information gap.

every once in a while, you hear someone complaining about how the internet has led to "information overload." the usual accusations follow: that it offers people so much choice, they are overwhelmed. paul virilio described the computer as a "window" on the world, changing our concept of the day to a 24-hour one, eliminating night, and therefore rest and sleep.

i am beginning to think that these conclusions are the result of the gap between a generation watching the world change, and a generation experiencing the world change. one is passive, watching as through a window. the other is actively involved, both absorbing the changes and exciting new ones themselves. a tight sub-set of the younger generation is what we used to call "generation y": the group in between gen x and the (*shudder*) "millenials." this is the group that participated in the mainstream rise of the internet, that still remembers when internet chat meant IRC, and who pioneered the use of napster. these are the kids that dropped out of college to make it rich in the dot-coms, or dreamt of doing so. we also remember a nastier internet and tend not to fall for phishing scams or put our cellphone numbers in our IM away messages.

these people do not suffer information overload. we came to it at a mature enough age to be able to filter it, but also to appreciate the potential it offers. we have people on our IM lists from countries all over the world. we follow international news because we are acutely aware that it affects us personally. to be the ignorant, uninformed, britney-spears-consuming american is an anathema. we are not consumers at all, in fact. we are customers, fully cognizant of the concept of comparison shopping, the existence of amazon, edmunds, and pricewatch-type sites, for everything from video game consoles to travel. our music comes from europe, our entertainment comes from japan. we have opinions, and are expected by our peers to be able to discuss reasonably intelligently current events, politics, economics, both foreign and domestic.

the sudden wealth of information available has caused this generation to be, i believe, the most "global" if you will, moreso than the ones before or after it. it is causing a societal shift towards a rational, manageable information addiction (if that's not a contradiction in terms). when your social expectation is to be informed, it's hard to be on information overload.

fast-paced lifestyle.

argh. the last week-and-a-half have been really quite hectic.

it started last wednesday when my mom called me at work to say, "there's...techno tonight at the musikfest. do you want to go?" so we checked out the website. it turned out, the dj doing the house set used to hang out with us. in fact, we remembered when he first decided he was going to be a dj and had all of 4 records. so we went, and we hung out, and we listened to the guy's house set and then a live acid trance show, and we drank beer, and got home at 1am.

thursday was a friend's birthday. so we went out, and we drank beer, and we saw a movie (Wedding Crashers, funny, but about half an hour too long), and got home at 1am.

friday, we went out for dinner with our families because both our little brothers are going off to university for the first time this year.

saturday, i volunteered with 2 really gorgeously cute kittens. that was the first time i was really tempted to take one home with me. so soft, very cute, like a black tabby smoke. awwwwwwwww.

sunday morning, we had to get up at 7am to take my parents and brother to the airport. getting up that early on a weekend ought to be outlawed. the one good thing about it is that i get my mom's car all this week. that evening, we met some friends for dinner, and drank beer, and hung out, but got to bed earlier than 1am. slightly.

monday and tuesday were mostly spent recovering. schedules are all messed up this week. wednesday night, we had friends over for dinner again, and we drank wine, and went to bed at 1am.

yesterday, it mostly all caught up to me. i came home from work and did nothing but play the new Dungeon Siege II demo for about 4 hours. i forsee losing lots of time to it this weekend while he has to work because his boss is on vacation.

gragh.

watching live techno is actually very interesting, despite the apparent contradiction in terms. i probably would have enjoyed it more, however, had it not been acid trance in the same mode as it was when it was hot about ten years ago. since then, dance music has changed somewhat, partly fueled, i think, by the drugs people take while listening to it. the rise in popularity of ecstasy in the quote-unquote rave scene (yes, i know i can just put " around it, but sometimes you want the sound) seemed to have equally given rise to not only music that panders to the effects of the drug, but enhances them. you get the concept of "programming" and "progression." the guy who DJed the house set was actually very good at that. you start off slow, and you mold the energy of the crowd with the music.

old-style acid trance doesn't do that. it's just the same level of energy and sound all the way through. when we were in toronto last easter, we went to hear a goa/acid trance dj. he was spinning fairly new stuff, stuff that had evolved with the scene. it was entirely enjoyable. he had programming. it was fun. i wish some of the other guys could get the hang of that.

assets.

it's funny to think about that when i walk to work i may have absolutely no cash in my wallet, but i'm carrying close to $500 in electronics.

weird.

speaking of assets of a different sort, homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff has declared that security trumps privacy, and american citizens will be made safer if they give up ever more personal information to government databases.

"Would you rather give up your address and date of birth to a secure database and not be pulled aside and questioned," he said, "or would you rather not give it up and have an increased likelihood that you're going to be called out of line and someone's going to do a secondary search of your bag and they're going to ask you a lot of personal questions in the full view of everybody else?"

it sounds to me like he's trying a carrot-and-stick approach there, except...i don't see any carrot.

social responsibility.

two sites i find fairly interesting are Petfinder and Local Harvest. the former is a site for shelter groups that's sponsored by purina and bissel and a few other major corporations. it's where we found our cat, and where i found the group i volunteer for.

Local Harvest is another cool site which allows you to find local farms, farmers' markets, or co-ops in your area. maybe it's the fact that i live vicariously in philly's food scene, but one of the main themes that's been coming out in the last few years has been an emphasis on fresh, local food. and i'd rather pay a little more and support my local farmer, who's more likely to use sustainable, humane, if not organic methods, than to give monsanto more money for their ridiculous patents. we already get our eggs from a local poultry farmer, so i thought i'd look around a little. using the site, i found a farmers' market right down the street from my parents which i finally got to visit last saturday. now i have fruit. yum.

i'm all for buying local and adopting a pet who would probably be killed otherwise. maybe a cat from a shelter doesn't have the cachet of a CFA purebred, but now he's got a good home and a healthy, happy life. and so the plums i bought are little spotty and uneven on their skin; i also know they were tree-ripened and not sprayed down with chemicals by underpaid workers, picked early, and loaded onto a ship somewhere. hey, if the oppurtunity to do something that much better for the world is there, i'll take it.

grrr, dammit.

i hate reinstalling windows.

but now my computer is all happily working again. no more missing .dlls, no more crashing explorer when trying to access "My Computer"...

the ipod gave me a scare, though. upon discovering i don't have usb 2.0, i plugged it into firewire and got the folder-with-exclamation-point again. plugging it back into usb caused windows to reboot, but then everything was fine. just slow.

also managed to figure out how to restore a profile in thunderbird. that took longer than it should have.

i think i fogot to back up my warcraft iii saves. bah.

gadgetry.

we have achieved consumer electronics.

new ipod arrived.

computer dentistry.

yesterday, after driving back from new york (and let me tell you, there's nothing to build anticipation like going 85 mph down the upper west side), we attended what is known as a "lan party."

it was actually quite a lot of fun. we spent roughly six hours, minus time for smoking and pizza, playing the freeze tag mod for quake iii, 6-on-6. i aquitted myself respectably, if somewhat without distinction.

however, i was using a different monitor than my own. it happened to have problems. so i did what any computer-savvy person would do. i opened up display properties, clicked on Settings, and then the fabled Advanced button. imagine my absolute shock when a little window popped up that said, "This application failed to start because mscms.dll could not be found." oh joy.

turned the computer back off, unplugged the monitor, swapped with another, plugged that one it, unseated my video card, reseated my video card, rebooted the machine, display properties, settings, advanced. still no mscms.dll.

i have to reinstall windows. it's like when you wake up in the morning and know you have to go to the dentist. it overshadows everything you do.

except it's slightly cheaper.