2004-09-24

Journal #5

“Moderation is the theme of Socrates guide for producing virtuous men. “”Everything in moderation”” is a commonly heard saying. This idea of moderation is that you should never go to extremes of overdoing a certain activity. Don’t get too much exercise our your mind will soften, don’t exercise too little or your body will become soft and useless.

People in our society that hold to strong moral convictions and reject changes in society are often rejected for not blindly following whatever fads come along. Those people often also fall into the idea that they must thoroughly reject everything and everybody that is part of their modern world.

“This attitude can often lead to people withdrawing from the world and making themselves completely unable to function among people. This is one extreme.

Socrates presents the idea that Guardians as children should b protected from all sorts of offending material that could corrupt their souls, they would not be exposed to many kinds of music, literature, and other entertainment. Why would Socrates advocate an extreme like this one? Does he not say that moderation in all experiences is the key to becoming a balanced man?

I have to admire those people with such strong convictions that they can pull their children out of the world and away from society’s undoubtedly corrupting influence. At the same time many of them fall into the extreme of shutting the children off from the world that they will some day be forced to enter and live in. These children do not receive the training that they should in the social norms of our world.

Certainly, avoiding extremes of immoral activities such as lasciviousness and drunkenness is necessary to produce a person of virtue. But at what cost? We seek to hide from that which we know has the ability to entice and corrupt, rightly so. Yet, in certain circumstances it seems that Socrates notion of well-rounded experiences with proper teaching will be a more effective tool to producing virtuous men.

Far too often you see people that have been locked away from the world by their parents finally get away on their own and fall into a fascination with that which they have been sheltered throughout their life. Whether is be simply becoming entranced by television, or becoming a heavy drinker. There are countless ways for the completely sheltered child to be snared by the world if they are unaware and unprepared.

2004-09-24

Highs and Lows

8:00 AM every Tuesday and Thursday. That’s when I need to be at my graphic design class every week. For 2 hours I sit there and suffer through my art professor’s attempt to teach design. Yes, most of us are “just multimedia students”, but we still try to get some education out of the graphic design classes here. The only problem is that this professor, though he may be a stellar designer, is just plain bad at teaching. He never really explains what the assignments are. Just hands out some baffling sheets of paper with instructions that must make sense to someone with a real, artisitic background.

“

I try to get all my work done for this class but motivation is lacking. I’m all caught up with the assignment that was due this morning, but now I have 12 more roughs due tuesday that will take me another 5 hours. Plus 2 comps due next thursday. The comps wont be a big problem because they are done on the computer. Usually in Freehand. I enjoy working on the computer and despise working on large volumes of content by hand. This leads to my lack of motivation which leads to late assignments, which leads to bitterness and frustration on my part. It’s really a never ending cycle between myself and the graphic design program.

I feel almost bad ranting this much about this class, but I just needed to let it all out.

So, my day started out bad, I was tired when I woke up and hungry and my sinus’s were congested, I don’t need to paint you a picuture. But my day steadily improved. Geography finished about 10 minutes early, and I was able to catch a few minutes of sleep in the middle along with the rest of the students in there. My meeting for crusade finished up in about half the time I have scheduled for it. My hypertext and multimedia class was only about 20 minutes long because of an easy test. Radio workshop class lasted for about 10 minutes after we were told that the station would be off the air all week due to a transmitter breakdown. So, no radio show tonight means that Timbly can have fun after Crusade tonight and actually get to bed at a decent time. Maybe. smile

2004-09-23

Uncranked

Alright, so the stream and everythig is working fine, but now the radio transmitter for our college station is blown out. So, there is no KLPR in any way shape or form for the next week. I’d say that there is a 50/50 chance that I will be back on the air and online next week.

2004-09-23

CSIS Assignment #2

“I have a lot of homework due tomorrow. I hope I am able to get all my sketches

done for Graphic Design at 8am. I already have my website assignment pretty much

ready to go for Hypertext and Multimedia, you can check it out here. The content

is simple and is all about the iPod. The content is not what is important, we

simply had to fulfill some requirements. Frames, tables, all this stuff is in

there. I put a lot of extra stuff in there too that wasn’t needed, but I felt

that I had to challenge myself to do a good job on this or I wouldn’t have had

the will to finish it at all.”

2004-09-22

Crank up the Radio

Hey, DJ Timbly is back on the air this year and also streaming his own “unique” tastes in music over the internet to anyone that cares to listen. Check out klpr.unk.edu to listen in to DJ Timbly from 9pm untill midnight every Thursday. The plan is to get a chatroom up and running on this site again so you can make requests, otherwise simply send your requests to sirtimbly_at_gmail_dot_com.

2004-09-21

Turn around

“

I just wonder what I would do with myself if I wasn’t completely insane. I finally decided to upgrade my site to a full fledged content management system. The name of this system is Mambo, and I think I’ve fallen a little bit in love with this piece of software. I’m sorry Becca.

So, this site will be looking completely different here for a while. The new template should be appearing here soon, and mambo will take over all funtionality for my site. The big impetus for me to get this started was the fact that I really need to do a bunch of Philosophy journals in order to get a halfway decent grade. So, blogging to the rescue.

The biggest challenge to having a content management system is filling it with content.
“

2004-09-13

All Things

Blogging is a hobby, I don�t have time for any more hobbys. Work and school continue much as they always have for these past 2 years. Minor differences creep in here and there, but my life at college is largely similar to what it was last year. Major differences such as the presence of my girlfriend Becca here at UNK are certainly blessings. Differences such as the increased load of credit hours I am taking this semester (17 most of which are upper level classes) tend to complicate my life more than anything else.

I realize now that the reason I never post anything on this site is that I never have anything interesting to say on my own. I am forced to write journals for my philosophy class but of course I have been slacking on that lately. Well, I�ll probably start a post for philosophy here soon.

2004-09-13

Journal Synopsis #1

“

**Journal Synopsis< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office”” /></>Word People vs. Picture People

Tim Bendt

Wilson Lowrey. “Word People vs. Picture People: Normative Differences and Strategies for Control Over Work Among Newsroom Subgroups.” MASS COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY, 2002, 5(4), 411–432

Problem.**

Journalists work as part of an organization and each journalist’s individual characteristics can alter the way that news is played out in the media by affecting the direction of the overall organization. Visual journalists and word journalists are often at odds in professional news reporting.
“

“

Theory.

AMILY: TimesNewRomanPS; mso-bidi-font-family: TimesNewRomanPS””>Visual journalists and word journalists follow different norms in the work place. Visual people, are less likely to openly challenge the positions of the organizational authorities, but are more likely to seize control of the organization for their own benefit.< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office”” /></>>

**Method.**

This study was based on in depth interviews conducted with 17 visual journalists at fairly large dailies across the < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags”” /><st1 :place w:st=””on””><st1 :country-region w:st=””on””>US. These interviews were conducted with the purpose of discovering the answers to the following questions. </>>

• Which norms do members of occupational subgroups involved with news

presentation observe and to what degree?

• How do different occupational groups of news presentation workers seek legitimacy

and control within the newsroom?

• How do competition among occupational subgroups and the observance of

different sets of norms affect daily decision making about presentation in

newspaper newsrooms?

There was also a component of the study that involved the observation of planning meetings for newspaper news departments for two large newspapers.

Findings.

In news paper organizations where the page designers and visual communicators in general had greater say then content was adapted to follow the form that was determined to have the greatest appeal to their audience in general. While in the newspapers that relegated the visual journalists to secondary positions the content dictated the form and made the direction of visual communication inconsistent and in some cases ineffective.

Evaluation.

 The research done for this article seems to be largely based on one persons interpretation of the comments of many journalists. As a visual journalist himself it seems likely that his own opinions and prejudices shaped the direction of this study. Other than that, the reasoning and conclusions of this article seem sound and insightful to how different journalists work together in a professional environment.** **
“

2004-08-27

Not a Journal Entry

I don�t know what up with all my crazy posting lately. It seems like the flood gates of blogging have opened. No sophisticated philosophical musings this time though. I just thought I should mention that I am really enjoying work so far. Certainly my position relatively far down the pecking order leaves me doing a lot of �grunt� work. Grunt work for web-design that is. I can sit here for five hours and enjoy being wrapped in my technology. I work in Macromedia suite and a attempt to accomplish design projects for a job. It�s like a warm cocoon of digital joy surrounds me here at work. Does using a Mac make everyone feel euphoric the same way? One way that this job far exceeds my job at Offut over the summer is that there are people I work with who know far more, and even the same amount as me about the topics that I am interested in, Web-Design, Programming, Server administration. Over the summer I pretty much lived in the forums at Kirupa.com. This was my only real social interaction with professional peers, and was actually the majority of all my social interaction for the last 2 weeks of the summer when Becca went back home. At college I�v placed myself in a social situation where I cannot be an introvert. At work I get to revel in my introverted tendencies. That�s the long and the short of today. I�ll be leaving work here in a few minutes and will be getting ready to go on a float trip with the crusade guys. Woo!

2004-08-26

Continuating

So, I failed to continue the saga yesterday, lets hope I can make this brief so I can take a nap.

When I finally got the details for this new job nailed down I was very close to finishing my internship at Offut. I really had a great time with that job, I was kept pretty busy but I somehow found ways to challenge myself with something new and different every week there. I will miss the friendly office environment of DNTT. I finished up work on Friday August 13th and went back home. Packing everything up and leaving my studio apartment was a little depressing. I knew that I would be going back to a dorm room with the likelihood that I will get a roomate at some point. For now I don�t have a roomate, and living in a dorm room isn�t so bad. I am able to keep busy enough here that I don�t really spend that much time in my room anyways. I have a bed and a desk for my computer and a nice recliner to nap in. What more do I need.

I moved back to school last Tuesday, 3 days earlier than everyone else. I had to start working in the IT department a couple days early so I got to move in earlier. It�s a kinda weird thought that (assuming all goes well) this will have been the last time that I will move into a dorm room at UNK. I�m pretty sure that I will be more than ready to be done with school by the time April swings around. After that point it�s all pretty foggy right now.

Books are freaking expensive this year. It�s always been a little frustrating in the past, but I never really buy books for my classes anyways. Everyone is telling my that book prices have jumped up to ridiculous proportions. The economy is not doing well enough yet for this kind of price inflation to occur. I swear, If someone were to actually buy all the books required for their classes they could spend over 500 dollars pretty quickly!

I may go buy one $75 used book today if my Geography teacher really insists. Hm, this is really freaking annoying, I just checked half.com and the price there was the same as that in the book store. How is that possible. What happened to half.com?!? What happened to power to the people and all that, are we all doomed to suffer under the iron fist of the tyrannical book publishers? Why must we suffer so with huge tuition hikes, loans that barely cover a third of the cost of attending, and no scholarships for the consistently average?!!?!!?!? You know what this post is lacking? More punctuation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Alright, so now I�m at school working for the webmaster and I just got a decent G4 for my machine now. I am really looking forward to working on it. I should talk to the JMC department and see what kind of price I can pick up one of their old lab G4�s. That would be pretty sweet.

�Those who take me seriously are doomed to frustration and possibly, even insanity.�

2004-08-25

Not Lazy

Okaaay� so yes, I sorta died off there towards the end of the summer and havent really given any updates on the many things that have happened in the past 3 weeks or so. I�ll just go ahead and say that I am in fact back at UNK for my last year of school and have jumped in with both feet to my many projects and responsibilities here. I�ll hopefully remember get back to talking about school later in this post. Right now I�m gonna progress chronologically from where I left off with the last post.

All summer I was a little uncertain what I would be doing when I came back to school for a job. For the past 2 years I was a helldesk� er um, �help�desk tech. Because of several factors I am not working for the helpdesk anymore, I had been working on gettting a job as work study assistant to the campus web-master. Same department on campus but different supervisor.

So about 3 weeks ago I end up talking to a guy that has a management position in the IT department and he tells me that there is a brand new full time position that involves watching the Help desk for the night shift and also taking care of some multimedia projects. This job was going to pay $11-12 per hour and keep me really busy. I was a little wary about having to drop at least one class and be so incredibly busy during school. But the money was sounding very ver nice to me. I accepted the position pretty quickly after he offered it to me and was of course very excited.

So about two days later I get ahold of him to clear up some details on when and how to get started with this job. He tells me that there has been yet more reorganization within the department and the position that he offered to me has now been scrapped and replaced with a training position for teaching faculty and staff basic computer skills.

On the up side, he did offer me the original work study position for $8.00/hour and 19 hours per week. So I still got a very nice job and I will still be able to graduate on schedule. I would have been much happier about getting this great position if it weren�t for the fact that the much better position was dangled in front of me and then yanked away.

Alright, I have to get back to work. (To be continued�)

2004-07-29

Trilobite!

I am a trilobite, not a troglodyte! OK then, random weird thing said so now its time to continue with the rantage. This saturday I will be in Aurora Nebraska at the Hamilton County Fair for Level 1 Media. We have a booth that Jason is manning most of the week. I�m simply taking over for him on saturday when he will be gone. If you are in that part of Nebraska and are bored please stop in and say wassup. Aaron is gonna be printing up a nice big poster for us to have at the booth, and I�m not really sure about any other details at this point. Maybe we should have gotten some pens or something to give out.

It was my birthday yesterday, now I am 20. No longer a teenager and not yet an adult, weird. Becca was, of course, awesome to me on my b-day and brought me out to eat at Hu Hot. Plus she gave me some sweet throwing knives. I am totally psyched to find a place to practice them at. I figure I could just go out into Memorial Park here in the middle of Omaha, but someone might not appreciate my fly cutlery.

Just ran into the Tenth Hour Calling website today, thought I would send that link along to you folks out there who have yet to hear this awesome band. They are from Kearney, but I�m pretty sure they will be going big places. Well, big places in the Christian rock scene, for what that�s worth. smile

As long as I am dropping so many links I might as well send along some of the more amusing things I have found lately.

One: This Land - totally freaking hilarious, equally heaps the political satire upon both candidates! You may be hearing about this one in the news before too long if the lawyers keep making a fuss about the song that was used.

Two: Switch - WARNING, probably only funny if you have some remote idea of what linux is any why it�s really this great.

Three: Transformers - seriously if breakdancing Transformers dont tickle your funny bone you can just go sit in the corner and think about what you�ve done!

Four: I�v probably talked about these before but it seems that the lawyers have decided to ruin something else great on the web - the Never Ending Bottle of Beer and the Nutrigrain commercials from Turnpike Films. So here are my copies, luckily grabbed before they killed the fun - Nutrigrain, NEBOB. Whatever you do, don�t tell the lawyers!