Now, I can barely even keep my attention long enough to write this blog post, never mind read the Alexandr Solzhenitsyn book I bought a few months back (I really do want to read it, though). There are some times I have trouble focusing long enough to read just a short article from Wired.com or Motor Trend. This has started to increase since graduating college in 2008: I still read a lot in college and not just for class. I know a big part of it is having too many distractions: I’m listinging to my favorite radio morning talk show right now as I type this, and I have a hard time doing things without either music, radio, or the TV on.

I feel like computers play a big role in this for me. It’s an information overload on a scale never seen before. I use reddit.com, which is nothing but information. Just looking at the four homepage tabs gives 100 links to go through, giving a combination of both pictures, graphs, and articles. And even just going on websites like wired.com will give me hours of reading. I hate to think what would happen if I let myself succumb to the dark side that is Twitter. I’d probably end up crouched in a shadowy corner, rocking on my heals while mumbling jibberish to myself. I know I’ve talked about my true feelings for Twitter in previous posts so I won’t go into that again, but it’s scary to think what the next generation of twenty-somethings will be like a few years from now. If I–as a writer by education and profession–am having trouble with my attention span for no documented medical reason, I don’t even want to know how the next generation will be.

This isn’t so much a worry with older folks, whether 30 or 70, because they grew up in a different era. Computers weren’t the rage (or in existence), and reading was all the rage. Even if these people are in-depth in the internet and social networking, they, for the most part, spent more of their lives without the internet. I’m not trying to shoot down my friends the internet and computers, but it’s a big part of it.

I realize this is somewhat of a carryover from my previous post, but I think it’s a big issue that’s hurting my own writing and even, to a point, my work ethic. My job is  a rollercoaster of too much to do in too little time and so little to do I contemplate counting my hair to keep occupied. Certainly, I need to get back into writing. I’ve got this great little arena here that is my blog, and even if no one reads it, it’s a great outlet for writing. Hell, no one reads most of what I write anyway because I don’t share it with people.

I’m still working for BAH and still writing, but in April I’m starting on a new task, helping out with BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure). We’re managing the relocation of Ft. Monmouth (NJ) to Aberdeen Proving Grounds (MD). Ft. Monmouth is where our client is currently based out of.

Not sure if I mentioned this in a previous post and I’m too lazy to go back and read through them, but I’m married now and have been since July. We got a puppy at the beginning of February the day the massive snow storm started. She’s an Australian shepherd named Lucy and is quite a handful. I can’t wait till she stops bitting and her bark deepens (the high-pitched yelp she shoots out should be a finishing move in Mortal Kombat).

The puppy eats up a lot of my free time, but it’s all good. She’s a great addition to the family.

I’ve been struggling with writer’s block for quite some time. For a while I had been working on a new novel, but I’ve sort of abandoned that. I tend to start writing something without any real direction so then it goes down the tubes. I just don’t feel I have the attention span for a novel, but that’s why I love short storise and one-act plays. I have been toying around with writing a screenplay and have a few general of what I want it to be about, but again, I can’t figure out the ending or the over-arching plot that’s needed to write something like this. I’m hoping it’ll come to me soon so I can start writing. I think this time around I’m going to do things properly and create an outline before starting to keep me on track. It’ll be interesting: I’ve only ever written an outline when I was forced to for a class and have never written one for one of my creative works.

On another note, I think Twitter is going to destroy the world. Screw this 2012 apocolypse bulshit. Kids nowadays have poor enough attention spans as is, but now we’ve got Twitter limiting people to only 140 characters so kids won’t want to read more than that. Pretty soon all knowledge will be lost because if you don’t have the attention to read more than 140 characters, you sure as hell won’t have the attention to listen to someone pass on vast quantities of information, Plato-style.

And this Chatroulette thing, yeah that’s real smart. Video chatting with random people. I saw a screen grab of one conversation that was between a high school-aged kid and a 5-year-old. The teen said, “Does your mom know you’re on the internet?” And the 5-year-old responded something like, “Does your mom know you’re a faggot?” /mind boggled/ What is this world coming to? Fuck Afghanistan. We need help on the homefront.

I’ve yet to see Avatar (but want to), though there are a lot of “great” movies I haven’t seen (at least in ful): The Godfather and Good Fellas, to name a few. No, I’m not trying to compare Avatar to The Godfather, just grouping them as “great” movies. (I put “great” in quotes because it’s purely subjective.) I’m not, however, big on this whole 3D TV thing. I think it’s a waste. Who wants to put on (non)reading glasses to watch TV? I used to wear glasses (have contacts now) and trying to watch 3D movies at Disney World was a pain.

I’m all for new technologies, but I think some are pretty absurd. Like those interactive “hampster balls” that let you “travel” to another country without leaving your house. Americans are fat and closeted enough; don’t give those people another excuse to become reclusive. Motion-controllers for video games (like Microsoft’s Project Natal) are getting old fast. They’re all trying to compete with the Wii. At least the Wii’s motion-control is bad-ass. Things like Project Natal will make you look more ridiculous than someone playing “Barbie Girl” on DDR in public.

Back to writing though (don’t you just love how I jump around with little to know transisitions?), I think there needs to be one standardized writing style (MLA FTW). Instead, we have a bajillion different styles, and most don’t make any sense. Take BAH for example: their internal writing style is APA (American Psychologists Association), but the government uses their own style that’s based around MLA. We’re not pyschologists; why are we using their writing style? At least we’re not using AP. /shudders/ I’ve never seen a more wanton disregard for commas. What did they ever do to you? *looks at AP style* Come on, no comma between the penultimate item and the and in a list of three or more items? Seriously? What if you’ve got a list with compound items, like peanut butter and jelly? What then? Hmm?

Okay, I’ll hop off my soap box, for now.

By the way: yay for warm weather!

So what have I been up to? I’m working as a technical writer for Booz Allen Hamilton. It has its ups and downs, but what job doesn’t? It’s fun enough, though, and I’m glad to be writing. I just wish I was doing something more hands on–kind of hard to do as a writer; I should’ve been an engineer.

At this point, I’m not sure where I want to go in my career. The managers around here want to push me into the cubby holes they think I’d like, but are really wants they want filled. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t know that I really like any of that. I kind of want to be a teacher. Not grade school–I’d get fired after the first six minutes–but college. So that means I need to figure out what I want my master’s in, and then probably have to get a Ph.D.

And why is that? Well, it’s simply because we’re getting buried in an avalanche (sorry for the cliche) of bullshit. I’ve done it before writing papers in school; the less attentive professors fell for it (mainly the non-English-teaching ones), but the better ones caught on most of the time. But those people are experts in writing. How many econ experts do you know? I know a finance major and that’s about it.

I think the government needs to get someone who’s really good at layspeak to go on TV and explain to the country just what the hell’s going on. And explain it as if we were all 5, because quite frankly a lot of people have that mentality. I nominate Bill Nye. Sure, he’s a science geek, but he’s great at explaining things in layterms and probably has a better chance of understanding this economic bullshit better than most of the country. So we have the country’s econ experts explain what’s going on to Nye in Econ-ese, and then Nye will turn around and explain that explanation in layspeak.

Half the battle is knowing in specific terms what the hell is giong on. I have conversations with my future-father-in-law about all this econ bs, and most of the time I really don’t understand it. I’m not sure he even understands all of it.

I’m always getting told by people to “watch your mouth.” First off, while I’ve uttered that phrase myself, “watch your mouth” is a bit of a lesson in futility. My eyes can only go so far as t look at my nose (without a mirror).

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the first right on the Consitution the right to freedom of speech? But oh no, I’ve got to watch what the hell I say. I can understand if my language is offensive in so far as me insulting someone, saying something like, “You’re such an *expletive deleted* *censored*!” But just saying “Damnit to hell?” Come on. Well, I’ll give you that one since some would argue that’s blasphemy, but that’s a realm I’m not going to delve into now.

This is especially a problem for me for two reasons. The first is that I spent six months living in England where even the Queen is wont to drop the F-bomb. (I’m not entirely sure how true that last statement is, but you see what I’m getting at.) The second reason is that none of my friends have any qualms about swearing. Sometimes we swear at each other just for the fun of it.

I know I’m not the only proponent of ditching censorship laws (insofar as FCC is concerned) and generally not swearing. George Carlin was a big supporter of saying what was on his mind. I mean, he’s got a whole spiel about the many uses of the word “fuck.” After all, some people say that it means “Fornication Under Consent of King.” Again, how true this is, I don’t know.

Others use a phrase popular with The Simpsons: “Won’t somebody please think of the children!” Puh-leez. You can’t protect your kids forever; they have to grow up at some point. Hell, they’ll be exposed to worse things reading the Bible than listening to the dreck that comes out of the mouths of swearers like me. At least I don’t talk about the apocolypse.

TV is starting to come around. A few years ago, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone pushed to get the FCC to allow them to use the word “shit” in an episode fo their show. Surprisely, it was agreed upon, with the thought that “shit” would pop up only a handful of times. Fact is, they used the word “shit” more times in a twenty minute episode than there are hours in a day. If memory serves, the episode contained over 150 counts of the word. That’s a lot of shit.

I remember when I was in high school I was playing in the snow in front of a friend’s house. For some reason, I swore. Not a major one (I wasn’t used to the word “fuck” by then), but a swear nonetheless. At the same time, a mother with a baby in a stroller came walking by; I didn’t see her. She shouts in my direction, “Virgin ears!” to tell me I shouldn’t be shouting. Look lady, if you’re damn kid is in a fucking stroller, he ain’t gonna understand the shit that comes out of my mouth. And if he does, more power to him.

George W. Bush even said “shit” on TV. And he had to fucking apologize for it! Are you kidding me?

This is a natural part of life; I really don’t think that it should be censored. The same goes for nudity. Well, everybody in the world has one set of those parts, and it’ll be seen sooner or later. Why not allow it on TV? The children. It’s always about those damn kids. I can understand not showing hard core porn on TV; I’m not promoting that. But a pair of breasts? That’s childish. They’re there, and you can’t avoid it.

I guess the point of all this is: stop being so FUCKING uptight America. You’re cool, and I love you, but chill the fuck out for fuck’s sake.

A favorite site of mine is wired.com. I enjoy reading their articles. But in doing so, there are several expectations that I have of them, since that site consists what I would consider “straight-up newsies.” What do I mean by this? Well, they’re doing out-right news reporting, for the most part, on topics like you might find in the New York Times. Sure, they are bloggers, but they’re blogging about real news items (as opposed to bloggers like me who just say what’s on their minds) like the Somali pirates.

Anyway, on to the expectations

1. They (now on referring to straight-up newsies) should get their facts right. That said, people make mistakes and if they’re correctly in a timely and reasonable fashion, then no harm done.
2. They need to have impeccible grammar and sentence structure. On Wired, I rarely ever read a blog-article that doesn’t contain at least one grammatical error and that includes ones written by the editors of that blog, including forgetting punctuation and writing fragments. Again, peopel make mistakes, but because this is writing, I won’t excuse this. (Read up on Plato’s views of writing if you disagree with me on this.)
3. They should separate personal opinion from fact. Again, I’m going to refer to Wired’s writers here. The fact is, most of the articles on the site are written by day-to-day bloggers, who, arguably, aren’t straight-up newsies, but they’re posting straight-up news so that qualifies them as straight-up newsies. But because they are bloggers, I always throw them a bone when they post opinion. That’s the bread and butter of blogging. I always see people bitching in the comments that an author added a pinch of opinion to the article soup. Well, suck it up. I think the authors should just separate it better or illustrate the fact that what they’re about to write is opinion.

Now, I’ll grant you that I probably have a few grammatical errors/typos in this blog entry, and I’m fairly positive that I have at least one fragment here. But I’m not a straight-up newsie: I’m a day-to-day blogger posting his opinions. Plus, this computer sucks so typing here is a little effed up.

But as far as a status update goes, my fiance and I are looking into buying a (town)house. We’re excited, but it’s hard getting things done when we’ve got work, especially because she’s a teacher so I can’t talk to her during the day. But I’m gathering lots of info and doing lots of research on my own during free time at work. Why do I have free time? Because the user manual I’m working on is for a project that’s a work-in-progress that I have no control of so I can’t spool out constant info to put into the manual. Plus, I have to keep waiting on a coworker to squeeze time into his busy schedule to review the UM to make comments and such.

The new WordPress is interesting, but I like it. This QuickPress widget (in which I’m writing this post) is very convenient.

/end rant

I don’t think there is just one thing that I can call “most valuable” when it comes to things I’ve learned from this class. But I can narrow it down to two. The first is blogging and RSS feeds (the two are related enough to be folded into one). I had a lot of fun with these assignments, whether it’s my rants about how horrible people are or even posts for class assignments, like choosing a good screen capture program. I thoroughly enjoyed blogging and don’t plan on stopping. And RSS feeds are great for me: I’m not a big fan of watching the news, but the feeds I subscribe to keep me up-to-date on many of the happenings in the world. I just need to add some more news-specific ones (I’ve only got a few Wall Street Journal ones at this point).

The other valuable thing I’ve learned is web design. For class we only had to make a very basic website, but learning HTML and how to use Dreamweaver let me help my roommate/close friend design his website (with which we’re still having issues). It’s also a great thing to be able to put down on a resume.

To be quite honest, I was most surprised by the fact that there were only four people in the class (from two the first day). It’s the smallest class I’ve had, followed by my freshman English class that had six. It also surprised me that web design isn’t insanely difficult–on a basic level. I was able to put together a simple site with relative issues. Of course, I’ve run through the gambit of easy and head-smashing-on-the-table difficult problems while working on my roommate’s site.

Before the first day of the class, I was assuming this was going to be, largely, a writing class (hence the name Writing for New Media). But at this point I would not consider COM315 a writing class. The only true writing we did was for our blogs. However, all of the other writing classes I’ve taken taught the students how to write. I didn’t feel like this class did. Sure, there are considerations for writing for the web, but it didn’t take thirty one-and-a-half-hour classes to learn that. It took, perhaps, five minutes. I think it would be beneficial to rename the class simply “COM315: New Media.” I’m not sure why we didn’t learn writing when that’s stated in the name of the class, but it’s not really a disappointment: I’m a professional writing major so I’ve had plenty of time learning writing.

I like that I was able to write whatever I wanted (more or less) in my blog, along with the required blog posts. There really would be no other way to get my views on the ultimate badass out to the public, otherwise. Not that anybody ever reads my blog other than Dr. Webb, though.

I really enjoyed this class and benefited from it greatly. I think it wouldn’t have been as good a class were there more students enrolled. With only four of us, Dr. Webb was able ot tailor the class more towards what we each wanted to learn, which was cool. I definitely would recommend this class to other students, but it’s not like any of them are reading this post anyway.