Revised writing!!!

Here's a link to my website with my revised writing assignment on it. I know there's a random letter P in the corner of the second page and I cannot for the life of me get it to go away. Oops!

U-G-L-Y you ain't got no alibi....

check out this ugly website!

First Web Writing Assignment

           Way back in 5^th grade, about 10 years ago, I was astonished by the power of the internet. My mom had gone through the trouble of setting up AOL’s Instant Messenger, or A.I.M. on our desktop sporting Windows ’95. I had no idea what this meant, but it was then that I became an internet fanatic.

            It was definitely a process of setting up A.I.M. First of all, we had to download the program on our dial-up computer. Not only did this take what felt like 82 hours, it took us even longer to figure out what to do once A.I.M. was installed. I called my best friend Shannon (the only person I knew with A.I.M.) and asked her what to do. I created my screen name, or S.N., which was EklundSoccer. My S.N. was my mom’s idea because she thought everyone in the family would be using the same one. Our last name is Eklund and we all played soccer, so why not? Then the fun began. I signed on and Shannon was online waiting for me with her S.N. SEC961989. Her S.N. was also very generic, as it was her initials and her birthday. All of a sudden, a new window popped up at the same time that the famous A.I.M. “new message” sound played. SEC961989 said “hi”. I typed “hi” back and was instantly entertained. This was far better than that fax I had sent my friend last week. I could send messages to a person and they could instantly receive them and respond back immediately! Soon I had more friends on my buddy list, including Shannon’s parents, Shannon’s sister, and my babysitter. I spent lots of time inside on A.I.M. instead of outside playing like I used to. I learned the A.I.M. lingo such as “lol”, “ttyl”, “lylas”, and the popular “brb”. I started to wonder why we did not have something this amazing before.

            Eventually my buddy list changed to include every person I had ever encountered, and I chatted with people I would usually not talk to in person. I edited my profile to look “cool” with quotes I found on the internet as well as shout outs to all my “BFFAE’s”, also known as best friend forever and ever. I frequently got yelled at for being online when my parents were trying to use the phone, and for not spending more time outside. Of course, once my parents caught on to the internet craze they bought another phone line for internet use. I started getting involved with my Yahoo! e-mail account and expage.com. My Yahoo! e-mail address was ur1curlyfry@yahoo.com, which makes no sense whatsoever. However, I thought it was cool and original so I kept it. I sent pictures to my friends over e-mail as well as funny forwarded messages. My e-mail account was linked to my expage so I could see when my friends commented on my page. Expage.com was a place where you could build your own website. You could design the background, the fonts, etc. People could read all about you and then comment on your page. I made probably around 342 expages just because it was fun. Kidding aside, it was similar to how Facebook is now. Everyone I knew had an expage and you got on yours every day to check out your new comments and to see if anyone had changed their expage around.

            It is hard to imagine how much the internet has changed since dial-up and expages, but I am sure glad it has. If I have a question about anything, I can “Google” it and get an answer. Although the reliability of my answer being correct is iffy, I can still get an answer. Now almost every one of my classes has assignments online, and the main form of communication between teachers and students outside of class is e-mail. If I wanted to get in touch with an old friend, I would probably use Facebook to do so. I am constantly online, not only because I need to for class updates and job-related updates, but because it can entertain me. I can watch T.V. shows or movies online, I can read books online, and I can play games online. What more do I need?

While I was first on A.I.M., I was surprised at how advanced the technology was. But as I became more involved with the internet and uncovered more of its treasures, I began to think that the internet could have endless possibilities. I believe the internet is something like Vannevar Bush dreamed about when he was thinking of his memex device. He says, “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” With the internet we can do all this, at an extremely fast rate. In fact, when I Googled the word “memex”, the search engine found 851,000 results in 0.3 seconds. Bush had some big dreams when he was thinking about his memex, but we have more than accomplished his dreams. We have digital cameras that record in High Definition video that we can immediately share on the internet. This is just one example of how advanced our technology has become. I have no expectations for the internet now that I know its capabilities and I bet Bush had no expectations of the limits of his memex either.

When Google's parents leave town...

This is a humorous video about all the things we use on the internet. It's a party when Google's parents leave town and all the other things on the internet such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Snopes, Facebook, etc. are guests at the party. Each person has the personality of the program on the internet they are imitating.

Cute Kitten Video

Since we talked about lolcats in class, I thought some of you might like this video. My best friend it to me this morning. (Okay, we're those people that spend way too much time looking at cute kitten photos/videos online...)