Next week is our last week before Thanksgiving break, and I want to make sure all of you are on track with your client projects before the holiday. Hence, I have rearranged a few of the checkpoint due dates for Unit #3, with the primary difference being that we will postpone our usability testing until after Thanksgiving.
At this point, your team should have worked with your client to finalize the domain name and web hosting for this project. If you have not completed these tasks, please take care of them as soon as possible. Once you have worked out the logistics for hosting your site, you can focus on transforming your wireframes into an actual site. This might mean finding a WordPress theme that you can modify or starting with one of the static templates or frameworks linked under the “Templates” section of the Resources page. Your homework for the weekend is to begin creating the homepage for your site. Here’s how we’ll build on that homework in class:
- On Monday, we will review how to upload and modify files using FTP and I will demonstrate how to install a content management system on a new hosting account. Before you come to class, your team should know which CMS, template, or framework you plan to use for Unit #3. (Again, refer to the Resources page for ideas.) I will reserve at least half of the class for you to work with your teammates, but please make sure that you come to class ready to use that time productively. (In other words, you should be coordinating your individual efforts and making some decisions before Monday’s class.)
- On Wednesday, we will be back in Tubes for the first half of class, so please read chapters 5 and 6 (pages 157–226) before you come to class and leave a comment on this post that addresses a specific passage you’d like to discuss in class. (Last week’s posts were great! One small suggestion: be sure to list the page number for the passage you’re quoting.) During the other half of class, I will meet briefly with each team to discuss your progress on the client project, so be ready to show me what your site looks like and ask any questions that might help you make progress on your site.
Before you leave for Thanksgiving break (no later than Friday, November 16), someone from your team should send me the URL for the first draft of your site. I recognize that the site might be messy and/or incomplete, but you should have something live on the web by the end of Week 12. I will review your site over the break, and when we come back, we’ll be ready to conduct some usability tests to improve the functionality and appearance of your site.
This quote reminded me of the videos we watched last thursday. It is interesting that new technology was able to develop in this spot because old technology laid the groundwork. A hub for information, via telephone, was able to transform more easily into the framework for the internet. Later, Blum brings up the paradox that the internet can eliminate distance only if the networks are in the same place, in this case the old Western Union building. If these buildings had not been put into place with the necessary connection between the two in the 1920′s, then they would not have become the internet hub that they are today.
“’This point is the millisecond…this point is the microsecond…and this one is usually expressed as nanoseconds, or billionths of a second.’ I mulled at all the zeros on the screen for a moment. And when I looked up, everything was different. The cars rushing by outside on Highway 87 seemed filled with millions of computational processes per second—their radios, cell phones, watches, and GPSs buzzing inside of them. Everything around me looked alive in a new way… (162).”
It is crazy to think that everything is powered and constantly functioning. Just as Blum explains when he looked up everything looked different, after reading this book everything around me seems different. I think of the internet, computers, cell phones, street lights, etc. differently. It seems so ‘simple’ because all of these technologies were just handed to us and everyone around us has them as well, but really the fact that we have any of these items is incredible. The fact that people lay tubes and chords underground for internet blows my mind, before reading this book I thought the internet was all above ground signals being sent back and forth. The videos we watched in class last week show just how far technology has come and just how much of it I was not alive for or conscious of.
I find the amount of control the companies laying the fiber cabling have over who does and doesn’t have internet staggering. It’s also interesting that in the face of rising interest in the internet and falling prices, the company would choose to offer the same product at a much steeper price, not because it cost them more to provide the service there, as they’d already built infrastructure, but because they could.
We talked last week about the undersea cables and how strange it seems that they lay forever unseen, emerging only in “classic port cities,” yet are the fundamental backbone of an international internet. I’ve also heard mentions in a few of my classes this year about the fact that so many major cities are on rivers near the coast, and heard people suggest that they don’t need to be(or shouldn’t be) there anymore. However, there were obviously historical reasons that the cities were settled there, and as long as they are major hubs for the newest technology (e.g., as long as the local internet hooks up to the rest of the world there) then these cities will continue to thrive.
“What if the Internet couldn’t properly be understood as places, but was really better thought of as math made manifest; not hard, physical tubes, but ineffable, ethereal numbers?…If the Internet was made of light, then what was all this other stuff–filling buildings, even whole neighborhoods, the whole glittering expanse of the skyline at night?”
-Tubes, p.163
“Brocade’s machines, powerful though they may be, were the traffic-clogged cities on a journey across the net. A millionth of a second was painfully slow, if that’s possible to conceive. According to the laws of physics, an unimpeded bit should be able to cross the three-foot cube router in five-billionths of a second, or five nanoseconds.”
pg 161
As Blum points out, it is almost impossible for many users, including myself, to understand the speed of the internet. We now take the internet for granted, and in doing so, fail to think about how fast it is working “behind the scenes” Exactly how do you put five-billionths of a second or five nano seconds into perspective? I think Blum makes a good attempt in his analogies. However, imagining that “billions of logical decisions per second” are being carried out both invisibly and constantly, is so awing.
“But visiting a cable landing station wasn’t as easy as getting inside the big urban hubs. The Docklands, Ashburn, and others had a constant stream of visitors. Security was tight, but there was a sense of them as inherently shared places, nearly public ones. But the cable landing stations were quietly hidden away, and they rarely received visitors.” (202)
I really liked the earlier story about how easy it was for them to just walk into the building in Milwaukee, so when I got to this part I was a little surprised that it was more difficult to get into the cable landing station. He mentions that all the other places have a constant stream of visitors, but the station is rarely visited. I find the thought of these underwater cables incredibly fascinating, and to think that other people aren’t in awe of them just sort of surprises me.
I think this is just really fascinating. This really makes me understand how tangible the Internet is and how much of it we actually don’t understand. I would’ve never thought large amounts of Internet cables run through the manholes of cities.
^pg.166
Page 198
Page 198
Pretty interesting how the cables connecting the world by sea need to be so carefully planned in terms of what paths they take. I guess I never thought about it. I wonder what kinds of resources are spent simply mapping the topography of the ocean floor just so they can lay some cable.
“By 1900, Porthcurno was the hub of a global telegraph network that linked India, North and South America, South Africa, and Australia. By 1918, 180 million words were passing through the valley annually” (204).
Since the beginning of this book we have learned that Tubes are everywhere, but it didn’t really hit me until reading this section, that they have been around a long time. To think that in the late 1800s people were communicating over tubes is just hard to fathom. The most impressive aspect is to see how far we’ve come in 120 years; where will we be in 100 more?
“As we stood there trapped for a long silent moment, waiting for the unseen computer to finish verifying our respective mass and identity, Silcock shot me a surprised look through the rounded glass. I had let out a burst of uncontrollable laughter, a loud snorting guffaw. I couldn’t help it: I was inside a tube!” Pg 186
I couldn’t help but smile when I read this, because it’s so true. The idea of being in a computer, the internet, or a tube is amusing because so many years ago it would have been a distant thought. But here we are, often connecting ourselves to the tubes.
I just find it so interesting how the exact same spaces that once held telegraph wires are now the same spaces that are connecting our internet to us. As we also learned in this chapter, the second “T” in AT&T stands for Telegraph. You don’t see that fact in many of their commercials. It’s this juxtaposition of how far we’ve come, and also how far we really haven’t come. What now is in the cables is light, instead of copper, but the systems themselves contain the same basic principles. Having said that,I’m not sure if it felt more like magic when I didn’t have any idea of how the internet was constructed, or now that I do and how immense a physical presence it actually has and I still am confused about how people figure these things out.