Posts Tagged ‘coffee’
Coffee and History
Originally posted on Friday, October 3, 2008
It’s 9:56 A.M. and I’ve just had my breakfast and coffee. I have roughly about 2 hours now before class. Actually, I’m supposed to be having a tutorial right now, but considering that they’re just explaining answers to homework questions, I didn’t feel like going. So here I am, writing the first real blog entry on this site, in this cold day. Who knows? Maybe some keyboarding exercise would actually warm up my fingers that were about to freeze in this cold October weather.
We’re about to enter the period of the year where the weather is dropping but the residence staff hasn’t deemed it cold enough to turn on the heating systems yet. It’s a time when all is nice and warm under the blankets, but the moment you get out of them, you can’t help but to curse at life. That’s probably the biggest reason why it has been so difficult getting up in the morning.
Hmm… my fingers are warming up… though I attribute most of this effect to my hot coffee cup.
I’ll talk about my arts and science course.
HPS202 is technically called “technology in the modern world,” except it is now turning out to be this huge history course. Well, it’s not just history, for a study into history would also examine many different aspects of life, like economic and social impacts due to certain causal factors, etc… In this case, the causal factors are technology, and the course basically looks at technology, its impacts, and how both of them impact each other. (e.g. how technology impacts its impacts, and how technology’s impacts in turn impact technology… confusing, lol)
I suppose the whole point of the course is just to teach you that technology are more than just electronic gadgets, instead, lots of different things can be considered technology, and they have such great effects on society that they should not be considered independently from economic, social, and political factors. My first impression to this is that well, duh! It’s obvious. Who actually considers technology to be only electronic gadgets anyway? What about when electricity wasn’t known? Are they devoid of technology back then? Of course not! Gunpowder was technology right? And when Oda Nobunaga drilled his troops in the Sangoku period to rotate their musket firing sequences, which person in the army actually had a radio receiver?
Though, to be fair, there are some stuff that were interesting in our current textbook. For instance, the very first chapter expressed the idea that without people ever developing a respect for accurate, 3-dimensional technical drawings, and without people ever inventing the printing press, technology wouldn’t have become this lasting, ever-accumulating entity that we see it as today. Instead, before these things came into existence, some genius in some faraway and little-known town might have the brains to build some cool mechanical device that saves human labor, but without a generation or two, it would have been forgotten and passing out of existence.
It’s nice going to sleep and waking up early. Sometimes my evenings are totally non-productive and non-enjoyable. See, if I’m not being productive, then I might as well enjoy slacking off, but sometimes wasting time itself becomes boring. It would be nice if I had a good anime to watch (*tears* goodbye code geass!), or a good game to play, but it sucks when you’ve realized that you’ve browsed through people’s shared files on DC++ for almost an hour and you still don’t find anything interesting. Spore turned out to be less addictive as any of The Sims games. The possibilities for creatures are great, but the gameplay is just repetitive.
I think I’m going to sleep early more often… But then again, I’ve said this before, and often it didn’t work out. However, let’s remember that each and every situation is unique, so maybe it will this time, who knows?
That’s probably good enough for a first blog entry. What do you think?
Jack
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