and this week: last week's readings!

i tend to be a procrastinator, so i've put off talking about last week's articles for, oh, almost a week now. true to the nature of my procrastinatory being, my memories are fuzzy at best, so i'll have to go with what i remember standing out rather than pull the articles up again. (i tend to wind up reading the articles over again and losing the motivation to respond).

i initially disagreed with the cheung article about discovering your identity through your blog, at least until i heard his argument. i especially thought it was interesting that ms. blood fit in that latter category too (when she mentions discovering what she was interested in based on the links she was posting on her blog).

it's interesting when she talks about the popularity a blogger can receive via the internet--there was this popular artist online whose gallery i used to visit waaaay back in the day, and one time when i was reading her blog she put up a survey she'd gotten from a friend (ah, the meme) in which she revealed that she actually kept her art endeavours a secret from her real life friends. i don't know if this is the case with everybody--keeping your online triumph a secret from your friends and family--though i imagine it is the case with a lot of them. i was a little disappointed blood didn't continue along this line about personal expression online and personal repression offline, but then again, she was talking more about the blog itself rather than the blogger in the article.

i'll post some links later today, if i can muddle through my bookmarks and find something relevant (and non-embarrassing to put up--see my self-presentation awareness in action!)

obligatory first post

just testing to see if it works--i'm starting to think i made the title too long.

oh, well, apparently we just got our first assignment. personal history with computers? ok, the earliest computer i can remember sitting in front of were the ones at my elementay school, and all the kids ever did was play number muncher on them. that, or we got on a program called kidspix or something like that (just googled, it's kid pix). i used to play around on my aunt's comps, which were old yet entertaining thanks to the casino games they had on 'em.

this isn't really going anywhere; we officially got our first computer when i was in middle school, though thanks to occasional use of computers in school i didn't feel like a complete idiot using it. i rejoiced when we finally got internet access (some 2 years later?) and i remember staying up till 4 am on our piddly little 56k modem the first night. erm, thanks to ut, i'm relearning how to view macs as tools rather than just cool shiny things that are pretty to look at. i'm fairly competent at using pcs, but the journey entailed the utter annihilation of our first dell thanks to me (bad program installation, wasn't pretty). my laptop is the second dell i've used for significant amounts of time, so i'm hoping dell doesn't have this secret vendetta against me for what happened years ago. i'm rather fond of my laptop, even if it has the unfortunate tendency to break my back.

i don't really need this class academically, but i wanted a refresher course in fooling around with computers (and, of course, using macs). or, "i wanted to be introduced to digital media." does that pretty much sum it up?

as an afterthought, sorry chris. i don't have any pictures of cats to upload for you. also, this is way longer than 350 words.