Perhaps my least favorite gadget is the fragile, delicate, tempermental, unreliable, slow, poor-quality Hewlett-Packard computer printer that is attached to my office computer at the high school.  It has the unbelieveable power to raise my stress level and blood pressure on a 5-day-a-week basis, guaranteed - never fails.  At some point, I am certain that I will re-create the sledge hammer photocopier destruction scene from the movie "Office Space."  It's only a matter of time.  I suppose that I will have to tell the school that it simply blew up or caught fire or was stolen, and they will perhaps then feel inclined to replace it.  It's only a matter of time.

     First, I enjoyed the posting by Tomomi Ishihara regarding her issues and problems with computers, and her thought that Apple computers seem right now to be the simplest way to go.  I agree.  I am planning to trash my home PC pretty soon and get some kind of apple laptop to replace it.  It seems to me that Apple has constantly worked to improve its products to make them ever-more user friendly each and every time they come out with something new.  I like the idea of plugging something in and being able to get up and running seemingly at the push of a button, versus the hours of set-up time that my PC required when it was first purchased.  I have to admit that I'm somewhat of a technology amateur, in the sense that I only started using a computer for a substancial time when I started college in 1997.  About all I did on a computer prior to that was use to word processor to plunk-out little papers for my high school english classes.  I'm gettin' better, though.

     Secondly, I enjoyed Payam Larijani's blog about his dislike of the walkie-talkie feature cell phones that are all around us these days.  I cannot tell you how frustrated I am when I find myself in a crowded public area, waiting in line at the bank or standing in the lobby of a busy hotel, only to have to listen to some person shout into their little plastic phone receiver as if they were some sort of military commander sending troops into battle.  I have to chuckle to myself when, in my occasional trip to the mall, I find myself amongst various people walkie-talkie chatting with displaced members of their family or checking-up on their small children.  Somehow, it seems that parents gain some sense of safety in hearing their childrens' voices, even if they have no clue whatsoever when they are located or who they're with.  Perhaps we should think as a society about the issues of noise pollution that are ever-encroaching on us.  As a musician, I value silence as much as I value sound.  Silence is the clean canvas on which we paint musical tones.  Our modern world, both indoors and out, sometimes feels like we're painting our tones on a dirty newspaper instead of clean white canvas.  Too deep?  Nah.

     Lastly, although there are MANY good blog entries in this class and I'm only going to mention three, I enjoyed Seth Anderson's entry regarding Malcolm Gladwell's book, "Blink."  Seth told of how he doesn't necessarily trust the type of gut reactions and assumptions that Gladwell discussed.  This, because his masters degree thesis ended up being a series of somewhat suprising findings and leads.  I can see where this could be the case, and yet I find Gladwell's ideas interesting from the standpoint that as academic scholars we should find times when our "blink" type of reactions and instincts and intuitions can "red flag" certain decisions along the path and cause us to raise questions within our own research.  I think the individual ability of intuition that each of us possesses can be useful as we advance in our careers and lives.  Our research still needs to be guided by the time-honored methods of data collection, of course, but I feel that this research can be aided and partly-guided by our intuitive sense as well.  Seth has good thoughts on the topic.

2)     Although I admit that I enjoyed many of the stories contained within Gladwell's text, I felt that the opening story regarding the Getty kouros was perhaps one of the finest examples of how rapid congnition, when used in conjunction with the proper research, could have been of real use.  This story very simply summarized much of what my thoughts were regarding the book.

3)     I regret that I was not reading the text with an eye open for the specific detail of which CGU scholar was mentioned.  I did not feel that this was a major part of why I was asked to read the text.  I will attempt to look for more detail to this end, in our future readings.

     I understand "old computing" to be in reference to the focus being on the physical machine itself, and on what it could do, versus the "new computing" idea of the user-focused interaction between the human and the machine.  The "old computing" used to be about what the maching itself could actually do, or hold within itself, whereas the "new computing" is much more user-based and more about how the machine can be used to achieve the specific needs of the user.