Free Speech for Morons

This isn’t my first blog. I have a separate blog on livejournal, so I’m no stranger to this type of thing. I used to blog quite a bit back in high school, but my inane ranting about booze or whatever substance fueled my weekend are now few and far between. Point being, I have a perfectly good medium for publishing something of substance, that substance not being alcohol, however, but I just use it for pointless babble. I am not alone in doing this though. There are millions of blogs all over the world and you can’t expect everyone to be a professor, so you’re going to run into some writing that will just flat out make you want to destroy something. On the other hand, we see everyday people on television spitting out psycho babble nonsense when we all know full and hell well that Lindsay Lohan’s opinion on, say, John McCain is null and void on such a level that if anyone should actually take her seriously, they should be shot on principle.

We as Americans do have a little something called “freedom of speech”, but this is obviously abused, but what can you do? There was a guy who went to my high school, we’ll just call him Birdman (he had an enormous nose) who decided to post a blog one day that some of us at school new about. The blog concerned an annual summer party I was throwing at my house and I had just graduated. Anyway, this idiot crashed my party to “rescue” my best friend’s girlfriend at the time because her best friend didn’t want her around any drugs, and those nasty little things were in abundance that night. The blog went on to explain how he heroically came to the rescue and viewed us all as scum all on account of a couple mushrooms that some of us ate and it made us feel a little funny. He then went on to say that in hindsight he would have rode up to my house with a couple of assault rifles that he claimed to have just lying around and would proceed to “cleanse the sin”, if you will. I found out about the blog, needless to say, he’s avoided me ever since.

Now, I’m a patriot and I support freedom of speech and I’m also all for having as much information as possible at my fingertips at any given time, so I have to say that I lean more towards the side of Bush on this one. I don’t really see any archaic beauty of not having the internet, unless you’re just a real book nut. The point of all this is, any right out moron can get a computer, create a blog and proceed to vomit a, let’s say “view askew” to quote Kevin Smith. It is, at least entertaining to scroll through some of these discombobulated opinions, however off they are, but I’m just being negative right now. There are some people out there that use blogs to the best of their abilities and cast light where there was once shadow. They enlighten and inspire us via illuminated screen, without the aid of national television and they would probably never even get the chance to appear on the small screen and deliver their message. All in all, I believe that most people possess at least the mental capacity to not take at all too serious half the things they hear or see. Most of us know that half the mess you see on the interweb is a sprawl of lies, untruths or whatever synonym you could think of. I don’t see it that much of a threat, but it can at least be enough to piss you off for a couple of minutes. There have been people on soapboxes preaching their own interpretation of the truth since the dawn of time, that’s how we got all of this silly little thing called religion that permeates through society. As a matter of fact, I’m on my little soapbox right now preaching my slant on blogging and the multitude of bozos that run their mouths via cyberspace. As with anything, there are always positives and negatives to whatever subject is at hand and in this case, freedom of speech and technology coexisting. In conclusion, keep your head straight, don’t take it all too seriously, grab a beer and watch it all go down. Maybe we can even get a war out of this.

Assignment 1

My first experience with a computer dates back, I would guess, around 18 years ago. I was about the age of three and my grandfather had a computer at his house. I don’t have a clue what its true purpose over there was, but my grandfather and I used it to play some very archaic video games. There were a lot of games on the machine, but the only titles I can remember were Space Invaders and Q*bert, there was another with a knight and a dragon, but I have no clue what that was called. I had no idea how to even turn the computer on, but I could work the joystick fairly well.

This particular machine was later replaced around the age of five, when I got my Super Nintendo. After this, I didn’t see another computer until about 2^nd or 3^rd grade. I went to a private Christian school, so I was lucky to not have computers considered the “devil”, but still, there was not much emphasis on the computer lab time. The time I did spend in there was well spent, once again, on video games. We of course had the Oregon Trail game, which I eventually beat, and some other graphics program where you could select different backgrounds and fill it with skulls or unicorns, or whatever. Even at that age, I was surprised we could toy around with a program with skulls and such things because Halloween was strictly forbidden at that school, so I guess I beat them there. It was also about this time that I was introduced to the floppy disk. Our parents were told to go out and purchase one of these things for out computer lab, but being as that the computer lab wasn’t that important and was probably taking up a pretty large amount of Jesus time, we never got around to using these interesting devices.

After the computer labs of the 3^rd grade, I didn’t see much of computers again until my early teenage years. Napster came out and I finally got to download CDs with Metallica and Black Sabbath songs without my parents (apparently still brainwashed by the church) knowing what I was getting into. By the time I got to high school, I was selected in a drawing to attend a technology school in my area known as Highland School of Technology. My parents were really pushing for me to go here and I still didn’t even know how to type, so it was around this time my family got our first home computer. At school, I learned to type, use Word, Excel and a plethora of other boring programs. However, this was a technology school and was separated into four different fields: Medical, graphic arts and so on… I went into the graphic arts field. I had a wonderful teacher named Don Michael, who is now teaching at UNCC. In his class I learned to use a lot of Adobe programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Unfortunately, Mr. Michael left for UNCC after my first year with him. A new instructor came and I quickly lost interest in pursuing a career in the graphic arts and I was pretty good at that stuff too.

These days, computers, for me, are for writing papers, catching up on heavy metal news, music and other inane things like Facebook. Anyway, this has been a brief history of Jeff Worley’s technological experience.

I'm Jeff Worley. I'm majoring in advertising and I'm a senior here at App. I don't mess around with computers that much, so maybe I'll take something away from this class.

Praise Allah,
Jeff Worley