Monday, February 22, 2010 | by nathan

the only difference being that I don’t have access to any liquid nitrogen. Not since the … unpleasantness.

When I matriculated at Wake Forest University in the fall of 1998, they were one of the most "wired" campuses in America. The internet boom had yet to turn bust, and recently-graduated Sanskrit majors were leaping headlong into the information revolution and becoming overnight millionaires (then, it turns out, overnight thousandaires). Wake had a really pioneering program wherein a part of our exorbitant tuition costs allowed each student to receive a laptop upon enrollment. Then, two years later, you’d trade in your laptop for a different, newer laptop.

It didn’t suck.

Since then laptops have become ubiquitous on college campuses; some people even argue that it’s hard to learn without one. To tell you the truth, I think that in my four years of free-laptopdom at Wake Forest, I actually took the thing to class exactly one time, and even then I sat there talking to a friend on AIM. We all had them, sure, but I never saw a Wake Forest classroom where people were wildly typing notes. You just didn’t see them in class. I’m sure this has changed now.

When I started my abortive half-semester at Yale Divinity School in the fall of 2002, I bought a brand-new Sony Vaio. Things were different in the Ivy Leagues, and on the first day of class, when I whipped out a pen and paper to take notes, I found myself in a minority of me; everyone else had their computers out. So I thought, what the hell, Nate, join the now.

Thing is, I found that I didn’t remember anything. I type about 110 words a minute, give or take, so I could literally almost type the lecture word-for-word. But none of it stuck. I quickly went back to being a one-man minority. I find that the physical action of writing things down, even if I don’t get every single bit, helps the information to stick in my mind. Typing doesn’t do that; it lacks the physical connection to the information. Going back and reading my typed notes later, I found myself thinking over and over, "I don’t remember him saying that." I felt disconnected from the lecture.

This isn’t true for everyone; it just is for me. At any rate, by the time I made another go at grad school and found myself as the teaching assistant for an Introduction to Mass Communications class at the University of Oklahoma, laptops were everywhere. So was MySpace. I warned the students in my discussion group within an inch of their lives about using the internet during the lecture. Bring your laptop to take notes, fine. But I stationed myself at the back of the class and watched those laptop screens.

One student in particular became a problem. Not only was she constantly MySpacing even after I asked her not to, she was distracting the people around her with it, showing them videos or photos or wall posts that entertained her. ALL WHILE THE PROFESSOR WAS TEACHING. Maybe it’s that my father is a college professor, but I found myself enraged by this behavior. The professor noticed it and asked me to do something. So, one day, after I’d already asked her once to either keep it on Microsoft Word or put it away, I walked down and sat next to her, a big, big grin on my face.

"Give me the laptop," I said happily.

She giggled. Oh, you’re so funny. Ha-ha.

"I’m not actually kidding. Give it to me." 

Her eyes got wide, but her smile remained.

"Right now." 

I’d tried to whisper, to be quiet, but now the whole class, comprised of somewhere in the neighborhood of 175 students, mostly freshmen, were staring at me.

"I want the computer. Hand it over. Right now." 

"Are you serious?" 

"Do I look like I’m kidding?" 

Her face orange with shame and fake tanner, she closed the computer and handed it over. I stood up and suddenly noticed the sea of kaiser-roll-sized eyeballs staring at me.

"LET THIS BE A WARNING TO THE REST OF YOU." 

The professor was barely managing to suppress a laugh. At the end of the class the student walked up to me.

"Can I have my computer back now?" 

"What computer?" I asked.

"My computer. My laptop. You took it away."

"Oh, that?" I said. "I threw that away. You might be able to dig it out of the garbage can out in the hall. But I also threw half a yogurt in there."

Her eyes welled up. I couldn’t take it anymore; I pulled her laptop out of my bag and handed it to her.

"You understand that MySpacing during class is, like, super rude, right?" I asked.

She nodded, chagrined.

"See you Wednesday." 

All that is to say, as awesome as I think the internet and mobile computing are, I somewhat question their value in the classroom environment. This long, long story drives home a point that was put much more succinctly by a professor at that same august institution, the University of Oklahoma, in a video I found on Engadget:

Thursday, August 6, 2009 | by nathan

Stitched Nostalgia

Anyone who knows me at all knows my great and abiding love for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo; I have literally spent entire days – beautiful days, sunlit days wherein I could’ve been out enjoying God’s creation or making a difference in someone’s life – inside playing Nintendo. And I mean, I’ve done that recently. So, when I got a new iPhone 3Gs* for my birthday, I immediately leapt on the chance to get this original NES controller case for it from Barry’s Farm.

*And incidentally, let me say that my last iPhone, which was also a birthday present right after the iPhone was first announced, is the first phone I have EVER had – EVER – to last the entire length of its contract and still be working as well as it did the day I got it, and not have broken or snapped in half like the cheap pieces of plastic that most phones are. They make ‘em cheap so you’ll break them and have to go buy a new one, thereby requiring you to re-up on your contract. Not so with the iPhone; it lasted me in great stead for over 2 years, despite the fact that I dropped it literally DOZENS of times. Its battery life was starting to lag a little bit, but other than that it was in great shape.

Friday, April 3, 2009 | by nathan

HELLO LOVER

It was time. It was past time. I’ve been working with it for a couple hours now and I have to say, OH MY GOD FORGET GAY MARRIAGE CAN WE MAKE IT LEGAL FOR A MAN TO WED HIS LAPTOP?

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 | by nathan

Into Thin Air

I’m what you might call a novice techie. I feel that I’ve run every inch of the gamut from luddite to technophile, including the high point of the swing this past summer when I briefly considered marrying my iPhone and then just carrying on a summer affair with Brian.

The other night on the way to the gym I snapped at Brian, which I felt terrible about, and which was absolutely wrong, but hear me out:

One of my major goals for this year has been to increase the flow and organization of our house, to just generally make it a more livable, vital place where we actually do the things we tell ourselves we’re going to, and we clean up once we’re finished. We have a problem with these things. To that effect, I hung one of the 100,000 reporter’s notebooks I own from the kitchen wall, and anytime we come up with something we need at the store, we write it down. We look at it every day. We add to it, and when someone goes to the store, he rips the sheet off the notebook and takes it with him.

Brian mentioned that he could easily set up something like that for us online, so if we’re at work, say, and headed to Target over lunch break – a favorite activity of his – we wouldn’t have to think to grab the sheet THAT MORNING, or otherwise try to remember what’s on it.

And I lost it, a little. Maybe it was my recent interaction with my favorite old philosophy professor, but the idea of having something as simple an innocuous as a grocery list on the internet just seemed ridiculous to me.

"I don’t want to use technology for EVERYTHING!" I shouted in the car. I shouldn’t have done that; it was uncalled-for. Things immediately got awkward.

I apologized profusely, then tried to explain myself.

I like having a physical connection with things, especially with words and things I need to remember. Physically writing things down helps me to remember them so much more than typing them or entering them in an internet form. Sometimes I log on to this very website and go, "Wait, when the hell did I write that? Did someone hack my site?" Then I see my gratuitous overuse of the caps lock key and think, oh, yeah, right.

I could never go to a class and type my notes on a laptop; this likely disqualifies me from most major moneymaking grad schools, but oh the hell well. At work people are constantly asking me, "Should I send you an Outlook invitation? Why don’t you publish your Outlook calendar? Could you just let me know through Outlook, EVEN THOUGH I’M STANDING HERE TALKING TO YOU AND YOU JUST TOLD ME?"

People! It HELPS me to write stuff down! To physically get a pen, and physically get a piece of paper, and make words, with my penmanship (which is pretty great, by the way, because I’ve spent decades perfecting it). That puts the info into my brain. Some of the people at my job – I love them – but when I tell them it’s easier for me to write it down on a post-it, they look at me like I’ve said, "You know what will help me remember that meeting next week? If I go outside and slaughter a couple of squirrels; excuse me."

The point is, there’s absolutely no reason to try to use technology for every single thing we do, and it drives me crazy that people are constantly trying to do exactly that.

Today Brian asked me what we needed at Target, and I remembered our grocery list, and rattled it off to him via iChat; in a good marriage, one person is weak where the other is strong, and we complement one another quite well.

Some people are more apt to remember things by writing them down; some people like having it on the internet where they can refer back to it at a moment’s notice; I just hope the former isn’t completely ever replaced by the latter, or else you’ll find me walking in circles in some foreign city, wondering, "How did this happen?"

So then, also, yesterday, we were introduced to the MacBook Air, a really transformative little piece of technology. I’m not going to get one; my little MacBook is more than adequate for my needs, but I thought it was interesting, the sort of vision of the future of personal computing that the MacWorld keynote showed. We’ve all known for awhile that the optical drive is on its way out, as downloads become faster, and media files rise in quality. This will mean that personal computers will get smaller and smaller, which is nice, and that they’ll have more room for hard-drive and RAM. Also nice.

My guess is in the next decade we’ll see a near-complete unification of the personal home computer and entertainment hub. Content will come largely through computers to our televisions, and will be available to transfer to our portable devices – laptops as well as iPhones, iPods, etc.

There’s something in the air, for sure, and I think yesterday’s keynote painted a clearer picture of it. I thought it was especially interesting that the Time Capsule is one of the first consumer-oriented products featuring 1 TB of storage; they just keep getting bigger, and, paradoxically, smaller. I imagine that in a year of two iPods will sync wirelessly. The real money to be made going forward is software that keeps one’s home computer/entertainment hub, laptop and mobile devices synced automatically. If you invent that, you don’t have to give me credit, but would you mind terribly to pay off my mortgage?

At any rate, it’ll be interesting to see how certain things fare going forward. I know it’s not very eco-friendly to say, but a completely paperless society is my idea of pure hell.

Thursday, November 1, 2007 | by nathan

Aaaaaand we’re off!

Today is the start of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for the uninitiated. It’s possible that November will be a semi-sparse month blog-wise for me, so thanks in advance for not abandoning me altogether. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, or if you’re wanting to just read some of my laughably terrible fiction, you may follow along with me at the WriMo website; my user name is okaycity.

Also, I got my new shoes in the mail yesterday, so as soon as I pick up a replacement Nike Sport Kit (grr bahh!) I’ll get back to posting my run times. My 5K is a week from this Saturday, and I’m recovering from a fairly nasty sinus infection, but I expect to be back to my regular 80% functionality by the time it comes around. After all people, I’m in it to win it.*

Also, for no other reason than nostalgia, and because I knew Brian would like something to tinker on, I bought this on eBay this week:

I’d like to point out here that I paid far more for the shipping on this dinosaur than I did for the computer itself, but hey. I’m actually considering installing the *ORIGINAL* MS Word on it (the one on which I wrote my first novel attempts and short stories at age 8 in my dad’s office), and making it an internet-free writing space. But who am I kidding? I’d have just as much a problem procrastinating with Hypercard and Kid Pix as I do with the internet. Does anyone know where I can download software for this thing? Is there a place on the web to do that? Come through for me here, internets.

* and by "win it," of course, as usual, I mean "finish at all, even if it kills me." 

Saturday, October 27, 2007 | by nathan

Nice Kitty!

Gotta say, other than a few minor things I’m having to get used to, I’m pretty much loving the crap out of Leopard right now. Thanks, iPhone rebate!

Monday, October 8, 2007 | by nathan

On the off chance that Steve Jobs is reading this…

…I would like to state for the record that I vastly prefer the generation 2 iPod Nano over the new video-enabled ones. The style was better, the colors much cooler (the new ones look like Easter eggs), and who needs video at the gym? Granted not everyone uses their Nano at the gym, but I do, and I’d much rather have my little(red)one than a wide, weird, bulky, pastel-y one.

Monday, October 1, 2007 | by nathan

And I Ran, I Ran So Far Away

As I mentioned last week, I’m training to run a 5K race with my friend Paul. Paul was very gracious when offering to run this race with me, to keep pace with me and make sure I get through it. My tendency toward laziness aside, I really do believe that one shouldn’t commit to doing something – especially when that something is for charity, for God’s sake – and half-ass it. So last week I changed up my gym routine. I’m now running a 5K on the treadmill 3 days a week.

It was immediately addicting. So I started going at it hard, and now I’ve decided I’d like to be into a 9-minute mile before this race. Then, last Wednesday, I got to the gym and realized I’d forgotten to throw a pair of socks into my bag. "No big deal," I thought, "I’ve run without socks loads of times."

Only, for whatever reason, this time my shoes weren’t having it, and I got about a mile into the run before I realized what a bad idea that had been. Except – and here’s the problem – I’m very, very stubborn sometimes, and I kept going. It felt like nails in my feet, and I got to 2.8 miles before I completely crapped out, and even then, limping slowly back to the locker room, I was berating myself for not finishing up. "Just a third of a mile left, loser," I kept saying.

So I spent all weekend with bandages and Neosporin on my feet, and they’re healing up nicely. I got back on the treadmill today, and while it wasn’t completely comfortable, I can’t tell that my blisters got appreciably worse; I wore two pairs of socks on my left foot over a bandaid. Tomorrow’s strength training day, so for cardio I’m going to swim, which I used to do in college and loved.

Anyway, as I was wondering what the hell had gone wrong with my shoes, which had once been so great without socks, I read several running forums and found out that you’re supposed to switch up running shoes after a year. I’d heard this before and called it bullshit; the pair of shoes I had before my current pair had lasted me for 5 years, but I’d run my feet raw in them more times than I could count. Still, since I started training I’ve been itching to try my hand a marathon or half-marathon (probably this one), and so I decided to suck it up and get some new shoes. See them up there? Ain’t they great? This experience aside, I really do highly recommend Nike’s Air Zoom Moire running shoe. The ones I have have done great for me the past year.

I’m also tracking my runs with my little iPod nano and the Nike Sport Kit, to which I treated myself when I paid off a huge student loan last year. I’m creating a new category and posting my results from every run, more for myself and purposes of keeping this info organized, but hey; feel free to encourage me. Or even better – join in!

Here’s today’s run. It was pretty good considering how much my left foot still hurt at times, and how slow and out of shape I still am:

Distance: 5.06 km

Time: 32:17

Pace: 6.22 min/km

Calories: 433

Friday, July 13, 2007 | by nathan

living in the future

My fingers were shaking slightly as they move tremulously over the keypad, the lightest touch sending a letter, a number, a semicolon onto the screen. I’d been dreaming of this moment since January, and finally – it was here.

Brian got me an iPhone for my birthday. 

I eagerly, yet gingerly, removed it from its packaging and began fiddling with the settings, controls, content, barely able to breathe for excitement. It came already charged! I plugged it in and it immediately began downloading my mail settings from the Mac, and with a kind of breathless excitement – the kind that comes when you’re at a long-awaited concert and the lights have just gone down but the band has yet to take the stage – I began flicking through my e-mails.

The second one was from a nice young man named Ken Quattara, from Cote D’ivoire, and began:

Good day ,

Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business transaction with you.i got your name and contact from the ivories chamber of commerce and industry.I prayed over it and selected your name among other names due to its esteeming nature and there commendations given to me as a reputable and trustworthy person that i can do business with and by there commendation, i must not hesitate to confide in you for this simple and sincere business. I am ken Quattara the only son of late Mr. Koffi Quattara, my father was a very wealthy cocoa merchant in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast.My father was poisoned to dearth by his business associates on one of their outings on a business trip,my mother died when i was a baby and since then my father took me so special.before the death of my father on march 2005 in a private hospital in Abidjan he secretly called me on his bedside and told me that he has the sum of Seven million,five hundred thousand united state dollars($7,500,000.00) left in fixed/suspense account in one of the prime bank in Ivory Coast West Africa, that he used my name as his only son for the next of kin in depositing of the fund, he also explained to me that it was because of this wealth that he was poisoned by his business associates, that I should seek for a foreign partner in a country of my choice where I will transfer this money and use it for investment purpose such as real estate management or hotel management.

Please, I am honorably seeking your assistance in the following ways

(1) to provide a bank account into which this money would be transferred to.

(2) to serve as a guardian of this fund since i am only 25years staying my pastor

(3) to make arrangement for me to come over to your country to further my education and to secure a resident permit in your country.

Moreover,please, I am willing to offer you 30% of the total sum as compensation for you effort, help and input after the successful transfer of this fund into your nominate account in country.

Furthermore, you indicate your opinions towards assisting me as I believe that this transaction would be concluded within short period of time,you signify interest to assist me.

Anticipating to hear from you soon.

Thanks and God bless.

Best regards,

Ken Quattara

(qkenuattara@yahoo.com)

Welcome to the future! 

Tuesday, April 3, 2007 | by nathan

It Keeps You Running…i hope…

Yesterday I mailed a cashier’s check to cover the very last bit of a debt I racked up several years ago. I was expecting it to hurt a lot more than it did, financially speaking, but when I balanced my checkbook afterward I found that – oh! – I have quite a bit more money left over than I thought I would.

So!

back in the fall I bought a wonderful new pair of running shoes from NikeID, which I had designed myself on their website. These shoes have the ability, along with some fancy pieces of computerage from Apple, to act as a kind of pedometer, tracking how far you run, how many calories you burn, etc. I never bought the extra computerage because, well, no magic money had deposited itself into my account.

But yesterday, it sorta did. So, I treated myself, fought AIDS (a little), and did a tiny little something for my health. I did 2.08 miles last night, though I won’t tell you what my mile-per-minute was, because it’s kinda sad. Let’s just say it’s a good thing a pack of hungry wolves wasn’t chasing me.