Partial ideas and reflections.

The world has become so segmented with social media it seems... Or am I just looking at it from a middle age man's perspective a decade too early?  Trouble is almost every and any status update contains small fragments of a person's day/life...  They are not true indicators of what is actually going on in a person's life.  They are only portions of a story, it would be like reading only one sentence in a paragraph and thinking that you understood the exact meaning of it all...  In fact, it would be like scientists thinking they understand the entire universe just by studying a butterfly as it flutters it's wings before migration... You can't see the world through a keyhole... 

My wife and I had our children early in our lives because we did not want to be old when they are teenagers...  I can at least relate partially with my kids simply because I am still young enough to do so...

I do find it rather interesting that as my kids grow they are discovering various things online that they may or may not take for granted...  Social media easily streams all kinds of interesting things out there for you and I to see, be amused and for that matter to be totally engulfed in it's emotional meaning...  However that emotional meaning is subject to our own interpretations.  A sad video from someone who was bullied... Ya we understand that person's point of view but it is really our own past experiences that fuel the emotions we feel when watching that video... The bad part of this is that we are constantly reminded over and over again how shitty we felt when we were bullied because almost weekly these videos are re-played and new ones pop up...  In my day, the bullies existed in copious amounts however the main difference is that we have moved on... No constant reminder.... Until now that is with social media...

 Today my son wrote a sentence in binary as his status update... This being the most basic language of any computer and coming from the very days when computers did talk in this way via DEC punch cards I understand the concept well...  But for him it is as simple as entering his string of text into a converter and some script will convert it to a cut and paste status update...  I would like for him to truly understand how this stuff works... Perhaps I will connect the old commodore 64 I have in the basement and let him learn how to "Peek and Poke" his way through the memory spaces...  After all, that's where I come from...

I remember a time when I was young when the hardware hackers otherwise known as the repair department in the "Computer Shop Of Calgary" showed me how they could make the head of a 1541 hard drive vibrate at different frequencies and follow a script that if you listened closely you could hear he song "DAISY"  I was so fascinated by this...  Or how I learned from them how to make free phone calls to anywhere in the world simply by shorting out the handset to the ground on a payphone at exactly the right time in the dialing sequence.  My friend Jason and I later figured out that you could record the sounds of coins going into the payphone then later play those back to convince the phone that you had deposited money for the long distance call...   All that is in the past and none of it works anymore, but our curiosity was endless...

Einstein may have said "I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots." Was he right?  I have a long commute to and from work daily and believe me there is no lack of idiots driving/texting or simply walking out into traffic while their attention is glued to the tweets that are rolling into their little hand held computers.

I admit, at times I have been none the wiser on this matter, I do want you to know that I am aware of this and make every attempt to limit it.  I crave a simpler life, and I want my kids, especially my daughter who turns 15 in two days to know that she does not have to spend her waking hours staring at her Iphone screen...  There is FAR more to life than that...  I suspect she knows this already, I just want to make it clear that this is the case...

Basic electrical knowledge...:

This is another topic I will get more into later but I do want to teach each of my kids some basic electrical knowledge so when the future becomes as I suspect it will they will know how to perform basic repairs and such for themselves.... Or how about when the power goes out for a week at a time, will they know how to safely fuel a generator and or use a power inverter to keep basic survival and comforts afoot?

More later... I feel like blogging again took several years after my mother's death but I'm ready now!