Poet Ponders the Digital

IBM PC XT with green monochrome phosphor screen and 10MB full height 5,25" hard disk drive (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 6, 2014 Deadline November 2014 Issue Thankful for Computing Technology Computing technology touches every minute of our lives, and it has made life better for most of us. Though I am thankful for computers in general, some inventions have changed my life in dramatic ways. I am celebrating this Thanksgiving by listing the technologies for which I am most thankful. Home Computers The early Apple, Atari and Commodore computers I used in school and at home during the early 1980s ushered in the personal computer revolution. Costing a fraction of business computers, these devices empowered the young people who would launch the dot-com revolution. We learned to code in machine language, BASIC and Pascal on computers with memory measured in kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes. When IBM decided, somewhat half-hearted...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley February 3, 2014 Deadline March 2014 Issue Social Media Getting Older, Losing Its Cool Social media are losing their “cool” factor, becoming a part of the largely ignored information static in our daily lives. Automated “bots” dominate Twitter, sending out so many tweets that it takes an effort to find any value. A small group of real, human users remain entertaining and informative, but searching and sorting tweets requires too much effort to be fun anymore. If you follow sports scores, news alerts or special events then Twitter is a wonderful tool. My friends who participate in fantasy sports leagues rely on Twitter for breaking news, at least on game days. They seldom send tweets, except to trade barbs with other “team owners” in the leagues. Twitter was supposed to make “texting” more social and more engaging, but the sheer volume of traffic renders Twitter useless. For most of us, hashtags, those “#WordsToFollow” that need a secret decode...