As I grew into a teenager the family used Windows 95 and then 98, yes I was even introduced to their creepy uncle Bob.  Many a Social Studies project was directly and wholly sourced from Encarta.  In school we had continued exposure to various iterations of Macs.  Since much like STD’s and illicit drugs, Apple believed firmly in the hook um young and keep them as a customer for life philosophy.

Then I went off to college and in the fecundity of morally ambiguous choices freshman year hooked up with a sultry copy of Windows XP from this dude who was “totally” a Microsoft Software Rep or something.  Then as I grew wiser and wanted to broaden my horizons, and test my paitence, I entered my experiemental period where I dipped my toe into the seedy dank, oh so dank, backroom world of Linux and fell in with the Red Hat crowd.  At somepoint in college I met the blacksheep of the Windows family ME.  As I watched it sitting in the corner chewing on paste I thought it best to not hang out with it a whole lot.

As I grew and saw my academic career winding to a close, I entered into my student teaching .  Here I met with this candy corn shaped oddity called the iMac.  Much like true candy corn I still believe that the iMac can rot your teeth, stomach and soul.  It was without a doubt the most broken, faulty, crash ridden computer I’ve ever had the misfortune of using.  Much like teachers once they get tenure, this computer which entered the school with dreams and hopes of being a conduit of knowledge to it’s pupils was beaten and broken by the rarely washed, hormonal hordes of 8th Graders that stormed the halls.

Then I entered my mid twenties and found that sultry copy of Windows XP had ditched the skin tight pleather of those heady college years for sweat pants that were still form fitted enough to remind of the goods underneath, but you could get comfortable with and just settled down and watch a DVD on.

As life goes, I settled into a career and much like the red head you smile at a little too much at the bar, I hooked up Win XP 64bit.  It was safe, same economic group, it cleans up well and you and introduce it to your parents, but you’re thinking maybe this is the OS that still puts the pleather on from time to time and goes out to the bars.  Then I found out that XP 64 held some very elitist views and wouldn’t associate with most of my trusty old friends.  Won’t play Warcraft 2, it can eat my ass.  Oh like all redheads, the hopes were high, the install was crazy, and then you learned that sparkle of excitement in its eye was actually the crazy trying to break out.

As I sit here closer to 30 than 20 with XP 64 on my desktop, since I have too much pride to admit some form fitting sweat pants are a pretty good thing; and Win 7 Ultimate, I’m a pig I know I hooked up with the hotter younger OS, on my laptop.  I knew that Vista the middle sister got passed around like a party favor by that crowd in college, so I stayed away completely.  I look back and have to admit I’ve dabbled around with a good bit of the modern mainstream operating systems.  In my personal opinion the best thing you can do is find the operating system that works for you.

There are fanboys in all the camps, and the simple truth is, that is all they are, fan boys.  With a desperate need to justify their personal choices they nerd rage against the world.  Personally I think, buying a cutting edge Mac is like dating the head cheerleader, it’ll get you status with the people who think that’s important and it’ll cost you an arm and a leg.  If you invest the same amount in an IBM based system you’ll have a computer you know inside and out and can really love for years to come. You mistreat any system and it won’t support you, give it a little love and it’ll stay there with you until it’s hard drives seize and heat sinks fail.

Just stay away from the redheads and Vista, and you’ll do alright.

I think the public at large has finally shaken the dew off this lily and what they’re left with isn’t as amazing as they had hoped it would be.  I don’t find Twitter particularly useful for things such as online collaboration or even getting my ideas across (hence this blog).  To use a probably out of date analogy I see Twitter just being an easy to update IM Client status message.  Back in college I’d put up “At Class” etc to let folks know where I was.  For collaboration I see far greater potential in Google’s Wave for instance.

Do I think Twitter is going to vanish anytime soon, no.  Do I see it expanding into some super web presence that single-handedly fosters global free information, no.  It is what it is, a simple way to link data (small posts, or urls to greater information) to others, how relevant you make that information is up to you.  Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go back to cyber-stalking Ashton Kutcher and President Obama.

The book is written in a great style that tells these gentlemens’ story without feeling like a drawn out history text book.  I highly recommend it for anyone who has an interest in the Cold War.

My impressions of it were very positive.  While I’ve been a fan of Guinness since college, it’s always been something that I can only drink one or two of since it’s so heavy.  Friends have compared drinking Guinness to eating bread, and I can’t say they’re very far off.  The 250 wasn’t as thick while keeping the strong flavors that I’ve come to expect from stouts and Guinness in particular.

I have to say Guinness 250 is a refreshing option if you, like me, tend to avoid beers that have light/lite in their name.  It had strong flavors but a smoother finish than regular Guinness.  Since the good people at Guinness say it’s a limited time brew I strongly recommend trying a pint before it’s gone.

Hopefully this will be the beginning of more advanced computer interfaces options meeting the retail market at a more reasonable price point.

This got my dusty old history brain rumbling  again.

Honestly I’m not all that surprised that they’ve found an earlier temple.  One of the interesting things about the neolithic era and the transition from hunter gather to agricultural society, is that it wasn’t a singular event but more like the ebb and flow of the tides.  Tribes of humans settled down tried to become farmers, sometimes it worked and other times it failed.  The temple is in the region where the known ancient near east civilizations were founded.  Sumeria was only a few hundred miles away further down the Fertile Crescent.  Granted that was 2-3 thousand years later, but just a hop, skip and jump away

I don’t agree with Schmidt’s closing statement that the temple was buried and forgotten because the religious views of the region changed and they didn’t need the old gods anymore.  If we look at other examples of religious changes in regions… The Roman’s adopted much of the Greek pantheon and just gave them new names.  The Turks in Turkey and the Moors in Spain converted Christian churches into mosques.  They did this because it gives the new religion continuity and a longer history by absorbing the previous religions of the land in question.  The Islamic crescent moon has been a religious symbol in the Near East going back to the Sumerian era.

I think he is giving an overly simple answer to what may be a large part of this temple’s history why after a millennium of use did the hunter gatherers stop meeting here, what happened to change this region?

I’m very glad to see that the amount of words we’re exposed to in our daily lives has actually increased.  After a quick search I haven’t found much that has assessed the quality of the written word we’re exposed to these days.  From my personal observations I feel that the quality of what is being written is decreasing.  Personally, I don’t have a problem with “leet speak” as much as words that fail to intelligently and comprehensively express their information.  Without parroting my “The Dumbing of Humanity Through Improved Training Methods.” I do feel that we need to strive to maintain the highest quality of the words we do express.  It is too easy to short cut our thoughts and fail to express our points clearly.

Modern web guides are mostly an image with one or two sentence blurbs that explain the image.  While this book had diagrams to show the skills being described, the majority of the information was described through those good old fashioned words.  The bigger, personally better, thing I noticed is not only did it describe what to do but why.  It went into how the different actions worked in terms of pressures on certain parts of the ski, edging the skis and why, also how to move your body up and down while making turns etc.  It was far more detailed and supported genuine mastery of the skill and not just recitation ability.

I mentioned this to Katie and she said that honestly there is so much to know that she doesn’t want to fill her brain with useless information about skiing.  She’s a very bright woman who has always shown me to be fairly intellectual so this desire to minimize information surprised me.  She said that we’re well past the days when we can have true renaissance men because there is simply too much to know in this day and age.  In this day and age we have to be more selective with what fill our minds with.  This minimalist view of just give me the knowledge I need for the task at hand strikes me as the intellectual equivalent of fast food.  Just like fast food, it’s there, it’s edible but it’s hardly the same thing as knowing how to cook a multi-course dinner.

As we have broadened the reach of training materials to greater audiences at the same time we have needed to start developing them for the lowest common denominator.  In my experiences with everything from google searching how-to guides to online graduate level courses, I’ve seen a progressive lowering of the definition of mastery in many areas of knowledge.  I don’t see the needed correlation between broader access to information and the simplification of information.  It is completely possible to maintain higher knowledge while using modern technology as the platform.  We just have to make a concerted effort to keep the quality level there as we develop training and information modules.

While I agree the amount of knowledge that is available in the modern world is far vaster than that of the renaissance era, the thing that defined those men was their drive to master all knowledge they were exposed to.  I see more and more examples of people who just want the simplified “sound bite” answer to their inquiry instead of striving to master a concept.  If the readily available information were developed at higher standards of intellectual quality I’d hope that would be a solid step in the right direction.  That people would start to have a greater understanding of more than just a single field or two.

Next time you have the opportunity to develop a training module, ask yourself are you creating a multi-course dinner or just ordering fast food.

To find some answers, I did a quick search on CNN for H1N1,  I was going to search Fox News but I didn’t really need Glen Beck telling me I have to buy gold to ward of H1N1.  Now the first thing CNN.com asked me is if I meant “hun.”  Yes I actually was looking for information on a millennial past horse tribe from the steppes.  Here are a couple of headlines that caught my eye… “Poll: America Losing Confidence in H1N1 Battle,” this one was from the middle of November so about a month after the peak of the infection rate.  I’m glad I’m not the only person who missed the memo.  I’m now worried about uninformed people taking polls, thanks CNN.  My favorite headline though was “Cat Catches H1N1″ I’m very glad when this news story broke we didn’t have a repeat of the good old plague days when we would have just gathered up all the cats in a sack and tossed them in the river.

Some CDC Charts

Now this is not to say that globally the situation is over but in our little corner I think we can breath a sigh of relief, just not in each others faces please.  If you would like to read more about the global situation as it relates to H1N1 I strongly encourage you to read the WHO Pandemic Updates.  If that’s not your bag then I encourage you to go back to surfing the news waves for the next tid bit about Tiger Woods and have a good day.