Geek

I have always been fascinated by the countless variants of the English language. I don’t know if it’s a latent actor hidden in my psyche somewhere or what, but whenever we travel I purposely focus on listening for differences in the speech patterns of the native and try to file that information away for future use.

That being said, I love the Irish accent, especially the speech patterns and sounds found in Dublin. Since our visit to Ireland I shall always enjoy a tomato (tah-mah-toe) instead of a toe-may-toe.

When I was in college the first time around I took a speech and theatre class in preparation for becoming a music teacher. I think it may have been one of the only classes I never missed because I was fascinated with the way my professor spoke. She was from Toronto and sounded a lot like the CBC’s Barbara Budd. It was fascinating that while Toronto was only a few hours away, her accent and turn of phrase was considerably different from my own, which was somewhat different from my native Western New York classmates. I think I picked up a few of that professor’s speech patterns and they’ve stuck with me over the years.

When Earl first introduced me to his family it was then that I realized that he spoke nothing like the rest of them. Since he’s a Philadelphia boy through and through it took me by surprise that he didn’t sound the part. He doesn’t drink “wooder” like his brothers and sisters did. Apparently he purposely shook off the accent when he left home. I think that’s cool.

There are many accents that sound somewhat offensive to me. I’ll reserve the list for myself so I don’t offend anyone that may be reading this, but there are some places in the United States that in my mind downright mangle our language. As I’ve met fellow bloggers face to face over the years, I’ve noticed that many of them don’t sound like the region they live in. Perhaps I’m not the only one that is conscious of my accent and always trying to improve upon it.

I do find some phrasing quite delightful, for example, there was a sweet cashier at a Chick-Fil-A in central Georgia who responded with “My pleasure” instead of the pedestrian “You’re Welcome” when I said thank you for the meal she had just handed me. I don’t know why I found that charming but it was nonetheless. When Earl and I were having our photos taken with tourists last week (when we were in our kilts), I asked one woman where in the midwest she was from and I was guessing Wisconsin. The “o”s and the “don’t you knows” gave it away. The northern midwest accent is another that I find cute. And I always enjoy speaking with Canadians regardless of the region they call home, since they seem to approach the English language in a less-lazy fashion that we do here in the States.

As I look over this blog entry, I realize that regardless of the accent I’m using I tend to babble a lot.

You know, I can’t say that I get the MySpace thing. I mean, I know what it’s for and what you’re suppose to do on there but some of the profile pages make me go “gak”. There’s such a wild assortment of mismatched colors with lots of noise blaring out of speakers and flashing beacons that could induce epilepsy in a boulder. Quite frankly, I don’t really take the site seriously but there’s a lot of people (especially my fellow students at school) that do so I suppose I should pay some attention to it. At least it lets me feel hip.

So I have a profile on myspace. Is it myspace, MySpace or My Space? There’s not a lot of dirt on my profile, nor is it particularly juicy, but it’s there in the glorious default style under my online persona. At least having a profile gives me the ability to show Earl who the cute guy in the back of the classroom is (after I play “elimination” by watching the attendance sheet, he says batting his eyes innocently.)

I’ve spent the entire day doing homework and wiping out my beloved PowerBook and rebuilding all the software from scratch. I wish I had something more exciting to talk about, but that’s I’ve got, homework and geeking. Not much more.

It’s all good but I’m looking forward to the fact that tomorrow is another day.

And tonight brings us the new season of “Heroes”. By all that is practical, I am begging the universe to make Nikki as un-annoying as possible.

I have been a computer user for quite a few years. Well, more than quite a few years. Actually you can count my computer use time in decades. I’ve been playing with computers since 1983 and I had my first online account in 1985. I’ve been online ever since.

During these years I’ve had a wide selection of internet names. “DJ JP”. That’s too short, I can’t use it to register for anything new these days. “BlueMarvel37”. Wanting to be just BlueMarvel, there’s already a bunch of BlueMarvels out there and quite frankly, I see myself as the only BlueMarvel so I’m not going to append a number to the end of my name. I even tinkered with “J.P. 2.0”, but the dots and the dashes must come too close to resembling morse code or something because half the websites I register with won’t take that for a screenname/username/handle.

Many of my friends have one internet name that they use across the board. My friend Eric has the same name whether he’s on Yahoo, MSN or AOL, as well as various other message boards. I’ve decided that I need to have just one name across the board. So I’ve changed my username on Flickr, AOL/AIM, YouTube, Yahoo, all over the place.

Introducing… iMachias.

I’m a Mac fanboy through and through and since I tend to use formal names when referring to people (I call my friend in Connecticut Gregory instead of the more common Greg, for example), I figure Machias is like a formal name for a Mac fanboy. At least in my hyperdrive curious little mind. So I’ve settled on iMachias. It’s not common, there’s no number appended to the end, I’m the only iMachias that I’ve run across.

So if you have me as BlueMarvel37 or itsjp2.0@gmail.com or anything like that on any message board or instant messenger, I won’t see you anymore. It’s full speed ahead with iMachias.

Back in June during the big Apple iPhone hype I said that I wasn’t going to get an iPhone. I found them to be a little too expensive and quite frankly I wasn’t in the mood to stand in line for days for a cell phone. Well then Steve Jobs announced a couple of weeks ago that effective immediately, they were dropping the price by $200. While still a tad on the expensive side, the 8GB model was something that I could handle.

Guess what we bought tonight.

Aside from the fact that my Motorola Razr has not held up well over the past year, I wanted something that I could manage my school deadlines and assignments and whatnot easily with. I’ll admit it, I also wanted to be one of the cool kids on campus. I haven’t seen an iPhone in use yet at school, I’m hoping to be one of the popular trendsetters.

I have a tendency of using multiple computers in my life. Between having a PowerBook, an HP laptop, multiple servers, a Mac in the music studio and my work computer, I never know where I’m going to check my e-mail from. To solve this problem I have abandoned the use of mail programs that reside on a computer and have opted to use the web-based mail clients instead. There are several to choose from including Hotmail, Yahoo!, AIM/AOL and Gmail. I decided to run with Gmail from Google.

I dislike it.

Now I know that anything Google does is the bees knees of the geek set. I love their search engine, I love their calendar and I love their photo editing software, Picasa. I get Google. But I just can’t wrap my head around Gmail. I find the interface maddening.

First of all, I have this tin-foil hat thing going on with messages being archived forever. This isn’t necessarily a fault of Google, as all of the web-based mail clients do this, but for some reason when I see messages such as “You don’t have to delete your messages, ever!” as an advertising point, I get nervous. Somewhere, someone is reading some seedy message that has been sent to my account (obviously in error) and I don’t like that. As I work for an internet provider, I can confidently say that there are no secrets on the internet, but for some reason that whole “store it in the cloud” thing makes me nervous. That’s not Google/Gmail’s fault however.

What I really don’t like about Gmail is the interface. With efforts in simplicity and trying to look like the Google default homepage, Google has made the interface somewhat non-standard. I haven’t found a way to drag and drop files where I want them. I have a hard time finding the print button and I don’t like the way the messages are grouped into discussions.

Surprisingly, I like Hotmail. Even though Hotmail is part of Microsoft, for some reason I don’t get as nervous about them storing my old e-mail. I figure they’ll lose them sooner or later like most Windows users lose their files from time to time. I’ve been a Hotmail user since the days before it was owned by Microsoft, so using their software is like wearing a comfortable shirt. In addition, Microsoft has tweaked the interface enough that it’s now much like Outlook, which we use at work. Again, it’s the comfortable shirt thing.

I’m thinking of moving off of Gmail and onto Hotmail. I know it isn’t the trendy thing to do but for me I think it’ll work better, and after all, I like doing my own thing.