Week 5 - Let a playa play!

Hello sports fans, welcome to another... (Bob Uecker cracks me up Major League btw)

Oops

Well this week presented some very interesting things. Before I get to the one that triggered my curiosity the most, i must do a shameless self-promotion



This is a motivational poster I made using one of the image generators. Its promoting my group, a friend and I make some interesting stuff and just finished recording our first CD. http://www.orangealbumproject.com/ is the link, btw. Ok enough of that.



I really found the rollyo create-your-own search engine very cool. I made one myself, http://rollyo.com/elsigwaldio/my_news/

It will search some of my favorite fact gathering and headline pages. I can imagine this being very useful to everybody, whether its the chronic online shopper and wants to search all their favorite online stores for the same product, or a librarian wanting to maybe poll multiple system catalogs through one spot. Very cool, very fun, very simple too. I do wish they had a tool that would actually upload your bookmarks in your browser to their search engine generator to make the process even more awesome. This was far more usefull than the bloglines page.

So this week I got myself an iPod. 80 gigabytes. Its amazing so far. I have put the entire Queen live from Wembley Stadium dvd on it. Also the movie "Airplane!". I don't know why I didn't have one of these before, but I am glad I waited for the video iPod and such a massive size. I also plan to put all my CDs on it. I am still learning through all of its ins and outs. Heres to crazy portableness. We watched airplane on it last night in the orchestra pit, kept us out of trouble.

Peace to you all

I am the Octopus?? coo coo ca choo

I read a fascinating article last night about how humans, thanks to technology, are catching up to Cephalopods in how they can transform to make themselves stand out or blend in, depending on the situation. As I read the article talking about creating online personalities different from our real life, I thought of this project, and why we would want to do that. Many feel persecuted for how they are in the social standings. The Internet is far more forgiving of social deviants. You can find websites dedicated to every sexual fetish, lifestyle, clothing fashion, or hatred. We can let ourselves out thanks to technology because theres no intimate contact, but we must conceal our identity because we know the RL world will find us and then our "dirty little secret" is let out of the bag. This really exposes, on a basic level, our shame. The level of vanity that went into creating the blogs was really amazing. Why were all of us so ashamed to admit who we are on here? What are we afraid of? I'm not saying post your name and address on the net for everyone to find. But I'm curious about the psychology behind why we all had to come up with witty names for our blogs, why we wanted to hide, but at the same time, many felt so overwelmed with the sudden ability to freely express themselves on the Internet, they locked up in a "freedom panic". Are my fellow co-workers afraid of ridicule for not knowing about youtube or flickr? Are they afraid of us finding out that they aren't as strong in technology as others think? Are they hiding a lack of writing skill? I will be honest and tell you why I went semi-anonymous. I have a studder from OCD. I get stuck pronouncing certain words and will repeat myself due some some subconcious pleasure received from the phrase I said. Typing in a blog allows me to avoid the vanity of this. I also wanted to remain secretive to avoid being nagged for help without someone actually trying first. Though for those reading my blog know who I am and can of course ask me for help. I don't mind helping, I really like to help actually. But, thing is, when I worked for tech support, people would never try to fix something themselves, just it doesn't work I need to get help and make someone else do it for me. I personally feel thats no way to go through life. Anyways, back on topic.

The Internet, and blogging, and online communities like MMO's have given people a chance to live how they want to. People can be homosexual, they can hate people with curly hair, or have a fetish for long toe nails. The Internet allows us be what we want. Theres no physical contraints unless you tell the truth and post an actual picture of yourself. We must be careful with a place where we can make up the truth. Take wikipedia.com for example. Its an online encyclopedia where anyone can publish information on anything. What you put there doesn't even need to be factual, but there is some integrety and people do monitor it and will take down fake postings but they too are members of the site and contribute.

I'm not going to bash the Internet for having this ability, I'm not going to be closedminded about it. I will say we all must be careful of what we present ourself as on the Internet, we have the ability to completely prepare and present ourselves free of what nature has given us. But, just in real life, what we do now affects us later. This power is great and awesome.
This video really gives a humorous look at this power going horribly wrong. Warning it has course language, freedom of speech is HUGE on the Internet.


I really hope we all can enjoy living our double lives! Peace to everyone.

Week 4 - RSS sinks like the HMS...Titanic

Alright fellow noobs, today I tinkered with RSS. I like the concept, I don't like the execution. Bloglines seemed bulky, confusing, and just plain not well thought out. RSS is intended to be delivered directly to your browser. Browsers like Firefox, my personal choice, has a built in RSS reader. I did not like the Bloglines page at all and do not plan to use it.

RSS itself though can be a great tool for a librarian if they don't have to rely on bloglines to use it. Librarians can get up to the minute notes on releases, seller lists, and other information so they would always know what they're conveying to a customer is up to date and ready.

Just as a side note, I believe flickr has an RSS feed for different accounts. For instance, the link to subscribe to my flickr account is:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=8763101@N02&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

So you should be able to put that into the subscribe box thing on Bloglines and see that I had posted

the other day, that being the picture of the week. Its the sunset photo from New Towne High School in Owings Mills last wednesday night. I took it with my cell phone. I'm kind of impressed by its quality.

But back to RSS, so everyone who has made a flickr account has their own RSS feed. I personally would have taken advantage of that to teach about XML (the programming language RSS is written in), and really let people see both ends of a feed, by subscribing to their own feed, have them upload and see what happens.

On another note, insanity has set in with Bye Bye Birdie tech week starting tonight. This is normally when all the musicians in the orchestra pit bring their new toys and do a bit of show and tell in the dark...get your mind out of the gutter. Not a lot of people know this but most musicians are closet tech geeks. We were the ones spending $400 on the first first like 2 gig iPods, and $1000 for the first CD burners. That brings me to this hot little item: http://www.estandmusic.com/
I want one but at the same time, my tech side tells me not to. The website and info is so watered down because they assume musicians won't know anything, don't want to know anything and just will buy it because it is a solution to a problem. Who doesn't want a backlit, digital music stand?? Its TOUCH SENSATIVE...COOOL! Problem is, when you look at it closely, its nothing but an overgrown pocket pc. This hot little item sells for a cool $1500...That doesn't include the stand for it or the footpedal for page turning, or the carry bag. Each of those are an extra $99. They really think musicians are dumb. Its sad. This thing is so cool yet, they cloud its details. Well thats it for me. Everyone have a good week. Peace to you

A Brief Update

I realized I hadn't posted anything for awhile so I figured I'd write a lilttle bit.

Did anyone happen to catch that sunset Wednesday night? it was spectacular. We were on break from a run-through rehearsal of Bye Bye Birdie and stepped out for some fresh air. It was amazing! It was one of those times I wanted to cry for not having my camera with me. I took a snapshot with my cellphone. I'll add it later, but I doubt it captured the reds and pinks very well.

I feel like I am behind in this program but then I realized I really started early. I just need an opportunity to go through the RSS feed stuff, one of the things I really want and need to learn.

I bought a new keyboard for my computer, its pretty k/a. Its backlit so this wonderful blue LED lights glow through transparent letters so I can see my keyboard at night. This is just of course more fuel for my insomnia. I am getting about 6 hours of sleep a night now though.

I will tell you this though, a few new homemade beer commercials have been uploaded to my youtube account.

Alright, I'm out. Peace to all of you.