Fragrance� of DOOM!
Today I lost another blog entry that was quite excellent in my opinion. I feel so depressed after this happens that I really don’t feel up to the task of duplicating the stream of consciousness that was transcribed earlier in the day. Tonight though I will attempt to relate my earlier feelings to you in some semblance of the order in which they were originally conceived (and promptly lost due to a short admin login timeout). At the very least I can say that I have less pressure and fewer difficulties in delivering my semi-regular missives than Tycho.
First allow me to bring you all up to speed on myself and those that orbit around, and are orbited by, me. My roommate was involved in a vehicle accident, and another of my good friends was with him. They are both alive and fairly well, and now back at school with some relatively minor injuries. The cause of this accident was some bad weather we had this weekend where we had >6�? of snow just days after and days before unseasonably warm temperatures in the 70’s. Crazy Midwestern weather is always throwing new curve balls at us. Oh, and about that whole global warming and the rest of that environmentalist propaganda that children are brainwashed with. It looks like we have another case of overconfidance in our human interpretations of life, the universe, and everything.
Much of today was spent programming for my Java class. Every day I remind myself why I do not want to be a programmer. I have spent entirely too much time this semester working on assignments after the date they are due. The problem with time intensive projects such as expansive Java programs is that as soon as you get behind with one all the rest of them are pushed back as well. I will have to hope for the best and get this one turned in some time Friday. Doesn’t everybody look forward to Fridays because of the chance to do that much extra homework and work on various other projects?
One topic that I had hoped to mention here was the recent sentencing of a website operator who ran www.isonews.org and sold modchips for the X-Box. On one hand I feel appalled that the DMCA can be used to incarcerate people for experimenting with products that they purchase. On the other hand there are legitimate precedents to protect the greater good by limiting what people can do with the products they purchase. For instance you are prohibited from modifying cars and firearms in certain ways, but these are for safety purposes. I don’t feel certain on my opinions in this arena and will therefore leave the flame wars to the more ‘reputable’ sites. Of course you are supposed to believe everything you see on the internet. I have to wonder how often we see news stories on popular sites and never realize they are completely fake. Few people that are accustomed to the ease of access to information that the internet provides will make the effort to research something in a traditional method such as a library. The real world scares me sometimes�
The topic that has been tickling my synapses lately has been the concept of how we navigate the web. The structure of the web is based upon hyperlinks, and exists entirely separate from the physical structure of the network. The manner in which we as web-surfers discover new sites is usually by clicking through a link on some site. This site has links to other sites, and each site has links to still others. The number of websites out there is nearly infinite and ever expanding. The interesting thing about the web is the fact that spheres of interconnectedness start to develop. Your own personal interests largely dictate the sites that exist within your own sphere of knowledge. As we explore a few main sites that deal with topics that we are interested in we soon discover other sites that are connected to each other. One great example of how a particular network of sites can grow is the web-comic community. The growth of web based comic strips has been huge in the past few years. And I enjoy many of them because most are related to geeky things like computer games. All of this is really interesting if you can visualize the complicated connections between sites and how the click-thru traffic flows between sites to open up the horizons of people to new sites every time they sit down to browse the web. If you have trouble fully realizing this concept in a spatial manner you can take a look at this extremely cool site that uses the powerful google search engine.
One of the most powerful tools for quickly expanding a sphere of linked sites is the new blogging craze. The fact that blogs allow people to write down their ideas and provide extended information that is not their own creation. The consumption of information becomes a monumental task if you consider the amount of raw opinion and data that is available within only a few clicks off of any one web-log site. Some feel that blogs are the new thermometer for social feelings and crazes. This is likely true but I feel that blogs offer a truly diverse network of information that people can have access to and can discover through blogs that deal with related topics. The sphere of interconnected blogs that each person is aware of will depend greatly on which person’s journals they consider most worthy of their attention and repeat visits. The sites that people enjoy visiting the most will be the sites that offer the best links to related information that will be useful. The networking of information is a complicated concept to unravel. In the future this abstract idea of interaction of data on a human level may offer insights on the way that the human mind processes and remembers data.
My roommate informs me that this entry has stretched out to an excessive length. Therefore I will cut myself off and leave you all to digest the crazy rant that I have unloaded on you all this time.