Breaks

     Breaks are a big part of our lives. For the most part, they go along with jobs. If you work four or five hours, you get a fifteen minute break. If you work six or more, you get at least a half an hour. These are awesome, because it lets you take a much needed "break" from work, and also helps pass some of the time without being completely bored. 


     Breaks are mandatory at work, however, they are not at home. Yet at home, it seems, is when we take most of our breaks. Chore breaks, homework breaks, you name it. The type of breaks I seem to take a lot of are homework breaks for TV. Now I know I'm not the only one out there, and I am not ashamed to admit it. Sometimes, after hours of staring at a computer screen, sometimes even a matter of minutes ;) , you really just need to let your brain rest and do something that relaxes you, or that you enjoy and the very least. 
     
     Eating is another great example of a break. It always seems that when I am bored, which would include doing homework, that the fridge always pops into my mind. I take a little stroll down to the kitchen and open it up just to stare at it sometimes, even if I don't get anything to eat. It seems to be common for me to repeat this step a couple more times before I finally break down and just pick something. In fact, maybe you are munching on a snack, or sipping a drink at this very moment while you read this. 

     Anyway, a break is a break, whether for five minutes or five hours. They are relied upon, and actually needed in most situations. Don't feel too bad if you take too many breaks, you aren't the only one. Procrastination on the other hand is another story...

Those People who Just Love Attention

     Those "people" that I am referring to, would be the attention seeking, insecure people on Facebook. From the article On Facebook, Biggest Threat to Your Private Data May Be You, I learned that I am not the only person who notices that there are desperate people out there who will post something-anything just to be liked, or have their status "liked." 


     Now author Jacquielynn Floyd is talking about when people go too far and share too much of their personal information on the internet, and then are scared or worried when someone they don't really know gets that information. In this argument, I totally agree with Floyd. No one would no anything about you unless you told them first. Posting things about your personal life on a site like Facebook, or anywhere on the internet, is just asking for it. 


     Floyd used good information to back up her writing, and she used good emphasis to back up her point. Giving examples helped paint a very clear picture in how people endanger themselves by posting personal information online. 


     I hope that her argument will reach out to a few people and they will be able to recognize if they fall into that category. People get so wrapped up in "friend requests" and how many "likes" you receive, that they sometimes forget the information they post, and just how many of their Fb "friends" are actually their friends in real life. Floyd uses a similar example in her article, and I really helps point out the main problem. So in the end, Floyd's argument was both relevant and realistic, as well as valid and backed up. 

Naps

     Who doesn't like naps? When I was little, my parents always made me take naps, and I hated them! Well now, I can't get enough of them. It's kind of like when you get to a certain age, you switch over from not wanting naps, to begging you parents if you could just sleep in a little more. I believe that teens and young adults should get more sleep, and even try to work in a few naps here and there.

     Now of course that doesn't mean that you should take naps if you already don't do anything useful, but for those of us who are full time students, work, and do after school activities, I say sleep it up! Grab a nap whenever you can, because trust me, they don't come often. 

     I think most of the problem is, that students tend to push themselves to their sleeping limit. Once college starts, the procrastination gets bigger. Procrastination is the root of this problem. Because we procrastinate, we push off our sleep due to last minute cram sessions or homework that is due tomorrow. We think that since we are young, our bodies can handle it. I'm not gonna lie, the only thing that gets me through some late nights is the fact that I know I can have a nap the next day. 

     For those of us who also have jobs, we get home late, relax a bit, do homework, and push off sleep until the late hours of the night, only to wake up early the next morning. Then the cycle just begins all over again.  Because of this, we tend to crash during daytime hours whenever possible. Our bodies do need rest, so I say, whenever you get the chance, take a nap!

The Violence of Hip-Hop

     Writer Brent Staples, who has a doctorate in psychology from the University of Chicago, writes a very interesting article about how Hip-Hop Music Lost Its Way and Betrayed Its Fans (this also happens to be the title of his article). This article is very interesting to me because I am a fan of hip-hop, and wanted to know more about what he had to say. 
     Starting off, he made some good points, and included a strong back story to back up his writing. He did a good job in writing professionally, however, it was from his standpoint of view. In writing about how hip-hop lost his way, I believe that writing from a psychology view is not the way to go. I take it that he is not a fan of hip-hop by the way he talks about it, and is stand in the matter, so who is he to judge that hip-hop lost its way? 
     Hip-hop is a genre of music, so naturally it has its selected amount of fans. It may have started out in one way and evolved to what it is today, but don't most things in the world "evolve" to be more modern? Music, writing, technology, they all evolve and change to keep up with what the people want and need. 
     I can understand that he wants to talk about how violence is affecting the people in the wrong way, but most of the rappers come from violence. That is what makes rap and hip-hop the genre that it is. I think that he makes some very good points, but then again, you can "hate" on a lot of things based on violence, that doesn't mean that it will lead to bad things, or good things. Our world is more violent today, and the people in it...the very people who rap and sing about it. 
     Brent comes from a good place, but he cannot make a very fair argument with simple facts and stories. Only the fans of the hip-hop genre can truly judge if this type of genre has lost its way. And as for the the betraying its fans part...well, I am still a fan!

Netflix

Ok, so let's talk about Netflix. It's fun, easy to use, and pretty awesome right? Wrong...Netflix used to be awesome. I used Netflix for a while, and found some good use out of it. However, I found more and more that it is just ridiculous. 


When I first started using Netflix, the cost was 7.99+tax with an extra 2.99 for being able to get DVD's sent to your house. The package was pretty sweet. For 9.99 total, I could watch unlimited Instant Streaming, and get one DVD out to my house at a time...for as long as I wanted. I'm not a big movie renter, so I would watch a movie, and then be lazy and not return it until I was interested in getting a different movie. 


This worked out great, until they decided to change their prices. Now, if you want instant streaming, and DVD's, they are two separate packages each 7.99. So now, instead of 9.99 total for both, you would be paying roughly 16 dollars! Now that may be fine for some people, but as a college student, I already pay 16 dollars a month for my DVR from Comcrap, and I really don't watch enough movies to be paying an extra 16 on top of that! 


So I stuck with just he plain ol' instant streaming for a while. The problem is, is that they took a lot of the movies off of their instant streaming, and made your "wide selection" not so wide anymore. Every movie that I looked up to watch on Netflix, whether semi-new or older, is under the DVD rental package, which of course is another 7.99 a month. It's such a rip off! The only thing I used Netflix for was for a TV show, and now I barely have time for that. 


Long story short, I am frustrated with Netflix, and the fact that they think the packages should be separate for one, and then on top of that, they take off a bunch of movies from streaming so you would have to buy the other package if you wanted to see them. 

ipad, ipod, iworld

Are we getting lost in the iworld? Andrew Sullivan, editor of Andrewsullivan.com, with a doctorate in political science from Harvard believes we are. In his article Society Is Dead: We Have Retreated into the iWorld, he clearly states how he believes new technology such as ipods and walkmans are taking away the "worldly sounds" of the streets. That cheerful chatter or the rush of the subway train. 


He uses a very professional sounding argument with no bias, stating that, he too, is victim to this new iWorld that is ever changing. He backs up his argument, with clear and concise statements. He makes his article informative yet fun to read at the same time. Not to mention the fact that the topic is very interesting since we can all pretty much relate to the use of ipods, or some form of musical technology. 


His topic and article make you want to take a step back and look around for yourself at what the world has become. Personally, I think that the world evolves, and the technology grows, as does the community along with it. 


I think that overall, he put together a very nice article and and supported his facts and arguments very well. He made you want to jump right in and see for yourself the changes of the world around us and how we are supposedly shutting out communication of our daily lives just walking down the street. Although he does have a very real and valid point, I doubt that now that we, as a people, will ever back out of the iWorld now that we have been introduced to it. It is always changing and evolving and that is just what we are going to have to do to keep up with it. 

Life on Social Networking

The title of the article I read was called Is Myspace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum.  This article posed a good question, "Are social networking sites beneficial or harmful?" Now this question has been hot debate ever since the launch of sites like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. The article did a very precise job on answering this question through a series of responses posted by "wise people who spend their days thinking about the issue"(p. 281)


This article was written by not one author, but a series of authors. Each one, with good credentials such as a professor at the M.I.T. media lab, or a professor of psychology at Sheffield Hallam University and social networking site researcher. This lets me, and all of the other readers, feel assured about what the article is talking about. It's not just written by some bums off the street. 


Some of the authors address different questions pertaining to the fact of social networking facts being beneficial or not. One came at it from a psychological perspective, and another talked about how they have changed our lives. One thing that all the authors had in common, was the fact that it helps us keep up with our friends, and what's going on in their lives. One author, Martin Baily, states, "An example is the spread of air conditioning, which makes us more comfortable, but those who grew up before its invention speak fondly of a time when everyone sat on the front porch and talked to their neighbors rather than going indoors to stay cool and watch TV." This is a good statement regarding the question as to whether or not social networking sites are a drawback for communication.


All in all, I believe they all bring a lot to the article and the layout is also interesting, since it looks like a webpage. This article gets a "well done".