Journalism and Some Inspiration
I got some great news this week that I'm really excited about. If you want to know what the hell it is, you'll probably find out soon enough or just email me and ask. In any case, I ran into this video (really long) and it seemed fitting:
Watched
Australian journalist, author, film maker John Pilger speaks about global media consolidation, war by journalism, US military's quest for domination/hegemony in the post 9/11 era, false history in the guise of 'objective' journalism.
"Media cliched language normalizes the unthinkable."
Listened
Found this track on record label. I recommend headphones.
Learned
I leaned that, "senior citizens, although slow and dangerous behind the wheel, can still serve a purpose." I went down to the museum after dad-in-law pimped out my knowledge of macs and offered for me to help an elderly coworker, Marcia, to "get the web working." It turned out that Marcia I was assisting was 74, had an awesome rig (23" AND 30" Apple Cinemas running on a G4 with a Wacom tablet the size of the fattest of our two cats) and by "get the web working" meant "publish things to the museum website with Dreamweaver." I'm not a Dreamweaver expert, but it turned out she knew her way around the application and just needed a refresher on how to find files on the mac and move things from development to test to live. She'd been used to a PC - so we worked to get some similar key commands operating in the Mac version of Dreamweaver. At first, Marcia seemed slow. Then I saw her open up a picture in photoshop and deftly remove a strap going across someone's shirt using more key commands than I could count. Next, she flipped over to the HTML code behind the dreamweaver design to get the dimensions of the image off of the <img> tag. I was impressed.
It's seldom I meet someone over 50 let alone over 70 who still has such passion to learn new technology and the patience to do it. Marcia is an illustrator and sculptor by trade, but taught herself photoshop and dreamweaver as they started to become required technologies.
Cruising around the live site looking for what she was supposed to edit, she pointed to a butterfly flying across a banner.
"That's what I want do learn how to do: make butterflies," she said.
"Oh. That's Flash stuff. I don't even know Flash," I said.
"Well I want to do it, so I'd better get to it and learn Flash."
Truly inspiring.
