Virtually Paul

Upgrading to Auditor

Yep… not long now before a number of people at work achieve their four year dream of getting me to wear a tie to work.  In case you missed the post, in amongst all the I-sang-live-on-stage-with-Third-Day hype… I am about to become an auditor.

I’ll be working 3 days per week, while starting part time for a Graduate Certificate in Chartered Accounting Foundations.  I’m looking forward to the challenge.

The best bit is that the firm have bought a new laptop for me to use in my new vocational capacity.  It’s an ASUS manufactured, Intel branded, Intel Core Duo 2 with 1Gb of RAM (for now), 120Gb hard drive and a bunch of bells and whistles on top of that, including a 15.4″ colorshine widescreen and a 256Mb graphics card.  Yeah… I know.  It’s not that cool… but it’s a work laptop.  What do you expect?

The best/worst bit (jury is still out) is that it’s running Windows Vista Ultimate.  I started setting it up today and to be honest all it did was frustrate me because I can’t find anything.  I’ve become very efficient with Windows XP so looking around and searching for stuff is just a hassle even though I’m sure your average home/business user will find it reasonably intuitive and user-friendly.

The interface is very Mac-ish, which is not surprising given that IE7 is very Firefox-ish… yet they’ve still retained a very ‘Windows’ approach to navigation.  One of the things I liked least about using Jas’s Mac was the weird quick-launch-on-steroids vibe it had.  Vista is a better middle ground in my biased opinion.  It’s not making me learn any transformationally different paradigms for navigation, for which I’m somewhat grateful.

Ask me if I hate it some time in April.  I’ll know by then.

P.S. Apparently Geoff invented policies.   Let’s get him.   Or seek his permission to write them.

Christian versions of the Mac vs. PC ads

I really like the points that these quite clever ad parodies raise.

Go here.

Not-that-quick-connection hint: quickly play/pause the other ads so that they load while you’re watching the first one

Book Review: Habits of the High-Tech Heart - Quentin J. Schultze

Schultze uses this book to take an in-depth look at the role of information technologies within our society, the purposes for which we use them and the resulting impact that this use has upon the quality of our lives. Appropriately, Schultze focuses on the usage of information technologies rather than criticising their use. His discussion centralises around an objection to ‘informationism’ as he attempts to demonstrate how technology is used to communicate without a sensitivity to human needs.Schultze’s basic contention is not unlike Postman’s critique of the role of television in society. Schultze believes that our society has sacrificed a conscious choice towards a virtuous, community-oriented and fulfilling existence, for one that is marred by a false consumer-driven hope in our technological ability to satisfy our needs. He quite effectively illustrates that the virtuous traditions of ‘revealed religion’ are the missing link needed to “reconcile our embellishments of technological ability with the reality of what it means to be human.”

Mozilla Firefox: Keyword Searching

I didn’t know about this. It is completely awesome. You can just Ctrl+L into the address bar and type “google whatever” to run a google search on the string “whatever”.

You can even add keywords for your own search engines. eg. gush West Coast Eagles

More info here: http://www.simplehelp.net/2006/09/19/how-to-use-firefoxs-smart-keywords-more-effectively/

Great Quote: Habits of a High-Tech Heart

“How could the software of a billion-dollar company - Microsoft - become susceptible to a simple virus program that probably hundreds of thousands of moderately savvy programmers could have written?”

-Schultze, Q.

Book review on the way…

Review Links: Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3933.html

http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2004/09/26/amusing_ourselve.php

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/05/20/163817.php

http://www.rogerwaters.org/nowthis.html

http://www.answers.com/topic/amusing-ourselves-to-death

Book Review: Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman

I had to read this book for college as part of my Communication Principles subject. At first, the title was somewhat of an irony. The first half of the book was quite boring. As I was thinking about what I’d put in this book review (an edited version of which I will have to hand in formally), I considered assigning it to the genre I like to call “constipated anglican waffle”. The book, however, sufficiently redeems itself.The first section is devoted to a thorough examination of the relationship between cultural conversations and the media used to conduct them. Postman makes observations as to the context within which a culture communicates and the shape of the society which results. Focusing predominantly on American history, Postman examines in detail the transition from the local community, where the written word was champion as the primary mode for ‘public discourse’, through to the emergence of the ‘global village’, which began with the invention of the telegraph and evolved towards television. As it was written in 1985, it does not even begin to touch on the application of Postman’s ideas to the internet. However, this is a logical extension of his argument and one worth considering once one has read through his ideas. Postman’s primary contention through his largely comparitive discussion, is that a print-based culture is more intelligent than a television-based one. He examines in detail the way in which the printed word facilitates the discovery of truth through the critical analysis of ideas. This, he says, better facilitates education and informed opinion. By comparison, Postman believes that the nature of television is one which, simply by association, encourages education, politics and religion to lose their core messages and assimilate into the entertainment landscape on the box. Refreshingly, Postman does not criticise television for being entertaining. Rather, he criticises our society for expecting it to be anything but entertainment. His underlying concern is that our culture will willingly sacrifice its capacity for intelligent thought for the illusion that television keeps us informed. The book does not make for the most thrilling read, which is probably a good thing from the author’s perspective, seeing that Postman proclaims entertainment to be the death of culture. The fact that you and I both have some expectation that a book will be entertaining, probably actually strengthens his argument to an extent. I’d recommend it for anyone interested in thinking about how the Christian faith is communicated within our culture, particularly through the use of print and electronic media, simply because I have never seen these quite relevant ideas presented (or even discussed) in any other place. You can download the MPEG of this blog post… …just kidding!