What Am I Not Comfortable Buying Online?

I feel that I am comfortable buying pretty much everything online.  I have bought all kinds of things online:

• car parts
• halloween costumes
• jewelry (as gifts, not for me)
• software
• books
• hot sauce
• viagra

Ok, not viagra.  No really, I have a few more years before that might spark my online purchasing interest.  I figure that if im relatively safe using my credit card, as it has a 500 dollar built in limit on fraudulent charges. 

I am more disinclined to shop online because it is soooo easy.  Talk about impulse buys.  I could very easily rack up some serious charges online.  I have done so in the past.  Talk about a spending hangover!  

Do I fear online fraud?  Not really.  I am more afraid of crushing consumer debt.

Vanity Search

I have performed a vanity search.  It was not done out of vanity but to complete an assignment. Still, I can’t deny that I was curious to see what was out there about me.  I had questions.  Would I find a list of my accomplishments or failures? Would it find something somebody had said about me?  Would it find anything at all?  What I found is that I have a lot of work to do to become the most famous me on Google.

             I fired up Google Chrome, and using the Omni bar, typed in my name.  I got over 5 millon hits.  Nice.  I'm assuming this is due to my last name.  Lets see how many hits doing my name in quotes will get me.  13,600. None of the first 100 are about me.  I am disenclined to go further.

Apperently the two most famous B.B.'s out there are an African American man living in my hometown in Kansas who has a computer science degree.  Whoa, weird.  Same name, same town, same education goals.  Ill have to email him and see if he thinks it is strange as well.  The other is the man I was named after.  He is an Associate Professor of Geography at Texas State University–San Marcos.  He was also award the Piper Professor award this year.  Quite a legacy to live up to.

I guess I still have yet to make my mark on the world enough that my name will register on Google for the top 100 results....

The future of newspaper and the web

The future of newspapers and the web will be the future of newspapers and the web.  What I mean by that statement is that their will be a future for both newspapers and the web.  These two are not mutually exclusive.  The success of one does not preclude the existence of the other. 

When I say newspaper, I am not talking about the bleached, pressed and printed sheet of wood pulp that is delivered to our door step.  That is merely a medium for getting the news to consumers.  To me, newspaper is an old-fashioned word that refers to companies and people that deliver news.  The act of assigning stories, chasing leads, and checking facts all leads to information that can be distributed via various mediums.  People pay for the information, not necessarily by what means the printed word gets to them.

Will paper news go away?  We all know it will.  The march of progress will do away with the use of trees for paper.  This is inevitable.  News will never go away.  As population grows and we become more of a global economy there will be greater demand for news.  It is just the way it gets to us that will change.

Email Versus Snail Mail

During class we were able to come up with quite a few examples of how email and snail mail were similar.  As you may recall they are similar in pretty much every area except one.  That one thing is when you physically need to send something.  Whether it is a Christmas present or Grandma's cookies, you simply cannot send that digitally.....yet.

My blog title is "living the digital life".  I must therefore find a way, any way, to prove that we can send items digitally.

Lets say you want to sent little Billy a model car for his birthday.  You could design one in a CAD program and email it to him in a file that wasnt accessible until his birthday.  Then when the big day came, he could open the file - import it into his special 3D printing software and print it out in a matter of hours.  Viola, a physical item sent digitally!

Here is an example of a 3D printer:

As technology improves, an edible substrate could be used and flavors added during the printing process.  Can anyone say instant Grandma's cookies?

Anyone who has seen Star Trek knows where all this technology is headed, "The Replicator".