Archive for December, 2006
John McCain Can Kiss My Ass
December 18th, 2006
Oh, humanity, pity out poor beleaguered children! The Internet is nothing but one gigantic seething pit of sex-offenders, child molesters, and NAMBLA phishing sites just lying in wait for some poor, poor little tyke to log on so they may all pounce and RAPE AWAY! How can we possibly sanitize the Internet to make it a safe and wholesome place for our kids?
John McCain has an idea how to do it. Recently, he floated a bill before Congress that would–get this, folks–make blogs just like this hyar PEGRITZ(.com)! circus equivalent to ISPs and hold them responsible for all activity in their comments sections and user profiles! Think Progress, one of my alltime favorite progressive-though websites, has a nifty little breakdown of Herr McCain’s lovely little piece of patriarchal bullshit. Under the law, should it be passed:
– Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”
– Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.
— Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.
PEGRITZ(.com)! is, primarily, a personal blog–my personal blog–but I do welcome comments to any and all entries, and anyone on earth is free to leave said comments. Sooooo…let’s say one of the people registered on my site were a–dun-dun-DUNNNN!–wicked, disgusting, thoroughly evil sex offender. If that person posted in a comment a picture of a naked five-year-old being “bathed” in a thoroughly inappropriate manner, I would be legally obligated to report that person to The Government or face fines that would put me and my descendants in hock trying to pay ‘em off. Would I immediately delete such a comment and ban that person from ever posting on my blog again? You’d better damn well believe I would! Hell, I’d probably report the jackass to the Feds on principle! But Herr McCain doesn’t trust me, a responsible citizen, to report such egregious behavior on my own, so legislation must be introduced requiring me to do so under threat of crushing fines.
But, quite frankly, I’m not too worried about that eventuality coming to pass. What particularly bothers me about this legislation is Item 3 above: the responsibility it places on social-networking sites to police their boundaries for the dreaded scourge of the Internet sex offender. It is basically stating that, under Federal law, anyone registered as a sex offender would be barred from taking part in almost any form of social interaction on the Internet–including being banned from creating a user profile on a commerce site like Amazon.com.
Do I think that sex offenders’ activities shouldn’t be monitored? Of course not. But first of all, what indeed is a sex offender? Obviously, someone with a history of sexual crimes–particularly against children–matches the definition. But so does the sixteen-year-old boy convicted of statutory rape because he had 100% consensual sex with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, whose parents found out that Daddy’s Little Girl was more than old enough to give up skins on her own accord and decided to prosecute the boy who made off with her virginity. At present, the definition of “sex offender” is far too broad and far too legally unstable in the United States to require individual websites to accept responsibility for policing themselves based on it.
And, more importantly, why require it in the first place? Republicans constantly rattle on about the evils of Big Government and the fundamental rights of American citizens to go about their lives with as little interference from Washington or state governments as possible…yet they are always the first to push such “Big Daddy” legislation that tacitly declares American citizens unable to properly monitor themselves. Oh, in many cases, American citizens can’t be trusted to govern themselves: if they were allowed to do so, in many parts of the country gay citizens would be hounded like Jews in Nazi Germany and African-Americans would probably still be suffering under Jim Crow laws. However, the aim of federal social legislation should be to protect the liberties of ALL its citizens from the prejudices and idiocy of certain others, not to restrict or otherwise oversee liberties–and such laws as McCain’s ludicrous blogosphere regulations do just that.
People…it’s simple: if you want to protect your children on the Internet, you as parents and individual citizens have to keep an eye on what your kids are doing. Of course, that won’t always work, especially if you have older kids who can easily hide their activities from you. But rather than expecting the government to do your job of providing your children with the necessary knowledge to protect themselves, why don’t you step to the plate and actually do it yourselves? Then the Senator McCain’s of the nation wouldn’t have any reason to trouble our nation with these kind of overbearing laws.
Minutiae 1: My First Computer(s)
December 17th, 2006
AllWords.com defines “minutiae” as: small and often unimportant details. Yet, it is often the small, so-called “unimportant” details that prove themselves exceedingly meaningful with time, or even downright revolutionary. Sometimes, those trifling, easily-overlooked particulars are merely interesting in that they illuminate the dusty and overlooked corners of our lives where tiny–but meaningful–truths come to rest among the cobwebs and lost earrings and dropped thumbtacks. Revealing the great, grandiose Truths-with-a-Capital-T that upend civilizations and decode the universe’s operating system is the province of Science. But it is the duty of writers like myself to take a featherduster to those dust-bunnied corners and reveal what lies forgotten there for the benefit of everyday people, for whom the simple ritual of taking a hot shower on a cold day is a million times more meaningful than the twanging of a cosmic string.
So, I’d like to inaugurate another PEGRITZ(.com)! featurette today by calling one’s attention to those all-important Minutiae that so many barely pay attention to. Yet, those little details are often the features that reveal how vast, and seemingly impersonal, forces of technology, society, history, physics, chemistry, and so forth reach down to touch our lives in very real and very personal ways. And what better subject to launch this vehicle than personal computers–the one technology that has upgraded the existence of virtually every human being in the First World countries over the past twentysome years?
Everyone today remembers his or her first computer just as everyone remembers his or her first car, first love, first BJ, first…well, anything. Once, only bonafide geeks, nerds, and technophiles like myself had such cherished memories of that virgin system that introduced us to the ever-expanding universe of computing…but today, almost everybody can think back and recall that first device that brought the Information Age home to them, however limited that first experience may be. How did computers become so ubiquitous that even stereotypical “jocks”, who, in the 1980s, wouldn’t be caught dead in a computer lab for fear of catching some kind of female-scaring nerd disease, now cannot live without their laptops?
My experiences with my first computers illustrate this principle perfectly, I think. Notice that I said “my first computers“–plural. I actually had two: a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer that I got in 1982, and a Packard Bell 386 PC exactly ten years later in 1992. Even though the TRS-80 was technically my first computer (i.e., a device that computed things and showed the results on a video screen), the Packard Bell was my first real computer, as the differences between the two machines were so gargantuan that it’s hard to believe they were both, fundamentally, the same type of device.
Check it out:
The TRS-80 Color Computer was, even by 1982 standards, a pretty useless machine. First of all, even though it could display colors (by being hooked up to a television through an oldskool RF modulator), it could only display nine colors (you basic red, green, and blue…and a handful of other tones that may or may not have been derived from them)–and it didn’t even come with a floppy drive, let alone a hard-drive. The TRS-80 was designed to save and load programs from audio cassette decks. It also sported a meager 4 kilobytes of memory and was so poorly-ventilated/cooled, that the damn thing inevitably overheated and locked up after about 20 minutes of use. The only thing I could really do with it was write my own short BASIC programs to perform simple math equations (making the computer little more than a hot, heavy calculator) and print the words “FUCK YOU” over and over and over again. But, because the cassette-deck “drive” was so useless, I couldn’t save any of my programs: I had to input them over and over again everytime I wanted to do something with them. Oh, and I had one game for the damn thing–something involving fighting dinosaurs that looked like stacks of pixelated Lego blocks–but I never played it because: 1) it took nearly ten minutes to load from the audio cassette that it came on, and by the time it loaded the computer was just about ready to die from heatstroke; and 2) it was about as much fun as doing long division in hexadecimal. But my mom paid $300 for the thing…so, really, how much could you expect to get?
I only got the TRS-80 because my grade school, German Central Elementary, had bought one for my classroom and I spent a lot of time on it writing goofy little programs. Still, I had to share the classroom computer with other larval computer nerds, and so I wanted one of my own. I distinctly remember my teacher applauding me for my interest in learning to program in BASIC because, as she noted, “in the future, computers will be everywhere, and everyone will have to know how to program them to make them work.” By the time I’d graduated from third grade, I was a veritable expert in BASIC, sure, but I’d grown completely bored with the TRS-80…simply because it was too much of a pain in the ass to work with. Oh, sure, writing programs was mad fun–but the most I could develop were simple matching games, mathematical functions, and anagram generators that could figure out how many cuss-words could be spelled using the letters in someone’s name. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do with the TRS-80 that I couldn’t do with, say, a piece of paper and a pencil. I had incredible ideas in my mind for programs that would…say, make music, or write stories–but I couldn’t implement any of them using BASIC on a friggin’ computer that choked on its own waste heat and had less memory than an Alzheimer’s patient.
I was still convinced that computers were The Next Big Thing, though–I read a lot of sci-fi, and all the stories and novels I devoured involved computers, so I naturally assumed that the Future was going to be full of ‘em–so years later I ended up taking a number of computer-science classes in high school. Again, we were programming in BASIC–though later we moved up to Pascal–and we were working on Apple IIe and IIc Plus computers…which were a great deal faster and much more reliable than the TRS-80s (they also had 3.5″ floppy drives, so we could save our work), but still very limited. I spent my entire senior year in computer science working on a database-management program in BASIC that, ahem, basically proved to be completely unworkable. We had one Apple Macintosh sitting in the lab, but no one touched it because it was virtually useless as a learning tool–you could only write little documents on it and use it as a calculator, and play solitaire.
By the time I hit college in 1991, I had lost almost all of my interest in computers as devices that I would actually use in the here-and-now. It was neat to write about sentient computers in the Year 2600, sure, but computers in the Year 1991 were–in my admittedly-limited experience–good for little more than random entertainment (I had a lot of friends with Commodore 64s and Amigas, but they only used them to play games not much better than what you’d find on an old Atari or Nintendo) or business applications, like spreadsheets.
When I started working for Penn State Fayette Campus’ local newspaper, The Roaring Lion, during my second semester, I began to use a Macintosh for writing and printing stories to be added to the paper. Now I truly began to discover the usefulness of computers! The Mac’s word processor program let me write papers, spellcheck them, edit them, and print them with an ease and versatility my little “stand-alone” word processor (a Magnavox, I believe) at home couldn’t touch. Plus…there were other programs on the Mac, too: a calculator, games, and a terminal program that let the Mac call other computers! (And do precisely what, I didn’t know–but it was still a cool concept that I instinctively knew was Cool As Hell.) The greatest thing I learned from working on the Mac was that you didn’t have to write your own programs to make a computer do all manner of things, not just business applications.
I looked into buying a Mac, but even then Macs were horrifically overpriced. It seemed I would be stuck with my Magnavox word-processor…until my philosophy professor suggested, “Why don’t you get a Windows machine like mine?” He showed me his PC–or IBM as we all still called them–and it just amazed me. Windows seemed to do all the same stuff as the Mac, but was at least a hundred times cheaper! Dr. Pluhar had gotten his computer at the Uniontown Mall’s Sears outlet, and he suggested I go there and look at what they had to offer as well. He gave me some specs to look for in a computer–so I’d get as much computing power as I could afford–and I zipped up to the Sears, all giddy and excited, but still half-expecting to find the machines out of my price-range.
But they weren’t. Two days later, I had my first real computer–a Packard Bell 386 PC with a 16 megahertz processor with two megabytes of RAM (that’s what they called memory these days), a 100 megabyte “hard-drive” (which was like a big stack of floppies you kept inside your computer and never had to remove!), and–AND!–a monitor that could display sixteen whole colors! That was twice what the TRS-80 used to handle! Hell, the Packard Bell’s specs were easily twice what that old Mac at the Roaring Lion office had, and it had a color monitor…all for $1100.
Now, that Packard Hell computer did nothing but give me trouble. In fact, it died–irrevocably–two days after I bought it, and Sears replaced it with a slightly better model that had a whoppin’ four megs of RAM but was, otherwise, the exact same machine. That one wasn’t much better: Packard Bell computers were, after all, the Edsel of the PC market. But it introduced me to the world of DOS and Windows 3.1. Much like MacWrite, the little word-processing program I’d used, Microsoft Word for Windows made writing research papers and silly sci-fi tales very easy, and as a glorified graphical front-end for DOS, Win 3.1 made file and program management easy as well. The key word here is easy, folks. Macintosh computers were touted in the 1980s as being computers that average, everyday folks could plug in and just use: programming experience was completely unnecessary. You didn’t need to know how the Mac worked in order to use it. IBM-format PCs soon followed, and MS Windows was the obvious champ at implementing the basic idea of the Graphical User Interface on a PC. Now, PCs of all sorts were still not plug-in-and-go machines like Macs, but by the early 1990s your Average Joe could buy one, set it up, and start using it productively within just a few minutes with only a modicum of technical knowledge.
The PC I got, however, soon proved to be at least a thousand times more powerful than the Mac–because there was just sooooooooooooo much more software for it. I could made music with my computer (if you added a sound card to it, which I obviously did). I could draw with my computer (once I bought a better video card for it that actually displayed an incredibly 256 colors). I could even call other computers (once I added a 2400baud modem to it). As you can see, I had to jam a lot of new hardware in that damned computer to make it do everything I wanted it to, but the key factor that everyone should note here is that I could upgrade my machine as easily as jamming a new card into it, and once I did so, there was software out there that let me use it immediately! I had absolutely no reason to write my own.
My first computers taught me a great deal about how electronics and software engineering works–but, more importantly, those two devices taught me something about myself, and, by extension, something about humanity which explains just why the Information Age exists as a pervasive entity today. First and foremost, I learned that programming simple things was fun…but that I had neither the patience nor the intellect to code large pieces of software. Few people do, in fact. I just wanted a flexible, easy-to-use device controlled by programs that let me write, compose, communicate with folks, and so forth. Luckily, I’m a little more technically-inclined than most people, so I jumped on the PC wagon train just as it was beginning to roll out in 1992. I was a bit ahead of the game, but as computers became easier to use, via standardization of hardware components and better software design, more and more people followed. Most humans do not care to know how anything works as long as it does work, and lets them accomplish stuff that is meaningful to them–like writing term papers, talking to your friends, creating music and art, and so forth.
The TRS-80 was an evolutionary dead end: a personal computer that one could only use if one was “computer literate”–literate meaning you were able to read code. I had several books of programs for the TRS-80, for instance. Books. Of programs. In order to use the programs, I had to type them in to the computer and then execute a RUN command. How incredibly inefficient is that? By the 1990s, all I needed to do to run a program was, most of the time, insert a 3.5″ floppy disk into a drive. Sure, even as early as the 1970s, there were companies developing software to be installed on computers for users to access…but few personal users would even have any idea how to install them, let alone configure them. With a Mac or Microsoft Windows, all you needed to do was double-click on the file clearly named INSTALL and you were usually good to go.
When the Internet first began to come into daily use (my first experience with it was in 1994 at California University of Pennsylvania, when I sent my very first email to a professor asking to take a final early), it wasn’t exactly a no-brainer to use. I had to access my shell account on the campus mainframe and use all manner of complicated command-line instructions to get to my ASCII porno. If I wanted to call up any of the local Bulletin Board Systems where fellow computer nerds hung out, I needed to initialize my modem with all manner of complex settings so it could connect to them. But then, one day, programs like Netscape and Eudora came along and made surfing the web and reading email a thousand times easier and more rewarding. Why? Because they were easy to use. By 1995, the web was blossoming because it was simple for simple people to work with.
Every year now, the ability of computers to Do More Stuff (for less money) is doubling–mainly because they have now become indispensable tools for living our daily lives. Very few users actually know how to program them, but that doesn’t matter anymore: there is such demand for computers, and their usage has become so ubiquitous, that there are programmers aplenty designing software for others to use on their machines. Computers are now everywhere thanks to a paradigm shift so obvious–but so damned simple–that most folks take it completely for granted. Hell, anyone born after, say, 1988 probably doesn’t even vaguely remember a time when only nerds played with computers and spoke to their devices in bizarre languages full of line numbers and weird symbols.
And, best of all, exactly ten years after I bought my first PC for $1100, I bought a back-up computer (that I kept sitting around just in case my primary machine died on me for some reason) with a 1.2 gigahertz processor, 512 megabytes of memory, a 100 gigabyte hard-drive, a video card that can display upwards of 32 million colors, and all other manner of amazing hardware that my 1992 Packard Hell never would’ve even been able to dream about. I paid $300 for this machine…exactly as much my 1982 TRS-80 cost.
Upcoming Pegritzian Attractions!
December 2nd, 2006
Yeah, I know. To quote my boy Jim Anchower, it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya….I haven’t posted anything here in nearly two months, which in the hyperaccelerated, Singularity-bound, short-attention-spanned bloggerworld is an friggin’ eternity. No doubt y’all have forgotten about your homie Mr. Pegritz, just like, earlier in this decade, y’all forgot about Dre. That’s okay. I‘ve forgotten about myself, too! The past two months have been really busy for your boy Flava Pegg: I’ve been teaching steadily - and very busily - at Waynesburg College, working on a great deal of fiction, nonfiction (and NONFICTION!), and of course music. I’ve been writing occasional reviews of wonderful new, or nearly-new, music over at The Spacing Guild Guide to Good Music…but, really, that’s about the extent of my internet publication for the past two months.
But fear not, Loyal - and, no doubt, Infrequent - Readers! During my absence, as I noted, I’ve been particularly busy…and soon you’ll begin to see the fruits of my long-suffering, bloody-fingered (and -minded) labours. I’ve been writing a number of long essays concerning everything from the tragic shadow-lives of former students to the Horrors of Medical Insurance, Asian horror flicks, and the abject necessity of human upgrading and enhancement in the coming Accelerated decades.
As many of you know, however, my first great love is fiction - in particular, Lovecraftian fiction. However, I must admit: much like HPL himself, I have a longstandiong guilty…wait a second - I have no sense of guilt! Lurid, horribly-written pulp fiction and penny-dreadfuls like Varney, the Vampire: or, The Feast of Blood and anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs is a straight-up honest pleasure of mine. I just can’t get enough awful dialogue, ludicrous cliffhangers, and…of course, six-breasted Venusian women. So check it out: I’ve decided to write a serial pulp-fiction/alternate-history adventure novel involving Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself as a character - as well as Percival Lowell, Emily Bronte, a society of semi-robotic British analytical-engineers, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, the continent of Atlantis/R’Lyeh, Planet X, Wells’ invading Martians, and Kong Kong! The novel is going to be called Howard Phillips and the Flowers of Yuggoth, and will soon be debuting on a subdomain of this site. There will be twelve chapters, each to be published on the first of the month from January of 2007 until December of 2007.
Best of all, this novel is going to be taking advantage of all of the many possibilities inherent in web-publishing and RSS serialization/syndication. What does that mean, exactly? you ask. Well…tune in and find out! I’m certain you’ll be quite enthralled and excited!
So keep your eyes and aggregators peeled to PEGRITZ(.com)!, ’cause there’s gonna be some serious Pegritzian heat coming your way soon. Word to your mothers.
