In a rare occurrence, I have managed to finish the primary homework assignments for the week. For the record, it is always my goal to complete everything except the minor follow-up tasks by Thursday afternoon but it has been a rare occurrence when this has happened in the last 6 months or so. Too often, homework has carried over to Friday or Saturday and even into Sunday, which is the usual due date at 11pm.
I'm going to take advantage of this week's oddity to get a jump on next week's work, which includes tossing out the Homework Help question of the week:
Will brick and mortar shopping disappear? Why or why not?
I'm actually not going to ask you to answer this question unless your answer is a resounding "Yes!" If that's the case, I would love to hear your answer.
Instead, I'll answer this one and ask a question of my own that is a variation of the given question because (1) this one seems too simple and (2), as has been pointed out previously, I'm not the kind of person that just accepts what's given.
My answer:
No, and here are a couple of reasons (feel free to add your own). First, there are some things that have to be experienced before purchasing. Clothing seems the obvious choice to me, especially shoes. Sure, companies have increasingly generous return policies but it's much simpler to just go to a shoe store and try them all on right then and there and walk out with the pair that feels right. Websites can have virtual models with your measurements but even if they make them into 3D images or holograms, it won't tell you what it feels like. Cars would be another choice that I would throw out there. Test driving seems mandatory.
Let me amend my intitial answer by adding an "at least not in the near future" behind the "no". This is a class centered on the Internet taken by students who are attending via the Internet. It could be very easy to jump to the assumption that everyone has access to the Internet and a way to make payments over the Internet. However, this is obviously not the case and it may be sometime until everyone has the Internet at their fingertips.
Now it's your turn. Look into your crystal ball and tell me what you see for the future of e-commerce in relation to brick-and-mortar businesses? What is on the horizon? What do you see as highly probable? More interesting to me, what do you see in the realm of incredible but possible?
In the category of, "So sadly ironic that it must be business as usual in Washington DC," the Great and Powerful Oz is setting up a new PLAN that will allow him to send a text message to everyone with a cell phone. The battle against spam is an ongoing problem and the president is jumping in on the side of evil. No surprise there really but doesn't he have better things to do with his time like play another round of golf or plan the next illegal war or something.
The president is just following through on the nefarious plot of his handlers, doing exactly what they (and I) expect of him, so I won't malign him today. Instead I will turn my attention to the media, which has given up all pretense at attempting plausible spin.
The LA Times had this piece of shite in their article, like phone carriers were doing us a favor:
"Consumers do not need to sign up for the service; their carrier will automatically sign them up, and they won't be charged for receiving any PLAN text alerts, the agencies said."
How convenient is that? You don't have to do anything at all. You're going to be signed up for the plan. Yes, for those that are asking, even if you don't want the service.
"Consumers will have the option, through their wireless carrier, to block all PLAN alerts except for those issued by the president."
Someone better figure out a way to filter spam out of text messages so we don't have to get this garbage.
There is a possible sliver of hope. Cnet.UK says that to pull off his king of spam act, the president is going to have put special chips into cell phones. Phones with these chips will be available next year. This brings up a very important question.
I spent all my blogging time doing homework today trying to make up time from being sick. Now, it's time for me to try to get some rest and with any luck, I won't even have a sore throat tomorrow.
My weekend project is to learn how to use InfoPath. If anyone has some nifty tips, feel free to pass them on.
In addition to amping up the terminal velocity of my Internets connection, I'm finally going to get around to adding the whole wireless thing to the house to make the virtual connection for my wife's laptop, her Kindle, and Trey's Wii (so that I can watch Netflix on the big screen). That should all be happening on Thursday afternoon and I'm hoping that it's fairly quick and painless because with Tia and I taking online college courses, we can't afford to have the Internets down for very long.
I posted the picture for the whole "wireless" thing but it reminded me of a conversation happening on CV Rick's FaceBook wall, which is going to prompt me to ask:
For those of you that were around, what 80's fad are you guilty of committing?
You can go to Reuters for that since that's pretty much every picture of Ben Bernanke.
This morning was the punching cardio workout. You know, with my attention span, I thought I would be tired of it by now but I'm still enjoying it. I have changed a couple of the moves but it is, for the most part, the same workout. I just like it. I've tried to explain it before and failed (but not failed as bad as Mubarak's attempts to throw the people a bone) so I'm not even going to try today. I'll just say that it was a great way to start the day.
Here's some good news that I'm sure most, if not all, of you will appreciate. Supposedly, in the near future, cell phone companies are going to stop the ridonculousness of changing cell phone charger designs every 6 months. As cool as phones are getting, this practice was getting on everyone's last nerve and putting much more garbage into the garbage then was needed. Landfills are filled with millions of phone chargers from year old phones. Phones will be set up with the mini-USB chargers so people can just keep their chargers until they break or get lost or are thrown into a lake to destroy the evidence after a politician strangles an underage hooker.
You would think the EPA would step in with that many cell phone chargers being thrown in lakes.
You would think.
I mentioned Mubarak so I thought I would check in on the story. It appears that he has given his 8-MONTH notice.
You would think two weeks would be sufficient.
They must have different customs in Egypt.
I'm thinking that Mubarak is going senile. Who's going to believe him?
"I promise, I'll quit in September."
"Good enough for me. Let's all go home."
Right?
He also promised that he would not flee the country and that he will die there. Most likely and probably not too far in the future.
Do they make tacos in Egypt?
Not that I know of. Why?
What does Taco Tuesday mean?
It means that I started the day with my punching cardio workout and I'm about to do another 90 minutes of martial arts cardio.
So, those are the sides of the shell and everything in between was 35% fulfilling but mostly fillers and binders?
No, but unfortunately, I am now out of time to explain it. Maybe next Tuesday.
You're a bastard!
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It was a bit of a drive yesterday but nothing too terrible. I have found that driving is one of the "activities" that is hardest on my injury so while 6 hours in a car seems like a simple thing, right now in my life it's not fun.
We got up here in time to do a bit of visiting and relaxing and stretching out from the car trip. I laid on the couch for a couple of hours while people watched a movie and just tried to relax. Then I went to bed and slept, and slept, and slept, and holy cow, I haven't slept like that in a long time. I don't know if it was the mental relaxation of being a vacation or just the cool air coming in the window (it was down in the 30's last night) but I just kept on sleeping. I think I must have gotten about 11 hours of sleep. I usually sleep for about 6 hours a night so you can see how huge this was.
Today, when I finally got up and moving around, we went out for lunch. For this trip, I thought I would try out an app called FourSquare a try. It gives you an easy way to "check in" where you are and then sends that info out to Twitter and Facebook. Now that I type this, I suppose that since all my Twitter stuff goes to Facebook, I'm probably hitting Facebook twice with my FourSquare stuff. Oh well.
Anyway, all you do is open the app and it finds where you are by GPS and then gives you a choice of "gathering places" to choose from. You click on one and you can type in a bit about what's going on and then hit send and you're checked in.
So, we went to lunch at Timber's Edge Restaurant, which I would consider a social gather place since there were plenty of people gathered around socializing. I opened FourSquare and scrolled through the list. Timber's Edge was not listed. However, the Island Park landfill is listed.
I wanted to put my karate class into FourSquare but it's apparently not a "social gathering place". FourSquare is going to let me put it in sometime in the future. Landfills, on the other hand, are apparently social hotspots. Who would've known? I know I'm not a very social person but how did I miss this movement of people hanging out in landfills and tweeting about it?
This afternoon, we went floating down the Snake River in a fishing boat. Just a lazy meander down the river for something to do, especially for Trey. It was fun and it was one of those moments that once again drove home to me just how impressive technology has gotten. Up until a few years ago, cell phone coverage was pretty spotty up here for us. Today, we were floating down the river and I was taking pictures with my Droid and then sending those pictures off on a cyber journey where they would almost immediately show up on Twitter and Facebook.
Truly impressive (and if you'd like to follow along with my journeys, join me on Twitter or Facebook).
It was chilly this morning and I was going to be in the water so I thought I would try out my VFF Flows. The Classics are my faves, no doubt but I thought the Flows would stay on better if I ended up in the river and they would keep me warm. I was correct on all accounts. I was in charge of getting the boat into and out of the water and the Flows stayed in place and kept my feet nice and warm.
They were much easier to put on to compared to last year. I think that it's probably because I have been wearing VFFs all summer. I think my toes are getting used to spreading out to go into the VFFs. It made it so much better for my mindset than last winter when it seemed like a struggle to get them on. I now have a new motivation for my next job. It should be a job that allows me to wear VFFs so that I don't have to jam my feet into shoes because of some dress code. =)
Tonight, I believe we have another lazy night of visiting and I have promised Trey that I would play a game with him. He has found a stash of games that we don't have at home so we'll be trying something called Pictureka tonight. We'll see if we can talk some other people into joining in with us.
Tomorrow, I believe we'll be heading into Yellowstone for a while because Trey wants to go back. I'll be taking plenty of pictures, some posted live from the Droid and many more to posted to Facebook when I'm back on my own computer.
I was having lunch with some cops and troopers yesterday (I just threw in the "and troopers" for the benefit of all the troopers I used to make fun of in Utah - "You know there's a section 76 in the code book right?") and the topic of texting while driving came up. Utah had a highly publicized traffic accident not too long ago where a guy was texting while driving, crossed the center line, and side-swiped an oncoming car. That caused the victim car to slide sideways across the center line where it collided with on oncoming car. Several people died. Now texting while driving is illegal in Utah.
One of the cops had just found out that the fine was about 600 bucks.
They were laughing because people think so little about it, even with the new law in effect, because it's "just" texting. They weren't laughing about the fine, which they thought was excessive, but about how often people just confess (even when the cop didn't know the driver was texting).
"The reason I pulled you over is because you crossed the center line twice."
"Yeah, I was texting," the driver answers sheepishly but not thinking too much about it. I'm sure that attitude changes when they get to the courthouse to pay the fine.
Hold that thought while I share a video with you that I came across this week. They can make cars now that can drive from Point A to Point B on regular streets with traffic without a driver. Between computers, sensors, and gps, the cars can do it all by themselves.
I'm not at a point of trust in my life that I would be able to just sit in a car and let the computer drive me to my location (but those days are obviously coming). I bring up the video just to point out that we have the technology RIGHT NOW to stop cars from hitting each other. Sensors can be mounted in the four corners of the cars and they would not hit each other.
There have been enough kids that have been run over by SUVs backing out of driveways that they are starting put sensors on the back of cars. How many people have to be killed by texters before we start putting the sensors on the front of cars? What is the death quota before a law is put in place to try to fix the problem? How many more people have to die before we actually just fix the problem?
For those of you that love legislation, we could even pass a law forcing car manufacturers to put the sensors on cars.
Imagine the dramatic drop in death and dismemberment from texting (as well as alcohol and painkiller impairment). Seriously, the drop in the death rate would be the front page news of every newspaper and website.
And, we could do this right now if we wanted to.
But, we don't.
One more interesting thing about the story and I don't say this to mock the cops that I was with (because I was one, you know). They were laughing about the texting law because cops are some of the worse violators. They don't text. They type on laptops. They run license plate information, pull up calls for service, and instant message either.
Where it's illegal for drivers of other vehicles to have a view of a TV or computer screen or to text, it is legal for cops to do (because it's part of their job).
This is the norm that we see, isn't it? I heard (but haven't researched so correct me if I'm wrong) that a bill was put before the house that would put Congressional Reps on the same health insurance plan as the masses. The bill, as you can guess, did not pass because it's not good enough for them. Any time one set of people is put over another set of people, there are going to be two sets of laws.
As a cop, I always pulled over when I was doing instant messaging but I was guilty of running license plates while driving. It really is part of the job. One of the cops at lunch wondered out loud why they don't just make voice recognition software for cops.
"Run plate . . . 555AAA."
"555AAA comes back to a 2007 Toyota . . . "
I have to say, yes, why don't they? You can dictate an entire doctoral thesis into your computer. Why can't you run a simple license plate?
Again, this isn't sci-fi "won't that be cool in the future" stuff. We are living in the future. We have all this technology right now. The question isn't about how to make it work. The question is, why isn't it being more quickly spread across the planet?
I watched another video (check my Facebook profile for the link) today that was about computer technology helping us interact in real time with the world around us. This stuff is so cool. An entire computer the size of a cell phone, with camera, that projects the information you want to know right in front of your face (and surfs the net and makes phone calls and plays video games and does everything that a computer does - absolutely amazing stuff). The creator said that it would probably cost about 300 bucks for people to make. For the cost of a Droid phone, you get the newest and most creative technology out there. You have to see the video to really see the possibilities and the creator is just going to keep on creating newer and cooler stuff.
Legislation is quickly becoming the barbaric answer to problems. It doesn't work that well and it's more expensive than actual solutions. It would obviously be so much cheaper for society to put mass produced laser and radar sensors on cars than to investigate crashes, pay for medical bills, replace cars, pay inflated insurance premiums, and everything else that goes along with destroying lives and cars.
People may argue that legislation *was* necessary to maintain an orderly society but it's easy to see now that technology can better solve many of the problems that exist in our world today. In a hundred years, people may look back at our legislative process and lump it in with, say, leeching in its effectiveness.
Out of habit, tradition, programming (and the obvious motivation factor of the rulers), it may take some time to get people to change their minds to practical solutions but I'm confident that the day is coming.
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