Technology eh?

Blog about technology.... Hmm. Well, there's always microprocessors. See right now we use silicon for our chips. And lately the chip manufacturers have been pushing the boundaries of physics with how small the chips are. So they started stacking them. You've probably heard of the AMD and Intel dual core, and now quad core processors. They double or quadruple the power of a single chip. What's interesting is that there's research into processor technologies using molecules that would be able to match current processor power and be only the size of a single bacterial cell. So you could fit billions into the size chip we have today. Scary thought - but wait. There's more. There's research into using a single atom as the processor unit making the processor thousands of times smaller than the molecular chip. But wait, there's more.... It has been hypothsized that a processor could be built from electrons, using their spin, a quantum attribute of the particle. That would shrink the size of the processor millions of times smaller than the atomic processor. I don't know the word for how many of those you could fit into a chip the size of a processor today. But I can tell you it has a lot of zeroes.

Fortune generator

Something I found on the FDToys thing was a fortune generator with associated pictures. The fortune was:

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage. -- Seneca

and there's a picture of a dog with what I guess is a wheelchair for dogs. It's a little beagle with his hind legs held up for him walking down a street. I liked that picture with the fortune.

I blog on my magazine cover

I made my "pic" for blogger on flickr, actually off of a generator, but I like it. It makes me laugh. Note the million dollar price tag.

I like phoenixes. Sue me....

Thing 1,2,3,4

#1 is really a non-step as far as I can tell.

"Lifelong learning" seems to be an exercise in common sense to me. If there's no end in mind, you will meander and become bored. Then you drop it because it's become pointless. Accept responsibility because otherwise you won't do anything. Problems as challenges means you won't give up at the first sign of trouble. Confidence echoes #3. A learning toolbox echoes #3 again. Use technology is an echo of #5. And teaching others is the best way to solidify the information in your own mind. Play just means do it. So really you have what, 5 steps. And really, if any of them are a newsflash to you, you should probably stop sniffing glue.

Step 3 is easy and a good step, but probably should have been step 1.

Step 4 is good. But the mistake that was made was in assuming people would be able to use the access database correctly. There's a whole field in software development that addresses this problem. It's referred to as "usability." What's really needed is a front end application probably written in visual basic to let people enter things into the database. But that would be too easy.

Soooo.....

I find out after I did them all that we're not doing the 23 things that the other library did. D'oh. Well, I guess I start over and try to be first to finish again....

Finito

Ok, so I'm kinda mashing the remaining steps together. I've used wiki's before. I've used YouTube before. I've used NetLibrary before. The web 2.0 awards was nice to see, and had some interesting sites.

As for the program.

It's overdue, and it ought to be mandatory. It took 2 days for me to do this, and I still fulfilled all my full time duties. I worked the desk, did my work room jobs, and had meals, and still did this in 2 days. Oh, and I don't have internet at home yet, so I had to do it all in the time I was at work. That's not long. And you need the technophobes to do this stuff too. There are enough savvy people sprinkled around to hold hands and walk people through it. I've been asked to do that very thing for anyone here who asks. And I'm happy to do it. People need to know about these things and how to use them. I already knew most. Everyone has to graduate to the modern times. Like I've said many times, this program is about catching up with the nineties. That's when most of this started happening. Yeah, the websites are new, but the ideas and technologies are old.

Online software

Also not new. I can't remember the guy's name, but the guy who heads the Xbox division at Microsoft told Gates himself that Microsoft needed to "webify" their applications. That was like five years ago. And Google bought writer a long time ago because it caught on so well. They eliminate the need to have the software loaded on your pc and you can get to them anywhere. Plus you can collaborate. It beats the old software arrangement in several ways. That's why Google is buying up these online systems. They're trying to pull the best of the web together.