Poet Ponders the Digital

Sample of BASH through a shell in GNOME. Screenshot taken in Arch Linux (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 4, 2015 Deadline June 2015 Issue Personal computer and device operating systems are the personalities of the machines. The choices we make when selecting an operating system , or the choices we have made for us, determine how we interact with the digital world. Regardless of whether you prefer (or need to use) Windows, OS X , Linux or BSD , the operating systems do the same basic work. Click a mouse button, tap a touchscreen or type a letter and the operating system converts your action into something applications understand. The operating system determines how to manage software tasks and communicates with the hardware of a device to send or receive data. Operating systems accept commands or actions from users and software (input) and then display, print or otherwise communicate the results of these commands (output) to other software or the h...

English: Apple IIe computer (enhanced version) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 7, 2013 Deadline November 2013 Issue Apple Tech is Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary Technology revolutions are not as sudden as people believe. Not even Apple has released successful revolutionary products every year or two. “The Myth of Steve Jobs’ Constant Breakthroughs” by Harry McCracken, appeared on Time Magazine ’s Techland site in September, 2013 (http://techland.time.com/). McCraken examines the myth of “revolution” that has lingered after the death of Jobs. You have to feel sorry for chief executive Tim Cook and lead designer Jonathan (“Jony”) Ive, as they try to live up to mythology. Apple, as a company, has a mixed history of innovation. My wife and I are an Apple household. We own an iMac , Mac mini, a collection of MacBook Pro models, iPhones , iPods , and an iPad. Apple dares to deliver products that its designers and engineers want, not what cust...

This complaint is aimed squarely at Apple. It needs to evolve as a company or risk losing its most loyal base: creative professionals. Apple must realize that power users, that small number of us willing to pay for any creative edge, cannot be surprised by the "Next Big Thing" at the end of the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). We need a clear roadmap. No, we're not why Apple earns billions of dollars, but we influence other users. Our decisions lead others to embrace or reject technologies. I teach in the School of Communications and Information Systems at a university. Our school includes everything from "Media Arts" to "Computer Forensics" — it is an eclectic school, with a strong emphasis on rhetoric, communications, and technology. We train graphic designers, computer programmers, and English teachers. It's that eclectic. Our students will learn specific programs on a mix of Apple and Dell systems. Then, they will go off and...

One of my favorite writing tools is Word Counter 2.1, from Supermagnus Software. http://www.supermagnus.com/mac/Word_Counter/ The price? Free. The value? To quote a popular credit card company, "Priceless." If you're like most of my students, you're asking yourself, "Doesn't every word processor include a word count function? What's the big deal?" Yes, most editing and word processing applications do count words, sentences, and paragraphs. However, I'm more interested in two features that are either incomplete or missing from word processors and layout applications: word frequency counts and readability analyses. Again, most applications provide at least the ability to create these reports, but none of them match the speed or ease of Word Counter. There are several reason I use Word Counter: Not every text editor I use provides real-time word counts; Word counts are curiously inaccurate within some applications; Macros for Word that ...

The surest way to get into an argument might not be a discussion of religion or politics. No, the real heated debates, at least online, deal with those really important matters of bias: Windows, Linux, or OS X? iOS (iPhone / iPad) or Android and Chrome (or maybe Windows Mobile)? XBox or PS3? (Sorry, Wii) FireFox, Chrome, IE, Safari, or other?  PHP, Perl, JavaScript, or ASP / .Net? Objective-C, C#, or C++ with Qt? You get the idea. If you really want to read arguments, read technology blogs. These are passionate people arguing vehemently over technologies that often come and go faster than an Italian national government. The lifespan of some fruit flies seems longer than the life of a cell phone generation. My students have grown up with the same attachments to modern technologies that I have for fountain pens and mechanical pencils. (I love a good pen or pencil.) Getting a student to switch from Mac to Windows or from Windows to Mac can be nearly impossible. I've had one...

Me : Why are people so personally rude via e-mail and blog comments? I'm deleting more mail and posts than ever lately. Friend : What are your blog topics? Me : I maintain websites on economic theory, political rhetoric, technology, autism, creative writing, and philosophy.  Friend : You do realize only creative writing and technology aren't likely to trigger hate mail. Me : It seems Linux is a religion.  Friend : Says the person with an Apple sticker on every vehicle.  Sometimes, it is easy to forget a personal zealotry. I am having a strong reaction to the fact my future employer is an all-Windows campus. Yes, I use Windows sometimes — but I just uninstalled Boot Camp from my Mac and removed the last Windows software.  Turns out, I am a fanatic, too. 

In college, I wrote software documentation for mainframe users, which meant I had the opportunity to use text editors and word processors on a variety of computer platforms. I composed documentation on everything from glorified typewriters (DEC VT102 and IBM 3270 terminals) to slick WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") Apple Macs. I was probably not alone in being captivated by the Mac experience. Toss in PageMaker, a few fonts, and a LaserWriter for a complete desktop publishing system, and the Mac was hard to beat. Yet, I quickly realized that I wrote better on my MS-DOS 2.1 PC running WordPerfect 4.2 from floppy disks. How could this be? The Mac was easier to use and the papers I typed looked much better on paper. Why did I type so much more, and much better, on the PC? I didn't work on the Mac; I explored. I'd play with fonts, formatting options, and the nifty features of Word or PageMaker. I'd also play Crystal Quest, Lode Runner, and Dark Castle for ...

Sometimes the technology wins. The reality of computers is that they are still machines. This means that parts wear out — hard drives certainly come to mind. We rely on fragile little boxes, in my case a MacBook Pro, to store our daily work, our family memories, and much more. Even the "non-moving" parts are technically moving on an atomic level, with heat slowly taking a toll. Memory chips start giving "exception errors" and video cards make abstract art of our virtual desktops. This is why I make lots of backups. It is why I have three external hard drives, and hope the digital demons never cause all three to die at once. One drive is a clone of the MacBook Pro's drive, so if disaster strikes my current work is ready to be revived on another system. The other two are archives, saved for those "I think I did something like that before" moments. With the preceding in mind, I now admit that even following good, defensive habits is not ...

The thoughts for this week are in response to: In your blog: how might you digital note-taking tools (see links on the wiki) to have your students take notes/engage in prewriting activities? Create a digital map using Inspiration (use a free trial download: http://www.inspiration.com) about your potential final project topic; reflect on how you could use digital mapping for helping students exploring relationships between different topics/images. I have to admit that I need more time to experiment with Inspiration 8, as well as other tools, because I am fairly set in my own note taking ways. Until I gather my thoughts a bit more, I can at least explain my own habits and my personal views on software tools. Before I start, I'll make a pitch: If you use a Mac, the Omni Group makes some of the best organizational tools I have used. ( http://www.omnigroup.com/ ) I like the fact Omni applications do not “feel” like PC software ported to the Mac — these are OS X applications from to...