Week 15 - Curtains

15 weeks. What a trip. I never would have thought that I had so much to say. So what has it all been worth? A critical look at my life in relationship to multimedia and technology, though sometimes painful to consider honestly, has given me new insight into the world around me. Insight and freedom. Thinking so much about all of this stuff has kind of liberated me from the chains I've bound myself with  in regards to the shame and guilt I carry about my use and dependence on technology. Like, is it cool to be techy? I guess I don't fucking care anymore about whether or not it's cool. Technology and multimedia in 2014 simply just is. I've come to terms with that. I can fight it all I want--be as analog as possible with polaroids and typewriters and vinyl and like abacuses--but multimedia is swarming my every day, and it's just easier to go along with it.

So that's it. Have I conformed? Am I seeking comfort in the will of the masses? I don't know. Hold on. I need to check my Instagram feed real quick.

What I've learned from this class penetrates deeper than my mobile operating system; I've become reacquainted with myself as a learner. Many of those same characteristics that helped me drop out of college in 2009 are still with me, but they haven't devoured me like they did last time. Whatever it was about me that didn't work before isn't as broken as I thought it was. Now, does that mean that I've signed on for a whole course load for next semester? No. Almost as important as finding out that I can be a good student is acknowledging that I don't need to connect my self worth to my academic status. Kudos to anyone who works full time and goes to school, because that shit is not for me. Luckily, spring has taken it's damn time getting here, so I haven't missed that much good weather, because being out on a bike and pushing myself in that capacity seems more important to me right now than finishing my degree.

That has been the most liberating thing about this class.

A lot of that has to do with priorities, but also with what I've learned about the world I'm growing up into. If contributions stand to count for more than credentials in this multimedia-focused world, then maybe that degree I've put so much stock into isn't as crucial as I thought. That isn't to say that I'm turning my back on education for keeps. I've enjoyed using my brain for this class, and could see future opportunities for enjoyment if circumstances allow.

But that's it for now.

Week 14 - CopyWRONG

Let's have one more go at copyright.

The people who care the most about copyright law being enforced are the same people that have the most to lose if it's not. It's a pretty basic human fear; that of losing something that you have. Especially if that something has, and will continue to bring you loads of money. The biggest shame here is how far off the copy written path our incessant greed has left us. Rather than using copyright to "promote the progress of Science and useful Art" it is more often than not that these laws and amendments are used to protect personal fortunes and prevent anyone else from taking a piece of profitable pie. Another interesting insight into greed's power over the human mind is how often the same people fighting for broader copyright boundaries become lawbook thumpers when the same rules and regulations they once rallied against for creative freedom become a means to protect often hard-earned financial gains.

We love money. We also love our American freedoms. Be prepared for shit to fly if you intend to mix the two.

What matters most to me is how this Big-Show struggle trickles down into my personal life. I am of that 70% who shares copy written material on peer-to-peer sites. I don't quake in fear that my door will be beaten down by law enforcement and that I'll be hauled off to prison for my infringements (knocking on wood). In my experience, so long as the threat I impose on other's copyrights remains local and insignificant, I can keep on with business as usual. Until what I stand to gain by blurring the lines of copyright comes from someone else's closely-guarded copy written pocket, none of this really matters.

What kind of message will this send to future generations? I can only image that as technology develops further, means to challenge these outdated rules and regulations will only multiply. Taking, for example the past 15 years of copyright hell since the inception of the first peer-to-peer file sharing network, Napster, what horrors could lie ahead in the next 15?

Something's gotta give. We've been fighting a digital war with analog weapons for way too long. Until someone figures something out, though, I'll keep downloading and sharing and remixing.

Week 13 - BULL$#!T ALERT!!

It seems like Gary Hammel is assuming that the corporate Fatcats of the world will suddenly yield to will of a younger generation. No friggen way! How do you think these Cats got so Fat, anyways? Or, maybe this article is really addressed to those Fatcats in an effort to say like "Ok guys, we have to make these young shits think we're responding to like their unique desires or something. You know, make them feel special. Maybe lets trick them into thinking that they're pulling the strings for one." (At which point all puppeteering Fatcats laugh hysterically.) 

Here's a little bit of bias (could you tell?). I don't think that the Fatcats of America are ever going to give up the power that they talk about in this article. This is more about adapting tactics to continue Business As Usual. I just think that these Fortune 500 companies are too big and their Fatcat CEOs lounge on too high a floor for Generation F to completely penetrate. Like, "tasks are chosen, not assigned"? I think that as long as it's someone else signing your friggen paycheck, you'll be doing the work that's assigned. Like, yeah, ok. I chose not to do this task, and I've subsequently chosen to find another job at like McDonalds. Not that there's anything wrong with that. You'd have a better chance seeing these work-relevant characteristics of online life in action at a locally franchised fast-food restaurant than you would at fricken J.P Morgan.

This all clearly gets me fired up. I don't think I need to go into that any more. After getting that off my chest, though, I will say that I've seen my employer responding to some of these charachteristics. Granted, the Skirack isn't sitting atop the towers of high finance. It's a small company that's been locally  owned for like 40 years or something and has never tried to grow beyond it's one location. I think the scale and lack of corporate ladder rungs to climb have something to do with that. Smaller companies, especially if they're successful, have an opportunity to try some slightly left of center business practices. In my experience, it's been that willingness to adapt to change and try things differently that has kept the doors of the rack open for so long.

See? I don't hate everything.

Week 12 - The Long Tail. I couldn't come up with a more creative title that didn't seem dirty or immature or somehow related to genitalia.

Considering that I get 95 percent of my music and movies for free from the internet, I'll expound upon the long tail in terms of my book buying. As a snobbish reader, I typically avoid the best-sellers list. Like, yeah that's nice that you liked that book but you're probably stupid and have bad taste (while I sometimes think that way, it's by no means how I actually feel about people who read best-selling books. In fact, I know many intelligent people with good taste whose home libraries consist almost entirely of best-selling books. What it has more to do with is my innate desire to be different and unique, even if it means pitting myself against really quite nice and rather smart people who happen to enjoy popular mainstream fiction).

So I dig deeper. Let's say I find an author I like. There was a time where I was playing a lot of pool and smoking a lot of cigarettes and listening to a lot of Tom Waits. Someone mentioned Charles Bukowski as a sort of literary equivalent of what Waits had done with music. I went to the old Brick and Mortar book store down the street, found a copy of one of his better known works, Ham On Rye, and resentfully paid full price for it. Resentful because I knew I could go home, look on Amazon and get it used for a buck and shipped for four and that guy at the book store seemed jaded and kind of like he didn't even like me. Ham On Rye was the last Bukowski title I could find in the greater Burlington area, so it wasn't long until I was on Amazon.

Now, I will say that I get certain twinges of guilt any time I buy anything from Amazon. I'm left with a dirty feeling, not unlike how I feel once I've left Wal-Mart. That sense that every penny I spend there is another nail in the already almost sealed coffin of the Mom and Pop Stores of America that can't compete with Amazon's pricing and inventory, and often times end up employing jaded and resentful cashiers whose subsequent disposition I'm in some part responsible for. Anyway, there must have been six or seven of his books I found. All used, all under five bucks.

Then, after crushing Bukowski's canon, I went after one of his biggest influences, John Fante, who, apparently, has less hipster acclaim and isn't counter-culturally influential enough for shelf space in the two bookstores in town. Amazon flexed it's long tail again. I found and bought probably five books in all. Some were more obscure and I may have paid 12 dollars for one but it didn't seem so bad considering of all the other deals I was getting away with. The further down the rabbit hole I went, the more obscure the books got. Apparently, Fante was obsessed with this book called Hunger written in the 1800's buy a Norwegian guy named Knut Hamsun. Of course, Amazon had it, and my local book store didn't. It was used and cost less than a sandwich, even though it kind of smelled like one. Once I figured out when to order new books so they came right around when I finished another, it was like I didn't even have to wait. Not to mention how easy Amazon makes it to impulsively buy whatever you want by saving your credit card and shipping information, pummeling the physical American Book Store just a little bit further into the ground with every click.

I guess you can't blame Amazon. Looking specifically at the sale of books, the tail is just too long to be contained to a storefront on Church Street. Maybe I'm still miffed about the snarky store owner who looked like he just smelled a fart when he rang me out. Mind you, I didn't fart.

Week Eleven - Podcastaway with Tom Hanks...jk

 https://soundcloud.com/dan-smith-91/podcast

Week 10 - Rainman

Week 9 - The camera adds ten pounds

Week 8 - Comically-oversised pointers.

Hans Rosling had an absurdly large pointer. He had to lay that sucker down across three chairs.

"Don't panic, it looks nasty..."

If I had been in one of the front rows of that presentation, I may have deserved a crack upside the head with Hans's five-foot pointer for getting bleary-eyed when he unleashed those first "nasty" looking graphs. I bet it was warm in that room. Those seats looked pretty comfortable. Even if infant mortality statistics were, like, as good as it got for me, I could still see having a hard time staying attentive while trying to interpret all of that data. My man Hans, though, he gets it. Make those same, boring graphs move around, and it's pretty much like watching a movie. Seriously. People friggen loved it. The bright colors didn't hurt, either. There must be something about witnessing data unfold that makes it more compelling than showing up once the party's over. Like, seeing exactly how the Swedish infant mortality rate fluctuated and ultimately fell--literally seeing it rise and fall--was much more satisfying than seeing that same data as a lifeless statistic. Kind of like how watching a sports game is more satisfying than just reading what the score was.

Hans summed things up at the end of his presentation and hit on like several different levels by saying "we need to have a modern concept that fits with the (modern) data." The most practical application of his modern concept are his moving bubbles. Infant mortality is certainly not a new phenomenon. Kids have been dying for as long as they've been being born! With a topic as seemingly old and rigid as that though, Rosling took the opportunity to conceptualize these long-running statistics in a modern way. "Averages are not a fair representation." That's right, Hans, because they're fricken boring. Give modern statistic viewers what they want and expand those averages in real time and narrate the whole thing like it's the Kentucky Derby. THAT will get people gassed about child mortality.

Just a cursory glance at some statistics can lead to generalizations that wouldn't necessarily occur if you were to expand the same data. I realize that a statistic is just that because it is a concise means of representing a large amount of data, but Hans showed that stats can sometimes misrepresent the data they were interpreting in the first place. When, for example, you lump sub-Saharan Africa into one category and measure it's decline in infant mortality, the resultant statistic is far less compelling than if you were to look at each sub-Saharan nation, individually. The bubbles showed three very different trajectories for the Congo, Kenya and Ghana. To combine the three nations statistics and derive an average is to deny credit where credit is due. Stats can be spun. Especially when they exists as static numbers.

The end result here is that I care way more about infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa than I did 20 minutes ago, and all it took for me were some colorful, moving graphs. Here is a very real example of how effective presentation methods can be used to convey a message that needs to be heard. Seriously, in less time than it takes to watch a TV show, Hans sufficiently informed me about this planet-sized problem.

Lisa, you're great, but I bet Hans would be a bitchin teacher.

Week 7 - Shut up Siri, you're driving me friggen nuts.

Ok so the crux of this whole e-reader controversy, for me, is the quality of the voice reading back. While I understand that developers may be close to developing a crazy, lifelike computervoice, they're just not there yet. Have you heard what the Kindle Read Aloud sounds like? Personally, I can think of like 14 kinds of gross, bodily harm I'd rather inflict upon myself than listen to an entire book being read by that robo-voice. That's the biggest thing that's making the Writer's Guild look like a bunch of Dingdongs. Like, seriously. Let this one go, guys. People willing to subject themselves to listening to 10 hours of that should be committed--or will need to be once they've finished a book. Forget water-boarding. Just hook up a Kindle loaded with like Finnegans Wake or something to a loudspeaker, make it read aloud, and lock the bad guy in a room with it. By the time robo is done reading "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!", you'll know where all of the weapons of mass destruction are. 

I'm guessing that if and when software developers are ready to debut their strikingly lifelike read aloud voice, it's going to come at a price. The current generation of e-readers' ability to read back text is pretty old news. I remember being in 5th grade in my middle school computer lab on those colorful, bulbous Macs that were so hot in the 90's, and getting an absolute kick out of hearing the computer voice read back "fart" and "penis" after I typed it in. Seriously. Hours of entertainment. I imagine that if I was able to do that back then, on a public school budget, nonetheless, it couldn't have been the most expensive technology. Fast-forward 15 years, and $200 can buy you a whole lot of hand-held--probably more capable than those bubble Macs--and I bet whoever makes them in Taiwan throws the read-back voice in for free.

New technology = more money. If and when IBM ever completes or releases that oh-so-human voice they've been developing for like probably 20 years, I bet you it won't come cheap. Some of the success of e-readers can be attributed to their fairly low cost. If you read a lot of books, buying a $200 tablet can just about pay for itself before long. Make those suckers a little more expensive, though, and readers may start crawling back to print as a more economical option. 

The Writer's Guild needs to concern themselves more with weathering the digital storm if they want to stay on top of things. Finding ways to adapt and innovate could prove more beneficial than acting like sore losers.Give it ten years, and some new technology will have come along that makes e-readers and read aloud seem positively prehistoric. The times, they are a changing, Writer's Guild. Get with it. For a bunch of probably pretty smart boys and girls, the Guild needs to stop acting like such dummies.

Week 6 - I HOPE you like this entry

I remember the first time I saw Fairey's image. I was 19, about to drop out of college and completely disenchanted with everything about the world around me. The posters were being given away by something like a 'Students for Obama' group that swarmed the campus that fall semester. What drew me to it, first, were the colors. Something about the tinted red white and blue against the faded white background. I got back to the apartment I was living in and hung it up next to my bed. The corny part of the story, is that after seeing that image every day and absorbing the election buzz kind of through osmosis, I think I actually found a sliver hope in everything that was going on in my world. It got to be that I associated Fairey's image with the thought that maybe my future wasn't going to be the shit-pile that I thought it would. At that point, I didn't need the poster by me bed anymore. It had given birth to an outlook I carried with me until the night of the election.

Then the next six years happened. Not quite as hopeful as I would have liked, but hell, I'm doing ok. I think that there are a lot of people that share a similar experience to what I had with the colorful picture of Mr. Obama. That Fairey's rendition of Garcia's original image generated more emotion than it did currency is one aspect of this argument that makes it so legally messy. If Fairey's intention was to make as much money off of HOPE as possible, then the legal battle wouldn't have gone on for as long as it did. The Associated Press probably saw how much they could have made, had the idea been theirs, and proceeded on the war path. They were broke in 2009--selling off assets to keep their heads above water and still posting profits way lower than the year before.

All of this lawyer talk makes my head hurt. What do I think? Yes, fair use applies to Fairey's Obama poster. It looks different enough than the original. Fairey doesn't have a private jet full of money because of it. The AP's original wasn't doing much before Fairey sampled it, so no potential market loss there. Most importantly, as was the case with me, it "stimulate(d) creativity for the enrichment of the general public." (I can't quite find where Wikipedia pulled those words from, but they illustrate my point wonderfully)

If you want my opinion, money brings out the absolute worst in humanity, and The Associated Press is no exception. I may take a hit this week for not dissecting the legality of Fairey's case into as many pieces as I should have, but the degree to which my head won't be spinning by the time I go to sleep tonight will be worth it.

Oh, and here is a testament to Shepard Fairey's artistic abilities. I tried Obama-izing an attribution-liscenced pic of our Head Cheese, and it came out looking awful. By the looks of what came up in the Creative Commons image search I did, Fairey probably could have found a workable CC picture of Mr Obama. We don't choose when inspiration strikes, though, and have to work with what's available in the moment. I would imagine that he'll stop to think before he pulls another picture from the internet, though.    

This image is a derivative of "Obama Speaking (15)" by borman818, used under CC BY. "TIRED" is licensed under CC BY by Dan Smith.

Week 5 No Selfies, Please

I got an iPhone about two years ago and picture taking completely changed for me. I had always liked the idea of taking pictures of things--you know, that I thought looked interesting--but who wants to develop film or even carry around a digital camera everywhere they go? I guess carrying a small digital camera wouldn't be so horrible but GOD how inconvenient is it to upload pictures to a computer?

My iPhone was the first time I had a relatively high resolution digital camera at my disposal and I loved it. I was living in Charlotte, VT at the time, at the top of a big old hill with a gorgeous view looking over the lake. I would ride my bike home from work every day and by like halfway through my ride, the sky was just friggen blazing over the lake and BOOM I had a camera to take a picture of it. Maybe even more important than just having the camera on my phone was my ability to then share what I had captured with people.

On vacation for example, I was seeing the West Coast for the first time, and I knew my parents were going to want to hear all about it. Instead of having to call them after everyday, which I'm just awful at, even when I'm not on vacation, I was able to post the pictures I had taken to Instagram and Facebook--like, on the bus, going from one picturesque scene to the next. No stupid uploading to a computer involved-- and was able to include them in what I was doing, while it was happening.

While I think it's nifty that, now, I can take a picture of a sunset when I see it, there are others that aren't so tickled. Advances in technology always seem to spur resentment among those in the field. In my experience,  I've heard purists complain that the real art is drowning in the sea of amateur uploads, and soon enough, people won't know the difference. Or, the reaction is to get as far away from digital as possible. One of the hippest things a hipster photographer can do is find an old camera that takes old, distressed looking pictures that look like what people are churning out on Instagram and other photo apps, and say that they had been using it all along. Way before Instagram even came out.

Either way, it's gotten people more into photography. Whether its the former techie learning his roots with film, or the novice experiencing things for the first time because of the ease and accesibality of cameras on iPhones. It's not like photography is dying because quality digital cameras are now on millions of people's smartphones. Like, I'm sure there was that stubborn guy who wouldnt put down his abacus when calculators were really catching on. Sure, it's nice to do all of that work by yourself, but technology can make things a hell of a lot easier, too.

Week 4 - Fight The Power like Public Enemy.

My neighbors and I started our first band when we were 11. 14 years later, we're still playing, and we've made a total of like zero dollars. We played a show as recently as last night, and I'll have you know that we probably lost money. I guess the pipe-dream of making a living off of my music has always followed me, but it's certainly not something I ever anticipate happening. I've come to terms with that. I'll live out the rest of my days working jobs I don't really care that much about because my real "career" path will eventually lead to a life (or early death) as a musician. Now, why can't I really ever make a career for myself as a musician?

Let's take a look at the record. I started making music around the same time that digital recording became super easy for any idiot--myself, included-- to use. Soon, any asshole could grab his Dad's Macbook, record a miserably mediocre and really just awful sounding collection of songs in Garageband, and create a Myspace page for his cool new band. Without the need for expensive studios or production or someone to physically edit your stuff--like, actually cut the tape of what you just recorded and glue it back together so it sounds good--digital recording and the internet let you almost instantly bypass the checks and balances of the last 20 years that had kept so much bad music from reaching the public domain. This, according to John Buckman, is just one reason why it's so damn hard for musicians to make any money.

Today, if a musician wants to achieve commercial success--strictly in terms of making as much money as someone with probably a real career who went to a lot of school-- they need either to be unbelievably lucky, or have a fat wad of income they can use to try to propel themselves to a moderate, tepid success. If you are of the one in 1,000,000 who happens to be lucky (or talented, but not necessarily) enough to gain the support of a major record label, then sit back and let the music industry fulfill your every want and need until they run out of ways to squeeze money out of your popularity. The other 999,999 of us, though, continue to piss away our hard-earned income, trying to do, ourselves, what the industry could do with its toilet paper budget.

This situation creates desperate musicians, willing to give almost anything for a chance to have their music reach an audience that they couldn't by their own broke-ass means. Too often these dumb, desperate sonsofbitches gloss over the fine print in their contract with Joe Bigshot Records and end up signing over the rights to their material along with it.    

Magnatune, however, will not rape or pillage your musical dreams. They are a much-needed, benevolent force in the dark and scary music world. Now, just because John Buckman created Magnatune doesn't necessarily guarantee your discovery and fame, but your chances have sure as hell gone up--maybe from one in 1,000,000 to like 112 in 1,000,000 (That statement is by no means supported by any factual or scientific findings, btw.)

Judgement Day

Did anyone else think of The Terminator when Kevin Kelly mentioned how the internet was doubling in capacity every two years and will easily be more capable than the human brain by the end of the decade? Like, seriously. The Matrix? Irobot? War Games? It seems like as long as there has been the notion that computers could one day be smart enough to destroy the world, they most certainly will. Whether that's paranoia or insight isn't for me to say, but smarter technology is where things are going. My new iPhone recognizes my thumbprint, so if I accidentally leave it on the bus, a thieving stranger won't have access to what's inside. It knows where I am right now and can tell me where I want to go and the fastest way to get there.

Kelly predicts that the way things are going, the “web” will be smarter and more personalized, but for this to happen, we're going to need to be comfortable with a heightened level of transparency with our technology. It needs to understand us to be used to it's fullest potential.

How much are we ready for? The change needs to be gradual enough so humanity isn't struck slack-jawed at the capability of the technology that's been made available to them. Maybe 5000 days is gradual enough. Hell, even if it does some day hit the fan and web-based technology becomes so smart that it decides that the best thing for the human race is it's complete destruction, at least I've seen The Terminator, The Matrix, iRobot, War Games, Eagle Eye, Tron, and Bladerunner (I'm sure I'm missing a bunch) enough times to know what to do.

The big question for me, is what exactly are we so afraid of? If more transparency is what web 3.0 is going to need before it can figure out how to match our socks to our ties, why not let it in? I hate matching those things. Kelly has predicted, and we've seen hypothesized in like a million ways how crazy powerful and capable the internet could become. Movies that give us a glimpse into the internetted future gross millions because we all want to see what it would be like. But, there seems to be a bold line drawn between what we day-dream of coming true and what we're terrified of happening. The recent whistle-blowing of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden made light of the latter; The age-old paranoia that BigBrother is watching. Or listening, or collecting data or probably reading our minds or something. How far will what some people see as this abuse of our basic american freedoms hinder what will be allowed to happen in the next 5000 days?

As a culture, we seem polarized. Either with our heads in the clouds, dreaming of satellite-controlled lawnmowers, or at the other end, convinced that technology will stand for nothing less than the absolute destruction of the human race. Can't we find some middle ground?   

Cloudkicker

I just heard about this band called Cloudkicker. They friggen rule, in case you were wondering. This is how I used my cloud to find Cloudkicker.

I wake up, get out of bed, and start making coffee. This happens in real life. Not the cloud. I open my computer. This is where human reality ends and digital cloudcity begins. Hmm, anything good on metalsucks? Oh look, these bands that are pretty good are going on tour. Look at the dates. No one good ever comes to Higher Ground. Who's opening for them? The Atlas Moth. Go to bandcamp page. Listen to first 45 seconds of song until vocals come in. Ok. Not in to The Atlas Moth. Who else? Cloudkicker. Go to Cloudkicker's bandcamp page. First three minutes of song is just ambient nature noise, so skip three minutes and two seconds in. Woa. Pretty good. Go to youtube, where I find Cloudkicker's latest album, Subsume, in its entirety. Press play, exit cloud, wash dishes for 45 minutes while banging my head and reveling in musical happenstance. Dishes done. Dry hands. Pour more coffee. Re-enter cloud. Go to thepiratebay, see if anyone's sharing any of Cloudkickers music. Cloudkicker discography 2008-2013. DOWNLOAD. Six minutes later, transfer eight Cloudkicker albums into iTunes. Put the one I'm most in to on my iPhone so I can listen to it whenever I need to thrash. Send group text to bandmates telling them to check out Cloudkicker because they friggen rule. Put newest album in my google drive and share with bandmates so they can thrash, too. Exit cloud. Pour more coffee. Press play in iTunes and listen to Cloudkicker "Subsume" again, and finish doing dishes.

Man oh man. What would I do without the cloud? I'd have to watch MTV, which I don't even think plays music anymore, to try to hear about new bands.Or, I could stay up way past my bedtime at concerts of bands I've never heard of, probably just to find out that once they start singing, there's nothing left to like. God forbid I'd actually have to BUY music.

Five years ago, this probably would have looked pretty similar. Some of the names different, but the process the same. Maybe myspace instead of bandcamp for the band's website, and any number of file-sharing sites that have since been shut down instead of thepiratebay.com. Anyone remember Mediafire? All of those .zip and .rar files? Those were the days.

People were definately skecpical about the cloud's potential five years ago. This week's articles looked at an angle I had never considered, though: The clouds ability to generate revenue. When I'm using my google drive, I'm not necessarily thinking of who's pockets are filling up as a result. Is the money I pay my internet provider then paying google? Money is confusing. I have my internet account set up so that my bill is taken straight from my bank account every month. I hardly even think about it, and go about my computing assuming that everything is made available for free by some benevolant compu-diety. Clearly, not the case. Who in the one percent is making a killing as the clouds power and accessibility swells?

Also, I can't tell you how many user agreements I've blown right past in the past month. Borrrrrrrinnnngggggg. What's the worst that could happen, right? A few years back, my gmail account did get compromised, and I was denied access to it. Luckily, I was 19 and had dropped out of school and had nothing important in it. The blow would land a little closer to home today, though, if either someone got in to my account or I lost access to it. As I grow up, and my responsibilities grow with me, I stand to lose more if my cloud gets kicked.

Week One: Blogging About Blogging

Hello Adoring Public,

I'm writing you from my living room. Winter has returned to Burlington, and I'm sitting as close as I can to my space heater without risking a melting, burning mess. I can imagine other, betters ways to start an online class that don't begin with a computer catching fire. Might help help heat the apartment though...All of that aside, I'm anticipating an interesting 15 weeks of e-class. It should be enlightening to hear, first hand, how other people engage in multimedia. I know pretty well how I use it, and it's effect in my life, but I'm looking forward to seeing how people of different ages and walks of life live with multimedia.

I must admit that I've never blogged before. Being on the receiving end of everything always interested me more. There's something very bold and admirable about putting your voice and opinion on the internet for the entire connected world to see, though. To be honest, I've held out this long for fear of what people would think of what I had to say. God forbid, a bunch of people who are never going to meet me might think that something I said once wasn't funny or relevant or smart or whatever it was that they wanted it to be. This class should be a good exercise in putting myself outside my comfort zone. Me biggest source of anxiety to overcome will be that nagging thought that what I've just written is somehow not good enough. Whatever THAT means. For all you know, I could not even exist. I could just be a digital manipulation.  I could be a 90-year-old woman typing this in her nursing home. Wouldn't that be impressive? No arthritis at 90? And who would have any harsh words for an exceptionally dextrous old lady in assisted living?

Let's say, for a moment, that I'm not a 90-year-old woman or a programmed cypher, and that I'm actually 25 and fairly connected to the technological world. I feel like I grew up with the internet. In sixth grade, my sister and I teamed up and bought a CD burner from Best Buy for like $150, and worked our way through Napster before media piracy became such a hot issue. I remember being a freshman in high school and my friend telling me about this cool new website called youtube, where I could find all kinds of music videos and live performances from my favorite bands.

Today, I use the internet almost immediately when I wake up, as embarrasing as that is to admit. My alarm goes off. I look at the weather forcast for the day. I see what pictures my friend Rob put up on instagram while I was sleeping. Then I get out of bed, get the coffee started, and switch to the laptop where the real media injection starts. I have a handful of blogs I check in on every day. Usually first thing in the morning, sometimes many times a day, depending on how busy I am at work. Again, shame. I get the latest news and opinions in the bicycle world from www.bikerumor.com, alternate uber-hip cool guy bike stuff from www.prollyisnotprobably.com and everything music (mostly metal music) from www.metalsucks.com. If those sites are down, or I miss a day of posts, I kind of feel lost and a little dead inside. Shame, Shame Shame. Seriously, though, the contents of these blogs have become a staple in the 24-hour life cycle of Dan Smith. How do I feel about that? A little embarassed. But, if you'd like, I can tell you why you'll probably think that the new Opeth CD sucks, and why Eight speeds probably aren't enough for an internal hub on a fully-loaded touring bike. If you had asked me this stuff three years ago I would have probably been just as confused as you are. But now, thanks to these silly blogs, I have all of this questionably usless (ful?) information sloshing around inside my skull.

So here's to the next 15 weeks. This is a big move for me. I hope that I've changed enough in the last five years to make this a successful go around. I'm doing this for me this time. The more rewarding things I'm finding in life are those that I have to work for, and have no idea what I'm doing. An online tech class without face-to-face interaction with the person doling out the grades is a perfect. example.
I'll ask questions and stay teachable. The older I get, the more I see there is to learn.

Thanks for listening.