Ode to Technology

For those of you reading this, you must have some love for technology, or at least the skills to use it.  For those of you who saw Napoleon Dynamite you may remember the song Kip sings to his wife at his wedding "We met in a chatroom, now our love can fully bloom.   Sure the World Wide Web is great but you, you make me salivate.  Yes, I love technology, but not as much as you, you see.  But I still love technology.  Always and forever."

Well I love technology too.  No I don't have every up to date gadget out there and I am not even aware as to all of the functions of the ones I do have.  I get lost listening to computer techies talk or try to explain things to me and if I do something a certain way that consistently works for me and has been reliable, I am hard pressed to give it up for a faster/easier method.

So I am not the handiest guy out there with a computer, but I love it.  

This is a bit strange for me because in my younger years I foolishly thought that it might be "cool" if the world went on without technology.  

You know, read a few books about life after a post apocalyptic event, see a few movies and would catch myself thinking "Thats the way life should be".

Those days are long gone.

Let's take last weekend as an example.  I attended a surprise engagement for my best friend and his fiance in Baltimore.

I got there because one morning before school at the beginning of June I was sitting at my desk and received an e-mail on my phone inviting me to this party.  Start the clock.  I called my girlfriend to see if she was free that weekend.  2 min.  I looked at flights online and booked 2 round trip tickets and hotel, 8 minutes.  Figured how I would get from the airport to the hotel, 5 minutes, and then looked up restaurants in the area, 5 min.  In 20 minutes I had confirmation e-mails for my hotel and flight, knew how to get to my hotel, and had a pretty good idea of where I was going to eat my first crab, my first raw oyster and my first Yuengling on draft.  How amazing is that????

I actually remember calling a travel agent (do these people still exist?) in the early 90's to book a flight to Chicago.  It took 2 days before everything was settled and then I had to wait for the ticket to come in the mail.  

I think that what technology gives people is the satisfaction and reassurance of something happening immediately.  Cell phones give this to us.

Remember the dreaded period of time from when someone left their house until they arrived at their destination, you had no way to contact them if plans had changed.  So you either had to wait at the original spot until they got there or leave a message for them somehow.  I remember many times discovering something had changed and the first thought being "catch them at home before they leave", usually while frantically dialing a rotary phone cursing the number of 9's and 0's in the number. Now if you're running late or plans have changed, you call.  No fuss.

Some people say that technology will be the end of us.  Maybe it will.  But it sure has been fun writing this Blog sitting sideways in my favorite chair with my feet up.

  Oh how I love technology

 

Word Weirdness

 BLOGS are our friends?  I don't like my friends very much right now.  As a new Blogger I have just spent the past hour trying to "Follow" my team members; Gina, Monique, and Kacie, I think I am successful and am now following you guys.

I think it is interesting that you can "Join", "Follow", or even "Friend" people on Blogger.  You are able to set your own title of intimacy with fellow Web Loggers which is great, it's nice to have choices.  But does anyone else feel strange now that we are all "Followers?"

When I think of "Followers,"I have to admit that the first things that pop into my mind are negative.  The first time I logged on and saw that people who followed other peoples' blogs are called followers, I immediately thought "Wow, how big would David Koresh have been if he had this means to communicate?"  Probably not a popular example, but really, it was the first thought I had.

If you take the word follower and its synonyms, you get a list if words.  Take the list and swap it out for follower and imagine your reaction to it if you logged on and saw it on Blogger.

follower
Part of Speech:	noun
Definition:	person who believes or has great interest
Synonyms:	addict, adherent, admirer, advocate, apostle,attendant, backer, believer, bootlicker, buff,client, cohort, companion, convert, copycat,devotee, disciple, fan, fancier, freak*, habitué, hanger-on, helper, imitator, lackey, member,minion, parasite, participant, partisan, patron, promoter, proselyte, protégé, pupil,representative, satellite, sectary, servant,sidekick, stooge, supporter, sycophant, toady,vassal, votary, worshiper, zealot Addict and worshiper are a little too strong.  Bootlicker, copycat, freak, hanger-on, imitator, lackey, servant and stooge are associated with put downs.   Some that I do like are minion, cohort, sidekick, admirer, sidekick and vassal.  To me these words are not too strong and a little fun but to someone else, they may find some of these words offensive.   Maybe offensive isn't the word.  They may find the word choice strange based on how they have seen the word used in the past. I was not offended by the word follower, it's usage matches its definition and for all intents and purposes it is a good word.  But my experience with watching the Branch Davidian's standoff and ultimate demise in Waco, Texas at the impressionable age of 18, and the repeated use of the word "follower" in the newscasts to refer to people that were associated with "the charismatic" David Koresh resulted in my initial response to seeing the word "follower" in Blogger to be negative. Does that ever happen to you?

My new curriculum.

I write this post from inside the safety of my house on this beautiful day. Inside? Yes. I was puttering outside from 8am until 2pm, the lawns are mowed, the pool is clean, the weeding is, well almost done. I was going along at a good clip until the garter snake slithered across my bare foot and I just about jumped out of my skin.
No, it's not the snake keeping me away from the weeding. Thursday night I sprained my ankle in a lacrosse game in the second quarter and not having many subs, I was obliged to keep playing, you know, for the team. Well after Sammy the snake made me jump I had to land and rolled my ankle again. I decided enough is enough, got some ice for the ankle, aloe for the skin and something cold to drink and wanted to discuss the story my class will be reading this fall.

I don't have a copy of it and I don't recall the details but has anybody read "All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury?

If you haven't the basic plot is a girl moves to Venus where it rains everyday (sound familiar).
In fact, the Sun comes out once every 7 years and only for a day. None of the other students she goes to school with have seen the Sun because they were all born on Venus and this girl enjoys telling stories about playing outside and it angers the other student. On the big day, they lock the girl in a closet and are so excited by the Sun, they forget about her.

Not exactly an uplifting plot but I am always trying to find stories that I can relate to real life. My goal is to have the kids think about how frustrating it was from the end of May through June and the beginning of July because of the rain. Maybe tie a "The beginning of my Summer Vacation...." and have them list what they wanted to do and what they ended up doing instead because of the rain.
Then have them think back 7 years; if they are 15, when they were 8, and have them imagine that stretch from May to July stretched out for 7 years. What would they do with that one day?
Then read the book and ask them if they want to change what they would do for that one day.

What would you do for that one day?

For myself. It would probably include a boat, a beach, some fishing gear and viewing the sunset over the ocean, so we are looking at the west coast..... or Australia..... Gotta think big

My First BLOG

After several attempts at getting things rolling and having the computer gods tell me again and again that there was a BLOG problem, I am now up and running, er, BLOGGING.

Now that I am a BLOGGER I felt the first thing I needed to do was learn what a BLOG is so I looked up BLOG in the online dictionary. Did any of you new BLOGGERS realize that BLOG is short for Weblog? After reading that this suddenly makes a whole lot of sense. Keeping a log on the web. Simple. I like it.

What I have a difficult time believing is that this is the ONLY definition for BLOG. What a great word. Say it over and over. BLOG..... BLOG.....BLOG. It never gets old. It could mean anything. Have you ever read the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll?

JABBERWOCKY

Lewis Carroll

(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.



"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.



`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

I first read this poem in my 9th grade Latin I class. My teacher had the class go through this poem and determine which nonsense words were nouns, verbs and adjectives. It called upon students' Syntantic system of language to determine what was what. From there we looked at a piece of writing in Latin and determined nouns verbs and adjectives and found that we were 90% correct.

But back to BLOG. This word could be inserted anywhere in the poem:
Twas BLOGGY, and the slithy toves or

Twas brillig, and the BLOGGY toves or

Twas brillig, and the slithy BLOGS (my personal favorite)

So this word we never used before that obviously has potential, is not even a word, it's an abbreviation for Weblog. Boggles the mind. Or if you are typing very fast and clip the "L" that is right next to the "O", it may BLOGGLES the mind.

Thanks for reading and keep on BLOGGING