Thursday, September 23, 2004
Ain't Technology Great
First of all, I need to thank everyone for their encouragement and support regarding the last post. That one was sort of posted by "accident," meaning that I didn't intend to dump so much of myself into my blog. It may be hard to believe when you look back at my postings, but there are topics I purposely refrain from using. That loneliness, until Tuesday, was one of those topics. Thanks for your encouragement and advice everyone!
Technology has a weird hold on my life. I love gadgets and innovations, and I have never been afraid of them, but lately anything with a microchip or diode has conspired against me. : )
1) Cell Phones: Everyone in the world has these things! The way that they have proliferated in American society is unreal. It was as if someone opened a gate in the mid-90's and suddenly everyone had a lot of people they needed to talk to for a lot of minutes. Everywhere you look, people are on their phones. I have even seen people on the phone as they pull out of their drive ways. What did we ever do before our cell phones? : ) I have a cell phone, but I rarely use it for more than a little black book. One of my pet peeves is when people fail to turn off their ringers for class-time, or at movies (or even church). So imagine my mortification when in Biochemistry my phone began to ring, loudly playing some hyperactive funk song. I was humiliated beyond belief. What made it worse was that the professor acknowledged the ring by saying, "Are we having a good time?" Yikes.
2) Calculators: I love calculators, which makes me a complete nerd. It amazes me the power that even the most common calculator allows us to have. For $30 you can do computations that NASA devoted teams of people and house-sized computers to in the 60's. I had to get rid of my graphing calculator recently, because I realized that no class I will ever have will allow me to use one. Teachers are paranoid because you can store information in these calculators, so they require scientific calculators. Luckily, I have a scientific calculator that I adore. I had to defend my calculators honor against my physics teacher last year, because he was pushing everyone to get graphing calculators (and I wasn't using mine at the time). He saw my scientific calculator and said "Have you ever got the right answer with that thing?" There is only one problem... it came to my attention this week that my calculator computes Henderson-Hasselbach equations wrong. This led to me missing questions on two tests, and becoming very doubtful of my own abilities. By accident, I noticed that if I broke it down into two equations, I get the right answer. So maybe my physics teacher was right...
3) Laptop Computers: Where do I start? I had something wrong with my laptop, so I took it to the school's IT department. The antivirus software was corrupted, and was not working. I didn't have a virus, but still... I got it fixed, but I had to go a whole school day without it. I hadn’t realized until then how dependant I have become on it. When I returned to IT, I got a nice lecture on not using online gaming sites like www.pogo.com . Sigh. Then, yesterday as I was blogging, I had a whole blog written about equilibrium in our lives, and comparing my school situation to metabolic acidosis. Guess what? The new Windows Service Pack 2 that IT loaded has a bundle of new features; one being a pop-up blocker. So not only did it block my spell check, it froze my Explorer window. And I lost 30 minutes of thoughtful work. *sigh* Your loss, I guess... : )
Well, I hope you all have a great weekend. I have a test today and one tomorrow, and two next week so wish me luck, and don't be mad if my updates are sparse. I'll try to make them worth your while. Thanks for reading my blog by the way, September has been a great month. We set a new record for visits (I'll share the number when the month is done).
See ya!
Technology has a weird hold on my life. I love gadgets and innovations, and I have never been afraid of them, but lately anything with a microchip or diode has conspired against me. : )
1) Cell Phones: Everyone in the world has these things! The way that they have proliferated in American society is unreal. It was as if someone opened a gate in the mid-90's and suddenly everyone had a lot of people they needed to talk to for a lot of minutes. Everywhere you look, people are on their phones. I have even seen people on the phone as they pull out of their drive ways. What did we ever do before our cell phones? : ) I have a cell phone, but I rarely use it for more than a little black book. One of my pet peeves is when people fail to turn off their ringers for class-time, or at movies (or even church). So imagine my mortification when in Biochemistry my phone began to ring, loudly playing some hyperactive funk song. I was humiliated beyond belief. What made it worse was that the professor acknowledged the ring by saying, "Are we having a good time?" Yikes.
2) Calculators: I love calculators, which makes me a complete nerd. It amazes me the power that even the most common calculator allows us to have. For $30 you can do computations that NASA devoted teams of people and house-sized computers to in the 60's. I had to get rid of my graphing calculator recently, because I realized that no class I will ever have will allow me to use one. Teachers are paranoid because you can store information in these calculators, so they require scientific calculators. Luckily, I have a scientific calculator that I adore. I had to defend my calculators honor against my physics teacher last year, because he was pushing everyone to get graphing calculators (and I wasn't using mine at the time). He saw my scientific calculator and said "Have you ever got the right answer with that thing?" There is only one problem... it came to my attention this week that my calculator computes Henderson-Hasselbach equations wrong. This led to me missing questions on two tests, and becoming very doubtful of my own abilities. By accident, I noticed that if I broke it down into two equations, I get the right answer. So maybe my physics teacher was right...
3) Laptop Computers: Where do I start? I had something wrong with my laptop, so I took it to the school's IT department. The antivirus software was corrupted, and was not working. I didn't have a virus, but still... I got it fixed, but I had to go a whole school day without it. I hadn’t realized until then how dependant I have become on it. When I returned to IT, I got a nice lecture on not using online gaming sites like www.pogo.com . Sigh. Then, yesterday as I was blogging, I had a whole blog written about equilibrium in our lives, and comparing my school situation to metabolic acidosis. Guess what? The new Windows Service Pack 2 that IT loaded has a bundle of new features; one being a pop-up blocker. So not only did it block my spell check, it froze my Explorer window. And I lost 30 minutes of thoughtful work. *sigh* Your loss, I guess... : )
Well, I hope you all have a great weekend. I have a test today and one tomorrow, and two next week so wish me luck, and don't be mad if my updates are sparse. I'll try to make them worth your while. Thanks for reading my blog by the way, September has been a great month. We set a new record for visits (I'll share the number when the month is done).
See ya!
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