A-Typical male's journal.

When they finally did invade, we welcomed them with applause--it seems several of the leaders bought 'the Clapper'.

I did watch some TV though, and I don't know why I didn't put on something that's supposed to be brain numbing. Instead, I watched the news.

I used to really like to watch the news. When I was a kid, I'd get up at 6am eat breakfast and watch 30 minutes of news on ABC. That got me local news, and the world news, weather, the whole thing. I had a secret crush on the local news anchor. She's probably still doing the news now, in Greensboro (except it's a FOX station now...)

At some point I realized how narrow the news was. Sometimes, if you watched the news a lot, and had a good memory, you could see a trend, and see how a story changed, and gathered depth. Sometimes you'd remember stuff that they news left out this particular time. The problem, of course, was time. You've got 17 minutes to do world news, and you're going to repeat it several times. Sure if something major changes you can append your report, but you can't spend more than a minute or two on anything.

It's kind of like paying someone to read the newspaper headlines, or story first lines to you. Pointless. So I stopped consuming news that way. I don't read the paper, either. Today, I might research a story--I heard such and such...i wonder what cnn.com has to say about it?--but, I don't just read the news.

Last night I watched it though...and remembered why I hated it. I felt like Peter Jennings and his cohorts were just telling me things I knew already. In fact, on one report I thought I knew more about the subject than they did. [They were discussing what to call the generation after generation-x...I thought the term Millenials was already coined, and had been around the time the people who wrote Generation X and 13thGen wrote their books.]

The local news was even worse. Some of it wasn't even news. I mean, Duke University is installing alcohol rules (ie, rules which prohibit alcohol on campus, or make it harder to get to.) I found myself wondering why this was New. I mean, UNC-Greensboro did this a decade ago. The only reason NC State didn't do it when I was there was that the drinking age was still 19. As soon as it went to 21, NC State's rules went in too. Sure, it's noteworthy, but lets not talk about it like it was new, ok?

Same with everything on Charlotte's news. Seems to be three major topics: 1) traffic and new roads, 2)school violence/murder/guns, and 3) the corruption of our police department. In other words, the same stories that were going on 6 months ago. It was more depressing than anything, because nothing had changed.

I guess I didn't think it could get worse, so I watched Inside Edition. About midway through, as I was thinking, "Well, duh," I tried to decide if IE was worse or just as bad as local news. They were doing a story about how some people do too much working out--in other words, they work out too much because they aren't happy with their bodies. Someone had to explain this to someone? I remember what it was like to lift weights, and what the people there would do for some muscle. But it falls into the normal category of "anything people do, some people do to excess, usually to their detriment." Violating the ancient Greek rule: Moderation in all things.

I just got disgusted and went into the bedroom, and worked on cross-stitch, and thought about my theoretical news service.

My dream news service does two things -- notification of changes in stories, and massive hyperlinking. The Notification part is essentially the same as a newspaper today, only I can narrow the topics down to just ones I'm interested in, with perhaps a random factor to throw up, miscellaneous stories. I like the random factor, because otherwise we'll all get wrapped up in our little specialties, and never see the rest of the world.

The massive hyperlinking is the key, though. Let me read related stories. Let me read summaries and opinions of people who've digested the material. Let me see first sources. Put links inside the stories so that if Uganda is mentioned in this story, I can jump to stories about Uganda. Maybe you don't see the link, but I might. Then I could write you a summary or opinion to add to the overall information. Because that's what I really crave--information. Not the random data I get from the Evening news.< br> I work with data every day. Data is just facts--there's no meaning to the facts, there's no organization, there's no reason. Only when we organize and give meaning to collections of data do we get information. How well we do that, as well as just plain how we do it, determines the quality and kind of information we get.

Given what's out there, we could increase our overall knowledge just by linking it all together better. And that's the hope for the World Wide Web.

Generic Joe's A Typical Male