So far, I've had one successful user testing subjext. One of the freshmen on my golf team trie to navigate through the first level of the maze. As it turns out, she was unsuccessful, because there were a few narrow coridoors that were not passable. My tester also found a second way to navigate through my maze. This second route was not my intention, because it took about half the time compared to the other route. Since her testing, I've created an additional wall to block off that route.

At this point, I'm still having some glitches when the user runs into walls. I keep finding temporary solutions, but I'm not satisfied. I'm really worried that I'll have to make the corridors wider, which will make the maze easier in my opinion. I'm going to further explore my options before settling for a less extreme version of the current glitch.

Here's my list of things to do by next thursday:

• Create 2-3 more levels (5 total?)
• Create the intelligent sprite(s)
• fix the on-going glitch where the user sprite gets stuck on walls
• Create an introduction
• Create a button sprite on the game over screen that will start the user back at level one
• Create the "win" background
• Make the bat and cat sprites hover over the actual navigating antagonist sprites.

These goals are in no particular order, and I'm aware that I probably won't complete every task on my list. I'm determined to finish as many as I can, but I'm going to focus the majority of my energy on making the bats and cats over, creating the winning screen and fixing that glitch.

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--Darnton 61-62

I'm not sure about the Kindle, but I know for sure that the iPad meets most, if not all of Darnton's expectations. In my Magazine Writing class last week, the E-I-C of Pittsburgh Magazine showed us a video of what Wired Magazine hopes to do with an e-book version of their magazine. And I have to say, I felt myself trembling with joy of the possibilities.

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The bargain looked dubious to some of us in charge of the libraries. We had provided Google with the books free of charge in the first place, and now we were being asked to buy back access to them, along with those of our sister libraries, in digitized form.

--Darnton 45

We've talked about Google Books before in class and in other assigned texts by Darnton. In later chapters, he mentions that Google Books never set out to be a monopoly, and I still agree with that. I do think it's unfair that they charge institutions to access full texts, but I can understand that certain copyright laws might prohibit them from displaying all of the data online for the world to see. There are plenty of hackers out there who can get around Google's firewalls, I'm sure. I just wish we could at least have some digital-world peace, at least for the case of books and other documents.

In the case of books, the digital copies in Google's database will belong to Google, and Google can charge any price it likes for access to them. It will own a vast stretch of the road.

--Darnton 47

Society's big mistake is not giving Google a capable competator. In my research for my term paper, I found that Microsoft released a similar program to digitize books a few years ago, but prematurely (if you ask me) abandoned the program. The millions of books already digitized are still available for anyone to read, but as of right now there's a huge battle with Google for rights in libraries. I'm optomistic that the iPad and other eReaders will level out the playing field sigificantly. Unfortunately, Google Books still has an advantage because they scanned the actual documents rather than just uploaded microsoft word-type documents online. Looks like we're on our way to a book war, if you ask me.

Google's mission statement: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Should we think of Google as a publisher?

--Darnton 54

I don't know about my peers, but I don't consider Google to be a publisher, because they aren't printing anything. Sure they're making documents more accessible to a larger audience, but they're just using information that was published by other companies. I think we need to think of a different word to describe just what Google Books is.

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When strung out in this manner, the pace of change seems breathtaking: from writing to codex, 4,300 years; from the codex to movable type, 1,150 years; from moveable type to the Internet, 524 years; from the Internet to search engines, 17 years; from search engines to Google's algorithmic relevance ranking, 7 years; and who knows what is just around the corner or coming out the pipeline?

--Darnton 23

He's absolutely right. I think it's just amazing to look back and see just how far we've come in the past decade, let alone in the past few thousand years. Like Dr. Jerz always says, everything's really coming together for us, since we're nearing the end of the semester. I think we all have a greater appreciation for the digital aspect of writing now that we've experienced all of the other fields as well.

Darnton also mentions that blogs now create news rather than just report on it. This is a pretty important thing to keep in mind, because it fits in with the argument that blogs allow "anyone to become a journalist."

As a spoof, a satirical newspaper, The Onion, put it out that an architect had created a new kind of building in Washington, D.C., one with a convertible dome. On sunny days, you push a button, the dome rolls back, and it ooks like a football stadium. On rainy days it looks like Congress. The story traveled from Web site to Web site until it arrived in China, where it was printed in the Beijing Evening News.

--Darnton 24

I found myself laughing quietly as I read this part of chapter 4. Darnton's right when he argues that the internet is both a place to spread information and a place to spread lies and spoofs. These days, I feel like nothing I see is true. I love when I get those emails with the "fantastic" nature images, because I can't help but wonder how much photoshopping was done to the image. Furthermore, anytime I recieve one of those chain-emails with a seemingly unrealistic story, I check it out on snopes.com, because you never can be too careful in the age of technology, can you?

Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves.

--Darnton 27

Darnton's comment here makes me think back to last semester in News Writing when Dr. Jerz assigned the class to watch the evening news. Before this assignment, I'd already had a great dislike and distrust of broadcast journalism, but this viewing only heightened my opinion, because I found their "news" to be dismal and more about advertising than anything else. I can see how Darnton might argue that newspapers are not reliable as one would hope, but I still have to politely disagree with him. A trained journalist should know to write a news article with an objective voice. Obviously he or she cannot hope to get every fact and detail exactly perfect as it happened, but Darnton should really give print journalists a little more credit, because they're stuck with the job of recreating an image with solely words and a few choice pictures. They don't have the option to broadcast video--until recently. I see great things happening in the future for journalists. We'll be able to include high-def footage of events as they unfold along with our stories. Some people already do this on their blogs with their media-phones. Darnton's aboslutely right--our new technology is revolutionizing the information landscape.

To students in the 1950s, libraries looked like citadels of learning. Knowledge came packaged between hard covers, and a great library seemed to contain all of it. To climb the steps of the New York Public Library, past the stone lions guarding its entrance and into the monumental reading room on the third floor, was to enter a world that included everything known.

--Darnton 32

That was then, and this is now. Nowadays, students look to online resources as citadels of learning. We prefer the internet, because it's more conveinent and it provides faster feedback. I use EbscoHost and other internet databases more often than I actually visit a library. I'll even admit that if I can get what I need out of a limited preview on Google Books, I'll do that over checking the whole book out in the library. Darnton furthers this thought by describing how modern college campus libraries are changing their atmosphere to adapt to their students needs, and I've got to say, our library's pretty close. We've got plenty of comfy couches and chairs to relax in. I spent many a day my freshman year reading assigned text for various classes in one of the armchairs next to the big windows in Reeves.

So what can we take away from this chapter of Darnton? The information age is growing and changing the way we access and search for data. Darnton's right to wonder about the future of libraries, as he does in chapter 3.

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--Emanuel Goldberg

The last time we talked about microfilming was in reference to libraries microfilming old newspapers as a means to keep more documentation once they ran out of room. Although I disagreed with the practice of destroying newspapers and books in order to make room for new ones, I was comforted by the idea that microfilming would keep them alive in at least one way. I'm still a fan of reading things on physical paper, but Goldberg introduced a pretty interesting idea when he mentioned that microfilming checks faught fraud. If you ask me, microfilming seems like a much safer process than making everything completely digital. From what I read,it seems like the memeux is very similar to a computer, in that it uses coding and similar coding at that to store things and also relate them to each other. Who woulda thought that Bush was actually on to something way back when?

It's really hard for my generation to remember what it was like before the internet made everything so readily available. Although I have to say, even though I prefer physical paper to digital media, if I had to choose between microfilm and digital, I'd go with digital. But I think that's mostly because of the era in which I grew up.

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