Article Databasses

Picking two of the Databasses that are unfamiliar to me was an easy task given that I didn't know these things even existed. Needless to say I am somewhat elated to discover these rescources, in particular, the two I looked at were World Book and World Book Advanced. How I have come this far on wikipedia alone is a mystery to me but now I can do roughly the same type of searching and reading, only I can be more or less assured that the information I have is accurate (reasonably so). It is an easily accessible, simple, readable base of knowlege from which it is easy to pick an area of expertise and then begin tracking down scholarly scources for proper research. I'm afraid I'm going to have to make this a regular part of my paper writing process from now on, and I'm sure it will save time and benifit marks. As my web savvy brethren would say w00t!!1!

a word on microsoft word. or; word to your mother.

One common practice that I have employed in much of my blogging from home is the use of Microsoft Word. I generally am finicky about grammar, punctuation and spelling, but I know I tend to try to write as fast as I think which usually results in a great deal of typos. Writing in Word allows me to spell-check as I go and then I just copy and paste into my text box on my blog or facebook note (as the case usually is). Since I have been doing playground, however, I have been, more or less, intimidated by the new and remodelled Word, and have been relying simply on the spell-check in Blogger. Today, I have gone along with my normal method and faced the scary new word to find, once I poked around a bit, most of it makes sense. Unfortunatly the presence of the “refrences” tab has got me wanting this new program, but that aside, this all looks rather useful and (gasp) user friendly. About the only thing I can’t seem to figure out is one of the things that has been present for several versions and that is the tab under “home” called “styles” I have never been able to understand why people are willing to let their computer format things for them. My experience with computer formatting has always been that you end up with indentations, numbers, bullets, and even strange columns where you don’t want them, and you’ll be hard pressed to get rid of them. Also you may find your font changes inexplicably and without warning along with your font size. The point though, is that by typing this whole entry in word, it is giving me not only an opprotunity to work with the new program, but it is also giving me an opprotunity to rummage through some of its features. (its too bad that I couldn’t add in the random images and non sequitur captions I added into this in word.

Pencil me in or type me in?

My experience with the communal calendars of Outlook was interesting, I was almost as suprised by the simplicity of it all as I was by the fact that this isn't more widely used. Why doesn't facebook have this? Anywho, the other thing I noticed about these calendars was the fact that as user friendly and convenient they may seem, I would probably have little to no use for them in my current position as most of what I do in any given day at work, it can be assumed I did at roughly the same time last week, and will do again at roughly the same time next week. That is to say, my fixed schedule, being the same great force that allows me to plan my life around work, more or less circumvents the need to plan my life at work. Thus the Outlook calendar is a program that, though I would seldom use, I am glad to have at least a passing acquaintance with.

Netiquette

Well, I suppose it's honesty time; my awakening to the internet hasn't really been so rude; I have at least been communicating over email and instant messaging for several years and thus little of the information in this "thing" was new to me. I was, however, fascinated (as I usually am) by the etymology of the word phishing (which had always been a bit of what we internet savvy people call a "wtf" thing for me) and now the practise and theory make more sense to me. Its funny how simply knowing what a word means can be insufficiant, but how much more you can learn by learning why it means that.

Wikis in all of Their Glory

For me, as for many other college and university students, the word "wiki" is connected with suspicion and guilt. This is, of course because wikis are all about free speech and allowing anyone to have their say, to add their 2 cents to the discussion of this or that topic. Of course we can see why institutions such as colleges and universities, who's primary perogative is the control and regultion of knowlege, would be opposed to this. For the rest of us, however, Wikis are a great leveling factor. In my brief little stint looking at a few of them I have learned a few things about their uses (other than the ubiquitous wikipedia) and even been coaxed out of my internet-proof den long enough to contribute to a wiki based school project I had been boycotting (not so much for anti-wiki reasons as anti-internet-instead-of-teacher reasons) adn learned why the instructor who assigned said project is one of maybe 3 faculty members singin the praises of Wikis. One thing that I found especially informative was the common craft show's take on Wikis in plain english. Always good info from that show, they seem to understand that rather than explaining how something works, it is more sensible to explain why you would use it.

Facebook (a.k.a. crackbook, facecrack)

I will say from the start, I am not an avid Facebook user, but I share a house, and indeed, a room, with someone who is, and boy can it be frustrating. I will mitigate this attack by noting that Facebook was an immensely useful tool during my brief, but hilarious, stint as the lead singer of a punk band, half of which lived in North Vancouver, the other in Burnaby. Coordinating practices, instrument transportation, and getting fans to shows were all made more easy thanks to Facebook, however certain things were made dicier. For example; discussions that involved communicating our work to one another had to be kept to a minimum, and songs needed to be transmitted by email; the reason for this was one of the dark insidious reasons behind the entire existence of Facebook; marketing and intellectual property. (Lots of semicolons! YAY!) Anything published on Facebook immediately becomes the intellectual property of Facebook. This may seem like a minor detail until one takes into account that if you were a member of a band, and you included the lyrics to one of your songs in a discussion, this song would be the property of Facebook. Say you then saw some success and wanted to put your song on a single. Well then you would have to pay royalties to Facebook for recording what would be a song owned by Facebook. This is just a rudimentary example of this issue, but it demonstrates well the danger of putting on Facebook anything you would like to claim as your own. Say you took the new definitive photograph of this or that monument, person, or geological formation; if you put it on Facebook, then see it in an add for a travel company, or some trite celeb magazine (though I would hope you wouldn't have much occasion to see such things), well that's because Facebook sold them your photo. Oh and that picture of your M.P. when s/he was in college holding that big... let's say "glassware", well if they lose the election cause somebody recognizes them on a "say no to drugs poster" you'll know they should have said "no" to Facebook.
My other major concern with Facebook, as I mentioned, was marketing. If any of you have come across my Facebook page (which I would hope you have not, you creepers*, you) you may have noticed that my interests as stated include everything from credit card fraud to international terrorism. No, I'm not building a bomb, and no I'm not defrauding the Visa Corporation, the reason behind this is that the primary purpose of Facebook is marketing. In older days a business would hire a marketing professional called a "cool hunter" who would form a focus group of young people and submit them to rigorous testing in order to garner an image of what is "cool" and thus marketable. With the rise of Facebook, they need go no further than Facebook and take a random sampling. "hmmm 6/10 kids think hip-hop is super cool and like to go clubbing while 4/10 actively deride such culture; therefore we should allocate 60% of our resources to "urban styles" and 40% to "alternative styles" (punk, metal, emo, new-wave/indie). My objection to this stems, of course, mostly from my tendency as "some pinko bleeding-heart" to view it as my social duty to make things difficult for large businesses, but also largely from my concern that by allowing ourselves and our social expression to be ruled by the fabled old "invisible hand of the market" we are allowing our culture to be manufactured artificially based upon random compilations of the data we as a group generate. As usual my immature need to be a square peg in a round hole shows through. The question is; does my awareness of this fact make it more or less okay? I can't decide.
*creeper, n, (slang, N. American) one who views your facebook page without your knowing about it, then proceeds to comment about something you've never told them in face to face conversation.


Ps. on a side note I just noticed that I can tag each of my posts! This is going to be fun! (though probably none to informative)

Popular searches on Technorati; a lesson in misanthropy

Again with the cynicism, but then, one little glance at the most popular searches, and I feel embarrassed to be human. Weight loss? Celebrity gossip? These are the things my cynicism generally causes me to expect but no, the ones that popped out at me were Jennifer Garner, Jennifer Aniston, Paris Hilton, Vanessa Minillo, and men. Yes that's right, not only does the internet seem to revolve around a culture of voyeurism, but we only care to look at women. Does this demonstrate a majority of users being heterosexual males or homosexual females; or rather is this merely an indication that, where voyeurism is concerned, we care about women on an individual level, but see men as just a general mass. These befuddling statistics begin to make sense only when we look further into the top 15. In doing so we find that also on this list is a dead giveaway; the 6th most popular search (just after "men")is "cheat-codes" aha! so it would seem that the popularity of these female celebrities stems from the portion of the web-demographic that is represented by adolescent male video-game enthusiasts. The cult of personality that we often find rampant among teens would tend to lead toward a sort of abstract idolatry directed at unattainable images of marketable femininity, now the notion of female celebrities vs. "men" makes a little more sense. And now we see how marketing can use tools such as technorati to take a quick and brutally accurate (though dreadfully imprecise) sample of general opinion based on something as simple as popular searches. (of course this would never stop me from making use of such a tool as technorati, hypocracy goes well with cynicism like wine and cheese (both come from rot and mould! yay!))

Delicious

mmm sushi.... I mean bookmarks, yes. Anyhow, having taken a look around delicious and learned a little bit about what it can do I find myself very wary of it. The notion of learning about various sites an tools on the internet by simply looking over the shoulders of others might seem a little more sensible to me had I a little more faith in others. Furthermore, airing on the side of paranoia, I'm even less comfortable with the notion of the reverse. That is to say, I don't really want people using my tags/bookmarks. I'm not sure why this is and I might be a crazy old internet hermit, but then my understanding is that hermits tend not to think that they're the crazy one.

Image generatormabob

In working with some of the image generators I put together this little tidbit. Somehow, the esthetic of having the leatherbound first edition as opposed to the " classics" edition is very important to some people.

My response to the ignorance of my friends and neighbors

I hear a lot of people complain about the issue of homelessness in Vancouver, given the looming unpleasantness of the 2010 olympic games this issue has quickly become a hot button topic, and as such I hear many discussions about this problem on a day to day basis. Unfortunatley, a great many of the people I talk to in a day insist that social darwinism, or some unfounded aesthetic morality should permit us to let the homeless languish in their current state, or get a job and find a home. this picture is one that I feel is demostrative of the blatent ignorance in that statement; the man in this picture clearly works much harder than any of the people who have insisted to me that the homeless are homeless on account of laziness. The man in this picture is more of a modern day subsistance farmer, waking long before any of us have had our morning coffee, working untill it becomes too dark to find more bottles, in the hopes of scraping together enough money for a mcdonalds meal prepared by sombody who, though they have a job, probably still cannot find a place to live on the 8.50/hour they make working for their company. Just something to think about.

In the Beginning

no, it isn't genisis, it is however the first page of a document which I hope will have every bit as much influence on the future of human thought. Some might say that this goal is a little ambitious, but I think its probably just delusional. Either way it is, if nothing else, indicative of my ability to create one of these blog things and make a post on it. Hopefully a post that is free of spelling or grammatical errors.