On technologic dependency
Yesterday Alejandro and I gave a talk on basic Unix. More than a talk it was a trivia-like contest. We had prepared the questions in about 55 slides (by the way, congrats to OpenOffice.org for sucha a great tool) in a floppy disk. However there was no computer in the classroom to show the slides on. If the exposition had been a few years back we would have had the questions on billboards or cards, but since it is 2002, we didn't have them. The best we could do was to go, find a computer, download the text file we had the questions on, download it to yet another diskette and print it. It is amazing how we have become dependent of technology, connectivity and networks. Just two three months ago, I connected to the internet through dial up, now that I have "upgraded" to a permanent connection I am dependent of it and need to be online every minute I'm working on the computer. The funny thing is, that was not such a pressing need when I didn't have the connection.


Despite all that the talk went great, we divided the class in two groups and started giving away points for each correct answer, all in all, it was fun.