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What can YOU write about in sixty seconds?

April 24, 2008

So I recently became addicted to StumbleUpon. For those not in the know, StumbleUpon is an internet feature that allows you to select your interests, click a button, and view websites, videos, or photos relating to those interests. It is user-moderated, and has an extremely large following within internet culture. If you use Firefox, you can add a StumbleUpon toolbar to your extensions.

Anyways, I selected ‘writing’ as one of my interests, and soon enough this website turned up. This is a website where you are assigned one single word, and given sixty seconds to write about it. I found the concept very intriguing, so I decided to give it a shot.

My word was ‘raw’, and this is what came out:

Raw can be conveyed as a type of extreme emotion or unfiltered desire. Raw is often what we do not see as a finished product, but rather a more true meaning of a normally tame piece of work. I admire artists who put out their raw work along with their finished work.

After you post your writing, you are given the option to view the writing of others as well. I found that the majority of people wrote about meat, which is predictable. Here are the last few entries submitted before mine:

raw is the color of the meat that spills, vomitously from my maw. i cannot be still until i have burned out the bacteria within my own flesh, my own understanding of myself. my ego is the greatest enemy i have. i should be raked across the fire to cleanse this problem. raw is the state of my heart.

[ghostlikeswazy]

[kristina]

meat, steak undercooked for grandpa too rare for me raw like skin rubbed off the bone raw like a wound, like a heart that’s broke, raw pain, raw alive raw tender raw

[rachel]

jesus

[toto]

raw meat red steak blood cuts wounds i have a wound the knife is stabbing my hand as it etches through the skin im giddy laughing like a stick in a steak, a raw steak red red red

[Adam]

meat, bloody, intended for vampires, all is well. Nothing can be stopped. Forever, always. Nothing more can exist. Nothing more has existed than what is now, the pure elemental force of nature and life within everything, and nothing. It all have survived and it will survive, yet nothing is alive, and all shall wither before it has existed.

[Nic]

I found the exercise very fun as well as exhilirating. While I was typing, I was constantly watching a progress bar work it’s way up to the sixty second mark. That acted on my internal desire to write as much as I can about a word that I may say once per month, just because I was being challenged and timed. A truly novel concept, and a brilliant way to entice yourself to write.

It also allows you to view the many perspectives of a seemingly simple word. For example, I perceive the writing that Nic wrote above was actually a work in action:

meat, bloody, intended for vampires, all is well.

This was the first though that entered that writer’s mind. A natural reaction to reading the word ‘raw’.

Nothing can be stopped. Forever, always. Nothing more can exist. Nothing more has existed than what is now, the pure elemental force of nature and life within everything, and nothing. It all have survived and it will survive, yet nothing is alive, and all shall wither before it has existed.

Nic likely though for a few seconds before typing this. The word ‘raw’ in that person’s mind, after the initial reaction, likely spawned a ‘chain reaction’ of thoughts deriving from personal experiences, literal knowledge, personal beliefs, and in this case an insightful though pessimistic belief in the meaning of the word.

See how that progressed? All we’ve been doing here is writing for one single minute about a word that makes us think about a pink steak at a supermarket.

I also like Rachel’s contribution:

meat, steak undercooked for grandpa too rare for me raw like skin rubbed off the bone raw like a wound, like a heart that’s broke, raw pain, raw alive raw tender raw

This also looks like a ‘work in action’. It started off as comedy, with the remarks implying that grandpa’s rare steaks are simply too much for her to take. However, look at the second part. Her mind was opening up and she was literally ‘rapid-firing’ her true ideas of the word into text. Unfortunately, it was of a negative context, but perhaps that writer feels better after deeply defining a word that no one really contemplates as deep. Perhaps it helped her figure out a bigger picture. Maybe once she read what she wrote after an extremely limited sixty seconds, she understood a little bit more about herself, and about the world around her. If you only had sixty seconds to write, wouldn’t you get the ‘big stuff’ out in the air too?

Once again, truly a great exercise, and I encourage any aspiring writer or any current writer on any level to give it a try.

After all, the only thing I have done is written for sixty seconds about a word normally associated with blood, but in the end I have opened up my mind further, and it has inspired a large post to this website touting the importance of such.

It is simply amazing what a person can do in sixty seconds, and I encourage everyone to try it.

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Teen Repellent?

April 24, 2008

Over the past couple of days, I have been reading about a so-called Teenager Repellent.

In short, this thing emits a buzz that is only audible to people under the age of 25. It is commonly used to ward packs of annoying teenagers away from shops, parking lots, and other places where kids do whatever it is they do these days.

However, kids are smarter than they look. Apparently, they are using the exact same sound as alert tones to text each other in class. Because the teacher can’t hear the tone, the students do not get in trouble.

Here is a CNN article that indicates the banning of the device in several areas of the world.

Me? I just think it’s funny. Think of a group of high-schoolers sitting around an empty parking lot, when all of a sudden the device goes off and the kids run off shrieking with their hands to their heads.

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Quotes that change us for the better

April 18, 2008

In class, I have two very effective instructors. One in particular has referenced two quotes that I now use in everyday situations:

“You are a performance race car driver about to hit the wall, FOCUS on your recovery point”

True indeed. When life turns chaotic, you need to focus on the one thing that will save you, and nothing else. Focus on the basics, and build on that to save yourself from hitting that wall. You need to focus on your basic skills to make it through, as well as think ‘outside the box’ (critical thinking).

“Professionals compete with themselves, and draw their inspiration from others”

I’m in a love/hate status with this quote. Lately, I’ve been drawing inspiration from myself as well as competing with myself. As a professional, I have indeed drawn a lot of inspiration from others. However, I’ve done a lot of things lately to warrant drawing inspirations from my own experiences, both in the context of being a professional and of my personal life. As a professional, I expect myself to perform at the highest caliber, and to execute my skills flawlessly and without self-doubt. In my personal life, I expect the same.

These two quotes have stuck with me, and have changed my perception on life along with personal experiences I have had since then, when I heard them.

Focus on the basics, and never expect less than the best you have to offer, and NEVER sell yourself short.

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Editorial: Nerds in the social/dating world

April 18, 2008

Nerds are overwhelmingly known to be the poster group of the socially isolated. Because of our extremely analytical minds, we often put an amazing amount of time interpreting a sentence and predicting the outcome of conversations or actions. Anyone who knows what I’m talking about knows that this can be the number one hindrance when it comes down to social situations, and knows how bad it can be.

It all comes down to risks. Since us nerds analyze everything inside out, we tend to stay away from risks because we generally have a pretty good idea as to what will happen if the whole thing fails.

However, while we are busy worrying about how badly the flame of failure is going to burn us, we often don’t even consider contemplating what would happen if the plan actually DOES work. Small actions and words can change entire perceptions, events, and even lives. Oftentimes, doing something that takes maybe three seconds can swing day from good to bad. What if it doesn’t work out? Well, nothing much has changed, has it? You certainly haven’t lost anything.

If it DOES work out, then good job! You will find that risks are often worth taking. If you don’t think about it and just do it, and use the same common sense that everyone else has, then your social life may get a lot better.

To be a social nerd, I find that you often have to put away that nerd tool-set that you have been gifted with. Social interaction is a basic pathological trait that all humans have, and it doesn’t require any ‘advanced tools’ and in fact, those tools are often useless baggage when interacting socially.

In a nutshell, quit thinking and start acting….chances are you are afraid of something that’s not even real.

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Editorial: The website of the 21st century

April 16, 2008

Go to nearly any web page that frequently updates and you’ll notice a trend: There are no static pages anymore.

Gone are the days of hitting the Enter button a few times and wedging in yet another cluster of HTML between the previous day’s news and the heading. Gone are the days of using Frontpage Extensions, FTP clients, and the good expectation that a website’s homepage was essentially a huge hand crafted Notepad document.

All of that is gone. Many modern websites use the services of what are typically called ‘Content Managers’, less formally known as ‘Blog’ software. The purpose of a content manager is to utilize a database hosted on a webserver to dynamically store and retrieve data, such as a post or a user name. Because of this, webmasters can typically update their website without ever leaving their website. Content managers typically use PHP.

After I post this article, it will be stored in an SQL database hosted on my webserver. Each time someone loads this page, the content manager will pick this post out of the database and display it. This post will be cross-referenced with other circumstances (date, category, etc) for archiving and searching purposes.

Not to say that you can’t flex your coding muscle as long as your using a content manager. My favorite thing to do when testing a new manager out is to go into the server and start tinkering with the PHP files and trying to tailor it to my tastes or improve it.

It’s a win-win for me. I can effortlessly update my site, yet I can dynamically change it if I want to. Goodbye *.html.

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Well…

April 16, 2008

Well. I finally got the site up using the Wordpress engine. I’ve modified it a bit and I think I’m going to stay with this. This site has been open for three days now, and has already seen more than five content managers. This one is perfect; I can edit the PHP files from the site itself, and I can have multiple pages. The content pages are created, but unlinked and empty. Within the month, I will have:

Reviews of both Hardware and Software
Downloads of software written by me
Editorials/Opinions

Also, the forums are up. There is really nothing going on there, but I think that every website should have a major PHP forum attached to it. Go there. Talk to me.

This page will mainly be used for Nerdly News, rants (opinions that are not proper enough to go into the editorials section), personal news, and quite possibly satire should the mood arise.

I will likely write an editorial after posting this. Yippeee.

Filed under: Site/Personal | Comments (0)

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