A Blinding Sonic Blast

Just a few observations in the differences in social structure. I’m sure other people at DaVinci have noticed this as well, but I figured I’d put it out in writing so people can yell at me for being wrong. This post has no warranty of truth for your particular area or college.

Now, I’ve heard from several people ranting on Facebook that they went to their college’s respective orientation event and were enthusiastically yelled at that if they did nothing else in college, it was to network. Ya know, make friends, open doors of opportunity, all that kitschy stuff people encourage you to do all the time, and one of the chief reasons people go to conferences. That’s what it sounded like college was. Let’s everybody network a bunch, and if you happen to glean a bit of information from your classes along the way, you’re that much the better off for it. Having just finished my second week of college (Of course this could all change in the future) that idealistic role that college could play in your life is about as far away from the truth as I’m willing to place it without involving some swearing to illustrate the distance. I’m in five classes right now, and I can count on one hand the number of people who’re actually interested (or maybe it’s just those that actually see a benefit…) in meeting people and making friends. The number is far less for those who’re actually interested in the course (2, One in public speaking, one in geology). I must be honest though, they’re gen-ed courses so I wouldn’t expect much more.

In contrast to that, I can honestly say at least 75% of the people I knew loved school. Maybe not always being there, but they were happy with (most of) the projects they did. I would also comment on DaVinci-ite’s friend making skills as being one of the better things that was developed in high school. Many people, seeing someone sitting despondent and in a corner, would just walk right up and ask what was wrong. It didn’t matter who they were, or whether they even knew their name. Those details were secondary to helping the person be cheered up or working through whatever the issue was they were having. Maybe some sound advice was in order, or just a good hug would suffice, but either way (and any other) people would jump through hoops to help people. That isn’t the case at college. On a related tangent, it reminds me of a court case that went through the California court system a couple years ago. The case centered around someone who had crashed on the highway, typical movie style thing with the car upside down, gas dripping out and about to catch fire and explode. A fantastic person stopped off to aide the driver who was unconscious or otherwise incapacitated and pulled them out of the burning (but not yet exploded) wreckage of their car, and in doing so broke their spine or something major like that. If the person had not been a good Samaritan, the driver would not be alive today. The driver sued in civil court and won, making a precedent that anyone who stops off on the side of the road to help someone (or any similar situation) and injures the person they’re saving is liable for it. There are laws on the books to prevent criminal prosecution of similar situations if it can be proven the  good Samaritan acted in good faith. This same sort of thing is erected in peoples minds at college. Here you have all these people – thousands, at larger colleges tens of thousands, and why should I want to help them? What good have they ever done for me? Well I can answer that. They’ve done you no good. Neither have they done you any harm. If you take that first step to help them, who knows what kind of friend you’ll make. I’m sure it’s not one you’d ordinarily make, and that’s perfectly good. A good friend is a good friend no matter what group or clique or cliché they belong to.

Another thing I’ve noticed although much less important (because I figured this was the case already) is that people are damned near technologically illiterate. They’ve got their little (or big) laptops their parents bought them for college and they can write papers, surf the web, accidentally download a virus that wipes out their term paper, and check their email like a pro. Anything beyond that is like asking too much of them. It’s very unfortunate. Though I wouldn’t wish the amount of knowledge I have on them, basic things like logical security practices and having a password that isn’t their dogs name followed by 123 and if they’re feeling really smart an exclamation point would be nice. I dunno. It just seems to me that things like that should be common sense by now. I don’t expect everyone to know that their password that’s rufus123! can be cracked in ~2.4 seconds, but they should know basic computer security. Antivirus, a good firewall, and good browsing habits can eliminate about 99.5% of the problems you could have software side. The other half of owning a computer, the hardware half, isn’t hard to deal with either. Don’t leave it out where people can take it, don’t drop it, and don’t throw it out of a second story windows (Had that at DaVinci, I’m not naming names…). This is supposed to be the technology generation, the computer generation, yet so many of our generation are so woefully inept at computers it makes me want to cry. I guess it will just take enough people getting all their data and information ripped off to finally make the tide change…

One last note that I’d like to throw out there, sort of a story of sorts… I met a girl in Geology class (If you’re reading this, hello :P ) whom I don’t remember her name, but it’s not terribly important. She had identified me as a computer person through conversation (It seeps out of my beanie when I’m not paying attention) and before class asked me to (basically) decode for her a voice mail an Apple representative (probably one from the Apple store in downtown San Luis Obispo) and I obliged. She had apparently had some issues with her macbook in that it had a kernel panick, which according to Apple was caused by bad ram. Rather than just telling her that and fixing it (It’s only worth maybe 50-75 bucks for a fix like that) they did a huge series of tests to the laptop in the name of determining what was wrong. The call was to tell her that she had two options, one was to just replace the ram chip that was dead (a 1 gig ram chip, 25$, Holy shit is that expensive…) the other was to do a ram upgrade to 4 gigs (I assumed correctly that she had 2 already) for an extra 100$(Again – dear god, 25$/gig). I advised her to opt for the replacement, not upgrade. It still ended up costing her almost 200 dollars in total. I could have done it for, oh, probably 45 including cost of replacement ram. I’m not sure what to say for that, but Apple’s prices and actions speak for themselves.