What have we learned so far?

Terry started this section of the course by talking about two fundamental problems of information, but most of this section seems to have been about the "construction" of information. I guess that he'll talk about the "meaning" of information in later sections of the course.

He started out by putting information technology in a historical context. I didn't realize that everybody is actually really quite sophisticated about information technologies - like, I mean books and stuff - it's just the newer, digital technologies that seem so foreign to folks. But when you consider what's been happening in the last 150 years - like it's just one big, huge continuum of changes in information technologies.

That example he used of Charles Dickens was interesting, but I remember that in high school I had to read a novel by Charles Dickens - and hey! that's tough stuff because Dickens used so many funny words and everything. I like watching movies of his novels instead.

The history of computers is kind of interesting. Like I didn't know that early computers were hard-wired to perform just one operation. That Neumann guy must of have been really smart to think up the idea of the stored-program computer.

It's funny, I got an account on the University's computers, but I really haven't done much work with UNIX - like the commands and such. But once Terry showed us how easy it is, I want to learn more UNIX commands. And the other thing about operating systems that is interesting is that there's like this big battle between Microsoft and Linux over who is going to dominate and be the controlling operating system. Like, I haven't made my mind up if everyone should be forced to use the same operating system or if everybody should use a different system. There seems to good points on both sides of that issue.

Pico is kind of clunky, but it's not hard to use. One thing I like about this course is that you get to learn stuff that is useful. It's not just Terry talking all the time. I mean, come on, his lectures are interesting and all, but come on!

Perl is easy enough, as long as you don't make any typing errors. I think that the hardest part of using perl is making sure that it is absolutely correct. I worked at the various projects that we had to do in the lab. Maybe it's a good thing that we could get our friends to help us. I got stuck several times and my friends helped me out.

I thought that Terry's lecture on the Web was the best one of the whole section. It's like I never thought about connecting the Semantic Web and the Tower of Babel or World Brain. It's the same thing about hypertext. I always thought that hypertext meant computers, but I guess that there are a lot of novelists out there using that same sort of thing of breaking up linear text to tell a story. I don't think that Dickens did that sort of thing. At least I remember my English teacher in high school yelling at us to start the Dicken's novel at the beginning and not just any old place like some chapter in the middle of the book. I remember that you had to start reading the Dickens novel right at the very beginning and I guess that is one reason it was so boring. I mean, let's just cut to the juicy parts, come on!

The one part of this section of the course that was sort of boring was all that talk about DNS and TCP/IP. I mean who really cares? Isn't it good enough that your computer works? You send stuff and you get stuff back, leave it be! But I liked that part where the other Terry Brooks beat our teacher Terry Brooks and got signed up with an IP address. That was kind of interesting. It made me wonder if somebody has already registered my name, so I used those tools Terry listed on the course page and searched for my own name. I mean, that's something I like about this course, there's stuff that's interesting and you can use it to find out interesting stuff.

And then, finally, Terry gave us a lecture about markup languages and stuff like that. It sort of fitted in with the theme of this whole section - the construction of information. Once again, there was a lot of interesting history stuff and Terry kept linking the stuff that we're learning right now with stuff that we'll be learning in the next two sections of this course.

So far, like, it's not so bad, but I think that I better study for quiz one. Terry seems to take it kind of seriously.