What a find!

I use this toolbar add on called StumbleUpon, and I love it to death. I think my dad was right in comparing it to Pandora. Upon initial use, you choose a number of tags related to interests, and they can be general or specific. Then, you hit the Stumble button, and a random page with a randomly selected tag from your choices pops up. Your stumbles are then honed by what you approve and disapprove of. New pages are added when users "thumbs-up" a page that was not previously tagged.

A while ago, I added "open source" to my tags, and today, I feel like I struck gold. It was a picture titled "Open Source, Open World." It started with a timeline of the 20th century, beginning with automakers striking down an attempt to patent the combustion engine, then moving towards computer stuff, highlighting the initial group efforts of scientists and hobbyists. I guess things like UNIX were free at first, then locked down. It goes on to illustrate the GNU project and the proliferation of Linux distros by country (I guess all of Cuba uses Linux, go fig). Next was browsers, then phone stuff, and tech tech tech.

But then! Things besides tech started showing up, beginning with OpenCola (it's not Coke, though, so it's a lie), Wikimedia and Project Gutenberg (public domain media things), Science Commons, which I've used for a paper, some other sciencey stuff, and then Open Courseware.

WHAT O_O.

Yeah, courseware. I immediately ran to Google and found that MIT has tons of old courses available online! It's not the full thing-- very often, it's not even most. What chunks there are depend on the level of the class. Intro to Linguistics, for instance, has more resources available than Linguistic Theory and the Japanese Language. It's very exciting, though, because they have bits and pieces of a lot of different things. Even still, it's far from a complete picture, but I like it.

The information in these things could probably be found in books or websites, but classes just seem accessible to me. I like the idea of structure, and that's what I feel classes provide (when they don't suck!). Still, it all comes down to motivation. I will probably be scouring MIT's site, and looking for a book or something on the side, because Linguistics is the field I'd like to study. I can't do it at OCC, so it's gonna be on my time, and until I find a book that looks idiot-friendly, I have to make do with the internet. We all know how utterly devoid of useful information THAT is, right??

I dunno, I'm tired and excited. I ought to do some studying for Japanese before I get too lost in something else, though. Mid-term's this week, and I'm gonna be busy on Friday, I think. Bill is gonna be brewing beer for real instead of from a kit. Making his own wort and whatnot. It should be interesting.

Next week, I'm hoping to spend more than a few hours on one day in Ypsi.

Sean