CSIS Assignment #2

"I have a lot of homework due tomorrow. I hope I am able to get all my sketches
done for Graphic Design at 8am. I already have my website assignment pretty much
ready to go for Hypertext and Multimedia, you can check it out here. The content
is simple and is all about the iPod. The content is not what is important, we
simply had to fulfill some requirements. Frames, tables, all this stuff is in
there. I put a lot of extra stuff in there too that wasn't needed, but I felt
that I had to challenge myself to do a good job on this or I wouldn't have had
the will to finish it at all."

Crank up the Radio

Hey, DJ Timbly is back on the air this year and also streaming his own "unique" tastes in music over the internet to anyone that cares to listen. Check out klpr.unk.edu to listen in to DJ Timbly from 9pm untill midnight every Thursday. The plan is to get a chatroom up and running on this site again so you can make requests, otherwise simply send your requests to sirtimbly_at_gmail_dot_com.

Turn around

"

I just wonder what I would do with myself if I wasn't completely insane. I finally decided to upgrade my site to a full fledged content management system. The name of this system is Mambo, and I think I've fallen a little bit in love with this piece of software. I'm sorry Becca.

So, this site will be looking completely different here for a while. The new template should be appearing here soon, and mambo will take over all funtionality for my site. The big impetus for me to get this started was the fact that I really need to do a bunch of Philosophy journals in order to get a halfway decent grade. So, blogging to the rescue.

The biggest challenge to having a content management system is filling it with content.

"

Philosophy Journal #3

Today in class we briefly touched upon the issue of what types of games the guardians should play as children. This issue seems important to the proper development of a well balanced reasoning person. Play in the life of a child seems really important because of the neccessity of learning 'rules'. So often in today's school systems children are told that they are pretty much perfect no matter what they do. And that everyone is equal.

Play on the playgrounds of school actually teach some very important social ideas. The need for rules in a game becomes necessary to keep those kids that would cheat to win a game. Rules are followed because they teach the lessons of life. Everything in society runs on rules because that is how everyone keeps a level playing field. If everyone knows the rules then everone has a equal chance to succeed within the confines of those rules.

Thinking about what games are not condusive to the development I realized that the most popular games of the past couple years. Have been the Grand Theft Auto series. The reason that these games are so popular are because they allow a person to disobey all the rules of society. You can steal, murder, and drive any way that you want to on that little digital replica of a city. The point of the game is to elude the police and escape the consequences of any rules whatsoever.

This game is probably the best example of the worst game for a child to play while he is developing his character.

Philosophy Journal #2

Throughout Book 3 of The Republic Socrates presents the idea that the guardians need to have very special training and upbringing as to prevent them from aquiring bad character. One of the things that Socrates spends a great deal of time talking about is the idea that music can change a person's behavior and potentially ruining their character. Socrates decides that music alone can change a person. In fact he puts forth the idea that any one type of media such as stories can adversely affect the youth.

"

In modern mass media theory the idea that only one type of media can completely affect a persons decisions and character is pretty rediculous. As far as I have read so far Socrates fails to see that there is a lot more than just the variable of media or entertainment in determining a persons character. The stories a person reads, the music they listen to, and the games that they play all affect a persons development. The degree of effect that each of those things has is highly variable and, most likely, not as large as Socrates theorizes.

A childs development is reflective of his entire environment. This means that parents and teachers have a great deal of influence over a childs growth.

The upbringing and indoctrination of a guardian should be perfect and pure according to Socrates. But, he also stresses the importance of a liberal education in all the fields of study and in moderate physical excersice. Is study and excersice even enough for a person to truly become a well rounded individual? Shouldn't exposure to a variety of media and entertainment be included in a youth's development?

In the proper environment and with supervision by those responsible for their education, a developing youth would learn a great deal more from exposure to these media and entertainment than he would from ignorance. How can one be expected to rule if he does not understand the things that help shape the lives of those he rules.

All Things

Blogging is a hobby, I don�t have time for any more hobbys. Work and school continue much as they always have for these past 2 years. Minor differences creep in here and there, but my life at college is largely similar to what it was last year. Major differences such as the presence of my girlfriend Becca here at UNK are certainly blessings. Differences such as the increased load of credit hours I am taking this semester (17 most of which are upper level classes) tend to complicate my life more than anything else.

I realize now that the reason I never post anything on this site is that I never have anything interesting to say on my own. I am forced to write journals for my philosophy class but of course I have been slacking on that lately. Well, I�ll probably start a post for philosophy here soon.

Journal Synopsis #1

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Journal Synopsis< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = ""urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"" />

Word People vs. Picture People

Tim Bendt

Wilson Lowrey. “Word People vs. Picture People: Normative Differences and Strategies for Control Over Work Among Newsroom Subgroups.” MASS COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY, 2002, 5(4), 411–432

Problem.

Journalists work as part of an organization and each journalist’s individual characteristics can alter the way that news is played out in the media by affecting the direction of the overall organization. Visual journalists and word journalists are often at odds in professional news reporting.

"
"

Theory.

AMILY: TimesNewRomanPS; mso-bidi-font-family: TimesNewRomanPS"">Visual journalists and word journalists follow different norms in the work place. Visual people, are less likely to openly challenge the positions of the organizational authorities, but are more likely to seize control of the organization for their own benefit.< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = ""urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"" />>

Method.

This study was based on in depth interviews conducted with 17 visual journalists at fairly large dailies across the < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = ""urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"" />US. These interviews were conducted with the purpose of discovering the answers to the following questions. >

• Which norms do members of occupational subgroups involved with news

presentation observe and to what degree?

• How do different occupational groups of news presentation workers seek legitimacy

and control within the newsroom?

• How do competition among occupational subgroups and the observance of

different sets of norms affect daily decision making about presentation in

newspaper newsrooms?

There was also a component of the study that involved the observation of planning meetings for newspaper news departments for two large newspapers.

Findings.

In news paper organizations where the page designers and visual communicators in general had greater say then content was adapted to follow the form that was determined to have the greatest appeal to their audience in general. While in the newspapers that relegated the visual journalists to secondary positions the content dictated the form and made the direction of visual communication inconsistent and in some cases ineffective.

Evaluation.

The research done for this article seems to be largely based on one persons interpretation of the comments of many journalists. As a visual journalist himself it seems likely that his own opinions and prejudices shaped the direction of this study. Other than that, the reasoning and conclusions of this article seem sound and insightful to how different journalists work together in a professional environment.

"

Not a Journal Entry

I don�t know what up with all my crazy posting lately. It seems like the flood gates of blogging have opened. No sophisticated philosophical musings this time though. I just thought I should mention that I am really enjoying work so far. Certainly my position relatively far down the pecking order leaves me doing a lot of �grunt� work. Grunt work for web-design that is. I can sit here for five hours and enjoy being wrapped in my technology. I work in Macromedia suite and a attempt to accomplish design projects for a job. It�s like a warm cocoon of digital joy surrounds me here at work. Does using a Mac make everyone feel euphoric the same way? One way that this job far exceeds my job at Offut over the summer is that there are people I work with who know far more, and even the same amount as me about the topics that I am interested in, Web-Design, Programming, Server administration. Over the summer I pretty much lived in the forums at Kirupa.com. This was my only real social interaction with professional peers, and was actually the majority of all my social interaction for the last 2 weeks of the summer when Becca went back home. At college I�v placed myself in a social situation where I cannot be an introvert. At work I get to revel in my introverted tendencies. That�s the long and the short of today. I�ll be leaving work here in a few minutes and will be getting ready to go on a float trip with the crusade guys. Woo!

Philosophy Journal 01

For my philosophy class I have been directed to journal my thoughts regularly. My assumption is that this exercise will allow us to more thoroughly analyze our own thoughts. Even I fear what I might learn if I were to ever truly understand my own thoughts.

For this class, which I have in about 7 hours, we are reading Plato�s Republic. I have finished the first section of the book and have to say that I was suprised at how easy it was to sit down and read it when I was really bored and had nothing else to do. I think that the point of philosophy is the painful elaboration of the obvious. Socrates seems to be the kind of guy that plays devils advocate and teaches by challenging his students to intellectual duels. He has crossed mental sabres with 3 different people already on one basic topic, Justice. Justice certainly seems to be a tenuous idea. No-one in this book is able to grasp any solid defining ideas on what Justice is. Socrates and company are able to point out many instances of effects that justice has, but lack any sort of structured definition. This book actually seems to be drifting over a variety of topics and will no doubt eventually land on the island of politics. Just a hunch, but I see this lengthy discussion leading to a discussion on what the role of government in peoples lives is, and why governments rule, and why a government needs to rule justly. And, oh yeah, what was justice again?

I�m just throwing words out here now, this is all raw thoughts I�m about to spew into being. Justice is the set of consequences (rewards and punishments) that allow society to hold itself together. Even if the very acts that are commited in the name of justice are truly atrocious and cruel they must still be done by each person in the society to hold it together. We may not really want to believe in the ideas that our current culture holds as justice, but we will follow blindly these ideas and even enforce them simply to perpetuate the society that we are a part of. Continuing the social stability through total justice offers the individual the greatest chance of surviving by way of giving the population a greater chance of surviving. Lack of justice means chaos, and chaos means greater likelyhood that an individual will die prematurely or be unable to continue his genetic line.

Of course that does not mean that each groups idea of justice is correct, in fact our ideas of justice are almost certainly wrong and harmful to many many individuals. Perhaps leading to our own distruction, but on a time scale that is too large to have a meaningful impact on our current decisions. So the people who are most able to affect a socio-ppolitical change are those who are willing to ignore conventional ideas of justice and follow their own ideas. These people can have good effects, or they can cause bad effects. A patriot and a traitor are two labels that can be applied to the same person, that depends on your perspective.

Whoa, these late night philiosophizing sessions kinda wear me out. At least blogging this is easier than *shudder* pen and paper.

Continuating

So, I failed to continue the saga yesterday, lets hope I can make this brief so I can take a nap.

When I finally got the details for this new job nailed down I was very close to finishing my internship at Offut. I really had a great time with that job, I was kept pretty busy but I somehow found ways to challenge myself with something new and different every week there. I will miss the friendly office environment of DNTT. I finished up work on Friday August 13th and went back home. Packing everything up and leaving my studio apartment was a little depressing. I knew that I would be going back to a dorm room with the likelihood that I will get a roomate at some point. For now I don�t have a roomate, and living in a dorm room isn�t so bad. I am able to keep busy enough here that I don�t really spend that much time in my room anyways. I have a bed and a desk for my computer and a nice recliner to nap in. What more do I need.

I moved back to school last Tuesday, 3 days earlier than everyone else. I had to start working in the IT department a couple days early so I got to move in earlier. It�s a kinda weird thought that (assuming all goes well) this will have been the last time that I will move into a dorm room at UNK. I�m pretty sure that I will be more than ready to be done with school by the time April swings around. After that point it�s all pretty foggy right now.

Books are freaking expensive this year. It�s always been a little frustrating in the past, but I never really buy books for my classes anyways. Everyone is telling my that book prices have jumped up to ridiculous proportions. The economy is not doing well enough yet for this kind of price inflation to occur. I swear, If someone were to actually buy all the books required for their classes they could spend over 500 dollars pretty quickly!

I may go buy one $75 used book today if my Geography teacher really insists. Hm, this is really freaking annoying, I just checked half.com and the price there was the same as that in the book store. How is that possible. What happened to half.com?!? What happened to power to the people and all that, are we all doomed to suffer under the iron fist of the tyrannical book publishers? Why must we suffer so with huge tuition hikes, loans that barely cover a third of the cost of attending, and no scholarships for the consistently average?!!?!!?!? You know what this post is lacking? More punctuation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Alright, so now I�m at school working for the webmaster and I just got a decent G4 for my machine now. I am really looking forward to working on it. I should talk to the JMC department and see what kind of price I can pick up one of their old lab G4�s. That would be pretty sweet.

�Those who take me seriously are doomed to frustration and possibly, even insanity.�

Not Lazy

Okaaay� so yes, I sorta died off there towards the end of the summer and havent really given any updates on the many things that have happened in the past 3 weeks or so. I�ll just go ahead and say that I am in fact back at UNK for my last year of school and have jumped in with both feet to my many projects and responsibilities here. I�ll hopefully remember get back to talking about school later in this post. Right now I�m gonna progress chronologically from where I left off with the last post.

All summer I was a little uncertain what I would be doing when I came back to school for a job. For the past 2 years I was a helldesk� er um, �help�desk tech. Because of several factors I am not working for the helpdesk anymore, I had been working on gettting a job as work study assistant to the campus web-master. Same department on campus but different supervisor.

So about 3 weeks ago I end up talking to a guy that has a management position in the IT department and he tells me that there is a brand new full time position that involves watching the Help desk for the night shift and also taking care of some multimedia projects. This job was going to pay $11-12 per hour and keep me really busy. I was a little wary about having to drop at least one class and be so incredibly busy during school. But the money was sounding very ver nice to me. I accepted the position pretty quickly after he offered it to me and was of course very excited.

So about two days later I get ahold of him to clear up some details on when and how to get started with this job. He tells me that there has been yet more reorganization within the department and the position that he offered to me has now been scrapped and replaced with a training position for teaching faculty and staff basic computer skills.

On the up side, he did offer me the original work study position for $8.00/hour and 19 hours per week. So I still got a very nice job and I will still be able to graduate on schedule. I would have been much happier about getting this great position if it weren�t for the fact that the much better position was dangled in front of me and then yanked away.

Alright, I have to get back to work. (To be continued�)

Trilobite!

I am a trilobite, not a troglodyte! OK then, random weird thing said so now its time to continue with the rantage. This saturday I will be in Aurora Nebraska at the Hamilton County Fair for Level 1 Media. We have a booth that Jason is manning most of the week. I�m simply taking over for him on saturday when he will be gone. If you are in that part of Nebraska and are bored please stop in and say wassup. Aaron is gonna be printing up a nice big poster for us to have at the booth, and I�m not really sure about any other details at this point. Maybe we should have gotten some pens or something to give out.

It was my birthday yesterday, now I am 20. No longer a teenager and not yet an adult, weird. Becca was, of course, awesome to me on my b-day and brought me out to eat at Hu Hot. Plus she gave me some sweet throwing knives. I am totally psyched to find a place to practice them at. I figure I could just go out into Memorial Park here in the middle of Omaha, but someone might not appreciate my fly cutlery.

Just ran into the Tenth Hour Calling website today, thought I would send that link along to you folks out there who have yet to hear this awesome band. They are from Kearney, but I�m pretty sure they will be going big places. Well, big places in the Christian rock scene, for what that�s worth.

As long as I am dropping so many links I might as well send along some of the more amusing things I have found lately.

One: This Land - totally freaking hilarious, equally heaps the political satire upon both candidates! You may be hearing about this one in the news before too long if the lawyers keep making a fuss about the song that was used.

Two: Switch - WARNING, probably only funny if you have some remote idea of what linux is any why it�s really this great.

Three: Transformers - seriously if breakdancing Transformers dont tickle your funny bone you can just go sit in the corner and think about what you�ve done!

Four: I�v probably talked about these before but it seems that the lawyers have decided to ruin something else great on the web - the Never Ending Bottle of Beer and the Nutrigrain commercials from Turnpike Films. So here are my copies, luckily grabbed before they killed the fun - Nutrigrain, NEBOB. Whatever you do, don�t tell the lawyers!

Ahhh�. refreshing

Just moments ago my aparatment entered a new era of existence. I now have a brand new Air Conditioner up here, it�s a little sucker but it puts out a lot colder air than the last one, which could probably recount stories of the Nixon era if it could speak. Or if it cared about politics. Anyways, suffice it to say that my apartment is now starting to slowly cool off. Apartment life is fun, I�ve never had a land-lord before and I have never had to complain about something to a landlord before. Does ductape count as weather stripping?

I guess I didn�t really need to go to the gym today at work, I worked up more of a sweat sitting here and breathing before installing the AC. I really like the fact that I get 3 hours per week to use at the gym on base, I didn�t utilize that time for the first month I was here, and I�m kicking myself now for that. I know that my trend of twice weekly exercise won�t continue once I reach college this fall. Plus who else but the government pays you to not work so much!

I learned an interesting fact today, apperantly a single stalk of corn can transpirate a gallon of water each day during their peak pollination time (now). So the humidity is completely unbearable in this part of the midwest because there are many millions of gallons of water being pumped out of the ground and into the air right now. This combined with the usual temps of 95 make Iowa, Nebraska, Norther Missouri, a veritable inland sea, just at a much lower density.

You never knew

pshawThis image may be disturbing to those of you who still held misconceptions about what the old He-Man cartoon was really about. I�m sorry, i just had to post this.

Ennui

So, my apartment falls somewhere within the 8th circle of hell on the temperature scale. The window AC probably hasn�t worked well since the 70�s. Being on the third floor, while keeping me safe from flooding, does have a disadvantage where the laws of thermodynamics come into play. I�m not even really sure where my pants are, but I usually remember to put them on before I leave for work in the morning. Speaking of morning, I now know what it is. I was lucky enough to spend my first two years at college blissfully ignorant of the pain involved with having to be somewhere at 8:00 every morning. I have a regular full time job in an office building that requires me to be there around 8 every morning. This concept would have seemed so foreign to me only a few short months ago. What happened to me? When did I start wanting to go to bed by midnight? When did I start drinking coffee every morning? Why do I feel OLD!?!

My feeling of agedness might be related to the impeding birthday. That day in which we celebrate� um� still existing I guess. Not that I am actually old, it�s just that I will be turning 20, and will no longer be a teenager. They say that youth is wasted on the young, I say that expendable income is wasted on the old. Speaking of expendable income, apperantly apple is releasing the rev 4 iPod tomorrow. Those jerks, they dropped the prices of each level $100. But they didn�t keep the lowest level and drop that $100 too did they! No, they completely removed the 15gig iPod from the product lineup instead of offering it at the sweet price spot of $200.

All these dollar signs are confusing me. Why do you put the dollar sign in front of the numbers, but say the word �dollars� after the numbers. It makes no sense!

At work I have been putting a lot of effort into the Space Weather CBT. I now know more about space weather and it�s impact on DOD systems than I ever will need to know. All in all I have learned a ton about flash development this summer and hope that I can really leverage my new skills to benefit Level 1 Media.

One more point I wish to make. I saw I, Robot the movie this weekend. I was truly impressed. It was a completely likable movie. It didn�t follow any plot of Asimov�s too closely, and it certainly violated the spirit of what he originally intended in his robot stories. Yet, somehow I felt appeased by the number of elements from his Robot short stories that were included as ideas in this awesome mix of action/mystery/scifi. Sure, I had trouble visualizing Dr. Susan Calvin as young as the person cast for her part here, Bridget Moynahan. Will Smith is, as always, funny enough to keep audiences interested in the unrelentingly sci-fi themes that pervade this movie. The problem with sci-fi is that it can make people think, people don�t like to have to think about their movies. Sure, Issac Asimov told much more fundamentaly interesting stories, but none of them had the action or excitement that the movie I, Robot delivers so easily.

I have a fun idea, lets go over Timbly�s to-do list this week.

* Call UNK, register for Radio Workshop.
* Go to the bank, get new ATM card, open savings account.(what�s a savings account?)
* Do Laundry!
* Find some sort of tutorial or book or something on SQL queries
* Start writing my paper about my internship

There�s probably some stuff I have forgotten. But hey, it�s the unexpected things that make life interesting.