As I got older, video games were still a big part of my life but responsibilities came into play. Through my college days, I still found time to game. I had all of my breaks, weekends, and even after class to indulge in some digital entertainment. However, I started to notice that the amount I played began to decrease…I had other things to do. I wasn’t concerned because I figured as soon as I graduated, I’d have all the time in the world! I was wrong.

I graduated from college and moved across the country and started the 9 to 5 grind. At first I felt like I had plenty of time after work. I no longer had to study or do homework…it was heaven. I thought to myself, that now I could finally play all of the video games I missed, since I had so much time. Four years later, with and without gamer roommates, and living on my own this has not happened yet. As soon I start playing a game, I begin to feel like my time can be better spent doing other “more important” things, like cleaning, working, or doing anything else really.

I started thinking about this in more detail. For instance, I saw people spend hours doing things just as brainless. Why couldn’t I bring myself to start a new game? Why are video game looked down upon? Why did I feel like I’m wasting my time playing when I was really enjoying myself?

I began to draw the comparison of sports fans and video gamers. You can insert any popular brainless activity and the comparison holds true, I just happened to choose sports, as I know some real fanatics.

In our American culture, it’s perfectly acceptable to spend hours every week watching sports. Nobody looks down on you, and you don’t get criticized or judged for doing so. In fact, you get rewarded, accepted and build camaraderie amongst peers. Yet if you spend the same amount of time playing video games, people give you weird looks..and consider you a nerd, or just a plain loser. Apparently, it’s OK for me to spend my time watching sports but not playing games.

How does this make any sense?

I’ll even take it a step further. I’m going to generalize here, so forgive me if this isn’t the same for you. It seems that sports fans end up being more social and successful people in our society when compared to video gamers. Both are social and competitive activities so it rules that out. At my current place of work, out of the entire IT and Operations Department (over 40 people) there are only 2 that are gamers. Think about it, out of all of the successful people you know how many are sport fans and how many are gamers? I understand that one could fall in both categories but I digress.

The subliminal message is clear: its OK to waste your time watching sports, but playing video games is a waste of time.

What do you think?

I spend a lot of time answering technology questions, almost as much time as I spend fixing computers. While I don’t have a problem answering people’s questions, I find that almost all of them can quickly be answered with a quick search via Google search. What do the beeps mean when your computer starts up? Try Google. Accidently deleted the recycling bin? Try Google.  Icons too big or too small? Try Google.

During my conversation with customer, a common question that comes up is how I learned all of this technical knowledge. “Google,” I reply.  I once had someone respond with “Can Google help me discipline my kids?” “Sure!” I replied, and searched for it. Needless to say they were dumbfounded. If you have a problem, I guarantee that someone has had it before, and has asked about it online. Google helps you find those people and see what solutions others have responded with.

I taught myself almost everything I know about technology. When I run into a problem I research it online, I scour the forums until it’s 3am, and eventually I find a solution to my problem. Over time I slowly build up my knowledge to the point where I can figure out solutions to most issues on my own. I understand that most people don’t have the time or dedication that I do to spend hour after hour searching for a solution.  But come on, at least try searching for a solution before you spend the time driving or calling someone. You may very well find the answer is easier to locate than you think. As much as I enjoy helping you (the customer), answering the same simple question 10 times a day gets a tad bit annoying.

It shocks me that more people have yet to embrace our Google overlords. Google is your friend, which knows everything about everything. If you have a problem, Google would love to listen, and give you advice. Who needs other friends when you have Google? Let me just Google that.

When I built one of my computers in 2004, I told a few friends that I had purchased two 120 GB hard drives. Their reactions were ones that I had expected, “You will never be able to fill those up”. Yet, just a few years later I have around 4 TB of space and am running out quickly. I don’t consider myself to be an average computer user, but at my place of employment, I see more and more average users purchasing larger drives. When I offer the 1 TB drives to them, a typical response is “I will never need that much space”. Never is a long time…

With the greater influx of data that we access every day, it becomes more and more difficult to remember what we have seen. In order to cope with the data overload, we are saving more information for later retrieval/review. With hard drive sizes increasing so quickly, we have no reason to delete the files that we save (even if we don’t use/access them for a long time). Thus we end up with gigabytes (soon to be terabytes) of data that we have, but are just too lazy to delete. We give ourselves excuses that we will eventually get through to deleting the junk files, but ultimately we don’t. I personally have a bunch of PowerPoint’s saved somewhere on my computer that my mom found online and emailed me because they were funny or inspiring, but in comparison to the amount of space I have, I see no need to delete them at this time.

The size of data is also increasing with HD content becoming all but the norm; it is not uncommon to have files greater than 1 GB in size. Within my movie collection, I easily have files that are 11 GB, and those add up rather quickly.

For example, many people I encounter don’t understand that with their new cameras, larger file sizes are common. Sure you may only have a few hundred pictures, but at 10 MB a picture, well…you can do the math.

Earlier this week I had asked a customer how much data they had and they responded with only a few hundred pictures and songs. When I started to do the back up and looked at the folder size I saw over 50 GB of data. I have no doubt in my mind that somewhere in the crevices of that hard drive, there were files that were meant to be deleted. With the abundance of space, the files stayed where they were. The customer also underestimated the sizes of their pictures and movies. Downloading a few movies to view on your iPod touch can eat up more space than people think.

How many of you keep buying hard drives in order to fill your need for space? And how many of those people know that they have a bunch of junk sitting on their computer that they can delete in order to make space and save the money they were going to use for a new HD. There is also the issue of deleting data that you might one day need. There are some files on my computer that I should delete, but I know that as soon as I delete them I will need them for something and then may end up spending hours trying to find them somewhere on the internet or getting them from friends or family.

I think it all comes to price versus convenience. With the price per GB being so cheap, and most of us being much too lazy, we would rather buy a new HD than take the time to look through our HD and clean it up.

Instead of wasting time explaining in detail what it does, I suggest you head over to wave.google.com and watch the hour long video. It provides a great overview of what wave can do.

The first question I get when I mention Google wave to people is, “What is it”? There is no easy way to explain exactly what it is; the best explanation that I can come up with is a collaborative work processing application. Similarly to many of other wave users, my first reaction to wave was “Great! Now what do I do”? My biggest issue is that this initial user group is so limited there just aren’t enough people to collaborate with, so my testing has been somewhat restrictive.

Educational Collaboration Tool
Ever since I first watched the video linked above, I have viewed wave as an educational collaboration tool. If a friend and I are in the same class, we would be able to create and edit each other’s notes. On days that one of us would not be able to attend, the notes would still be accessible. We would be able to provide real-time feedback regarding questions we have about the material. Teachers would be able to host discussions in real time, and witness feedback as it occurs. Many University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) students are commuters, and finding the time to get together to study or work on projects is extremely difficult. This would allow group members to work from any location and it would be like they were in one location collaborating and discussing in real-time.

Wave uses robots to crawl through wavelets and provide various added functions. For example, if an address is entered, a Google map can be generated within the wavelet. All of the participants can see the map and interact with it. These bots can be built to add functionality to the notes being taken during class. UIC uses the Blackboard website for submitting assignments as well as posting grades. Creating a robot that would poll Blackboard and pull assignments or grades into wavelets that are related to certain classes may be possible. It is possible to incorporate the school’s e-mail (webmail) into the wave to further reduce the number of clicks to access information.

I don’t know what’s going through the minds of the wave developers; I foresee a cloud-based application that will pull information from throughout the Internet to a single place. Instead of opening PowerPoint and Word to get my notes out, going to Blackboard to get the slides, and checking my webmail for new messages, I would be able to go to wave and have all of that information accessible from one location.

Google also has the ability to integrate wave into its existing applications. Google voice has the ability to record messages and have them play online. Recording lectures or conferences and posting the audio inside of a wavelet for review does not seem so farfetched. Google chat also has the ability for video, if Google could incorporate video chat into wave, it could replace cloud based meeting tools as we know them.

Wave is still under heavy development and many features are not available, but I am hopeful of the possibilities that it will offer to cloud based work. The most difficult thing for Google, will be to find a practical application for wave. Similarly to many Google Labs projects, tech savvy people jump on them as soon as they are available, but the mass public can care less. The public does not see a need (or does not understand) for anything that wave offers. Who wants to sit though an hour-long preview? How will Google overcome this giant new technology hurdle?

I intend to post regularly regarding technology related topics. Looks like I lost some of the pictures during my import, I will try to find a backup copy.

Thanks for visiting.

-Jason