Tag: Computers

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, ARPANET. Without you, we would be lacking the Internet.

Some will whisper, this is an anniversary, not a birthday. Maybe they’ll make such a remark on the Internet.

Few realize how long people worked on ARPANET and its principles and processes and what its success actually represents. Like Philo Farnsworth and other inventors, their work is used but rarely remembered and celebrated. Most ARPANET and early Internet pioneers worked in teams. They’re remembered but no celebrated but they had some nifty ideas. Their accomplishments helped drive Internet development. Without them, we’d not have bloggers sharing opinions, dreams, hopes, frustrations and cat photos and videos, and complaining about government, politics, manners and movies. WordPress would probably be a lot smaller and less successful.

Where would Amazon and eBay be without the Internet? What would Facebook be without an Internet?

Seriously, take a moment to imagine a Facebook without an Internet and the web.

I need not add the rhetorical amendment asking where the rest of us would be and what we would be doing, but I kinda did.

Going back to my early Internet and computer learning reminds me minicomputers once roamed the electronic frontier. Remember the Burroughs Corporation?

Sure, some remember. Some also remember the Nash Rambler.

Such is the case with inventors, engineers and their work. Their ingenuity shapes our lives but we remember few of them. As always, the winners shape the marketing we refer to as history.

Ah, it’s all ancient history, way back, like a long time ago. Here we are, on the Internet, clicking, scrolling, and googling away the morning.

Happy New Year.

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M.A.D.

Yep, M.A.D.: More Awesome Dreams.

The dream waves continued last night. All the remembered dreams were about going on picnics. Thinking about this, I laughed: this is all a picnic. What a ‘tude.

So the three dreams were about going on picnics. Each had wonderful weather and different settings. I was an adult in each but in different stages of life. In dream number one, I was youngest and my picnic companions were mostly family, augmented with friends. The second dream featured military members (although none were in uniform – I just ‘knew’ they were military members), while the third dream was community. Again, it was a surprise and a laugh to think, interesting, I’m going on picnics with three pillars of my existence in family, military and community. Although I knew in the dream this is what these were, nobody from any of those areas of my life were actually there. That is, Mom was there but it wasn’t my Mom from life.

All the dreams shared a very joyful, flirtatious, happy and energetic atmosphere. The picnics were planned and now were being executed with small details gone awry. For instance, in the first picnic (with the family), there was confusion about my food and the proportions, but I was working it out. In the third dream, the ‘community’ dream, a young female stranger sought me out as we were preparing to leave. She had a computer issue and couldn’t open a file with a certain application, and was asking for my help.

I won’t subject anyone to further details. They were cool dreams and I awoke feeling uplifted, rested and energized. I laugh just remembering them. I give them four point five stars on my scale of one to five.

After all, they weren’t perfect.

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Sometimes….

Sometimes, you want an outlet. Or a second opinion. For me, this usually comes when computer and connectivity issues crash my plans activities.

Because I’m left wondering, is it me? What is causing this? Is it Google, Chrome, OS, the Internet connection, the web site, computer security, plug in failures, or one of the add-ons, or some misplaced value, or an update running ‘transparently’ in the background? And then I go through each of those, looking for answers about why this is happening, but not finding any. I track to sites like isitdownrightnow.com. By the third incident on one -day, exasperation is spilling over into my tranquil writing-like-crazy processes. Worse, this is the third day in a row….

My evil twin whispers, “Yes, but wasn’t this week of the monthly updates?”

Yes, yes, my evil twin is correct. Update Tuesday, when Microsoft unleashes its fixes and updates and sometimes called Patch Tuesday (please don’t confuse it with Patch Adams) was this week. Microsoft’s updates trigger a tsunami of other fixes, which often include a software entity whose updates or fixes don’t work. Or, some organization doesn’t update its software and now is out of compliance, aka, broken.

Of course, as Wednesday follows Tuesday, Exploits follow Updates. The released updates reveal what needed to be fixed. As all systems and orgs don’t immediately update their systems or launch a corollary fix to address the revealed issues, exploits are quickly developed and deployed.

Yep, anything can happen after Update Tuesday. It drives me mad because here I am, alone on my desert island of computer use, wondering, WTF is going on?

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