Visitors

Seems like there has been quite a few visitors in the past day or two. The hit counter on this site is showing an inordinately large number for only being up a week or so. I mean, I thought that there were just like five fellow nerds living in a basement who read this site, but possibly there are a few other people stumbling onto my insanity lately. Crazy rants, I have been lacking lately. I enjoy switching up my predicate and subject in sentences. I don't know why, but I think it may have something to do with the influences of the little green jedi master we all look up to... errm, down to I guess. Unless he flys, which he might, I mean he is pretty spanking cool. Do you think that our favorite diminuitive jedi-council-memeber will get to kick some booty in episode 3? The DVD versions of episode 4-6 were pretty sweet. I guess they discovered the color green and artificially added it to the first movie. Weird. I suppose that those of you who are not huge nerds have been frightened away by now. Excelent, that was my aim. Now that all the non-nerds are gone the rest of us can enjoy a good laugh at their expense, I mean, those people probably don't even know the difference between and ATAT and and ATST! Hahahahararhahrr... argh. Coming up next time, timbly learns how to write a well structure paragraph instead of chaining a bunch of nonsensical sentences together.

Graphic Design Presentation

"Long sleepless nights of homework are lurking in every assignment. Last night saw me endeavoring to complete today's GD assignment sometime before sunrise. To my surprise I was finished by 2am. Nyffeler of course was less fortunate, judging by the text message that arrived in my phone at 4:18. Steep, like pilosophy, is an idea i have yet to grasp.
Since my assignment for today is simply a number of inked roughs on paper, I am unable to effectively share this work with you all. I am able, on the other hand, to share the presentation I did for this class 2 weeks ago. This presentation is in flash and I spent nearly 7 hours on it one night. Not that it is terribly complex and worthy of the time I spent on it, but it's in flash, not powerpoint. This ability to utilize flash is a small point of pride for me, so I try to show it off when I get to use it. Here's the link."

Journal #6

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Equality is a subject that Socrates deals with from an interesting perspective. Socrates' luxurious city has no room for people that cannot add something of value to society and therefore gives them nothing in return. Everyone is not completely equal in all things, opposing the ideas that are indoctrinated into the youth of this country through the government school systems.

Socrates points out that women are not equal to men in all things, in fact women are often more suited for certain tasks above others. Specificly Socrates presents the view that women are best able to carry out the tasks of child birth and rearing, and other household care tasks. Socrates also presents the view that all women should be given the same education and training as men.

What a unique idea! Women recieve the same training as their male counterparts, but are still tasked to birth and raise children above any physical exertions such as warfare. Personally I believe that this idea is party true and just. Women, in general, are much better at the tasks that are necessary to the longevity of a society such as child care than men are. There are certainly exceptions in both sexes. The question also arises though, why are women more suited. I honestly don't know for sure, part of it must be physiological structure, psychological structure, and societal training all combined together to produce the confounding creatures that women are.

The more important question that socrates raises is that of this ideal societies unusual practices of reproduction. I'm not sure if I understand why Socrates is attempting to lead his audience down a fools path. But he is certainly leading their responses through the manner he conducts his reasoning. He is able to show that his audience is unable to think clearly about the subject they are discussing. Socrates speaks of these ideas in broad general terms. And is therefore able to convince them that this society would be better off if there was no marriage and if all the women were owned in common by all the men and that traditional family structure should be removed completely.

The society that socrates has been describing is beginning to sound a lot like the societies that are often described in modern science fiction as a terrifying possibility of the future. The strange removal of marriage and family customs to improve the functioning and efficiency of the whole society is an idea that has been brought up in many cautionary tales in the past century.

Journal #5

"Moderation is the theme of Socrates guide for producing virtuous men. ""Everything in moderation"" is a commonly heard saying. This idea of moderation is that you should never go to extremes of overdoing a certain activity. Don't get too much exercise our your mind will soften, don't exercise too little or your body will become soft and useless.
People in our society that hold to strong moral convictions and reject changes in society are often rejected for not blindly following whatever fads come along. Those people often also fall into the idea that they must thoroughly reject everything and everybody that is part of their modern world."

"This attitude can often lead to people withdrawing from the world and making themselves completely unable to function among people. This is one extreme.
Socrates presents the idea that Guardians as children should b protected from all sorts of offending material that could corrupt their souls, they would not be exposed to many kinds of music, literature, and other entertainment. Why would Socrates advocate an extreme like this one? Does he not say that moderation in all experiences is the key to becoming a balanced man?
I have to admire those people with such strong convictions that they can pull their children out of the world and away from society’s undoubtedly corrupting influence. At the same time many of them fall into the extreme of shutting the children off from the world that they will some day be forced to enter and live in. These children do not receive the training that they should in the social norms of our world.
Certainly, avoiding extremes of immoral activities such as lasciviousness and drunkenness is necessary to produce a person of virtue. But at what cost? We seek to hide from that which we know has the ability to entice and corrupt, rightly so. Yet, in certain circumstances it seems that Socrates notion of well-rounded experiences with proper teaching will be a more effective tool to producing virtuous men.
Far too often you see people that have been locked away from the world by their parents finally get away on their own and fall into a fascination with that which they have been sheltered throughout their life. Whether is be simply becoming entranced by television, or becoming a heavy drinker. There are countless ways for the completely sheltered child to be snared by the world if they are unaware and unprepared."

Highs and Lows

8:00 AM every Tuesday and Thursday. That's when I need to be at my graphic design class every week. For 2 hours I sit there and suffer through my art professor's attempt to teach design. Yes, most of us are "just multimedia students", but we still try to get some education out of the graphic design classes here. The only problem is that this professor, though he may be a stellar designer, is just plain bad at teaching. He never really explains what the assignments are. Just hands out some baffling sheets of paper with instructions that must make sense to someone with a real, artisitic background.

I try to get all my work done for this class but motivation is lacking. I'm all caught up with the assignment that was due this morning, but now I have 12 more roughs due tuesday that will take me another 5 hours. Plus 2 comps due next thursday. The comps wont be a big problem because they are done on the computer. Usually in Freehand. I enjoy working on the computer and despise working on large volumes of content by hand. This leads to my lack of motivation which leads to late assignments, which leads to bitterness and frustration on my part. It's really a never ending cycle between myself and the graphic design program.

I feel almost bad ranting this much about this class, but I just needed to let it all out.

So, my day started out bad, I was tired when I woke up and hungry and my sinus's were congested, I don't need to paint you a picuture. But my day steadily improved. Geography finished about 10 minutes early, and I was able to catch a few minutes of sleep in the middle along with the rest of the students in there. My meeting for crusade finished up in about half the time I have scheduled for it. My hypertext and multimedia class was only about 20 minutes long because of an easy test. Radio workshop class lasted for about 10 minutes after we were told that the station would be off the air all week due to a transmitter breakdown. So, no radio show tonight means that Timbly can have fun after Crusade tonight and actually get to bed at a decent time. Maybe.

Journal #5

"Moderation is the theme of Socrates guide for producing virtuous men. ""Everything in moderation"" is a commonly heard saying. This idea of moderation is that you should never go to extremes of overdoing a certain activity. Don't get too much exercise our your mind will soften, don't exercise too little or your body will become soft and useless.
People in our society that hold to strong moral convictions and reject changes in society are often rejected for not blindly following whatever fads come along. Those people often also fall into the idea that they must thoroughly reject everything and everybody that is part of their modern world.

"This attitude can often lead to people withdrawing from the world and making themselves completely unable to function among people. This is one extreme.
Socrates presents the idea that Guardians as children should b protected from all sorts of offending material that could corrupt their souls, they would not be exposed to many kinds of music, literature, and other entertainment. Why would Socrates advocate an extreme like this one? Does he not say that moderation in all experiences is the key to becoming a balanced man?
I have to admire those people with such strong convictions that they can pull their children out of the world and away from society’s undoubtedly corrupting influence. At the same time many of them fall into the extreme of shutting the children off from the world that they will some day be forced to enter and live in. These children do not receive the training that they should in the social norms of our world.
Certainly, avoiding extremes of immoral activities such as lasciviousness and drunkenness is necessary to produce a person of virtue. But at what cost? We seek to hide from that which we know has the ability to entice and corrupt, rightly so. Yet, in certain circumstances it seems that Socrates notion of well-rounded experiences with proper teaching will be a more effective tool to producing virtuous men.
Far too often you see people that have been locked away from the world by their parents finally get away on their own and fall into a fascination with that which they have been sheltered throughout their life. Whether is be simply becoming entranced by television, or becoming a heavy drinker. There are countless ways for the completely sheltered child to be snared by the world if they are unaware and unprepared.

Highs and Lows

8:00 AM every Tuesday and Thursday. That's when I need to be at my graphic design class every week. For 2 hours I sit there and suffer through my art professor's attempt to teach design. Yes, most of us are "just multimedia students", but we still try to get some education out of the graphic design classes here. The only problem is that this professor, though he may be a stellar designer, is just plain bad at teaching. He never really explains what the assignments are. Just hands out some baffling sheets of paper with instructions that must make sense to someone with a real, artisitic background.

I try to get all my work done for this class but motivation is lacking. I'm all caught up with the assignment that was due this morning, but now I have 12 more roughs due tuesday that will take me another 5 hours. Plus 2 comps due next thursday. The comps wont be a big problem because they are done on the computer. Usually in Freehand. I enjoy working on the computer and despise working on large volumes of content by hand. This leads to my lack of motivation which leads to late assignments, which leads to bitterness and frustration on my part. It's really a never ending cycle between myself and the graphic design program.

I feel almost bad ranting this much about this class, but I just needed to let it all out.

So, my day started out bad, I was tired when I woke up and hungry and my sinus's were congested, I don't need to paint you a picuture. But my day steadily improved. Geography finished about 10 minutes early, and I was able to catch a few minutes of sleep in the middle along with the rest of the students in there. My meeting for crusade finished up in about half the time I have scheduled for it. My hypertext and multimedia class was only about 20 minutes long because of an easy test. Radio workshop class lasted for about 10 minutes after we were told that the station would be off the air all week due to a transmitter breakdown. So, no radio show tonight means that Timbly can have fun after Crusade tonight and actually get to bed at a decent time. Maybe.

Uncranked

Alright, so the stream and everythig is working fine, but now the radio transmitter for our college station is blown out. So, there is no KLPR in any way shape or form for the next week. I'd say that there is a 50/50 chance that I will be back on the air and online next week.

CSIS Assignment #2

"I have a lot of homework due tomorrow. I hope I am able to get all my sketches
done for Graphic Design at 8am. I already have my website assignment pretty much
ready to go for Hypertext and Multimedia, you can check it out here. The content
is simple and is all about the iPod. The content is not what is important, we
simply had to fulfill some requirements. Frames, tables, all this stuff is in
there. I put a lot of extra stuff in there too that wasn't needed, but I felt
that I had to challenge myself to do a good job on this or I wouldn't have had
the will to finish it at all."

Crank up the Radio

Hey, DJ Timbly is back on the air this year and also streaming his own "unique" tastes in music over the internet to anyone that cares to listen. Check out klpr.unk.edu to listen in to DJ Timbly from 9pm untill midnight every Thursday. The plan is to get a chatroom up and running on this site again so you can make requests, otherwise simply send your requests to sirtimblyatgmaildotcom.

Turn around

"

I just wonder what I would do with myself if I wasn't completely insane. I finally decided to upgrade my site to a full fledged content management system. The name of this system is Mambo, and I think I've fallen a little bit in love with this piece of software. I'm sorry Becca.

So, this site will be looking completely different here for a while. The new template should be appearing here soon, and mambo will take over all funtionality for my site. The big impetus for me to get this started was the fact that I really need to do a bunch of Philosophy journals in order to get a halfway decent grade. So, blogging to the rescue.

The biggest challenge to having a content management system is filling it with content.

Philosophy Journal #3

Today in class we briefly touched upon the issue of what types of games the guardians should play as children. This issue seems important to the proper development of a well balanced reasoning person. Play in the life of a child seems really important because of the neccessity of learning 'rules'. So often in today's school systems children are told that they are pretty much perfect no matter what they do. And that everyone is equal.

Play on the playgrounds of school actually teach some very important social ideas. The need for rules in a game becomes necessary to keep those kids that would cheat to win a game. Rules are followed because they teach the lessons of life. Everything in society runs on rules because that is how everyone keeps a level playing field. If everyone knows the rules then everone has a equal chance to succeed within the confines of those rules.

Thinking about what games are not condusive to the development I realized that the most popular games of the past couple years. Have been the Grand Theft Auto series. The reason that these games are so popular are because they allow a person to disobey all the rules of society. You can steal, murder, and drive any way that you want to on that little digital replica of a city. The point of the game is to elude the police and escape the consequences of any rules whatsoever.

This game is probably the best example of the worst game for a child to play while he is developing his character.

Philosophy Journal #2

Throughout Book 3 of The Republic Socrates presents the idea that the guardians need to have very special training and upbringing as to prevent them from aquiring bad character. One of the things that Socrates spends a great deal of time talking about is the idea that music can change a person's behavior and potentially ruining their character. Socrates decides that music alone can change a person. In fact he puts forth the idea that any one type of media such as stories can adversely affect the youth.

"

In modern mass media theory the idea that only one type of media can completely affect a persons decisions and character is pretty rediculous. As far as I have read so far Socrates fails to see that there is a lot more than just the variable of media or entertainment in determining a persons character. The stories a person reads, the music they listen to, and the games that they play all affect a persons development. The degree of effect that each of those things has is highly variable and, most likely, not as large as Socrates theorizes.

A childs development is reflective of his entire environment. This means that parents and teachers have a great deal of influence over a childs growth.

The upbringing and indoctrination of a guardian should be perfect and pure according to Socrates. But, he also stresses the importance of a liberal education in all the fields of study and in moderate physical excersice. Is study and excersice even enough for a person to truly become a well rounded individual? Shouldn't exposure to a variety of media and entertainment be included in a youth's development?

In the proper environment and with supervision by those responsible for their education, a developing youth would learn a great deal more from exposure to these media and entertainment than he would from ignorance. How can one be expected to rule if he does not understand the things that help shape the lives of those he rules.

All Things

Blogging is a hobby, I don�t have time for any more hobbys. Work and school continue much as they always have for these past 2 years. Minor differences creep in here and there, but my life at college is largely similar to what it was last year. Major differences such as the presence of my girlfriend Becca here at UNK are certainly blessings. Differences such as the increased load of credit hours I am taking this semester (17 most of which are upper level classes) tend to complicate my life more than anything else.

I realize now that the reason I never post anything on this site is that I never have anything interesting to say on my own. I am forced to write journals for my philosophy class but of course I have been slacking on that lately. Well, I�ll probably start a post for philosophy here soon.

Journal Synopsis #1

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Word People vs. Picture People