06 July 2008

Doesn't it go by in a blink

I added a Blogversary calendar a few days ago, after seeing it pop up on bunches of other folks' blogs.

The day I did it, I realized that MY blogversary was just around the corner. July, 2005. Long before depression, before losing my old non-profit job, before I thought about losing weight. Before so much. Things change. Time moves on. So slowly, sometimes, and at others moving by at lightspeed.

Writing nearly daily has changed me, too. I go nowhere without a journal that I write ideas for posts in, or jot down a few words that will later jog my memory. Any time that I have to myself, I'm often thinking about things to write about. I think my writing has evolved, gotten better. Or I hope it has.

The web's changed all of us. Changed the way we work, shop, research, spend our leisure time. I've spent some time talking about my undergrad days recently, reminiscing about classes and various idiocies with a classmate, but also talking about the administrative details of going to school. Registering for classes, buying books, paying tuition. That's all changed so much since my undergrad days. This dates me so much, but it also amuses me to no end. When I started university, there were black and white television screens in the registration hall that listed endless series of numbers, class codes. (Please note that color television DID exist, was widespread, just not needed in this case. We're talking about the early nineties, people.) As a freshman, there were a handful of "musts" prescribed by the institution: freshman comp (English), remedial maths if you needed them (and I did), human phys (sex ed). The "good" classes filled quickly, and you had to scramble around to get the requirements whilst still finding a class or two that you were actually interested in.

Today, they register online. They buy their books online, they pay tuition online. Heck, they even take some classes online, and professors have dedicated spaces on the universities' servers for subject-specific websites.

I picked up a book about my alma mater for my dad, as it is his alma mater, too. The history of the university, pictorial and narrative. Flipping through it, looking at pictures of co-eds in white dresses, graduating classes of 17 people, football players in leather helmets, I wondered what the class of 1928 would think of the class of 2008.

When I think about new technologies and advancing time, I often think of my grandfathers, both of whom are no longer with us, and what they'd have to say about my Crackberry, and the internet. Grandpa S hated computers. <i>Hated</i> them. Remember some of the early computing acronyms? Like GIGO? (Garbage in, garbage out.) He said that all the time, pointing out mistakes that they made. GIGO is still a true-ism. Databases are only as good as the data entry operators who populate them. HTML coding doesn't write itself. But it is amazing, heady stuff, something I'm glad to have taken the time to learn, if only in the most rudimentary fashion.

Trying to predict the future is a waste of my time. But I look forward to the next few years with hopeful anticipation for what is to come.

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