From the desk of Mr. Walters…
with a squishy new theme!
A great man has died today.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87901434
Gygax, ‘Dungeons and Dragons’
Co-Creator, Dies
Listen Now [3 min 55 sec]
With co-creator Dave Arneson, E. Gary Gygax developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. Gygax died Monday at age 69. AP/Family photo
All Things Considered, March 4, 2008 · Imagine a mournful horn echoing across thousands of fantasy worlds: E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, died Wednesday morning. He was 69.
Gary Gygax was an icon to fans of the game, many of whom would show up at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis.
What began as a fantasy game published in book form in the early 1970s, eventually morphed and tumbled onto kitchen tables and dorm room floors. Players assumed the character of elves and dwarves, magicians and swordsmen, and confronted the primal conflict between good and evil.
“D&D,” as fans call it, is the granddaddy of popular online games that attract hundreds of thousands of gamers to the Internet today.
“I’m Hub McCann. I’ve fought in two world wars, and countless smaller ones on three continents. I’ve led thousands of men into battle with everything from horses and swords to artillery and tanks. I’ve seen the headwaters of the Nile and tribes of natives no white men had ever seen before. I’ve won and lost a dozen fortunes, killed many men, and loved only one woman with a passion a flea like you could never begin to understand. That’s who I am.” (Hub McCann, Second Hand Lions)
Uncle Hub, from the film Second Hand Lions, is everything that makes men say, “that’s awesome! That’s a man!” Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot about this character tat reflects a sense of being lost and lacking purpose that I don’t aspire to, but he does know who he is. If someone were to ask me the question, “Who are you?”, I am often unsure of how I would respond. I’ve been thinking about this more and more being a new father, knowing that I too must give the “What Every Boy Needs to Know About Being a Man” speech.
I was watching a bit of Public TV on a recent weekend, because I’m a dork who loves public television. I was watching Martin Yan’s China. This is basically a cooking show in which Yan visits locations in China, gives you a bit of cultural and geographical history and then cooks a local dish. This particular week he was high in the mountains of southern China, visiting beautiful Lugu Lake, where women rule the roost. A seven-hour drive from the nearest major city, the people of this region are known for both their hospitality and their food. You get the idea.
Okay, today I want to address one Elephant in the room, that big “global-warming-destruction-of-the-earth-as-we-know-it” thing. Basically, we’ve passed the point where there is any debate at all that it is indeed happening. The climate is changing, and it’s going to equate to a bit more than minor discomfort for most of us. The thing is, I don’t think our society locally or globally is willing to undergo a little discomfort now to prevent severe tragedy later.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of folks are doing their parts. You may be one of them. Maybe you use cloth grocery bags, high efficiency light bulbs, or maybe you even drive a hybrid. That’s just awesome. Incidentally, when was the last time you had a cheeseburger?
I’m sitting here sipping my coffee and eating a cheap danish, waiting for the keynote speaker. Laptops on the table are the rule rather than the exception. The woman to my right is video chatting with her 7 and 10 year-olds on her Mac book, while the woman to my left is checking email on her Blackberry. Bear in mind, these are the digital immigrants. We’re all teachers and administrators in our 30’s through 50’s. If this is the norm for us, imagine what our students did before or during breakfast, this morning!
…and there was much rejoicing.
After weeks of frustration, the first solution I had tried (typing “sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel” in the terminal) finally panned out. I turned out that after installing the intel driver I had to manually edit my xorg.conf file, replacing the defaut “vesa” driver with the word “intel”. Below you can click on the thumbs to see my original 1024 x 768 layout and my new 1440 x 900 goodness. Check out all of that desktop real estate I gained back! Wide open spaces are wonderful, particularly when you’re running a seperate OS on a virtual box!
Tune in next time for ”The Noble Experiment, Part IV: The Perfect Desktop”
Okay, so I’ve been a little distracted lately, what with changing diapers and feeding and just plain enjoying the company of my 1-month-old son. My distraction, however abruptly ended when, in one week, my Windoze Vista single-handedly:
- Destroyed my Flash Drive (not kidding… my Lexxar USB drive doesn’t even open anymore. It’s just dead).
- Deleted files I was backing up to a CD on the CD and the HD because it “lost the connection”
- Wouln’t record sound in Macromedia Captivate (perhaps the only program for which I keep windoze around).
I’m teaching Adobe Photoshop Elements to my eighth grade students for the first three cycles of Technology class this year, and I’ve been spending a lot of time examining the authentic career applications of such a product. Elements is essentially Photoshop without the Web Design and Graphic Design tools, which limits its practical application to photo enhancement and manipulation.
Incidentally, I do have some moral qualms about the primary application of Photoshop in the world of publishing for photo enhancement and manipulation. This situation is nicely summed up by the “Evolution” film, available at Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” web site.
Obviously, this is a reality that I will be sharing with my students, but it begs the following questions:
- Do we, as educators, have a moral responsibility to equip students with the knowledge of the consequences of the technology we’re training them to use?
- How is it that we are encouraged to teach applications that ultimately harm a multitude of individuals, but are forbidden to use collaborative web based tools on the premise that we may encounter something offensive?
- By sanctioning such commercial products and their related careers and media whilst banning community based tools, known for breaking down such barriers as media vs. public, are we not perpetuating such harmful distortions for future generations?
As Roger the Shrubber once said, “There is a pestilence upon this land.” That pestilence is Microsoft Windows, particularly Windows Vista, which came pre-loaded on my new Acer Aspire T-690. I’ve been fighting buying a new computer for about 6 years now, scraping by on used and surplus units. I kept Windows light by running Win2k Professional with no bells and whistles, allowing me to run Macromedia Studio 8 on Pentium III computers. Slowly, I’ve been eliminating Windows from my home computers in favor of Ubuntu & Xubuntu Linux. I’ve had to keep one Windows computer to do web design, as Studio is very limited in Ubuntu under Crossover Office. Three weeks ago, the day of judgement came when my only remaining Windows computer, a Dell Inspiron 4100, died, losing a lot of web design client data, I might add. This is one of those bad deaths that you can’t recover from no matter what you do. There were missing drivers and damaged registry files. The bottom line, it’s still a paperweight until I can get the data off of the physical drive by another means.
I didn’t expect him to be purple when they took him out, a metallic purple-grey color. He, of course began to turn a nice fleshy color as they cleaned him up. I cut the cord! I never thought I’d be able to. I am definitely the squeamish type. I was fine though, and blood and goo from the cord shot all over my scrubs. I’m sitting here in our maternity room waiting for Lanette to come back from recovery. I can’t believe how big my son is! Hudson came out at 8 pounds, 15.9 ounces. In the real, non-doctor, world we like to call that 9 pounds.
My life is going to be very different from here on out. As I watched them clean and care for my son in the nursery, I winced when he cried and worried throughout the whole process. It’s amazing how much love and care you can have for this little person you haven’t even gotten to know yet.
What a blessed day.
Clint (a new Dad!) Walters
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