Always Time for New Tech
March 28, 2006
I have major projects from three classes waiting to be graded. I have five classes worth of work waiting to put on the school website. I have seven classes worth of grades needed to be bubbled into the scantron form. I have income tax to send off to my accountant. I have student loans to do paperwork on. I have applications for other districts and colleges that I need to fill in and send in. I have Fall term Pepperdine projects that I need to finish before the end of April. I have an invitation to a cousin’s wedding next month that I need to RSVP. I have a geeklog site meant to be used as my tech blog that I still need to populate and occupy. I have a lot of blog entries partially begun that have never been completed. Hell, I have loads and loads of e-Harmony material that I need to post in my blog. So in the middle of all of this what do I do? I spend four plus days getting my new macbook Pro up and running (though I’ve discovered that I should have done a clean install when I first began with this system because the computer transfer application copy Norton systemtools and now I can’t uninstall the damn thing. Ack). Oh, to the joys of new tech…. JBB
iChing & e-Harmony
March 14, 2006
Apparently the month of February was too traumatic to write about. Well, not really. Actually I’ve been doing a ton of writing just none that’s appeared in these pages (yet).
Sci-Fi David Gerrold wrote in tech magazine in the early 1980s about this neat piece of software called iChing, which mimicked the function of the Confucian book. The program had a primitive AI used to offer “predictions” to the users. But what Gerrold discovered about the program wasn’t it’s powerful ability to predict the future but it’s ability to move the user to discover what the user really wanted to do in the first place. In other words, if the user is contemplating a decision between two choices, because iChing comes down with one choice, it forces the thoughtful user to explore reasons to either agreed or disagree with the iChing. It’s not the technology but the human reaction to the choices mediated by the computer.
