Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and today marks the 235th anniversary of the creation of a fine force of warriors. There’s a long line of Marines in my family and I’m thinking of theme today. One of them lost a leg in Vietnam, others served in more peaceful times.
A few years ago we watched a battalion graduation at Parris Island. I spent two years there is a child and watched countless graduations. I don’t remember any of them, but I think of the men I saw four years ago. I think of these young Marines today, and I hope they are safe and still serving proudly.
Semper Fidelis, Marines.
That’s this evening at Samford. Evenings being relative. Three weeks ago that same time was the afternoon. At any rate I was walking from one errand to a meeting and had the best view. By the time I made it back to the office it was completely dark. And that shouldn’t happen.
Spent the better part of my night working on a paper for my media effects class. I wrote, revised, edited, re-wrote and moved things up and down until it didn’t make sense any more. That’s when I quit, having achieved a level of perfection that is not easily reached. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and realize two or three things that I should have added, but you should live by this motto: Print early, never second guess.
That’s a great motto, but hardly a practical one. I’ll continue on with this paper until the bitter end — trying to massage every possible detail into a very finite, five-page space — and hope my professor makes sense of it as well.
Random fun: In 1995 Dr. Clifford Stoll could see no future to this Internet thing. Newsweek, a fine brand today weakened by both content and their very name and now being absorbed by The Daily Beast, published his scribblings:
Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Remember, this is 1995.
(T)he Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.
Sound like any curators (or journalists or producers) you know?
Then there’s cyberbusiness (sic). We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete (sic). So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
He decries the lack of human interaction, the virtual communities and some sense of isolation.
Dr. Stoll’s Wikipedia page says he’s now mostly a stay-at-home dad and sells custom-made blown glass on the Internet. Good for him.
OK, back to that paper, lest it become an all-nighter.
World’s Fair update will be along in a bit.
