Archive for February, 2006

peter hutchinson for governor

Posted February 25, 2006 * Comments(1)

The last time I picked my horse early in the game, it didn’t work out so well, (I still believe he has the right answers though!) This time around, I’m hoping for a change of fortune.

This will probably be the first of many links you will have to endure on the subject…

Peter Hutchinson: Memo to Tim Pawlenty Re: State of the State 

Struggling with Myspace

Posted February 18, 2006 * Comments(2)

I’ve been working a lot lately on trying to articulate my message about what myspace is all about and what my response is when asked about it (or asked about filtering it).

Then, I came across this post at Ed-Tech Insider in my newsreader that sums it up nicely:

It isn’t just MySpace.com that we need to be concerned about, it is any web site that students tend to use. The predators, scam artists, etc. will follow. We need to teach students safe, appropriate use of the Internet rather than just block them from these sites.

We block MySpace.com and Xanga.com to keep kids from reading and posting during the school day, but you can’t stop them from posting when they are at home, and you can’t enforce school discipline on them for what they post at home.

I’m against the filtering and blocking of websites in general, for this reason. If we can’t educate kids about these sites, what’s going to happen when they leave school?

Total Hard Drive Space On My Desk

Posted February 15, 2006 * Comments(0)

This is not to brag or anything, but I just noticed that the amount of hard drive space, that I have currently have sitting on my desk, is absolutely staggering.

First, a little history:

  • My family’s first computer, a 386sx/16, had a 40MB hard drive in it. This was about 1991.
  • Then we got a Pentium-60 in 1995 and that had a 500MB hard drive.
  • I switched over to the Mac when I went to college (1996), and the drive that came with that was 800MB, I think..
  • Then I bought a Blue and White G3 Tower (99? I forget), with a 6GB hard drive.
  • After the Blue and White came my current Powerbook (2003), 80 GB drive.

Now, with the new drive I just bought tonight, I have sitting on my desk, in various computers and iPods and external drives, 789GB of Hard drive space.

789GB! To put that into perspective a bit, in terms of my family’s original computer, I have about 20,000 times as much storage space now. The concept of lots and lots of hard drive space in and of itself is not foreign to me, I’m around this stuff all the time, but to think of how this has progressed in the past 10 years, is just crazy.