It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: internet (Page 1 of 6)

Day 353: facebook

January 30, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Facebook may be the most important website of my life right now.

Sure, Google is important (how would I find anything on the wild and untamed Internet without you?) and there are specialized websites, like Wells Fargo, that handle my financial transactions without which life would be much more inconvenient.

But Facebook is a site that I visit every day and it is a self-contained microcosm of everything important that happens in my life. My moment-to-moment Twitter thoughts are cross-posted to Facebook, and I get far more comments on Facebook than replies on Twitter. My daily blog entry is imported into Facebook, where I (once again) get far more comments than on my actual blog’s website.

I learn about high school friends getting married on Facebook, co-workers getting engaged on Facebook, current events and today’s zeitgeist on Facebook. It’s the first place I go if I need a cell phone number or for a picture of someone’s new baby.

I don’t spend hours on the site each day, but I find it somewhat exciting that one website can add a layer of social interaction and connection that elevates my daily actions and thoughts from personal to communal. This is especially exciting because only a scant decade ago, this would have been impossible.

So here’s to you, Facebook! Despite your shady ads that use profile pictures, always evolving and somewhat complicated privacy settings, and annoying games that post items to the news feed once a minute, I like you and hope that our future relationship continues to be agreeable.

Day 348: future tech

January 26, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I wish I could do more things over the Internet.

And it’s not because I dislike people.  I enjoy the company of humans and I’ve been known to even initiate gatherings of humans so that a medium-sized group may form in a single location and we may rejoice over a common interest or goal, like football or cheating at a high-stake baccarat game.

But people make mistakes and people have feelings and other things to do.  Interactions over the Internet are different, especially if there’s nothing but bits on the other end of the conversation.

I renewed my car registration over the Internet a few days ago, painlessly.  I was able to enter in a code specific to my car, view the bill for car registration this upcoming year, and pay with a credit card in a matter of minutes.  The system was able to serve me specifically, without time pressure, and I was able to finish the whole thing without ever having to wait in line or dig my license out of my wallet.

I enjoy ordering food over the Internet because it means that the restaurant gets an exact printout of my order and there’s less room for human error.  It also means that I don’t have to wait on the phone while other orders are taken, repeat myself over a bad connection, give my address every time, or remember to ask if I can pay with a credit card before I hang up.

The Internet codifies routine interactions that many people do so well.  I can do them efficiently and at my own pace, without needing to disturb anybody else.

The imagined future of a few decades ago was wrong.  Computers aren’t here to become intelligent and kill us and the nobody has a personal robot that looks like a person.  No, machines are used to make sure that when we order our custom pizza with a different sauce and two different toppings on each half, we get what we ordered.  And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Day 339: things that happened

January 17, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I beat Uncharted 2 last night. It was a non-stop thrill ride, even if I’m still not entirely sold on the treasure collecting part of the game. I played a bit of multiplayer today, where I was mainly manhandled by skeletons with shotguns who sounded like British people.

We made decent headway on the vine infestation in our backyard, despite strong resistance and being completely outnumbered. We will continue our quest to prevent our walls and the tree back there from being choked to death by these evil vines tomorrow if the rain doesn’t make the prospect completely miserable.

We ate at a small Chinese restaurant in San Leandro tonight named Little Namking. While we were there, Katie asked me where Namking is. I wasn’t sure. After returning home and looking it up, there actually is no Namking. It probably is a bad transliteration of Nanjing, which is actually close to Shanghai. Either way, the food was pretty good and very cheap. I can’t wait to go back another and try their signature beef chow fun. There’s nothing that compares to a good chow fun.

Then we watched the scandalous second episode of The Bachelor on a laptop in bed. I tried to log in through Facebook Connect so that I could create a text commentary for the episode with all of the snarky things Katie and I spouted but technology was not on my side tonight. I hope, however, that my attempts did not – as Katie suggested – post to my wall that I was watching The Bachelor a dozen times. I only watched it once, and that’s shameful enough.

I also played a bit of the Saboteur today, where I eliminated an entire Nazi radar station single-handed, but accidentally shot a nun in the process.

Day 337: comics

January 15, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I never had comic books as a kid, and even nowadays, I haven’t read all that many comics.

More than anything else, I’ve started to become a bit more interested in graphic novels, but I’d be fooling myself if I said that I was anything other than a bumbling amateur, trying to both understand the medium at the same time that I’m entertaining myself with the art and the story.

Beyond that, comics were never a part of my childhood, the format never entered into my circle of hobbies.

Is it too late?  I feel like comics are one of those things that, like playing the clarinet, if not taken up early enough in life, never really get an opportunity later to get a foothold.  Nowadays, I do so much other stuff in my free time: there are TV shows to watch, video games to play, a house and cats to upkeep, and – soon – a baby to care for.  Without the nostalgic joy of comics to look back on, could I really introduce comic-reading now into my life and not feel like it was more of a distraction?

I bring this up today because while surfing the web late at night, I found that Marvel has a digital comic subscription, which would allow someone to read most of their back catalog of comic books in digital format while connected to the Internet.  It’s an interesting model, and the lack of a physical comic book – while probably quite distressing for those who had grown up with subscriptions that arrived in the mail and local comic book stores – is not something that would bother me too much.  And I do really enjoy what I know of the Marvel characters/universe from movies and video games.

But, yeah.  Comics.  Something I could get into, even as an adult?

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