Tap, Tap, Tappity Tap -- Gotcha!

Algorithms allow computers to act like accoustic sniffer dogs to breach security and transcribe documents based on how it sounded to type them. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050915/sc_nm/keyboards_security_dc

Was Marshall McLuhan Right?

"In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." In his now famous remark, McLuhan set a lot of people postulating. Had he lived to see the evolution of the Internet, I suspect his opinion would not have changed. Blogs, too, can be examined in the harsh light on McLuhan's conjecture.

Cerf's Up!

Amazing to be working in a medium that is so powerful, yet still so young. Where many of the early inovators are still launching new ventures and forging new relationships. This from the Times of London about a new alignment between Vinton Cerf (an Arpanet originator) and Google. Kind of like watching history in action. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1772775,00.html

Brief Sidebar on Dogs

Since ours seems a Dog-friendly group, I thought I'd include Duncan. We call him a "Virginia Golden Chowlie" that we rescued in April. He's such a doll that the in-laws fell in love with him and ran out that week and adopted his brother, Harley.

There was some discussion of changing Harley's name to "Hines" so we could have "Duncan Hines" but my sister-in-law put her foot down.

Dark Side of Blogging

Since so many of my coursemates have already gotten rolling, I'd like to skip the preliminaries and jump to my initial thoughts as a first-time blogger. In a nutshell --Cool medium, but I think it's in trouble.

In browsing other people's blogs, I was dismayed at the amount of "junk mail" that ended up, clearly unsolicited in the comment folders. Can we speculate that people dumping junk mail and trash into blog comment boxes could spell the medium's slow decline? What a waste. It reminds me of the early days of chat rooms. They started out fine, but in a short time, it got ugly. No matter what topic I visited from Hawaiian music to drum corps to who knows what else, all the chats, unless monitored, ended up in random, rancid flamefests that made using them all but pointless. by the late 90s I gave up on them.

Now comment boxes are filling with acres of electronic junkmail. Very unfortunate.