Wilsonsway

Linux / Life / Open Source Alternatives

Posts Tagged technology

Newspapers – Paper or Electronic, please?

Jan 27

Posted by ScottW in Opinion | 1 Comment

There has been a lot of talk lately about newspapers going with paid-for-online-content over offering it for free as has been the norm for some time now. This is in effect something they’ve been headed for since the industry has been in dire straights economically speaking for a while.

The overall idea is to pad their income with online content by charging subscribers a fee. This way, they can get customizable content along with a few ‘perks’ delivered right to their virtual inbox or browser. This, along with paid subscriptions to the printed version would hopefully, add to their bottom line since it’s headed for the bottom anyway with the high costs of ink, paper, overhead, etc. on the constant rise. Read the rest of this entry »

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School Technical Consultant

Aug 11

Posted by ScottW in General | 2 Comments

It’s yet another year at Johnson Elementary and I’ve been drafted again as the resident ‘techie’ who handles most of the technical affairs of the 4th grade teachers. It’s funny sometimes but most importantly, it’s my way of contributing to their cause of educating the kids.

This year again promises to be fun-filled and interesting as ever. Wish I could talk them into converting over to Linux though. It’d make things so much simpler. That won’t happen anytime soon however but I can wish. :)

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Skill Poachers

Jul 10

Posted by ScottW in Opinion | Comments off

The human race will never cease to amaze me as long as I draw a breath. We as a people have come so far and yet still some think that they deserve a free ride. Case in point: a friend of mine recently tweeted about someone who complained that the fee being proposed for a web design was too high, that they couldn’t afford it. This person even had the gall to ask my friend to “teach them web design” so they could turn around and do it for companies that also didn’t like my friend’s fees.

Get serious here for a moment! Do any of you have any idea of what it costs to go through school to learn any of this stuff? What all it costs to continue your education as technology progresses? The time and again, costs involved with getting your own business started?

And these folks want to be taught to do the very same thing….for free? :/

I honestly cannot type the words I feel at the moment as they’d be so harsh that most eyes would burst into flames. I hope that one sentence in itself will suffice in describing my feelings about this.

I’m a self-taught web designer. SELF TAUGHT! No school, no begging others to teach me this or teach me that….I taught myself. I’m proud as hell of this accomplishment. I started my own company several years ago and did pretty well for a while. The economy was my biggest competitor and it won. But I learned and gave it my best shot. I’ve had this very same thing happen to me before and my answer was and will always be: Go buy a book!

To ask someone who has gone through school, gone through starting up their own business, going through learning as much as they can about the new technology……to teach you how to do the same thing….for free? Would you go to a doctor that had learned his/her trade by asking other experienced doctors how to do what they do? Why, of course not! Would you hire a lawyer that learned by begging other lawyers how to do the same job? No again!

Go to amazon.com or drive to Books-a-Million and buy yourself a book! Start there and stop insulting these professionals who have worked so hard to get where they are today.

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Technology owns us!

Jul 6

Posted by ScottW in Opinion | Comments off

Think about it for a minute. What all do you have in your home that technology brought you? TV’s, the internet, a laptop/desktop computer, cellphone, home theater system, wireless router….the list is actually endless and I’ve only touched on a minute bit of it. Reason why I am writing about this tonight is because technology really does own us in our daily lives.

Case in point:

My DSL modem went down this past Friday night or early Saturday morning.

  • Cause? Unknown. It just went down. No power, no lights…nada.
  • Effect? No internet for two whole days! On a holiday weekend to boot!
  • Result? Loss of two days pay from side job that depended on the internet plus a not too happy wife who couldn’t play her online games.

The fact that my ISP seems to have the market cornered on this particular modem didn’t help either as no one else had one that would work. It has to be activated/programmed by them online. A cable modem would have been great in this case as pretty much any old cable modem would fill in nicely. Thing is, I’m not paying the local cable company $54 per month just for internet…..not yet anyway.

So, no internet for 2 whole days with the minor exception of my wife hunting for an unsecure wireless signal she could ‘borrow’ to check her Facebook junk with (signal fade in, signal fade away). Wish I could have snapped a picture of her while she was doing that too…..it would have been funny later on. ;)

Other than the loss of two days pay, it wasn’t all that bad. It’s just that we had become so dependent on the internet for our daily lives that we actually felt a ‘loss’ of sorts in not having it. Like a big part of our lives was missing. Crazy, huh? Try it at your home and see how you react to it for a weekend or two days of your choosing.

So, in my opinion, technology does own us these days as we’ve allowed it to intertwine itself in our lives to the point where we feel powerless without it. Maybe true for some, maybe not for others but for most, it really does own us.

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