Wednesday, April 19, 2006

sports as a barometer


April 19th, 2006. The roof is open at the SkyDome for an afternoon game between the Blue Jays and the Yankees. This might be the earliest point in the baseball season that they have opened up the roof. Usually the roof doesn't open up until May, sometimes mid to late May.

As I was studying last night, I had mlb.tv on in the background and was amazed at how far the internet has gone in the fifteen odd years since I've had access to it. What started out as a young lad playing doom online to now, using the internet connection to watch sporting events.

One thing I will never forget is the sound that a modem made when it would be communicating with another one, I think it went something like this, "beep boop beep boop kudung kudung tchhhhhhhhhhhhhh". With the "tchhh" part being really loud. I used to hide from my parents the fact that I was playing Doom late at night against my friend Mike by using pillows to cover up the modem noise. Man, why couldn't modems come with a mute button?

And now, I can sit on my patio, in the sun, in the twenty-degree Celsius weather outside, read a book, and have my laptop play the game with the help of a wireless connection. And make a blog entry at the same time.

With all these toys at our disposal, it's the kids that I'm truly worried about. Toy toy, distraction, distraction. By not paying attention, you could sign away your soul to the devil, and not even get a donut in return. Kid's, don't sign for anything if you aren't sure what it means. It's ok to say 'I don't know what that word means' or, 'is this what this word means?' before you sign it. Because recently, I saw a clip of a young guy walking around convincing young girls to sign a petition to end women's suffrage. Actually, it was a pretty funny clip. The only girl they showed not signing it was a blonde chick, so you can take that stereotype and boom box it.

Suffrage n 1: vote 2: the right to vote : franchise

Reason number 1243 that computers can't take over the world like they did in the Matrix yet: We humans are not programming them with much intelligence. To wit, the spell check on this blog site does not recognize the word 'blog'.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You've had internet for 15 years? Who are you, Al Gore?

Liar

Unknown said...

Yeah, I got internet a long time ago when I used to be a road hockey goalie.

Everytime they selected the small brown guy to shoot tennis balls at, I would pull a Patrick Roy, and instead of talking to my goalposts, I would say 'alright superstar, are you ready to enter net?'

heh heh