the final push

And now the end is near

So I face the final curtain

This has been an experience, that's for sure.

I enjoyed learning about Rollyo, though I'm not sure if I'll ever use it again. I had lots of fun, of course, with the image generators and YouTube. And, strange as it may be, I've almost made my peace with Bloglines. The truth is, I only regularly check one of the feeds that I put in my account, and I usually do it from my laptop (where I have the same one saved in my IE "Favorites"), but when I'm not on my laptop, it's been a quick and dirty way for me to access the information I want without directly visiting the site and having it show up in the drop-down address bar. (Although, if I'm at home, even not on my laptop, I will just go straight to the site, and I can tell now at one glance whether anything is new.)

In addition to my relationship with Bloglines surprising me, I was also sort of amazed to discover how much about the Internet I never wanted to know. Although too many people assume something to the contrary, I've never claimed to know anything about the Internet or technology in general; I teach myself most of what I want to know through exploration, and if I don't know something, it's usually because I don't want to know it. The various exercises included in PRL's "20 Things" program exposed me to a number of things on the Internet that I really just didn't want to know existed. I got very uncomfortable with tagging, publicizing RSS feeds, and even blogging. After some of my experiences, I started feeling very paranoid, as if Big Brother really were watching--or could. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt that way. Suddenly, I went from amateur 'net surfer to unwitting conspiracy theorist! And I felt like an old grouch, too, stuck in the past and unwilling to leap into the future with the rest of my lemming friends. While I've never been one to blindly follow new trends, that feeling was also a first for me. Never before had I so pined for regression! So that was new, and that was surprising.

Overall, this program had a unique impact on my education in that it made me want to crawl back into my shell and never again emerge. What is it they say, ignorance is bliss? How true. Knowledge is power, but power corrupts, so doesn't that mean that knowledge corrupts? I'm reminded of a lyric from "Good and Evil" from Jekyll & Hyde: "Adam and Eve and the apple tore Eden apart." Anecdotally, was Eden not the most blissful place to be until the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge was consumed? [And we're all on a path back to the garden. That's the inescapable fate of mankind--reversion to sloth and ignorance. God bless the efficacy of technology!]

I have had many regrets in my life, but none really worth mentioning or fretting over. I've also had many complaints in my life, but similarly few to voice emphatically. My one suggestion for this activity is this: I wish it had included/required more interaction with fellow Pamunkey staffers, like by sharing things with one another over the Internet. I mean, if we're talking about the community nature of the web, why not ask everyone to share their favorite website, then ask bloggers to locate another staffer's blog, visit the recommended site, and blog their own thoughts about it? That would get everyone reading someone else's blog, exploring a new site, and maybe even learning a little about the person who posted it. It would also give folks a little more freedom to tailor their experiences to something that would be personally useful outside of work.

And finally, through ups and downs, I had a generally good time.

codpasting... or, podcasting

I found the how-to tutorials for podcasting very interesting. I have several friends with shows--though I never listen to them--so it was cool to see how they go about doing what they do.

As for podcasts that interest me, I located the Modlin Center podcasts, added that feed to my Bloglines account, and tried to listen to a couple of them on the office computer at the library. After finally loading, the show I wanted to hear wouldn't play. I don't know if there was something corrupt with the file, or if QuickTime is outdated on this computer, or what. At any rate, I was disappointed. I might try later from home or something.

Sadly, even the podcasts I tried from podcast.net were disappointing failures. Not a single one would play. Have I been doing something wrong? Is there a certain finesse one should use while clicking the "Play" button? Perhaps I'll try these from home, as well.

The 2.0 Awards

So, I explored the "Fun Stuff" category of the Web 2.0 Awards. The top selection was really cool. It was cocktailbuilder.com, and what you do is enter in the ingredients you have in your bar (soda, mixers, alcohol, fruit, etc.) and the site generates a list of cocktails--with recipes--that you can make! How awesome is that?! That would have been so handy when I was in college, instead of making all those gross experiment drinks like tequila & Sprite. And there was that one time when I drank a whole mug of vodka because I didn't have anything except for Gatorade to mix it with. I guess the "Web 2.0" aspect of it is that users can contribute their own recipes for cocktails. Anyway, this is the coolest site I've found in a long, long time.

There was another site I looked at, called onesentence.org, where you're supposed to tell a true story in only one sentence. Some of them were rather good, others were clearly written by people who thought they were being intelligent/poetic, and still others by folks trying (and failing) to be Hemingway [that's an allusion to his famous six-word story, of course].

The third site, fuzzmail, was ridiculous. I couldn't get it to work. It kept telling me that the e-mail address I was trying to use didn't work, even when I filled out a feedback form. Unless it's supposed to be a joke, it's dumb and needs to be debugged.

That is all.