This morning, a post from Geeks are Sexy caught my eye with the headline Nintendo Entertainment System Bed [PICS]. When I opened up the link, I found the bed of my dreams, but unfortunately you can’t buy it anywhere. This amazing bed was created by a gamer’s mother and sister for him. If anybody wants to make me one of these, I would greatly appreciate it . Anyway, here are a couple pictures of the bed but you can find all of them at the French blog nowhereelse
I’m still waiting for my copy of Halo Reach to arrive tomorrow but in the mean time, I have been keeping an eye on the talk about the game and I happened to have this video forwarded to me. Apparently the computer drives about as bad as the people around here do. Anyway, below is the video by Chris Pirillo about just how bad the computer is at driving a warthog in Halo Reach. Enjoy!
I came across yet another image I thought you guys would find interesting and possibly delicious. Apparently there is some restaurant where you can get a glass of bacon. Yes, you read that right. Here is the pic as proof. I don’t know where this place is, but I want to go there.
I came across this image and just had to share it with all of you. Apparently somebody by the name of Gary thinks that if they put their address and a request to return the money on the back of a dollar bill, somebody will just send them the money. As funny as this is, I am curious to know if this idea works.
Sorry it has been a very long time since I have blogged, things have been busy and I haven’t had too much to say that I don’t say on other blogs, podcasts or on Twitter. I am now feeling more like writing longer posts again, so expect many more blog posts here. In fact, my only New Year’s resolution is to blog both here and and the Global Geek News Blog at least 5 times a week.
Speaking of trying to be more productive, I am considering bringing back the Geek News Daily podcast. I was going to bring it back last summer but it never happened. Lately I have felt a very strong desire to get it up and running again but I am still trying to gauge how much interest there is in its return. Would you like to see it return? I want to know!
The Global Geek News Podcast is going amazingly well and our audience is growing at around 50%/mo. I hope we can sustain that kind of growth so that someday soon, I can try to monetize it and make a little bit of money to at least pay the server bills and stuff that are currently paid out of my own pocket. To help me reach that goal, please tell your friends and family about the show. Speaking of the show, we had an amazing show last week with special guest Maya Grinberg and we even did some 2010 predictions as well as a couple extra tips of the week. Starting with tonight’s recording, there will be some big changes coming to the show. What kind of changes? That is a surprise! Make sure to tune in when I post the show tomorrow to find out just how much more awesome the show will be than ever before.
I have a few other things to talk about, but I will save them for future posts. Stay tuned!
Do you enjoy daylight savings time? Have you ever found it useful for you? Personally, I find it extremely annoying, especially since the idiots in Congress decided to extend it and extra few weeks.
Why do I hate it so much? The main reason is how badly it screws with my sleep schedule. Regardless of when I go to bed, I always seem to wake up around the time the sun comes up or a few minutes before. In other words, I have recently been waking up sometime between 6:30 am and 7:00 am. Try as I might, I can’t seem to sleep in like I used to or anything so I just have to deal with it whether or not I want to wake up at that time. Now that Daylight Savings Time has ended, I expect that I will now be waking up around 6:00 am. Since I would say that my body is more in tune with the sun than most people, I expect that I will not only be getting less sleep than most, but I will likely be more agitated because of it. I would give anything to get rid of the whole concept of Daylight Savings Time if for no other reason than to keep my sleep from being screwed up as it usually takes a week to two weeks for me to get used to the change and I am sure that is the case with most people.
I honestly don’t understand why we still have daylight savings time in this day and age. I know the origins of it and the fact that it is mainly for the benefit of an agricultural society but we are not an agricultural society anymore so there is little use for it, rather less to expand it like Congress did a couple years ago. What is really annoying about it is that countless electronic items from VCRs to watches that were built with the old Daylight Savings Time schedule built into them so there is no way to update it to the new days. Instead, I have to go around twice to all of my various DVD players, microwaves and such to set the clock to what it should be when it changes early and then change it back when Daylight Savings Time actually changes. This is a major pain in the butt. I think we would be much better off and have far fewer headaches if we just got rid of the whole concept of Daylight Savings Time. Besides, any farmer that I have ever known started working well before the sun came up and after it went down so I don’t know how much it really helps them anyway.
Another week has begun at University of the People and after a horrible last week, I was expecting this week to be better but I am not so sure that is going to happen. The work load doesn’t seem so bad this week but something that was a minor annoyance before has now turned into a major annoyance.
Why am I so annoyed? I am annoyed at the school’s lack of consistency and software bias. A couple of weeks ago, we were given an introduction to the desktop. Normally I would say this is fine despite the fact that I don’t need to know how to click the start button but what really annoyed me is that the walk-through was for Windows XP and XP only. From the discussions that have taken place among the students, there don’t seem to be too many of them on XP anymore. Some, like myself are on Windows 7, some are on Vista, a few are on a Mac and many are on Linux. A number of students, myself included, are irked that the school seems to be showing favoritism to an 8 year old, insecure operating system instead of something even halfway current not to mention the fact that many are on Linux because they can’t afford a license for Windows and are at a disadvantage because of it. So much for the school being free and open to everybody no matter their circumstance as long as they have Internet and know English.
If this was just a one time thing, I would be willing to overlook it but this week it has gotten much worse. Now, we have the problem of lack of consistency. In this week’s learning guide (our reading material for the week), we are told how to do certain tasks in Microsoft Word 2003 and OpenOffice Writer. Again, I have my current software complaint but I am also irked that Google Docs, which is what I use, is completely ignored. If that wasn’t bad enough, part of our work for the week, our discussion, requires Office 2007. Huh?! Why would you tell us how to use Word 2003 and Writer, only to make us talk about features of a completely different program and only that program? This is insane! How are those of us who use Google Docs or OpenOffice Writer supposed to participate in the discussion (which is for a grade) if we don’t have Office 2007? I have multiple copies of Office 2007, but that isn’t the point. It is not my preferred environment although I do enjoy it, but many people can’t afford to have several different word processors just because a school can’t make up its mind as to what it thinks we should be using.
Make up your mind University of the People!!! I recommend making the system where everybody can learn equally regardless of their software and stop using old software or playing guess what word processor you need next.
Well, it only took about 6 weeks, but I am already burned out on school. I am not sure of the exact reason why, but I think it is a combination of several things. Between spending more hours than expected on school work (I basically have next to no free time anymore), the horrible interface we are forced to use, the lack of good English skills by many of the students and bizarre deadlines, I am getting so sick of things that It is everything I can muster just to do my homework anymore. I still greatly believe in the mission of the school but at this point, I want a break.
Like many people, I have never enjoyed school. Whether it was middle school, high school or college, I have never enjoyed school like some do. I love to learn but I don’t like being forced to learn in an educational environment. I prefer to be free to learn whatever I want in as much depth as I want and find beneficial at my own pace, not that dictated by somebody else. If I am going to retain anything that I learn, I have to be able to enjoy learning and I have never been able to do that in school. When I was going to college at Neumont University, I enjoyed it but that was largely because of the other people that I got to interact with rather than the actual learning which I struggled with. With University of the People, I fell very alone and disconnected despite the fact that it is supposed to be a school based around the idea of social networking. There is no fun in something like that and it makes it very hard to get motivated. Hopefully something will change so that I can get motivated but at this point I just want a vacation.
What do you do when you need to get motivated to work on something like school? I am open to any suggestions I can get at this point.
I thought I should give you guys a quick update on how things are going with my schooling at University of the People.
Things seem to be improving and others seem to be going nowhere fast. It took the school about a week after our discussion on the learning environment to acknowledge our displeasure with many aspects of it and our suggestions on how to change things. Supposedly things are in the works but other than them finally getting the forums working as they should, there is no indication that anything is happening other than the fact that they say there is.
I am liking the length of the homework assignments although the deadlines that we have to go by are very strange and I don’t think they work that well for a global school. They also don’t seem to care about the fact that nobody sees a purpose in having a learning journal and a really crappy one at that. They seem to be sticking to their misguided ideas and keep reminding us that if we don’t use it, our grade will be affected by it. They can keep saying that all they want but it wont make me care any more than I did in the first place which is not at all. I still refuse to use it. My English class seems to require us to use it for the assignment this week. I am torn between wanting to complete my assignment and hold on to my boycott of the learning journal. I am still not sure what I am going to do but I suppose I better decide soon since the assignment is due tomorrow.
Maybe I am not talking to as many foreigners on there as normal but I haven’t noticed the lack of English skills this week as much as in weeks past. That said, it seems that likely because of them, many people don’t seem to be understanding the assignments and how to do them so when I grade them, I have to really mark them down because they didn’t do what was asked. I hate doing that because they don’t understand the question but the school was very clear about knowing English when they got into the school so I can’t say I feel too bad for them when they get bad grades because they don’t understand enough English to do their assignments as required by the school.
I am also slightly annoyed at the fact that they are teaching the basics of the desktop with XP. XP is old and about to die, it should not be used as an example in a learning environment. If you are going to use Windows, use Vista or even Windows 7. There have also been a number of other people with issues with this because they use Linux instead of Windows. I agree with them that it should be taught in more than one operating environment and I fully support their desire to have some of the material compatible with their systems as I use Linux as well on occasion.
Oh, and the calendar they use is crap! They need to use Google Calender.
That is all of my thoughts for this week on my experience at University of the People. More next week.
Greetings everybody! It has been a while since I have talked much about my podcasting so I figured now that I have some fresh ideas, it is time to share them!
First, I want to start really pushing my podcast hosting network, the Geek Podcasting Network. I want to try to build out a high quality network of shows rather than just host my own shows and be open to other people that happen to come along. I am getting everything ready to make for a big push although I am not sure how big of a push I will give it for the next month or so because I am looking at changing web hosts and I don’t want to make matters any more difficult than they have to be.
Speaking of more podcasts, I am kicking around some more podcasting ideas for myself. I am thinking about bringing back the Geek News Daily podcast as soon as tech news picks up again so there is something worth reporting on. I am also kicking around an idea for a piracy podcast. It would cover all of the big from the week in regards to piracy, P2P, copyright law and stuff like that. After seeing how much stuff there is on that topic to cover in the Global Geek News Podcast, I think it would be a good idea to spin it off as its own podcast. Right now, I have pretty much decided that I am going to do this, I am just kicking around some ideas for names, format of the show and a few other things but hopefully I will have it up and running in the next couple of weeks. I will post more details as I have them. In the meantime, if you have any ideas for names or what you would like to see in the show, let me know!
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. Anyway, here are a couple pictures of the bed but you can find all of them at the French blog nowhereelse
