Things and Stuff: The Weekend

Saturday brought with it a very interesting reinforcement of what is arguably the overriding, and most important, lesson of living in a post-industrial society:

In a world spanned by an instantaneous communication network of global scope, in a nation whose most powerful and most influential sectors are not involved with the digging of ditches or the making of things but rather with the moving of information, it doesn’t matter what you know. What matters most is how you can find what you need to know. The ability to memorize skills or information matters less than the ability to find the skills or information you need, when you need it.

Seriously. On Friday, I did not know how to set up a database, how to add or retrieve information from a database, or how to pass information from a Web browser to a database. Today, I do. Just like that.

We take for granted many things that for 99.9% of human history would seem strange and unfathomable, and I’m not just talking about heavier-than-air powered flight and iPods. I’m talking about the way we learn, catalog, disseminate, and transmit information and knowledge. Google became a billion-dollar company on the basis of a single insight: when the sum total of readily available human knowledge reaches a certain point, the index into that knowledge is worth more than the knowledge itself. If you can’t find it, you might as well not have it, as any good librarian knows.


Sunday was a bird of a whole different feather. The entire day, beginning to end, was spent playing World of Warcraft (which is, really, nothing but a gigantic database of immense proportions that’s accessed through a very specific type of real-time graphical interface). Ran Hyjal Summit, ended up with a new ring and new wrist piece (which are, for some strange reason, still not showing up on Wowarmory…hmm). Finally replaced the Horseman’s Signet Ring I got off the Headless Horseman event last year, which means that I wore that ring for exactly a year and a day.

Sweet.

Now if we could get our collective asses in gear and kill Kael and Lady Vashj, I could complete the quest for Keepers of Time and get another new ring. Plus Kael drops the Tier 6 chest piece, and that’d be pretty sweet.

I got my Onyxia key just three days before they removed the attunement requirement for Onyxia. Dammit.


It’s growing cold. joreth is coming up this evening; she’ll be here for the rest of the week, and on Saturday i fly to Chicago to see dayo. I’ll be in Chicago until Tuesday, if any of the Chitown peeps want to get together. We’re probably going to be at GD on Saturday, at least. cunningminx? scathedobsidian? Anyone?

Got some wood for the fireplace yesterday, then realized that I have no poker, or little shovel thingie, or any of the other accoutrements one normally associates with fires and fireplaces. Got to remember to go shopping for those things tonight before joreth arrives; I hope to do a photo shoot with her and the fireplace at some point this week.

Mmm, fire. I live in a place that has a fireplace!

Link O’ The Day…

peristaltor points out that if John McCain insists on calling himself a “maverick,” he (and his handlers) might want to learn a little bit about the word’s origin. I had no idea myself where the word came from, and now that I know, I gotta say: McCain keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

Interesting to folks who care about politics and folks who find language fascinating. I know I have a few of both on my flist.