Party on Dudes!

Well, it’s been a while since the last blog. Probably not a good thing, but I’ll get this baby caught up. Anyway, I just finished my personal webpage for the class. I’m pretty pumped about this one. I have put a lot of time into this site so I am hoping it turns out pretty well. Other than that, I am pretty excited for this coming weekend. As most of you know it is Halloween. However, I don’t really care at all about the whole state street thing. I used to love heading down to State Street just to check out all the creative costumes. However, now I don’t really know what I think about the whole situation. The first part I don’t like about the giant State Street bash is all the meat heads who come from out of town and their only intention is being involved/starting the annual bullshit riot. That crap really pisses me right off. The second part I don’t like is how the city is handling the whole situation. It makes me feel like a pig in a pen. I understand that it has come down to that because of all the previous crap that has gone on in the past. I look at it like a nasty cycle though. The tighter the cops squeeze down on the crowds, the rowdier they are going to get. They have to remember, they aren’t dealing with regular sane people. They are dealing with crazy drunk people behind masks who for the most part are looking for a good time, but if they are pushed in the wrong direction, bad things happen. Anyway, enough with that…I’m sure I’ll have a good time anyway this weekend.

The thing I am most excited about is the hockey game on Saturday. I have a ticket to the Wisconsin vs. Boston College hockey game. I think it is going to be absolutely nuts. I think it will be sweet too because a lot of people are going to be dressed up for Halloween at the game. The other part I am looking forward to is that we are playing Boston College. I HATE BOSTON COLLEGE!!!! They are like the even more stuck up and asinine version of Notre Dame. I really hope that Wisconsin beats the tar out of them, and maybe if we’re lucky, their mascot will get run over by the zamboni. Alright, now I’m just getting ridiculous, but maybe now you get an idea for how much I dislike Boston College. That’s really all I have for now. I hope all of you enjoy the Halloween weekend here in madtown, and blog about it later.

p.s. post pics of costumes and stuff. Alright later dudes!

Catfish and the Cold Air

So my birthday turned out to be rather enjoyable after all. Even though my actual birthday was overshadowed by exams early in the week, my friends and I managed to make up for it this weekend. The exams I had turned out well for the most part. I would have liked to do a little better on one of them, but I’ll make up for it on the next one. My birthday festivities began with a very excellent dinner with Gina (my girlfriend). We went to Eldorado Grill on Willy Street. I highly recommend this restaurant to anybody that enjoys Southwest and Mexican cuisine. The restaurant chef has really put some amazing dishes together. It is a little pricey for the average college budget, but definitely worth a try. For the two meals, an appetizer, and a couple drinks, the total was just over $60. If you are a tequila person, then this is a great place to go. They have lots of very fine tequilas ranging from $3 a shot up to $30 (insane). I didn’t get any of them this time, but I did get a chocolate margarita, and it was very tasty. For dinner I got the blue corn crusted catfish, and it was amazing! It was really nice to finally spend a nice night with Gina because lately we are so busy all the time that we really don’t see much of each other.

On another note, we just turned on the heat in our house. We finally gave in, and fired the old furnace up. I am not happy about it because it makes a huge difference on the electric bill. Usually we can fight the cold off until about early to mid November. However, I have spent the last 5 nights in a row or so, sleeping in a house that ranges from 40-55 degrees. Sleeping wasn’t really the biggest problem because I could put lots of blankets on my bed. The real problem was in the morning when I had to shower. I was really getting sick of the intense muscle spasms I was having immediately after getting out the shower from shivering so much. My roommates and I decided that for our general health and sanity, that we needed to turn the heat on. Now, guess what. The rest of our house is being maintained at about 65 degrees or so, except my room. Of course, my room has to be at least 80 degrees currently. I can’t catch a break, but at least I will be able to get out of the shower and dry off normally without chipping my teeth from chattering so much.

Well that’s all for now

Derek ------> Kevin Bacon?

So I’m going to start this post off by saying that I’m a little frustrated today. It is my birthday (woop woop!), but due to exams, I am not able to celebrate accordingly. I have an exam this afternoon, and then another exam tomorrow. However, my roommates and I are having 2 parties this week (Thursday & Saturday), because all of our birthdays are very close (October 4,9,10,16). This time of year gets pretty ridiculous, and GPA points tend to drop slightly. Anybody in my 201 section is welcome to come, just ask me about it in class if you are interested.

Anyway, enough about that, and on to the important stuff. What did we talk about last week in discussion? Well, we talked about a lot actually. My favorite part of the discussion was talking about Duncan Watts and his writing called Six Degrees. For those of you not familiar with “six degrees”, it is in reference to the idea that any person is linked to any other person through six people or less. That idea is pretty crazy to think about, but very cool also. Anyway, Watts starts out his discussion by explaining networks in a way that most of us already understand. His biggest example is the power grid, and how it is linked. Most everybody in our country has electricity, and doesn’t think twice about it. We definitely take it for granted, but if you really stop to think about it, the electric power companies are huge networks of cables and power sources that link to all of our houses and buildings, and if a power outage like the one Watts describes occurs, there can be mass panic. An important idea I got from this is that people often over look the interdependencies in a network because they are made of many different components. As Watts put it, “The trouble with systems like the power grid is that they are built up of many components whose individual behavior, like that of football crowds and stock market investors, can be sometimes orderly and sometimes chaotic…”(pg. 23). In class we brough up the example of Madison, and the big Halloween celebration. Currently, the city feels they have an idea of how the Halloween crowd will act simply by looking at the group as one, but they are failing to recognize that there are 80,000 people who make up this group, and it is nearly impossible to predict their actions.

In Suzy’s discussion we talked about how power in networks work. For example, our 201 section is a network in a way, and we all feed off of one another for ideas and discussion topics. However, if somebody in our class who maybe tends to talk a lot or is a “load bearer” is gone, other people in the network need to pick up the slack to keep the network functioning. Now back to the power lines. If a load bearing part of the power grid crashes, the rest of the network has to pick up the power and take it somewhere, and if this fails, the network crashes and you end up with a big power outage. The same could happen in class. If the load bearer is gone, and nobody picks up the slack, our discussion could suffer a huge malfunction, and we all sit there in silence. I am really trying to make a big deal out of a pretty boring example if you haven’t noticed. I hope I am making sense.

And now, a little bit more on the six degrees. My question for everybody else is, how many times have you met somebody that knows somebody you know, and then said to yourself, “wow, it’s a small world”? Well, this is why the six degrees of separation is so cool, mostly because most of us link it to Kevin Bacon. It makes this huge planet we live on seem a lot smaller. Watts says the reason this happens is because “Each person has a circle of acquaintances – network neighbors – who in turn have acquaintances, and so on, forming a global interlocking pattern of friendship, business, family, and community ties through which paths could be traced between any random person and any other” (pg. 37). The amount of people you can reach grows exponentially with each additional person you go through. This sort of thing happens all the time. To think that through 6 people, you can link to billions of people is mind blowing.

Mr. Clinton...boxers of briefs?

Last week during discussion, class was definitely more exciting than before. We were able to talk a little bit more about topics that people were able to put their minds around. The first reading I am going to refer to is done by Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd and it is titled Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog. Now, first and foremost, my printer ran out of ink while printing the 18 pages needed to copy the entire document so I was only able to read up until about Pg. 6, and gather parts of pages 7-11 or so. This document was rather long, so I will sum up what I think the main point was. Miller and Shepherd are trying to lay out exactly what caused weblogs to come about, and the genre in which they formed. For example, in the 1990’s there was a shift in the country from peoples’ lives being private, to being very public. This was very evident with the uprising of the Real World series and other reality television programs. Well, with weblogs, people are able voyeuristic, exhibitionists, or both. Some people love to read what other people are doing in life, while other people enjoy posting their own stories.

In class, Sara brought up the point that blogging can be more intimate because some people are willing to write things that they normally wouldn’t say out loud to the public because they don’t have to face the people whom they are actually speaking to. I think this is a great point, and that a lot of people are able to come out of their shells because of weblogs and they are not confined by their social ties. Some people have a sense of freedom when they are online because they can express the person who is really inside.

Mike also brought up a great point as to maybe why blogs came around, and from what I got out of it, he was saying that due to the rapid integration of technology into our society, people are becoming increasingly more isolated. For example, people at the bus stops can’t talk amongst one another because of the ipods in their ears. Therefore, they turn to another form of technology, the computer, and blogs for social interaction. I apologize to Mike if this is not really what he was getting at.

There is so much more to this article, but you can read it for yourself because I don’t have time to sit here and discuss every detail. I also wanted to say quick that I have checked out most of the classes webpages, and they are pretty sweet.