Greetings, Futuremen

The minutia of day-to-day existence in the early 21st century will no doubt be of interest to all futuremen who will have access to the archives of Blogger. In the far-flung hundreth century, presuming these words are still intelligible, such a detailed account may be of interest to school children or historians wondering what a book was.

Today, I was awakened at eight o'clock (as determined by the timekeeping system we earthbound-humans adhere to, which was originally based on the sun, Sol) by the alarm on my cellular phone (a primitive interpersonal communications interface, held in the hand, and under the hegemony of the phone utility company known as US Cellular).

I did some laundry, which involves putting garments made of polymers into a "washing machine", a top-loading device with a spinning bin that floods with water and detergent, and unloaded some fresh laundry from the "dryer", a front-loading machine that heats up to assist in the drying of the garmets that are spinning around inside of it. I placed all of these fresh, dry garments into a basket with my own two hands, as we do not yet have the robot slaves that make your lives so easy and carefree.

Forgive my use of "robot", as I am projecting a 20th century vision of the future onto your time. Robots were mechanical devices that could be programmed to do certain tasks. We use them to build cars, explore Mars (in the days before it was terraformed and populated - you futuremen fellows have gotten around to that, haven't you?), and other such tasks that would fatigue our fleshy, weak bodies.

My breakfast was a slice of whole-grain bread with peanut butter, a substance made from grinding and blending peanuts with oil and salt.

I then got into my car, which is made of metals and plastics, has four rubber tires, and an internal combustion engine fueled by gasoline, and went to a library, a vast warehouse for the "books" we rely on so much, to return some already-read books and pick out some new ones. Books are dangerous and you are well lucky that you have done away with them - the pressed paper pages can cut one's fingers, and too much reading of a fixed-size font can cause eye strain and headaches. Reading was a much more exhausting physical activity. The first e-ink displays are on the market right now, but they are very expensive, rather like exotic spices to those of centuries past. It was and will be ever thus. I'm sure there are those among you who cannot afford brain-links to the core-hive.

When I arrived home, I had some homework for classes. How quaint it will seem to you all, to know that we one inscribed our homework on pieces of paper bound together in a notebook, and then brought it to the classroom the next day to physically hand over to the instructor, rather than just hyper-flashing it to their dedicated brainspace. I envy you futuremen, for ours is a cumbersome system and transporting notebooks in the rain can be a tricky business.

Then, of course, I got bored of homework - a form of electronic Attention Deficit Disorder seems to define our age, as having a whole world-wide Internet at our fingertips is still a new and shiny thing from a cultural standpoint - so I decided I would pen this record, just for you.

Hideo Kojima Respects Mr. Miyamoto Too

...As anyone who played The Twin Snakes with a Nintendo game saved on their memory card can tell you. And who wouldn't give mad respect? Miyamoto is the designer who invented many of Nintendo's beloved mainstays, and is as a god and father to those who grew up with a Nintendo as one of their closest friends. And he's always... always... grinning. ("Microsoft is unveiling Project Natal and somewhere, Shigeru Miyamoto is laughing. Of course, that's true as a rule.")

He is, in some ways, the anti-Craig. Scowly vs Smiley. I think he could take Craig's Bond. He'd even bring help. Perceive:

And here's a picture of Mr. Miyamoto with some candy.



How sweet it is to be smiled at by you, Miyamoto-sama.


Thanks for the pics, Google Image search.

Five Moderator Points! Use 'Em or Lose 'Em!

I just love getting moderator points over at Slashdot. I don my cape (it has Woodward and Bernstein's faces on it!) and go digging through the -1 inferno seeking moderator injustices to set right.

Of course, I'm always disappointed. One can only read so many trolls before a spark of their faith in humanity is extinguished and they fall back on the tried and true method of expending mod points by bumping a lot of +3 Funny to +4 Funny. Slashdot at -1 is where idealism goes to die. At least the cape is handsome.

Oh, and I found a picture of Daniel Craig emoting!

Behold! This can only mean...

CATNAROK IS NIGH.

Looking For New Ways to Share (And Laziness Marches On)

I do a lot of collaborative writing. Back when the world was young, my tech solutions of choice were private FTP servers or shared folders on a network. These days the hobbyist writer and her co-authors are better served by dynamic, web-spanning, free services like DropBox or Google Docs.

Gone are the days of endless e-mail attachments with incremental yet important revisions and the nightmare of enforcing naming conventions. The other day I stumbled upon (literally, with my StumbleUpon button) a nifty add-on for Microsoft Office-Google Docs interoperability called OfficeSync.

I'm not convinced that OfficeSync will revolutionize the way I use Google Docs, but it is a huge convenience to open online documents right from Word's interface instead of groping for Firefox.

Downloading and displaying seemed to work seamlessly, but saving back to Google Docs wasn't so fortunate. The updates arrived on Google Docs, but only after it took so long to upload via Word that I wasn't sure if the process had hung or not. If any of my associates want to give this a try, we can probe the perimeters of usefulness for people who aren't me - i.e., those who don't install cool but impractical add-ons like mouse gestures simply because they *can*.

Technical stuff:
OfficeSync requires Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 and, obviously, a Google account.

We'll discuss the potential consequences of handing over precious data to a corporate entity in another post.

Recalibration

Over the next few weeks I'll be re-branding this blog and bringing it more in line with the trivialities of my day-to-day existence. Let's begin with a link to this blog's sister-site:

Trivial Book Lover's Pursuits

Final Blog Entry... Or Is It?

In all likelihood, it probably is. I have never been much into blogging aside from an OpenDiary phase back before "blog" entered the vernacular. It was fun at fourteen, but then I turned fifteen and discovered I had other things to do. Like reading. And Dark Age of Camelot.

Of course, my egotism knows no bounds, so who can say? :)

It's been a pleasure getting to know all of you and reading all of your blogs! This course was really interesting and exposed me to a lot of material that I'm sure will stick with me. I hope everyone's papers go well, and good luck with final exams!

We did it, kitty! We learned us a blog.

Reflection

The wiki project was an interesting experience. I had never actually built an article from scratch, but it turned out to be really intuitive. I guess familiarity with MediaWiki’s software helped in this instance. It was kind of like learning… uh… a new dive, when one already knows how to swim.

For my article on Avidemux, the easiest parts were the technical requirements and what scant history of the project is available online. The brief analysis and overview of strengths and weaknesses for writing classrooms took a bit more thought. I didn’t want to overwhelm the reader with theory – I know the audience is meant to be teachers of the English language, but whether they would have the same background in the material that we now all have wasn’t quite clear to me. I erred on the side of caution and chose to address Avidemux’s strengths, weaknesses, and impact on writing as simple as possible. If the wiki is aimed at people with the philosophical/phenomenological basis that we all share, then they may find the strengths and weaknesses a bit too simplistic to be fully informative.

Building the Avidemux page wasn’t necessarily “difficult” but it was a tiny bit time-consuming. Since I’m old-fashioned, I tended to do my drafting in Google Docs or Word, just to keep everything safe in the event of unfortunate catastrophic network failure! It’s not that I don’t trust the wiki, but it’s never a good idea to let too much of your hard work sit unsaved on the preview page! That was the most interesting part of the process of forming the page, really, aside from going through many other articles and generalizing a template that would fit the look of the Writing Technology Wiki.

My main focus was the entry for Avidemux. I think our group spread the work very evenly and fairly – while Avidemux was my main responsibility, I also had good suggestions from my groupmates. We all pitched in to modify the category page, and Addison did a great job wrangling the Wax entry into shape. I mostly just tried to give suggestions and not step on others’ toes when it came to the other entries, since my focus was elsewhere.

I’m not sure what remains to be done this semester. In future semesters, I imagine continued maintenance of the wiki entries to keep them up to date will be a primary concern, and perhaps tweaking the strengths/weaknesses sections if the clientele for the Writing Technology wiki changes. Adding new entries is, I imagine, one of the major goals of the wiki, and since new video editing software is being created all the time there should be plenty for future collaborators to work with.