Light and Tangler

I had first met Marty at a lift.  After forcing myself on him (conversationally ofcourse), I had managed to get myself invited to weekly soccer matches (Luckily you can suck at soccer while still loving it!).  At one of these matches he had told me that he was working-on/starting Tangler.  At first I had assumed this was a flavour of chips for us geeks.  So I had decided to go to tangler.com and was presented with an option to signup for beta-testing their new product.  All I had known at this point was it was kind of a forum – “jees done before” I thought.

Soon after I had received my account from Mick.  So I logged in for the first time.  Big mistake.  Let me say I am still paying for it.  While forums themselves are not a new idea, Tangler’s approach to facilitating forums is in fact quite simple and yet very very addictive.  They have used a pure web 2.0 approach to their app.  No software installation is necessary, works on major browsers (so far I have only tried it on Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 on linux), and provides complete control to you.  Also Within moments, I was part of about 15 groups (mostly invited to by Mick) and managed to create a couple myself.  Ofcourse this is what  contributed to one of the biggest mistakes of my life.  With the ease of (instant) communication, lacking in many other forums, you are never out of communicado with your contacts.  Eagerness of new technology will have to give way to rudeness and introverted behaviour if you would like to get any work done!

Tangler also has a standalone desktop client for windows and linux.  However I have not got this to work in linux yet (complains about missing libfXfixes.so.3).  I would have preferred a plugin to existing IMs like everybuddy and/or Trillian rather than YASIM (Yet Another Standalone IM).

One thing I had found (possibly) buggy was time-zone management.  Even though my profile says I am from Australia, I found some of my posts to have the wrong date.  May be I havent set it up correctly.  Also being in beta, I cant expect color-scheme customizations which I think would be very useful.

But all in all a great approach to forums, and especially justifies the eccentricity of folks at Tangler.  Hope to see lots more of it in the future from this bloody awesome team (For non-ausies: “bloody” can be negative – ie “what a bloody f@#%” or positive like “what a bloody ripper”… and this definitely is the latter).

Are reeding and riting important?

Lately (well last five years anyway) there has been quite a bit of media frenzy regarding whether traditional penmanship and writing skills are now becoming obsolete in this day and age of computers, PDAs and styluses (stylii?). One article (Jason Fry, “Mightier than the Pen“, March 05 2007, Wall Street Journal), suggests that the said new forms of communication are sufficient to replace traditional methods (writing and penmanship). Reasoning is that throughout human history new forms of communications have replaced older forms of communication successfully and this is no exception. Also, as Jason suggests, these new forms break down the creative boundaries for child who has embarked in his/her educational journey thereby increasing his/her imagination in ways not envisaged before. Another common argument presented is that (the physical process of) writing, due to outsourcing of this task to computers, itself does not add to human competency (of which survivability in the woods was traditionally a measure of ).

As a high-school student, I absolutely abhorred the idea of writing in all forms (essays, analysis, creative writing, poetry for women and all that “boring” stuff) so I am not sure Id be the right person to comment on this issue. But I suppose that is what blogs are for.

Ignoring the issues of availability of computers and word processing tools, bad (font) typing, eye-strain, difficulty in entry, should a child with access to a computer and wordprocessing tools, first develop handwriting skills or bypass this process in their favour?

I am not so sure it is a good idea to dispense with the basic writing skill (cursive or not). While efficiency can be definitely gained by using computers (via touch typing, voice recognition, styluses etc), there are other benefits that only handwriting, if not a clear and neat one, can offer. Briefly, these include:

• Motor Skills: Handwriting, that most adults take for granted, requires dedicated effort to master and maintain. Learning to type is a process of taping fingers at discreete locations on a keyboards; Handwriting reuqires careful and controlled motion to produce continuous and fluid patterns.
• Orderliness of the mind: Wordprocessing facilitates the noting of ideas in a sequential manner. This forces organising thoughts in an orderly and flowing fashion.
• Internalising Skills: This really falls into the “Terminator” line of thought about maintaining/improving skills internally rather than (unnecessarily) depending externally on machines for basic skills and ideas.

At the end of the day, where can we draw the line regarding dispensibility of core skills? Do we need reading abilities? Text can be synthesized into voice. Computers can solve some of the most complex mathemtical problems so why do we need algebra? If Matrix (the movie) has anything to say, we could all be feeding ourselves via tubes attached to our bodies. Talking about dispensible skills, how about this automatic beer dispenser:

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/beer-launching-fridge-all-lazy-men-rejoice

Having said all this, perhaps a bit of organising my thoughts on paper would have helped?