Today’s post is brought to you with inspiration from Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop.  Every week she posts a couple prompts and you choose one or more to write about.  It is a fun way to find something to write about and maybe get a few more hits on your blog.  I obviously don’t participate every week, but when there are prompts that spark my interest I have been know to write about them.

That being said, the prompt that I chose for this week is: “5.) That one time you met your online friend in real life (was it everything you thought it would be?)”  The story that I have is not a glamorous, romantic online dating story nor is it a horror show of meeting someone who it totally different than how they seemed online.  It is more of a story of school kids doing what they do.

I was in middle school when the internet was new (yeah, I know I am not THAT old).  I remember the first computer that we had, a black and white Macintosh SE/30.  I also remember the day that my dad took me to CompUSA to look at new computers and I never thought we would actually come home with one, but we did.  It was a Macintosh Quadra 605.  We set it up in the den and my dad proceeded to string telephone cable through the halls of the house to the modem that he got with the computer.

I wasn’t really sure what we were going to do with a computer that could make phone calls, but my mother told me about thins thing that you could dial in to, NEBBS, The Newton Educational Bulletin Board System.  You dialed in and then were greeted by a text-based interface that was very similar to say IRC today.  In fact, NEBBS was basically an early chat and messaging system.  So, you could go on and have real-time chats with people or just send messages back and forth like email.  I would imagine that it was also used for more pertinent information for people like parents and teachers, but us kids just used it for fun.

So, while cruising the NEBBS I “met” a girl who went by the name Zoopy.  This was her handle at the time.  We chatted all the time.  She lived in a different part of town so she was at a different school than me, so I had never met her.  I think that my mother was friends with her mother as my mother was (and still is) very active in the Newton Schools System.  I can’t really remember what we chatted about, probably trivial pre-teen things and school and homework and such.  I sure it would all seem very interesting now!

So, this internet communication went on for a while until the D.A.R.E. program scheduled a city-wide roller-skating party at the former Wal-Lex roller rink and arcade.  So, Zoopy and I decided that this would be an ideal time to finally meet eachother in person.  It was, I can say this now looking back, very cute.  We told eachother what we would be wearing to the event and when we got there we sought eachother out.  Thankfully, we actually got along in person like we did online.  I don’t really remember much about the night, I went to so many events at Wal-Lex, they all kind of bled together now.  I do remember that I wore a Peace Frogs t-shirt.

I believe this might actually be the same shirt that I wore that night.

It turned out that Zoopy and I would be going to the same high school, so we remained friends through our high school careers.  One of the funniest memories I have of that was in our senior year.  We both had switched down to different math class, but since we had been in a higher level before, we knew a lot of the material.  So for much of the class we would sit in the back row and crochet as she was working on a blanket.  The teacher didn’t mind because we still paid attention and did very well on homework and tests.

We were two kids who, in all likely hood would have crossed paths in school at some point.  Would we have been as good friends had we not “met” online?  I have no idea.  It was interesting though, because no one thought about the risks and such of meeting people online at that point n time.  I am sure that it had something to do with the new-ness of the technology and the fact that there were probably fewer people out there trying to take advantage of others.

Meeting people online today can be very interesting, depending on your motivation for meeting people.  Sure, there are online communities where you might go to interact with like minded people or people who work in the same profession, or other bloggers your age.  However now there is also an entire industry in online dating that is just so mind boggling.  Can you ever really “meet” someone online and know what to expect if you ever actually meet them?

What is worse than finding a worm int your Apple?  Finding half a worm.

Don’t get me wrong, I would never trade my Mac for a Windoze machine ever.  I can’t stand Windoze and I really just tolerate the idiosyncrasies of Office because I have yet to really find a suitable replacement that is actually compatible with the rest of the world.  That being said, I really want to know:

WT-Fuck is going on at Apple these days?  I can’t remember a product that was released or updated in the last six months that didn’t have some kind of major issues.  The followers of Apple are kind of like Trekkies, always loyal, so why does Apple feel like they just need to push out products that are not quite ready?  We will wait.  I am not one of those people who HAS to have the newest technology on the day it is released.  I am not going to stand in line at the Apple Store or at AT$T for the next new iPhone on “iPhone Day.”  That is ridiculous.  However, even the people who do that would be happy to wait a little bit so that they actually get a product that works correctly!

Consider that the roll out of iPhone4 was fraught with bugs.  First we had “Antennagate” where the placement of the antenna caused it to essentially short out and lose signal when held in a person’s hands.  This lead to Apple giving away free cases for the phone.  Then there were the screen discoloration problems in a few batches of the phone, not terrible as it sounded like that mostly cleared up for people.  Most recently we have seen issues with the glass on the phone due to scratching, scoring, and breaking.  In fact, there have been more claims for broken glass on iPhone4 than any of the previous models.  Go figure, seeing as form was put well over function on this device with front and rear glass.  Seems a little stupid and superfluous.  Most people use a case anyway, why bother with rear glass?!

Around the same time there was also the release of iOS4, which, for the most part crippled the iPhone 3G, which I am a user of.  There were two software updates before iOS4.1 that didn’t solve the problem.  This was a point that turned many 3G owners to the jailbreak community so that they could revert back to the 3.1.3 firmware.  At least over the summer I wasn’t using my phone as much as I do the rest of the year.  iOS4.1 seems to be better, and they say that iOS4.2, which is due sometime this week, should have even more performance improvements for 3G owners.

While still talking iPhone, lets step forward to this week, specifically this morning for most Americans, though last week for people in Europe and Australia.  So, daylight savings time ended Sunday morning, huzzah for an extra hour of sleep.  The problem was that this morning, anyone who uses repeating alarms on their iPhone probably didn’t have their alarm go off.  Why?  A bug in Apple’s clock software allowed the clock to reset to standard time, but the alarms did not.  Thus alarms went off an hour late.  I am not a programmer, but this seems like way to simple a thing to have been overlooked.  To tell the truth, I have no idea how it is even possible, I mean, doesn’t the alarm just look at the clock and say: “Oh, it’s 8:00AM time to go off!”  Not only that, but Apple knew it was a problem in Europe and did nothing to fix it in the US, and they had a whole week to try.  So, until iOS4.2 is released, it seems that we might be stuck with messed up alarms.  Bad move.

Lets look at other products.  We just saw the launch of the new Macbook Airs, a cool product that I don’t think would really fit in my lifestyle at the moment.  However, many purchasers of the first run of the new Airs were haunted by graphics issues.  Flashing screens, screens with blinkies, it just was not good.  Apple supposedly released a software update that fixed this, or they were exchanging machines, but this is something that should never have happened in the first place.  If it was one or two machines, that is to be expected, but the mass problems indicates to me that they really just needed a little more time to work out the bugs.

Then there was the release of iLife ’11.  Here is software that almost ever Mac user uses almost every day.  What happens?  Install iLife ’11, open iphoto, update library, and bam, lost data, missing photos.  Um, hello!  Apple released two updates to iPhoto within a week of release to address this issue and issues with other missing or non-functional components.  I am glad that I waited and read about the bugs before just diving in with the upgrade, I have a lot of photos and I would hate to lose any.

So, what the heck is going on over in Cupertino?  Apple, Steve, you guys need to wake up and smell the coffee.  Just because things have been going well, doesn’t mean you can slack off.  We endusers do notice when you guys fuck it up, and there has been a lot of that recently.  Figure it out and make it better, things used to be really good, you didn’t used to hear about so many issues!

I couldn’t really come up with a better title.  I had ideas for posts this week and now none of them seem worth writing about or inspiring or something.  It is quite possible that the recent events of the evening had an effect on that.  I had been thinking about writing something about election day, but that didn’t happen.  It would have been something about how I don’t really know enough about local politics to make educated decisions, though I know that there is too much religious influence on politics here.

Then I thought that I could write about how I ought to start my own Apple-Fix-it service business.  When it comes down to it, though I am not an Apple Certified technician or an Apple “Genius,” I am very good at fixing both software and hardware issues with Macs.  This week I was commissioned to help migrate one of my co-workers to a new machine.  A relatively easy task, all things considered.  Swapping out hard drives and optical drives on the old iBook G4s on the other other hand, is quite the project.  I like working on computers, it is fun, and it is always very satisfying when everything gets fixed.

I had also considered writing about how I think that it is so strange that here in Utah everyone celebrated Halloween a day early, because heaven forbid that anything should happen on a Sunday.  I get that some people justify it as a “school night,” but if you are over 18 and out of high school, there is no excuse.  Then, to top it off, since I totally forgot that Utahans are crazy, I didn’t have any candy for the first time since I moved into this apartment that I actually had trick-or-treat’ers.  Go figure.  I felt really dumb having to tell kids that I didn’t have anything to give them.

I could also have written about life at the theatre and how we just finished Dracula and are moving on to White Christmas. The show went well and people enjoyed it.  In other theatre news, Ruth’s show, Hay Fever, opened on a very high note.  It is great fun and I would encourage anyone in the area to go see it.

I could have written about all of those things, but my mind isn’t quite with any of them anymore.  While I was sitting around at home, killing time before strike, I decided that I would bake some cupcakes.  Now, when I say cupcakes, I really mean mini cakes, because we have the really cute tube-pans that are really fun to make “cup-cakes” in.  As I was about to start pouring the batter I get a phone call from Ruth’s mother.  Her grandfather, who has been very ill, was in the hospital and she wanted Ruth to come up after the show.  She wanted me to go up and tell Ruth because we thought that would be better than a phone call.

So, I rushed up to the theatre to make sure that I was there when her show ended.  This meant that I actually left the oven and the TV on in my apartment.  Yeah, I know it isn’t the safest thing to do, but it was important.  At least I hadn’t put the cakes in the oven before I had to run out the door, that would have just turned into a charred smelly mess.  I did still manage to burn things when I finally got home after strike and baked the cakes.  Some of the batter rose over the sides of the pan and burned in the bottom of the oven.

It has been a long week.  At least I get an extra hour of sleep tonight!

“Would you like to play a game?”

Many people around my age or older probably recognize that line from the 1983 film “War Games” starring Matthew Broderick.  The WOPR, a military supercomputer puts the US and Soviet armies on high alert when David Lightman (Broderick) hacks into it thinking it is a game developer’s.  Needless to say, playing “Global Thermonuclear War” online with an unknown computer might not have been the best idea.

Now this might not be the most recent news, but I just uncovered it and found it kind of interesting.  The US Airforce is procuring 2200 Sony PS3s to network together into a supercomputing cluster.  As I trolled some of the tech blogs most were making jokes about what kind of gaming may be going on behind closed doors, but apparently the PS3 is actually a very good platform for creating an efficient and inexpensive supercomputing cluster.  While I don’t really understand the technology, the PS3 is powered by the “Cell” processor which sounds like it is quite well suited to the task.

US Airforce PS3 Cluster Computing

The Ps3 apparently has become the predomenent platform for distributed computing applications like Folding@Home.  In fact, the PS3 holds a record for most petaFLOPS of computing power applied to the Folding project.  The PS3 has also provided a platform for cluster computing for the physics department at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.  Called the PlayStation 3 Gravity Grid, it consists of 16 PS3s used to simulate black holes.  So, some pretty cool uses beyond just playing games.

The real question is how does it make you feel that your tax dollars are being used to buy up a relatively huge quantity of console game systems?  While they claim to be using them for crunching numbers and processing things like video feeds and radar displays how long will it take for some hacker to find their way in looking to play some high end video games?  What about all those military people just itching to break out the video games?  Are we in for a real life version of war games in the future?

In general, many of us live pretty public lives nowadays.  Even if you don’t do Twitter or don’t have a blog you probably have a Facebook or a MySpace page or belong to some other online community.  The strange thing is that even if you don’t really do anything online there is still a bunch of information about you out there in cyberspace.  We leave cyber trails without even knowing it.  It can be a little overwhelming to try and manage it all and I would assume that most people my age don’t really think twice about their cyber presence.

What got me thinking about it was the fact that a couple days ago I got an email from Facebook that someone had commented on my status.  Turns out that it was my grandfather who had made the comment using my grandmother’s Facebook account on a status update that I didn’t realize had been posted about my latest blog entry. (how was that for a convoluted sentence?)  Needless to say, I didn’t even know that my grandparents really knew what Facebook was, let alone had an account.

I got on Facebook when it was fairly new, in fact I believe that I had to wait until they had added my school as one that was eligible to sign up from.  I probably used it a lot more at that point in my life compared to know.  While it is not as convoluted as MySpace, Facebook has so much going on now with all the apps and ads and pages and fans and whatnot.  Even if I were to clear out all of the notifications currently sitting in my inbox there, I would probably have hundreds more within a week.  I even block lots of Facebook apps, but every day there are new ones and new invitations.  Most of the time they are from “friends” who I really have had nothing to do with since high school.  Sometimes I wonder what the point really is.

Getting that email and comment, while it did get me to call my grandmother to say hi, was one of the last things that I ever expected to see in my inbox.  They are not totally technologically illiterate, but they are not computer wizzes.  The whole situation was an interesting reminder of how quickly information is disseminated and how far it can get.

I actually find the timing of this rather interesting as Sci-Fi (Sy-Fy now I suppose) just aired the pilot episode of Caprica. For those non-sci-fi people out there, the premise of Caprica, which is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, where a preeminent scientist looses his daughter in a terrorist bombing.  Zoe, the daughter had been working on a digital version of herself based on collecting the information from her digital trail through life.  The concept being that what we are today is a sum of the events that led to today and much of that is traceable given how much of our lives are contained in the digital world.

I hear people say all the time that you have to be careful with what you post online.  While it is true that employers may look at the Facebook and MySpace pages of potential and current employees, how much of your life can you really keep private these days?  How much information do you keep private?  Is it actually possible to live a truly private life? Is there anyone whose name you can type into Google and just not turn up anything?