Stream of Consciousness

I was recalling this morning at work how very much easier life has been since most of our students have acquired thumb drives.  These are also called USB drives or USB keys.  Sometimes you will see them on a keyring or a lanyard.

These are so cool becacuse, unlike floppy disks, they don’t get ’stuck’ in the drive slot (for which we have our high-tech diskette removal beauty supply eyebrow tweezers). 

They are better than CDs for three reasons.  The first reason is that some of our older computers don’t write to CD.  The second reason is that sometimes the student will bring a CD that is not re-writable and then they get upset that they can’t write over an older file.  The third reason is that CD are prone to scratches and USB do not expose the data surface to damage.

The only drawback to USB is that they are so small.  Usually this is a good thing, except that they are so totally small that people forget to take them out of the machine before they leave.  We have a special box in our lost & found collection for these.

My thought on this is that the manufacturers should start making them in dayglow neon colors instead of the traditional black and grey - that way they’d be much more eye-catching and therefore more difficult to leave behind on accident.

But until then, if you leave your USB on the lanyard when you put it into a computer, and you tie a colorful little ribbon on the lanyard, you’ll be much less likely to forget your thumb drive when you leave. 

I didn’t get it.  When I first created an account on Facebook it was so totally boring.  There was nothing going on, and it was not easy for me to figure out how to find stuff.

Now, a group of my peers has discovered Facebook, and suddenly it’s the neatest place to be.  I feel like I’m in school again, doodling on my papers and passing notes to friends.

I’m sure this initial fascination wears off, as evidenced by our less-frequent logins from a few months ago.  And, of course, now that I’ve been actually using it I’ve got too many cutesy little applications plugged into my profile.  I’m sure they’re all gleefully sucking cookies off my computer too.  But how to choose which ones to let go of?

I find that when a friend sends you an application, it’s tough to say no.  One of my problems is that I may have to use my own site to demo stuff for work, so I don’t want to put anything too offensive up there, and yet I still want to have fun at the same time.  For example, there are ‘fight’ pokes you can send to your friends (all in fun) but I would hate to have any of those taken out of context.

One of these applications that has me hopelessly hooked is called ‘fluff pets’.  Yep, now not only do I go home to clean the litterbox of my own 3 dimensional cat, I have to be sure to feed, pet, and walk my virtual pet daily in order to avoid tremendous guilt as his mood changes from happy to miserable with increases in my neglectfulness.  I need a virtual pet-sitter!