Disguise the truth with wordiness

It’s something politicians and lawyers are good at, and right now the former is really shining in this field with the economic troubles we’re having. I think a major part of the problem is that no one has any clue as to what’s truly going on. Sure, we know the banks are tanking and their execs are stealing our money (like the $78 billion that disappeared with the first stimulus package), but I don’t think we really know the nitty-gritty of what’s going on.

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.

Epic fail

So as it turns out, the housing market hasn’t plummeted everywhere. Over the weekend, my fiance bought a house. Well, we got our bid accepted and are waiting on the seller to sign the contract. But did we get an amazing deal? No. We were more or less forced to bid only $10k less than asking price.
Why? Well, it’s because hte housing market hasn’t failed everywhere. In this area, the median house goes for about $224k, the high is about $240k, and the low a mere $205k. While I wanted to bid $200k (asking $219k), that wouldn’t have jived, according to the agent, because with about $3500 seller contribution, he’d be making less than $200k. Boo fucking hoo. He bought the damn house for $154k. People have told me that doesn’t matter, but when the president wants to throw a trillion dollars into the economny, I’d say it does, especially because the housing market started this whole deal.
But hey, we’ve got the house so it’s not all that big a deal. Though, if the housing market really was as shitty as everyone says (and it certainly is elsewhere) it is throughout the whole country, then perhaps we could’ve made out like bandits. But unfortunately, in this neighborhood, the sellers are making out like bandits.

I’ll give you something to *censored* whine about…

Oh censorship. Thou art the bane of my existance.

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.

Expectations of straight-up newsies

(I say “newsies” because I don’t feel that “journalists” really cover news bloggers.)

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.

The Return

So I’ve decided to attempt to return to blogging. No guarantees on how regular these posts will be or what they’ll entail, but I’ll soon be switching to a new job, which should give me more time for stuff like this (after work, that is) because I’ll no longer have a 5-6 hour daily commute.

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.

work work

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post, but I’ve decided to once again post on the folly of job searches. I’ve currently got an internship with MannKind Corporation, a biopharmaceutical firm with a manufacturing plant in Danbury, CT, where I’m working. Out of about thirteen interns, I’m the only college grad, and yet, I’m making the same as all the other interns, even one who has yet to start college. Go figure. On top of this, I’ve had more training and experience in the two weeks I’ve been there than in my entire life, and I still can’t find a full time job. People keep saying that it’s because the economy is bad, but I say that’s horseshit. I’ve been applying since January, even to jobs that ask for a year or less experience. I might as well sit on a peg and rotate…

/end rant

COM315 Round Up

It’s hard to believe, but I’m just a mere seventeen days from graduation. It’s kind of scary, really. These four years have flown by, just like everybody said they would. But this isn’t a time for depression. Instead, I’ll be going over COM 315, Writing for New Media, and giving reflections on the class.

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.

Critique of a website

This week’s blog assignment is a critique of a website based on feedback and visibility, constraints, mapping, consistency, and affordances. I’m going to use Planet Half-Life for this critique because I’m quite familiar with it, considering I work for the site.

1. Feedback and Visibility: This part refers to what the site is telling you when you perform a certain task, whether it’s an error or you’re doing something correctly. I’ve not encountered errors too often with this site, but when the site itself has an error (for instance, there’s a page missing), it’s usually the internet browser noting the error and generally not the site itself. However, in both instances something appears saying that there’s an error, which is usually a separate page. When you’re doing something right, however, it’s easy to know that you are because you’ll have found the information you’re looking for, or have gotten to the point at which you want to be.

2. Constraints: The site doesn’t really have any constraints to it. It’s designed to give information so users aren’t really blocked from doing or viewing anything because if it’s on the site it’s designed for users to see. Although, the site can be limiting based on the user’s end goal because it doesn’t have all the information available in the universe or even what it’s specifically about.

3. Mapping: The site is quite intuitive as far as usage. The design allows it to act the way one would expect it to.

4. Consistency: The similar objects on the site behave similarly and the dissimilar objects behave differently. However, there isn’t a whole lot in the site is different as far as actions go: it’s mostly links to get to bits of information.

5. Affordances: This refers to how easy is it for people to know how to do things. The site is really intuitive for usage: there’s nothing complex about it, merely a slew of links and text to build the website’s design.

Clone yourself without the all the legal garbage

Well, almost. It’s been a while since my last post, but I’ve been busy with school, and we’ve been doing a lot of other stuff in COM315. This week, however, our assignment is to critique Second Life and virtual worlds.

Figuring out Second Life wasn’t the easiest thing to do. As I like to do with a lot of things for this class, I tried to figure it out on my own without the aide of a tutorial. The program isn’t all too intuitive. Some things appear to be straight-forward, but that’s not always the case.

The aesthetics weren’t all to pleasing. It looked very cartoony and poorly put together, visually. I can understand why, though: not everyone is going to have a computer that can handle high graphics and the makers want as many people as possible to be able to play. But, of course, it did leave me with the feeling that, yes, I really am playing a game. I’ve played other games with a much higher level of realism that make me feel like I’m actually there in the action; I never really got that from Second Life. And while I’ve never played other Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), I’ve seen footage from them and know that they’re marginally less realistic. Taking World of Warcraft into consideration, nothing is realistic because everything is mythical.

The aesthetics certainly led to a bit of a feeling of distrust. It’s easy to fool people in the game. Guys can pose as women and vice versa; I even saw one character while in class that looked like a cross between a squirrel and a fox. How can you trust someone who’s a squirrelfox? They’re both an obnoxious acorn-lover and crafty carnivore at the same time. While in class on Wednesday, a classmate, mentioned that you could go visit the Twin Towers. Things like that also lend to distrust.

As for an ideal virtual world, I really couldn’t say. I’m quite content with the real thing so never really put much consideration into a virtual one. However, I do think that the ideal place should look more like the real thing. Current virtual worlds only rely on visual and auditory signals; there’s nothing else. To gain 100% realism, the other three sense should be thrown in somehow, but then that leads me back to my point about the real world being better than any virtual world. Tactile virtual reality is here already to some degree: the Wii has a much more phyiscal input requirement than other virtual environments. Sure, other games have a mandatory tactile input, but the Wii takes it to a new level.

Isn’t humanity grand?

According to a Popular Science RSS feed article, wolves have recently been taken off the endangered species list. And three states already have plans to put them back on the list, if not wipe them out completely. I realize that the wolves are eating farmers’ cattle, but it’s a fact of life. The wolves were here first so we have to make considerations for them. Oh, but wait, we’re humans: we don’t do that sort of thing.