Much delayed musings on theater

Ah, it's that time of year again. The time of year when each student is frantically scrambling to get all the papers in order before Thanksgiving and Christmas. The time of year when those few students that call themselves academically capable relax and continue to keep a sane pace. The time of year when the rest of us rush frantically to complete assignments before the deadlines.

For me that means finally getting around to writing a blog post about theater, and the recent display of theatrical prowess by the Whitworth Theater department. Be it dancing herds of upper middle class, singing law professors, or a chanting union protest, The Cradle Will Rock did, in fact, rock.

The play began with a fairly dark note, letting the audience know exactly where they players stood. Steeltown, America. Union problems, poverty, and a ruling elite class. Some very well orchestrated song and dance filled vignettes later, we find ourselves looking at the whole of the problem: the ultrarich elite (in this case, Mr. Mister) are buying up all of the local uppermiddle class in order to stave off the dreaded Unions.

All in good time, we're reminded of the joys of human perseverance, as the good guys win out and the Unions march. The marching of the unions was quite the fun scene, with singing protesters taking the audience surprise behind, climaxing in yet another shock of "audience members" standing up to join in the song.

The musical brings up several very potent points about Unions: They have the ability to protect, but also to slow progress of innovation and production. They bear a powerful double edged blade: They can save or destroy a market all based on whether or not they self regulate. A union that protects sub-par workers does nothing but wrong to the industry, where a union that regulates and keeps performance tabs on a worker can do only good for the industry.

All in all I quite enjoyed the musical. It was definitely a pleasant experience, and I look forward to the next production by the Whitworth Theater Department.

Apple and Scripting

Today I decided to poke my nose into a field I don't normally venture into: Coding. Yes, Applescripts are an incredibly basic form of coding. This was a leap for me. There's an impressive amount of power available for any Mac user in the form of scripts. They're built into the OS, and they make mundane tasks a breeze. 

Find yourself emailing files to the same person a lot, and get frustrated with the lost time clicking and writing that email? Why not write a script that shoots the file to a pre-determined address when it's dropped into a folder in Finder?

Find yourself forgetting to bring that spreadheet to class at least once a week? Use Mail and Applescripts to set yourself up a little safety net: Create a rule in Mail to run a script every time you send an email to yourself with the words FileGrab in the title, and the file path in the body. Have the script send you the file that you specified in the body. This works wonderfully well if you took advantage of Apple's back to school promo, and have yourself a shiny little iPod touch.

This isn't a how to, this isn't a technical paper either. Instead, it's a prompt. Start poking Applescripts. Look up tutorials. It's quite impressive what can be done.

Blog Entry

This is another a blog entry, simply because my mother asked me to do one. Enjoy.

Voice-recognition

At the suggestion of my freshman advisor, I decided to try out voice recognition software. So far, it's interesting. It seems to have a few flaws, but apparently it will train itself and overcome those over time. I'm curious as to how this software will help my writing clarity for papers and essays. The level of control that the software provides to you is quite unique. Also, it's interesting to not be typing while writing a paper. For example, I can write a paper at the same time that I'm reading my outline and notes for that class. This opens up all sorts of opportunities for productivity as well as clarity. This will also aid my writing voice because I'm literally speaking my words.

I plan to use this software as much as possible over the next semester or so, in order to allow it to train itself fully. The impact of a fully trained voice recognition system has the potential to be enormous. It would allow a surgeon to control a computer doing information on the vital organs, without ever taking his hands out of the patient. The benefits for the handicapped are even more prominent. If using a keyboard is no longer required to type a paper, and using a mouse is no longer required to launch an application, then there is very little standing in the way of using a computer for a handicapped person.

As this technology advances, the amount of fields that could be used in are astronomical. However, there is still much ground to be covered as far as word accuracy and process speed are concerned.