Tony Brewer

Girlfriend wants the beach, we’ve never been to Mexico, and with the price of the dollar and gas and such, Cancun is the obvious choice this year. So we are heading down to Cancun for 9 days, I will still be online everyday, but I have promised to be offline for at least 8 hours everyday. I think that is a fair trade, I may take the time to spend a couple of days offline - we’ll see how much online drama can be avoided and see if I can actually enjoy a vacation without work for once.

Of course once we started planning this we have had friends suggest that perhaps we should consider a biking tour vacation. Maybe, maybe next year.

Forums are a great way to communicate and share, there has been free ones like phbb in use for some time all around the web. Many communities have sprung up and thrive with the free phbb software which is easy to set up and use. There are great premium forums software scripts as well including vbulletin which has paid plugins and lots of support around that. Some time ago Automattic released bbpress which is a simple forum software script from the makers of wordpress. I have spent some time with it and found it to be easy to install, simple to use and there are many free plugins being developed for it as well. If you need a quick and easy forum setup take a look into bbpress.

I have been looking forward to the possibilities of the metaplace applications. I had seen a post there at boing boing some time ago, and the concept is awesome. 3d virtual worlds you can create and have hyperlinks inside, it will be great if this becomes an affordable easy way to take people from the 2d web into 3d worlds and back. It’s coming soon!

I want to learn so many things, and I have had the wonderful opportunity to learn so much already. Some of the costs of learning are financial - the cost of books and tuition fees, which apparently are rising somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 percent or so this year in my neck of the woods. There are also the costs of time, and time is a factor that really costs me these days.

There are the hours in classes and seminars, and travel time that comes to mind. With the price of gas and me free time almost non existent these costs are getting out of hand. Add to that the rising cost of tuition and the fact that more and more books and other materials are certainly going to need to be purchased, and I realize that my utopian dream of free education for the masses is getting further away, even as some technology and institutions are offering free learning via video seminars. The free open courseware from MIT, Stanford and the like is a giant leap towards the education that I have dreamed about for so long.

Costs are kept down, as there is no need to travel , saving that valuable time and money spent on fuel and travel, and the education is from top notch professors. The big question in my mind is how we are going to get the books to be as good and cheaper or free. There is much debate about this in some circles and not enough debate in the bigger circles as far as I am concerned. I would love to see students have access to free text books with the best knowledge. Of course there are writers who want to get paid, and less importantly, but more vocally the publishing houses will try to subvert this. I’m sure there will be (or maybe already has been) PR from them about the quality of books going down with this, but the opposite may be true if you look at what wikipedia can become.

More on this later.

I remember some of my techy-er friends talking about some of the social networking sites back in the day, about how they could keep up with friends and network quickly at the speed of broadband, but recently it seems that social networks have really become a tool of not just tech geeks, but many of my business associates and not just my friends, but their kids seem to be on mypsace, facebook, and even using social news sites like digg one a regular basis.

I have to admit this is one of those tech ideas that I though would never catch on with mainstream America, but it seems that it has taken over quickly as a must have communication tool. Very cool.