Armin's Weblog

Changing the design of my Weblog was an interesting experience, to say the least. To do it, I had to learn a new programming language and then figure out how it was used in the Sylesheet. I suppose I could have wiped the sheet clean and started from scratch, but I thought that would simply take too long and since this was my first time using this programming language I thought it was better to start with what was already there. Following that plan, I first had to decide what I wanted to change. Number one on my list was the color scheme. I didn't like all of the bluish-gray colors so I decided to change them to something that was a little more vibrant. Fortunately, changing colors in the Stylesheet was probably the one thing I felt most comfortable doing. At first, I kept it simple, using the words "RED" and "BLACK", but then I took a look at Lynda Weinman's website and that made it really easy. Once I got the colors up to snuff, I decided that I wanted to make the text in the blog wider. That proved to be difficult at first but then when I tried to make the boxes on the right wider I somehow managed to move them over to the right and make the actual blog text wider. Overall, I like the look of my blog but I wouldn't mind adding some photos from my digital photography collection. But I'll save that for another time.

Posted by Armin Cooper at 02:48 PM | Permalink

Stranger on the Street
By Armin A. Cooper

I saw a man on the street. He looked familiar but I wasn’t sure why. We passed each other and I walked on, but I couldn’t forget him. I turned around and went to find the man. When I saw him again I recognized his face. He was my father. But my father is dead.

Posted by Armin Cooper at 08:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My father once told me that money, cash and coins, has no intrinsic value, unlike, let's say, an apple, which can be eaten. His words came back to me when I read the article by Clive Thompson entitled EverQuest: 77th Richest Country. Thompson details how players of online role-playing games are turning "virtual" money and items from the game into hard cash in the real world. I found this fact utterly amazing as I never knew that online gaming, which I've known about for years, had reached this point. But what does this all mean? If it is possible to give things that are virtual a value in the real world, what does that say about the real world, or at least the monetary system we use in the real world? This point is raised in Thompson's article when he discusses what might happen if one of the companies that created these online games were to go out of business. If the game is shut down, all of the virtual goods would be destroyed along with their associated values to the players in the real world. Now here's an interesting question: wouldn't the same thing happen if you were to burn a dollar bill? All of a sudden that dollar is destroyed, it's value meaningless like those virutal goods in the shut-down game. So what does that say about the dollar bill and our monetary system? Is it virtual too? Is the value of a dollar bill virtual? My father would say yes.

Posted by Armin Cooper at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)