Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
Over three hours later and the news media has done a wholly terrible job in reporting this national tragedy. Save for a few poignant reports from Diane Sawyer in Times Square and MSNBC reporter on the scene Ashley Banfield (?) i have seen everything from threats of war to incorrect facts restated repeatedly to Peter Jennings at a loss for words. I’m going to make an effort to type up my current notes now, and then surf through the national news sites.
Not to be a newsmonger, but i am a Journalism student, and so far the coverage of this is ridiculous.
Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City this morning within less than a half hour of each other. So far there is no official word on the motive or on any casualties. The first plane struck shortly before 9am and was described by witnesses as a small twin engine passenger jet. A witness from Dow Jones was quoted as stating that “it looked like the wing crashed down to the street” despite the fact that the majority of the aircraft remain lodged in the upper floors of the building.
The second plane was filmed by television cameras already present as a result of the first crash, and appeared to be a Boeing 737. MSNBC reports that “the FBI said it was investigating reports of a hijacking. A United Airlines employee said he had heard reports that an American Airlines jet had been hijacked and was one of the two aircraft that flew into the center. It was not clear if there were passengers on board.”
The last infamous terrorist attack on the World Trade Center occurred on February 26th, 1993 in the form of a truck bomb. The blast killed six people in injured over a thousand others.
I’ll continue to update with distilled news as it breaks.
For those of you who didn’t realize that Philadelphia was the sexual technology Mecca of the East coast, check out this msnbc story about two women who were arrested for running a “sex dungeon” out of their residential “computer solutions” storefront. This local flavour story was brought to national spotlight [sic] by my local NBC affiliate, who didn’t even bother to blur out the number on the store’s sign. Good job, guys.
Philadelphia’s NBC10 news crew is the largest local collection of yellow journalists and hyperbole artists that i’ve ever had the opportunity to witness in action, and their newscast tends to be aimed directly at people who circle Access Hollywood and Wheel of Fortune in their teevee listing every week (which is a double whammy, because not only are those two syndicated gems typically aimed at the lowest possible denominator possible, they tend to be on at the same time every night and thus don’t generally require circling). Lead stories on their news teasers feature (in this order) (without fail) death, fire, breaking news on weightloss, & NBC-centric entertainment news. This station followed each NBA Championship game with a half-hour of local coverage featuring reporters standing in every sports bar in the Greater Philadelphia Area rather than run the normal nightly news or the NBC post-game show. They break into soap operas to report a dusting of snow that had been forecasted the night before. Their anchors are local glamourpusses who marry local politicians and are in-turn reported on by local gossip columns. In other words, it’s a quality all-American news organization that focuses on the subject-matter that an alarming number of Philadelphians actually care about.
Please don’t fail to take note of the wholly unspecific and incidental (though ironically written) reporting on this story by Lu Ann Cahn, who recently reported on a “Flash Fire” at Drexel that was really a small propane tank explosion. Aside from her tantalizing lead-in mention of the women possessing a “large knife,” there’s the explicit name-dropping of “medical bondage.” Unless Lu Ann has mistaken “bondage” for the ever popular “masochism” angle of S&M, i can’t imagine what she meant by “medical bondage” other than maybe wrapping ace bandages around unusual body parts. My favourite part of of the article was, without a doubt, friends and neighbors who didn’t mind the (apparently) openly operated sex shop as long as “they would be dressed real nice” and that their customers were “guys in Mercedes.”
B&D, S&M, E&P, and the shocking news about your favourite Friends star’s personal life, tonight on NBC10 at 11! And, for more unsual explorations of sex and computers, head over to Ernie at LYD, who blogged the article all the way from California.
There’s a whole story that goes along with this post but this post is a story in and of itself, so maybe i’ll tell the other part some other time. Anyhow, here is the crux of it: We have 20 high school guidance counselors from up and and down the East Coast staying with us here at Drexel while they receive training from the National Institute of Technology. Seeing as how i work in the admissions office and that i’m (apparently) some sort of secret weapon with my disarming naivité and big city customs, i’ve been deployed repeatedly to help out these counselors (with the hope, i would suppose, that they’ll want their students to apply to Drexel in the future so that they can be as jittery and disarming as i am).
My position as designated schmoozer has left me with ample time to sit back and observe the N.I.T. instructors at work and in their own conversations, and i have to say that their technical merit is nearly as uninspiring as their name. The two most intense technical conversations i’ve personally eavesdropped were one about using Mailing Lists effectively and another about setting up an FTP server hub, both of which i understood very simply (hell, i eat that shit for lunch. After all, i am a regular reader of Linkstew and Fury). As for their work, they’re training the counselors in basic internet applications using IE, Netscape, and Powerpoint, and therein lies my problem with this whole charade of technological advancement.
At a reception for the counselors last night more than one of them remarked to me that they had spent time at similar trainings in the mid-90’s, but that technology had obviously advanced so much since then that they needed to train again. While this is true, i began using the internet in the mid-90’s at the most basic entry-level without a hint of instruction and now i’m certainly able to do anything they’re being taught this week at Drexel. So, where’s the difference? Don’t say that it’s because i’m young and because this is a hobby, because we all know urban professionals who’ve picked up the same ‘net fluency on the job over the last half decade. The problem, and the difference, lies in the fact that they’re being trained on application use instead of technology use.
The best example i can give is that in learning how to design a simple webpage for their counseling department to have a mailinglist signup on, they were all instructed to do so with Netscape Composer. When it came time to inform the counselors that they could change the colors of their background and their links, the counselors were shown the wonders of the ‘Fonts and Colors’ menu – which they ooh-ed and ahh-ed at enough to make me slightly naseous.
Now, i’ll be the last person to propose that we teach all of the counselors raw HTML coding from their first day on the job, but the flaw here is inherent in the design. They’re learning page construction on Netscape4.x, which is already obsolete, and they’re barely even learning how to change link colors. They have no concept of what’s going on behind the words and colors and italics of their page, and they are being trained not to care. This training will be out of date by the end of this year; had the instructors instead taken an extra thirty minutes to explain the tag and hexidecimal color values, the training would last them for nearly another half decade (not to mention the fact that really everyone uses style-sheets for color now, and that style sheets are dead-simple to learn from scratch when you don’t have a misunderstanding of HTML to get in your way and that they control a hell of a lot more than just color). So, these counselors are essentially paying money for airline tickets and “continuing education credits” to get barely fluent in software that is barely considered competetive, with the instructors knowing full well that they’ll have to run a new training session in another year or two when Netscape4 is finally put out to pasture as it should have been earlier this year.
Right. Stuff like this annoys me. When i taught my mother the rudiments of how to use her computer, i made sure not to root them in a single program suite. I taught her how to save files and copy and paste in something as simple as NotePad, and she scaled those skills to Microsoft Works and Netscape without batting her eyes. Similarly, in Netscape i taught her what to do rather than how to do it so she could figure it out on her own in IE if she ever switched over, and while she certainly doesn’t have her own subdomain of Uprush i’d like to think that she is savvy enough and well-prepared enough that she could learn PowerPoint or Composer in a fourth of the time these counselors are taking (neverminding how long it would take them if they were being taught the right way).
By far the worst part of this is that i keep schmoozing the instructors and they smile patronizingly at me when really their company’s website isn’t even coded as tightly as this shoddy little adventure held together in CSS, PHP, duct tape, and arcane prayers to the gods of blog. But, they all carry cell phones and wear business-casual shorts and have funny little conversations with each other about “downloading-to-floppy” and “maximizing user potential” and it’s all i can do not to bust up laughing.
sigh. No wonder i’m not an IST major; i couldn’t put up with all the bullshit.
The acoustic “Superhero” from 24/7 just came on… Garrison telling me: we are ten years old, and we are holding our breath under water. ear drums bursting from the pressure; we can touch the bottom. won’t you come away with me? we are flying high, and we are airplanes today; we can do anything. and i don’t ever want to leave the stage, i am a superhero these days. i don’t ever want to leave my age. i am a superhero these days.
I hope she still feels that, because she really is. Meanwhile, in the “Peter wants to be a superhero” category, can i please be this boy? Granted, i’m not pissy and depressed enough to be nearly as captivating as he is, and although i’ve got much better hair than he does i’m not nearly as otherworldly and elfish. Of course, good hair is as good a place to start as any…