I finally created the eletric setup for a mini joystick. I am so excited to see it work. In reality, I hate the electric part. It reminds me of my body. It's demanding and has so many physical requirements.

I totally enjoy the programming, it is so much more my style. I wish the circuit board would stop demanding so much.

He makes such a good point here

The way you meet people in cyberspace puts a different spin on affiliation: in traditional kinds of communities, we are accustomed to meeting people, then getting to know them; in virtual communities, you can get to know people and then choose to meet them.

This is so funny, it is about a user addicted to the WELL, an early online community:

Years after he had kicked his cocaine habit, he claimed, somebody put a line of the substance next to Blair's computer while he was logged on. It dawned on him, several hours later, that the white crystals were still there, and he had known about them, but had not mustered the energy necessary to sniff them. It wasn't a moral decision but a battle of obsessions, Blair explained--he couldn't tear his hands from the keyboard and his eyes from the screen of his current, deeper addiction long enough to ingest the cocaine.

Wow, this video of the tsunami is insane. It is someone personal home video right at the site on like the thrid floor of a hotel.

It just arrived. (E:matthew) and (e:terry) decided to cool together. It looks insane delicious. They rock!

This is a quote of a quote. It is taken from Chapter 1 of Howard Rheingold's Virtual Communities.

"What will on-line interactive communities be like?" Licklider and Taylor wrote in 1968: "In most fields they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest. . . ."

I repsonse I would like to say there exists no reason why computer mediated communication will turn into ."communities not of common location, but of common interest."

In its essense, the web can be regarded as a cyborgian extension of the human psyche. By harnessing the power of this tool, people can and do rebuild local communities. Communities that are barley existant in a world where people have replaced their human interactions with their television and their local public sphere/marketplace with carefully constructed global supermarketplaces such as walmart that we arrive at in our very solitary SUVs.

While the television, film, and video have created a society that shuns community interaction, the computer, and specifically the internet, can act as a tool to bring local community back together.

I am not just saying this to promote my own site. Computers bring people together locally on so many levels. Just look at IM, email and chat rooms. I would argue that with the advent of IM, especially portable IM, that people will actually end up spending more time of the day involved in human to human communication than they do know, and definately more than they did 10 years ago. I can persoanlly attest to the fact that portable CMC eventually starts to feel like a psychic connection.

And do people really suppose that most time spent communciating online is really only with far away strangers. I know so many people that spend hundred of hours communicating with people online locally, especially those in search of the perfect mate. They are using tools like friendster, date.com(this one is funy ) , yahoo chat, aol, craig's list, gay.com, etc

The reality is that people will never find local community through film and video, unless the local community is based on a love for film and video. So put down your television and contribute your local online community, you never know where it will take you.