I have weird roommates…

It’s weird to to see that the last time I posted on this blog was September 2008, And then the post before that was May and I was a Freshman.  It’s easy to say that again, like my End of Freshman Year post, the time has been flying.  Now I’m in the second semester of my Junior year and it doesn’t seem to stop.

That’s not to say that the work is getting to me, it really isn’t.  I could say that I am enjoying the work, but really who ever enjoys work?  We just get through it, day by day.

Well, from Freshman year to Junior, I went from living on campus, to a place in South Burlington (or SOUTHEast, if you’re asking my roommate), to a place in Williston, and this summer I’m sure we’ll move again.  That seems to be how it goes.  A change in living is always nice.

So, heres to another few years of silence on this page (except for my Tweets, they keep going on my Twitter page and in the Tweets category).

According to Llewellyn’s website, Youtube has become a place where he posts videos a lot.  This is truley a person who has his feet in both the old media and the new media.  But what the hell does “old” and “new” media mean?  Obviously it differentiates between television, newspapers, radios, and Youtube, blogs, and podcasts.  My question is why? Why should we label the media we watch/listen to as old and new?  To me it doesn’t make any sense.  As much as I would like to see it, New media is not going to replace old media anytime soon.  There are a lot of people that trust sources that have been around for over a decade.  And yes these sources know their stuff and can write well, but how well do they know there stuff?

I believe that a blogger can do a much better job with reporting on certain things.  Take technology.  Most news shows have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to technology.  They like to throw around terms like “hackers” just to scare people and created Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD).

The problem with bloggers lies in neutrality.  Bloggers have issues staying out of the conversation because they are writing about what the love.  Take me writing about this for example.  I obviously have a bias being a blogger (though I only blog for the sake of blogging), but I support “old media.”  I listen to NPR.  I watch TV shows and sometimes even read a newspaper.

I don’t rely on these as my only sources of news.  I also have 178 RSS subscriptions in my RSS reader (creating 142 unread feeds from the past hour currently).  Some of these feeds are in fact from old media though.  Most of it is from new media.

Why do I still use the terms Old and New media even though I don’t like them?  It’s an easy way to distinguish between the online and offline news.  Though those worlds have collided in many senses, it still needs to be differentiated somehow.  I like everything equal, but this is not going to be one thing that is.

This lead me to think about what happens if we have all our assets on the internet in one form or another and this happens. I know the helpdesk and a lot of other people weren’t able to get any work done because we didn’t have the pipes for around 3 hours. Our ticketing system for requests is on an outside server, which means we couldn’t do any of those jobs. We couldn’t send email outside the college which meant if someone needed our help with an online course we could do nothing. Also, since many of our website servers are on campus or in the state, our school website and the student portal wasn’t accessible to the outside world. Sounds pretty bad for business right?

The goods news is this kind of thing could only have happened in Vermont. We have almost literally two lines in terms of internet entering and leaving the state so if they go down the whole state is pretty much doomed. As we become more wired though we expect less downtime, so any downtime at all frustrates us to the max. It really is an addiction, and we must avoid it.

Ignore the whole splitting blog and frontpage apart.  I’m just gonna write it all here.  All pictures will be on my flickr account (which will be pro).  I love WordPress 2.5

Today was also my last day of college freshman classes.  It’s been crazy how fast the year has flown by.

What I really wanted to mention was the fact that the 8/9 edition of All Songs Considered used Skype to talk to one of their correspondents. Clearly, NPR gets mad props for using this ip telephony/voip/peer to peer technology. Of course, the broadcast had a small glitch, which they left in the podcast (I don’t know about the radio) which was amusing. It was funny cause I had realized that skype stopped working because I heard the tell-tale noises that all skype users know and love.

What I realized was that Skype is, indeed, a viable option for television and radio. Look, it has it’s issues, but so do satellite phones, and satellite video. Why are the major broadcasters still using satellite video feeds when foreign correspondents could take a laptop and a DV camera and have improved quality. I’m always surprised at the clarity of Skype when it’s configured correctly. It sounds better than a regular phone line already, and goes pretty much head to head with an ISDN line. For less money than an ISDN line.

I’m not saying that the big people should switch, but it could be used when an ISDN line isn’t possible, or if the broadcasters can’t afford ISDN, etc.

Beware kids, major broadcasting companies are starting to use off the shelf products. What’s next, everyone will realize that Mac is a much better operating system for home users?

Look, I’d be fine with doing this if it were an upgrade from, say, 5.0 to 8.0, but this is from 5.1.2 to 6.0. That’s outlandish. That’s a rip-off. There are very little updates either. This could be a .x release. It looks as if the only thing they really update from release to release is the look of the program, and that doesn’t warrant much in the way of cash.

I have an issue: I want to be running the latest and greatest at all times. This is why I’d like to have version 6.0. But it’s not worth the money. The whole idea of charging people thousands of times over is ridiculous as well, but as long as there are stupid people, I guess there will always be people ripping them off.

Screw you Missing Sync

     Well the first thing is: i’m done with high school foreva!

It still doesn’t feel like I’ve spent four years of my life at that place. It’s really crazy. But now it’s over, and I’ll probably never see most of the people there again. For some, that’s a hallelujah moment, for others it’s not-so-much.

     So Now I’m moving on to the big crazy get-away-from-home type schooling: the college lifestyle. Yes, where everyone’s a starving college student. By the way, notice the Make a donation button underneath the Feed a Starving Student in the sidebar? Yeah, so there’s that.

     Pretty soon I think I’m going to do that whole divide Frayedwires to have tech/geek/etc things on the homepage. I’m going to have the still separate blog, and some new additions. There will be a whole blog for my college stuff. And it will be updated more frequently, so hopefully more traffic, more ads, leading to a bit of moola.

     I’ve got more to say, but I’ll save it for another day….