technology as a teacher

Before I get to the meat of my post, I'll start with an update from nfinite's alternate reality aka [Insert nfinite's birthname]'s life. So it's been exactly (in it's approximate sense) one week since classes and finals ended. I've moved all my stuff home; shifted and organized all of those belongings into different boxes and I'm halfway set to move to Virginia for my second co-op rotation. All that is left is clothes, and bathroom and laundry necessities. I've finished packing the kitchenwares and electronics. Yes, that means my computer tower is sitting in a box. Which essentially means no PC games for me as this laptop is strictly school/work related applications only. *cough* Except for maybe TrackMania and o2mania. I should probably just switch it over to Ubuntu and not be tempted by games period.
So I suppose I've been fairly productive this past week. I even managed to scrap together a "new" PC for my mom. All she really does is use the internet, but I didn't feel like an old eMachines with a 1.0GHz Celeron and 256MB of RAM certainly doesn't help with a newbie to technology (objectively speaking of course, I love my mom). As such, it's hard to tell whether the computer has frozen or is just simply being slow. So I searched around the garage, found some parts and managed to find a 2.4GHz Celeron. Oh snap! ... I guess. Still not too much of an improvement, but 512MB of RAM certainly does speed things up. Just for kicks I installed Ubuntu instead of Windows. Mainly because I couldn't find a uh, ... suitable copy of Windows. (I imply nothing here of course ;-).
So with that done as well, I spent most of my week playing Xbox.
"Altair, it seems my students do not fully understand what it means to wield the blade. Perhaps you could show them what you know?"
I decided to give Assassin's Creed another chance. I'm glad I did. At first I thought it was too repetitive. 3 types of investigation quests:

• Beat up people aka Interrogation
• Find benches where there's always two people sitting at opposite ends (all the benches in the entire game are like this) aka Eavesdropping
• Grab people's butts aka Pickpocketing (now that I mention it, I'm surprised you never pick the pockets of women; I suppose that's for harassment issues huh)

Save the citizens side-quest - which consists of beating up soldiers who are harassing either scholars or women. Upon defeating all the harassers, you are rewarded by one of four or five praise-dialogs from the victim. They go along the lines of this:

• Female: "Thank you, Thank you. Another minute and they would've made off with me. I'l be sure that the whole city knows of your bravery."
• Female: "Thank you; Now don't think I couldn't have handled them myself. In any case, I'll be sure to let my husband know of your bravery."
• Male: "Thank you, are they all gone? I hope so. I shall be returning home now; and don't think I'll be leaving it any time soon either. I'll find some way to repay you."
• Male: "Thank you, I wish my sons were half as brave as you. They will hear this tale and know what it is to be a true hero."

I wouldn't be so intrigued about this if the same audio clips were repeated by the various citizens. However, these lines are reproduced with different voice actors! You'd think they'd have the money to change the script just a teensy bit even for a new voice actor. But nope, you hear the same lines uttered by different people of different accents. 'nough said.
And then there's the repetitive climb-tall-towers-to-view-surroundings-then-jump-off-tower. Again, the same issue arises with repetition. There are a total of maybe 6 or 7 different types of towers with around 30 towers in the entire game to scale. (The actual number of towers is listed in an achievement, but I'm lazy). Still, I suppose this is passable since multiple towers in a city could have the same construction plans. In any case, with all of those repetitive tasks and views, I thought it would be quite boring.
You know what though? The game is actually very satisfying. Climbing the same towers in different places turned out to be amusing. Saving the citizens was amusing because of the fighting system. And the investigation quests were short (I don't think I could've done them if they were longer). I guess two things make this game enjoyable: the fighting and the freerunning. I wish I could freerun like this monkey. The fighting is pretty epic too, with the camera adjusting to a cinematic view when you deal a killing blow. It's also pretty raw; I smiled in evil delight when I witnessed Altair stab a dude in the skull for the first time. I'm not violent, honest.
"And that, my students, is how we all should fight."


I do believe I went off on quite the tangent there. Now to the point of this post's title. Technology, namely computers, teaches us so much about life's lessons as well as how to approach life. Really, I only have two examples: one for each point.

Point A: Technology teaches patience.
Ok, so you may be recalling when I was talking about my mom's old Celery based PC. Back in the day... (who am I to talk, I'm not that old) ... Let's rephrase: Back when I was a kid, I had myself a kickin' 286 that was my dad's old computer. I wasn't really old enough to know how to use the darn thing, but who cares. When I lived to the wiser age of about 8, I got a spankin' awesome Pentium S, clocked at a friggin' awesome 166MHz. Man that thing could blaze through... not much at all. I kept that Pentium until I was in 7th grade. At this point, we were at the age of the Pentium 4; and I was stuck with a Pentium. This truly teaches patience. One must not be angry with the slow speed at which the computer is processing. This only leads to frustration. This frustration generated does not change the fact that the computer is slow. Therefore, one must learn not to be frustrated. Hence, the computer has successfully conditioned us to be patient.
One would think that this day in computing, with the advent of multi-core processors at 15 times the clock speed of its predecessors, we wouldn't have the issue of slow computers right? Well I suppose that there will always be more demanding applications, but let me point us to one specific example where slowness should not exist.
Installation and uninstallation of applications on a computer. This should be relatively quick and easy right? Depending on the size and scope of the application of course. Have any of you installed any of the Adobe products lately? That new installation wizard thing is slow as BALLS. I have absolutely no idea what the darn thing is trying to do. Installation took forever. Uninstallation - one would expect to be relatively quick right? I mean, all the other programs uninstall in under 10 seconds. But no, I was uninstalling the trial for Flash CS3. It took (and I'm not exaggerating) at least 15 minutes. Core Duo @ 1.83Ghz. 15minutes *uninstallation*. That's either a very thorough uninstallation, or a very crappy implementation.
Technology teaches patience.

Point B: Ultimately, succeeding in life is all luck
Maybe this is a little pessimistic, and maybe I'm just a little mad at this little thing called Minesweeper, but this can be so true. All the skill in the world gets you close to succeeding. However, more likely than not, there is someone with the same amount of skill as you - probably better as well. What does it all boil down to in the end? Whoever is luckier gets the cookie.
I hope everyone knows the rules of Minesweeper - clear out nonlethal squares and make sure that your :-) does not become x-(.

May I direct your attention to exhibit A. Okay, I did this one fairly quickly (by my standards only, there is always someone faster). I may have been able to win this one out. The upper left corner had hope of succeeding. It's too bad that the lower left destroyed my hopes of placing my name in the High Scores for Expert of my own laptop's records. Such a shame. This didn't make me so mad. After all, technology teaches patience right? A win will eventually come to me after waiting and not be exasperated.





New exhibit: Exhibit B. This one was slower by a minute or two, but still showed promise. UNTIL THE VERY LAST MOMENT! This, my friends, is the lesson that Minesweeper has to teach us. The game is so very simple. You can think of life as such. Simplify life to the cycle of acting, gathering data, and reacting : clicking, assessing numbers, flagging mines and back to clicking. No matter how skilled one is at life, the conclusion is simply a matter of luck. Do you turn into x-(. Or shall it be a win for your next reaction.
Minesweeper teaches that succeeding in life is just a matter of luck. It seems I'm unlucky.



My family will be going on a cruise after Xmas and we'll return in time for the New Year, but if I don't get another blog post in before Xmas and the New Year, I wish everyone the best over the holidays and cheers for a new year to come. I'll be back with pictures of the cruise - sans nfinite of course - just scenery and cool things.

Until then, Happy Holidays!