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I've been away from St. Lawrence Country for a while and I'm finally home. Hours of driving has ended and I can finally do daily posts to this blog. It was quite a burden when the only real access I had to the internet was my friends phone. I was at a friends wedding on Friday and it was great seeing old friends and partying in style. The only drawback was living at friends places and driving countless hours to various cities in and around NY. I was so happy to pull into my parking lot last night and plug in my new Intel Core 2 Duo Mac and surf the net with ease. Unfortunately, something had mysteriously broke with my netgear, and I talked on the phone with customer service from time warner and netgear. After about 3 hours I finally have ridiculously fast internet on this computer and my xbox. It was worth the wait. I've been wanting to edit photos, update my flickr page and write in this blog, but summer time is always frantic. I've already been to 2 bachelor parties and one wedding. In early August I'm going to another. I probably have lots of stories of madness and mayhem but this blog isn't about cocktail stories. During my time without a computer I actually wrote down some thoughts I had about this class and new media journalism in general. It mainly covers my opinions on the internet completely taking over, and what it means to those who can't regularly use a computer.

The internet is probably one of the greatest tools on earth. You can do work, art, video, music, taxes, planning, etc. and this of course is even before one is hooked up with sweet sweet internet. If you have the internet, you can literally find out anything you need to know about... well ANYTHING. It is almost impossible to have a problem you can't resolve yourself with information you can gain online. Many people can work from home or on the road just because they have an internet connection. But do bloggers and internet media journalists lack the traditional setting? I was writing one post for this class at a friends house and I'm sure it could have been longer and more detailed if it weren't for one thing. His dog was climbing on my lap and jumping on my leg the whole time. Does this mean that one without an actual office is more likely to find distractions while working? I find that working at a library is easier and more efficient than working at home sometimes.

I also previously talked about auto spell check with this site and others. Does this make students smarter or lazier? I thought about it for a bit and I have to say it makes students smarter only if the word isn't changed for them. If you consistently spell a word wrong, you are forced to google it and find the actual spelling. I do that from time to time and have learned to spell tricky words properly.

The other major thing I noticed while writing in my little pad was that my hand writing is horrendous. I never hand write anything long anymore and I think I'm not alone. All school papers are to be handed in printed out or submitted in email. That requires zero hand writing. I look at older generations hand writing and there is almost a subtle art in the grace of pen on paper. I can barely even read what I write myself.

My news story will come early this week since I've been away for so long. Expect daily or semi daily posts from here on out.