Whispers

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    29.10.08

    Running from the T-Rex

    "Don't ... move."

    You may well wonder what happened to the man. Eaten? Trapped underneath a Ford Explorer? Cowering inside a bathroom stall? Torn to shreds inside a remote power facility?

    E) None of the above

    October has been a busy month. Truth be told, blogging has taken up shop in the back of my head, waiting, biding its time.

    Luckily, the ideas, the thoughts, the wondering and observing have not ceased. I have no reason to think they ever will, but that is likely just wishful thinking.

    Both "Dinosaur Eats Man" and "Our Feature Presentation." It's November come around the corner, and you know what they say, "Revenge is a dish best served cold."

    Brew some coffee.

    -----

    To offer some consolation for coming here only to find a shallow explanation and nothing to grab hold to, here's a glimpse at what I've been up to.
    That's right, you guessed it. It's the top-down pin planner view of a Cyclone II series Altera field-programmable gate array! I used it to successfully implement a four-bit addition and subtraction unit that I designed using both VHDL and schematic capture in Quartus II. Fun stuff, I tell you.

    Fun stuff.

    7.10.08

    Braving the "E-storm" or The Way I (Think You Ought To) See It #4

    Ahoy-hoy?

    Welcome to http://dinosaureatsman.blogspot.com. That's hyper-text transfer protocol, a couple of notifiers and delimiters, a header, a domain, and a classification. All brought to you by the cooperative efforts of several different magics. DNS, HTML, yadda yadda yadda. I know what you're thinking. "Is this going to be a bunch of our endeared author flaunting some empty knowledge of a bunch of acronyms that are totally unimportant?"

    Oh ye, of little faith. Forgive my indulgence; the comma was included for dramatic effect.

    What I speak of is what makes the world go round. What makes your Dow Jones Industrial Average do that thing it does. What keeps you seated in front of an array of a vast array of pixels for a big chunk of your day. What puts Paolo Conte's "Come di" out at a more than moderate decibel level for your pure enjoyment. What lets me see what's going on, at any given time at 024 HWY 69 & MIMOSA, at 008 15th and McFarland, at 030 McF & Rice Mine, and at 004 LWS & University across my Tuscaloosa Metropolitan Area.

    I speak of what has so commandingly placed humanity on the precipice of its greatest leaps and bounds forward. I read an article saying that human evolution is leveling off thanks to the growing homogeneousity of dispersed population. That and agriculture. Me and my Dell Latitude D830 beg to differ. I believe our fingers will grow stronger, perhaps even more adept at doing all those... "fingery" things than they are now. I believe our minds, given enough time, will adopt a more structured interpretation of natural and cognitive phenomena thanks to the digital world we have imposed upon our senses. (Read: don't mistake what I mean by digital - it's high or it's low, on or off, 1 or 0, +5V or 0V, Vcc or ground.) I believe, mayhap even most likely-ily, that our eyes will take leaps and bounds to keep up with smaller things. Faster things. Far less discreet things.

    But I am no geneticist. No human developmental anthropologist. Not even an engineer... not yet.

    We live in an age where more world than is reachable by sea is reachable by strokes on a keyboard. Where the face of a child who might never have known the rest of the world, or vice-versa, is captured in a resolution more refined than many of us can see in the first place and entrusted forever to the annals of the internet.

    Mind you - let me borrow that spring board, Mr. Louganis - I don't think the internet has limits anymore. You know in "Terminator 3" (I'm going to assume everyone watched the sub-par threequel just like I did) when they figure out that the whole ploy was to get them to survive Judgment Day inside the mountain, and Connor makes the comment about how Skynet was not some machine they could deactivate, but that it was software, existing all throughout the world. That's the internet. But surely it has ventured past classification. It is nowhere (read: now here.) In your pockets, in the memes in your head, in your cell phone conversations, in your car's technical read-outs, in your shoes! It is our world. And what a world we have crafted for ourselves.

    We live in an age of limitless potential... think about that for a while.

    I do not frown on any aspect of the information age. It is our beast, should we not take it by the horns? Turn it where we would have it go? Should we not utilize being able to quickly and effectively communicate at all times? Bounce ideas around, question concepts, resolve conflicts in the most open forum possible?

    I think so.

    We live in an age of limitless potential. I said that a moment ago, now let's come back to it. You would assume I infer that the internet, that the machines of our information age have granted us this condition. I beg to differ. We have always lived in an age of limitless potential - this I call the age of man. Simply enough, we've just got one of them fancy new-fangled playgrounds to romp around on, instead of one of those step-by-step jungle gyms littered with pebbles from back in my day. I tell you, back in my day...