days I hardly ever have free time just for listening to music.) I'd heard good things about last.fm for a while now, and I guess that for now it's fun to tinker with, but it looks like the custom radio stations aren't as easy to tinker with as Launchcast's were. Anyway, I'll switch my radio station link in the right-hand bar once Launchcast moves to CBS over to my last.fm link, and in the meantime I'd invite you all to listen to my last.fm station if you'd like, and add me as a friend on there if you have an account too.
posted 2009/01/23 at 17:56
Because the majority of my students fall between the ages of eighteen to twenty, I spend a fair amount of time on YouTube and Websites oriented towards that young adult demographic, so I can get a bit of a handle on what is popular in that age group. I'd watch television, but I just can't stomach American Idol and its ilk, and the radio on my stereo -- like so many parts of it -- just isn't working that well right now. I really need to catch up book-wise, though; I still haven't read any Harry Potter, and so many of my creative writing students are fans of Chuck Palahniuk that I feel obligated to read at least a couple of his books. Anyway, on the balance I find myself more aware of certain Internet fads than my students -- I had to explain to one class last semester what LOLcats were -- which is probably a sign that I shouldn't spend so much time researching this stuff on the Internet. (Hey, it's free, it's readily available, and I have an itchy mouse finger if I ever find something truly revolting.)
I had certainly taken note of rickrolling when it started a while ago, and yes, I've been hit by it more times than I care to count. It had seemed that it was a fad that had run its course long, long ago, but when Cartoon Network rickrolled the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade last year, all of a sudden I heard people who had declared rickrolling blasé long ago say it was the greatest thing ever. Since then I've been wondering just why so many Internet people switched tunes on the Thanksgiving rickroll; certainly it was rickrolling on a scale that no one could have ever anticipated happening, but there was something more to it than that. Perhaps Cartoon Network gets a pass because of their image thanks to stuff like the Adult Swim block and their other cult shows (Powerpuff Girls' tenth anniversary, anyone?), or because rickrolling such a huge event as the parade was truly unexpected, or because they actually brought Rick Astley out instead of just cutting to the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video. Whatever the case, none of my students last term brought it up, so I never mentioned it to them; the last thing I need is to seem even less cool than I already am (which is to say, not cool at all).
That being said, Nancy Pelosi rickrolling everyone on her YouTube account ... no. Just no. This is why you leave political comedy to the masters like Stephen Colbert and Rick Mercer; very few politicians know how to make jokes, particularly in relation to their own work and images. President Obama manages it well, which may make his presidency more bearable to watch these next few years, but he is one in a million here in America. (Seriously, everyone should watch Canadian political comedy television shows and see how much better both the comedians and the politicians are up there.) Pelosi inserting a rickroll into an already banal video smacks of a bad joke told months after everyone stopped caring about the joke in the first place. I know the Democratic press ate this up with a spoon, calling it yet another sign of good change in Washington, but I just shook my head when I heard of it and wondered if we could President Obama to write the Democrats' jokes for the next four years. He's got more important stuff to do right now, though.
Labels: internet, politics, teaching, work
posted 2008/07/29 at 19:26
Depending on the situation and circumstances, I can be for or against convenience. As an example, I buy nearly all of my bread from the supermarket, but when I decide to make homemade bread you'll never find me anywhere near a bread machine, or even an electric mixer for that matter. I do all of my mixing and stuff by hand, and the dough doesn't even come close to seeing electricity until I finally place it in the oven to bake. When it comes to computers, I may build my own computers instead of buying them off the shelves, but once I have them powered up, I want them to perform their tasks as quickly as possible, and 99% of the time I'll go for something that helps me save time when I'm on here. When Microsoft introduced its Autocomplete feature to Internet Explorer -- the thing that remembers what you typed in text boxes before, and pops it up below the text box after you type the first couple of letters -- I was in nerdvana. Not only does this feature save me time, but it also keeps important search strings in mind when I'm on Google, so I don't have to spend time remembering what combination of keywords got me good information on something I'm researching for a story, or an opinion Website that speaks to my political convictions, or details on any of the thirty-seven people I'm currently cyberstalking.
Lately, though, sometimes I have found this Autocomplete feature disabled by a new technology built into some Websites, a feature that compares what you're typing to the Website's own repository of search strings instead of strings you've used previously. I first noticed this technology in use at Wikipedia -- for some reason only on the sidebars of entry pages and not the homepage -- and the biggest Website I know of that uses it right now is YouTube. Strangely, though, this is not my first run-in with this kind of technology; the first time I can remember seeing this in use was in the Sega CD adaptation of Jeopardy! In previous games based off of Jeopardy!, your answers, er, questions had to be entered either by multiple choice, or you had to get the spelling exactly right in order for the computer to recognize your question as correct. That's probably the biggest advantage of this technology: it stops misspellings before they start. After all, it's not like there's a Website out there devoted to YouTube misspellings ... oh yeah, right.
Anyway, while I appreciate that value of this new autofill system, I strongly dislike that it removes my ability to recall previously-used search strings. Although my student days may be over (for now), I still conduct a lot of research online. The end results of these research runs may not be tidy twenty-page MLA-formatted papers, but I try to learn as much as I can about everything that crosses my path, and rare is the time when a simple one- or two-word Google search will give me the information I need. Next month will mark fourteen years since I first got real Internet access when I started going to Antioch, and a good part of those fourteen years has been spent developing trial-and-error algorithms to use with search engines to help me find the information I need in the shortest amount of time. Autocomplete lets me keep that search string ready to return to at a moment's notice if I decide more searching needs to be done at a later date; now, with this new site-based autofill, Internet Explorer's native Autocomple gets wiped out.
In and of itself, this is a minor inconvenience. What particularly bothers me, especially about YouTube's autofill, is that the autofill can be used as a kind of front-end passive-aggressive censor. For example, type "sex " into YouTube (with the extra space), and the autofill goes bye-bye. Oh, there are still lots of videos on YouTube having to do with sex, from religious denunciations of our sex-filled culture to instructional and informative videos on safe sex practices to, well, sex, but the YouTube autofill isn't going to help you narrow down your sex search any. Worse yet, these word filters are used indiscriminately; try doing a search on YouTube for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' seminal album Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and autofill disappears once it gets to sex. Ironically enough, "blood sugar sec magic" shows up in autofill, indicating that Internet end-users have once again returned to the same silly deliberate misspellings of words it used to get around this stuff, started back when Metallica got Napster to pull its tracks off of the music-sharing service. In fact, I'm listening to an MP3 of "Enter Snadman" as I'm typing this right now. No, not really.
I know that what Google is doing with YouTube's autofill doesn't count as censorship since the autofill doesn't actually remove content, but it's still silly, annoying, and altogether capricious. For example, you know how last week, after Barack Obama gave that speech to 200,000 people in Germany, everyone joked about a charismatic leader riling Germans up with a speech? Well, you would think that YouTube would be a good place to go to find actual videos of Adolf Hitler's old speeches to compare to Obama's, since I assume they must all be in the public domain by now. Funny thing, though. If you type "hitler" into YouTube, the autofill once again gives you the silent treatment and disappears before it can help you narrow down your search. Now, I hate neo-Nazis and racists as much as the next sane person, but trying to put even the slightest veil up to prevent people from accessing the words and thoughts of Hitler strikes me as being only a few degrees separated from outright Holocaust denial. The idea behind freedom of speech is that you allow free access to the dumbest and most insane ideas out there, for the implicit purpose of allowing people to see how stupid the people who hold those ideas are.
It's even more galling that this would happen on YouTube, a Google Website. Never mind the inconsistency of Google not using this same technology to block search results from Google.com; Google is supposed to be the shining beacon of the Internet megasites, the company that has kept the great evil Microsoft as a perennial second banana, the corporation with the short, easy-to-understand philosophy: Don't be evil. Then again, this is the same company that already agreed to content restrictions on its Chinese Website in order to placate the Chinese government, so maybe this is to be expected. Google is, after all, out to make money, and maybe they stand to make more money by using this word filter in their autofill than by not censoring the autofill and, perhaps, getting accused of abetting searches for hate, violence, and porn. Well, they'd probably only get in trouble for the porn stuff, but that's America for you.
Sometimes the words that get blocked out by the autofill don't make any sense at all. For example, one of the people I subscribe to on YouTube is Mark Crilley, who has produced a number of incredible manga-drawing tutorials, demonstrating illustration concepts and techniques in a way that I understand better than anyone has ever explained them to me before. Keep in mind, my Dad did illustration for a living, so he tried to teach me a lot throughout the years. However, type "manga" into YouTube, and the autofill's word filter shuts you out. What exactly about manga is so bad that Google feels a need to filter it out? Anime works, so why not manga? Does someone at YouTube think "manga" is some of bizarre sex act involving a multi-tentacled monster or something? Well, maybe not, because "tentacle" gets through the autofill filter okay. I'm getting a headache trying to figure all this out, and I just wish I could turn YouTube's autofill feature off so I could get back to my old search strings. I'd tell YouTube what it could do with its autofill, but once you type "stick it up your" in its search box, for some reason the autofill won't help you narrow it down any further. Go figure.
Labels: freespeech, internet
posted 2008/01/31 at 20:37
Is the United States Chess Federation in trouble? (New York Times blogs)
Getting back into playing chess is one of those things that always seems to be high on my to-do list that just never gets done. All I've managed to do over these past few years is knock off a few tutorials and practice games on Xbox Chessmaster (yay no absurd security locks), and play the odd game online. I really don't like playing on television or computer screens because it just doesn't inspire the same kind of deep thinking that I can do playing on an actual chess set, but I haven't really had anyone to play chess with in real life since high school. For that matter, my physical chess set kind of poofed after the fire and wasn't in the boxes of stuff we got back from the fire people, and I haven't bothered to replace it. (Actually, I take that back: I picked up a two-dollar chess set at Kroger a few years back, but a huge corner of the board was torn off of it when I got it, even though the package the set came in was sealed tight.) Perhaps it's because of how I've been socialized to handle in-person stuff versus Internet stuff, but playing chess over the Internet just isn't something that works out too well for me.
This article kind of makes me think about how the Internet has changed the various aspects of gaming. I had a youth membership to the USCF when I was in high school, although I never played a USCF-rated game. (I didn't want to travel to the big tournaments with the rest of my chess team because I didn't want to spend any more time with them than was absolutely necessary. My love of chess only extended so far even back then.) At that time, playing in school leagues and playing in USCF tournaments was kind of a big thing because it was the only real way to get rated and to be able to position yourself against other people and have an idea of where you stood. Pretty much every online chess service I've tried has had its own ranking system, though, and that takes away a large part of the allure of the USCF and what they offer. I imagine that similar games must also be experiencing identical growing pains. I don't follow chess closely enough to understand all the other politics that may or may not be going on at the USCF, but I can't help thinking about how the Internet may be changing the face of even the most classic of games that don't absolutely require physical presence and performance.
As the networking capabilities and pure computational power of the Internet increase, games of the mind are likely to become more and more altered. Chess is one of those games where I confess to being something of a luddite; I don't want to play speed chess and bullet chess all the time on a screen that doesn't give me a real sense of dimension. I kind of miss sitting in a school library somewhere, spending two to three hours on a game, enjoying the silence in which I could contemplate my next moves. With the way modern life is evolving, silence is becoming a scarcer and scarcer luxury, and contemplation seems to be almost an anachronism. For all that computing and the Internet make so many things easier for us -- I would never give them up -- I hope that they don't spell an end to the old chess clubs and tournaments.
posted 2008/01/22 at 20:56
When I first made Yggdrasil Mark I, I bought an IBM mouse that worked like a charm for a while. Eventually, though, the wheel became stuck, so I wound up buying a Microsoft mouse as a replacement that didn't work so well. Not only does the pointer like to jump around the screen a lot, but about once every one hundred boots or so it just doesn't respond at all and I have to reboot in order to get the mouse pointer to work. About a week or so ago I actually had the mouse fail to work on two consecutive boots, but a third boot got it to work all right. However, once I started loading my applications up, I found that my Google sidebar had lost all its information; my blogroll and photos were defaulting to things I'd viewed on the Web recently but didn't add (and my old directories disappeared), and my to-do list just vaporized. I can't be certain that the mouse problems and the Google problems are related to one another, but I was starting my reboots before Google Desktop had a chance to load. I'll just blame Microsoft for this, since it's easier and, let's face it, likely true.
Speaking of Google stuff, I'm only now beginning to use Google Calendar on a regular basis. Back when I was going to school my schedule was kind of straightforward, and I never really had much need for a scheduler of any kind because, well, I had no social life. I still don't have a social life (or at least much of one), but as I start teaching more and more, and start branching out into other professional things, I'm starting to see the value in scheduling software. If nothing else, by putting in the days of upcoming events that I probably won't go to but would give some consideration to, I'm at least giving myself a reminder that there is other stuff out there for me to do in case I change my mind about going to stuff. (Given all the tasks I've already piled upon myself, though, I don't know where I'd find the time for most of these events.)
On a related note, I think it's only now that I'm starting to see the value of browser tabs. I hadn't heard about Meebo until Ariel blogged about it recently, and now I'm finally beginning to get a picture of what so many of you out there must be doing. I'm guessing that for a lot of you, you keep one browser tab for surfing, then keep your Webmail account always active in another tab, your messaging client in another, and your scheduler in another. I'm still using Outlook for e-mail and Trillian for messaging, so I have to keep switching between windows, which isn't as elegant. I'm not sure if I could ever switch entirely to Web applications, but I'm probably going to use browser tabs a lot more in the future here to see if they help me keep things in order.
Labels: internet
posted 2007/12/23 at 20:39
I've been sick for close to two weeks now, and it's only been in the past day or two that I've felt well enough to resume what I consider to be normal activities for me. It's almost as if my body was trying to make up for how I didn't have a serious illness for close to two years there, and shut down almost completely when this bug really hit. As it is I'm still not feeling well enough to resume exercise, and I continue to use television as a way to distract myself for how lousy I feel (thankfully there was a MythBusters marathon earlier today), but I'm no longer feeling like I was earlier when I basically had to save up my energy so I could tend to work stuff, then come back here and basically collapse either in front of my computer or, more likely, on top of my bed.
It's amazing just how out of it I continue to feel right now. I've kind of been taking things easy so that I didn't tire myself out with other things, but now I feel kind of disconnected from the world around me. For example, I haven't been following the news that closely for a couple of weeks, and I don't even have my Google Sidebar on my computer now because it was hurting my head trying to keep up with all the information on it. I recognize that this is a natural response to being sick, and that in the long run this is probably a healthy thing for me to be doing, but at the same time we're getting very close to the first primaries for the "big two" parties and I don't feel all that informed as to what's going on here. Just from the cursory glances I've gotten of the news lately, it looks like Ron Paul's come out of nowhere in terms of coverage devoted to his campaign, and once again Dennis Kucinich is getting the short end of the straw. Without being able to delve deeper into the news, though, I don't feel like I can make a good blog post about the campaign, so I'll probably need to take an afternoon here after Christmas just to get caught up on the news.
I also haven't been on instant messenger that much lately, when I'd been doing such a good job of making myself available on it once I downloaded Trillian and got it installed. Normally this wouldn't be such a big issue for me, but a couple of my friends seem to have been going through some tough times recently and it kind of stinks that I haven't been around to help them. I suppose it would help if I were better about talking on the phone, but I haven't had a landline connection in my room since we got our cable modem, and I only really use my cell phone for emergencies and business purposes. I'm kind of an insulated person to start with, but this cold just made things ten times worse for me in that regard, and just like with the news, now I find myself needing to catch up on stuff with my small circle of friends that I missed these past couple of weeks.
There have been some other important developments in my life here, but I'll get to those in another post; right now I must play catch-up with yet other things. Gee, I thought things would slow down once I was on vacation here. Silly me.
Labels: internet, personal, politics
posted 2007/11/18 at 18:19
Reforms urged after MySpace hoax's victim kills herself (AP via pantagraph.com)
I've been following this story as it's been developing for the past few days. This doesn't exactly follow the pattern of behaviour I've been so interested in tracking recently, since the person who created the fake "Josh" account on MySpace was an adult (and a parent at that) rather than a fellow teenager, but what happened to Megan is certainly similar to what I've been warning could happen if this kind of Internet misanthropy, more common among younger people than people the age of the parent mentioned in this story, continued unchecked. Although I have mentioned in the past that I am concerned over how some older people have latched onto the relative anonymity of the Internet to keep doing the kind of immature bullying most of us get tired of in our teenage years, this was clearly more a case of premeditated action than juvenile humour. I still think it's a huge cause for concern, though, and I can only hope that this news story opens up a greater dialogue about this kind of cyberbullying.
At the same time, though, I'm kind of conflicted about how to resolve this issue. Someone on a messageboard I visit pointed out that there is a free speech issue involved here, and of course whenever the words "free speech" get brought up I hesitate because I'm such a huge First Amendment advocate. That being said, there is that whole thing about not being allowed to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre, and I think that in that same spirit it's hard not to argue that there should be some consequences for telling a vulnerable person to kill himself or herself. (Ignoring that Megan was diagnosed with depression and Attention Deficit Disorder, the fact that she was just thirteen years old kind of automatically made her a vulnerable person.) Perhaps for the parents involved here this was a more methodical thing, but it's shocking for how many young people this kind of "go kill yourself" rhetoric is a humourous pasttime.
I don't know if there is a legal solution to this problem that can make me, let alone anyone else, happy. The underlying problem here is a society that encourages people to act in their own self-interest and not care if their actions harm others, and gives young people lots of examples of how attacking other people, whether physically, verbally, or emotionally, can either work to their benefit or at least provide them with "great entertainment." This is a problem that would require an incredibly long time to correct, though, and given the changing sociopolitical climate in this country, we seem to be moving away from a more just society in this regard rather than towards it. In the meantime, though, 13-year-old Megan is dead, and every day since then there have been more immature people going online, harassing people just as vulnerable (if not more so) than Megan and inflicting tremendous emotional pain on these people for their own jollies. I can only hope that this story, as tragic as it is, draws more attention to this problem before it becomes a true epidemic.
Labels: cyberbullying, freespeech, internet
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