Richard Thames

Bernadette talks on the phone while Patrick laughs too much (possibly high).

I’ve been preparing for the entry requirements of the San Antonio Fire Academy, and one of them is to be able to run a certain distance in a certain amount of time.  I thought this would be easy here on campus.  After all, almost every high school and other college campus has a quarter mile track around some football field somewhere.  However, at St. Mary’s University such is not the case.  There do happen to be two tracks here on campus though.  One – located up in the rafters of the gym – is one thirteenth of a mile long.  It’s useful for the person who needs to know their seven thirteenths mile time or likes running around in tiny circles.  The other – located on the northwest corner of campus – in all my years at St. Mary’s has never really had a consensus on its length.  It’s almost like an urban legend.  The most common school of thought is that one lap is slightly longer than half of a mile, but I’ve also heard people claim it is as long as two thirds of a mile (and more recently in my research – as short as a quarter).  In any case, this track is useful for the runner who doesn’t need to track their distance and likes to read tons of liability deferring signs (in all honesty, they need to put out some warning signs about their warning signs – they do have sharp edges).  And while both of these tracks have their own niche audience, for me – the person who needs to run one and a half miles in thirteen minutes – neither one is quite suitable.
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Nobody can deny that technology has changed our lives. The same person living a hundred years ago wouldn’t live the same today. But what about the person who lived twenty years ago… or ten? I’ve always been amazed at how many things I have in my life that my parents didn’t when they were growing up and how it’s changed our lifestyle.  However, the fact of the matter is that there are always new trends and technologies emerging. In my own years, I’ve seen the rise to ubiquity of the personal computer, the mobile device (cell phone), the internet, and the social network. The latest rage however isn’t a new physical technology, but rather something that utilizes all four of these other things that existed for me but not my parents.

Perhaps you have heard of a web service called Twitter? It is essentially a bare bones version of an online social network that revolves around a single question “What are you doing?” Read the rest of this entry »