“Rights have to come from somewhere, and they come from the community. In return, all of us have a responsibility to the community.” – Randy Pausch

What value do you provide to the world?

This is the fundamental question that nobody is talking about. Everyone wants to talk about rights, especially in America: the right to free health care, the right to “good” jobs, and so on. You can’t say anything constructively criticizing anyone today because they have “rights”.

Okay, but what about the value you or they provide?

When this country was founded, three human rights were established: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Life is an easy one: we have a right to live. There’s no debating that. Taking someone’s life from them is a crime, and it is punished severely. Liberty means freedom – it means that we have the right to choose how we want to live our lives and what paths to take.

The pursuit of happiness is something that many of us misunderstand. A lot of us think that it means we have the right to happiness. However, happiness is not a right. Happiness is a reward. We don’t have the right to a happy life. We have to work for that.

Think of World War II: the entire country worked toward keeping Hitler’s regime from taking over. Soldiers went to war, families stayed home and supported the war effort in their daily lives. They rationed their own supplies so that the soldiers could have what they needed to fight. That was a generation that understood their rights were not just given to them – they had to work to support them.

There is endless protesting in this country because things feel unfair. But what is protesting doing? Sitting around telling people what they’re doing is wrong is not the way to make changes. You have to create change. You don’t have a good job? Get a crappy one and work your way up. Demonstrate your value to employers.

You don’t have the right to a job. Employers hire based on what value you provide to the company. If you can’t demonstrate any, other than a degree that you have, then the employer certainly has the right to hire somebody else.

The beautiful thing is, we have the right to pursue happiness.

That’s a cooler freedom than anyone realizes. I’ve been building my business for over 5 years now, and that’s me pursuing happiness. I don’t have a right to make any client give me their business. It’s up to me to pursue it – it’s up to me to demonstrate to them why I’m a better choice than the thousands of other copywriters they could hire.

Randy Pausch, quoted above, wrote an excellent book I recently finished called The Last Lecture (affiliate link). In it, he talks about his childhood dreams and how he achieved them. The basis for the lecture is that he is dying of cancer.

The beautiful thing is, Randy never gave up on life.

He knew he only had months to live, and he worked hard to not only make sure that his wife and children were going to be taken care of, but also to enjoy the rest of life while he could. It was something he worked at – something that he didn’t feel he had a “right” to. Not only that, but he spent his time providing value for so many other people, especially his children.

It would have been really easy for Randy to curl up and wait for death. He could have tried to enjoy himself with little regard for others, and nobody would have blamed him. Instead, he worked out and exercised every day to keep himself feeling good, and he provided tons of value to so many people through his lecture at Carnegie Mellon University and his book before his death on July 25, 2008. I highly recommend both.

His quote above is one of my favorites from the book. Randy understood that, when you have a right to something, you also have a responsibility to the community for providing that right.

Sitting around demanding your “rights” is not providing value. You are not helping the community. You are just complaining until you get your way. Get out there, work hard, and try to provide something to the community, whatever that may be. Once you start giving, you’ll start getting.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood. – Devil in the White City, Erik Larson

I can’t do the Chicago World’s Fair justice in this post. If you want to know the complete saga, go to the library or jump onto Amazon and buy Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (affiliate link). You’ll see the full story of the planning and execution of the fair, along with a gripping true-life serial killer story (in other words, something for everybody!).

But the basic plan is this: Chicago at the turn of the century is a dirty hole of a city. Human waste flows in the streets, and dead animals float in the rivers. Paris just held the World’s Fair and pretty much established themselves as being awesome (it was also the debut of the Eiffel Tower). So, because America is never going to settle for being second to France in anything, decides that they are going to hold a bigger World’s Fair: bigger buildings, stunning exhibits, and the first Ferris Wheel, which held over 2,000 people at one time (!).

In short, despite a ton of setbacks, terrible weather leading up to it, and people dying left and right (it WAS the turn of the century, ya know), the Chicago World’s Fair revolutionizes the world, establishes Chicago as a major city in the United States, and changes history.

But it happened because they were thinking big.

What’s the point of saying “me too”? Are you looking at your life’s plans and seeing that you are just going along with the usual plans? The typical approach to life is get married, get a job that makes you $50-75,000 a year while you sit at a desk, work your way up a few job titles, have a few kids, retire at 65, die.

Where’s the magic in that?

I don’t kid myself. I know that this world sucks at times. I know that life is not easy, and no matter what you do, you’re going to get knocked around a little bit. But who says that we can’t try to find a little magic while we’re here?

Amy Winehouse kicked it at 27. My great-grandmother was almost 90. Two of my grandparents were in their 70s. “The Macho Man” Randy Savage was 58. A series of strokes took my friend when he was 18.

We have absolutely no clue when we’re going to go. All we can do is plan. Some think that means being careless and doing whatever the heck you feel like. That’s fine. Me? I’m going to plan to be here for a very long time. If I go sooner, so be it. But I need to plan accordingly.

And if I’m going to be here another 90+ years, I better find some magic. I better do things that excite me. I better take the time to live a life that is worthy of living.

“Get busy living or get busy dying.” – Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption

I don’t want to just scrape by with my business – I want to build it into something that is going to fully take care of my family for years to come. I don’t want to just have children – I want to be the best damn father I can be, teaching my kids to be smart, responsible human beings. I don’t want to just watch the same crap on TV all the time – I want to be challenged and educated (and the same goes for books).

If I find myself stuck in any of those ruts, I need to get out of them. If I’m working in a job I hate, I’ve got to quit and go find something else. If I’m caught it an endless cycle of mindless television, I’m jumping on Netflix and watching a documentary that will make me think for a little bit.

Sure, I’ll take my lumps along the way. That’s cool. Challenges are just as much a part of life. That’s what makes them worth going after anyway.

I want to create a life worth living. I want to make plans that keep me up at night because I’m so excited. I want to plan things that make my legs bounce underneath my desk while I work on them.

Because as long as I’m here, I want magic. And magic isn’t just going to drop by some day – I need to go out there and get it. Don’t you want a life worth living?

This week’s podcast focuses on the unintended benefits of trying to do something – for example, the changes I made in my eating habits led to the correction of a serious health disorder that had impacted my life for years. I had no idea that would happen! Sadly, there’s no fun music intro this week, I just dive in – but I hope you enjoy it regardless.

[As always, if you cannot see the "play" button at the top of the post, just click the post title.]

Wow.

That’s what I have to say. From January 1st to January 1st, The Practical Nerd had over 12,000 visitors for exactly 22,000 hits! How cool is that?!? And it gets better: these numbers start in April. There’s no place to go but up!

This is why I keep doing this, people. It ain’t about finding a way to make money or garner fame. It’s about entertaining and helping all you “Cooler People” out there any way I can. I’m very blessed and thankful for each and every one of you, and I can’t wait to start pulling out all the stops in 2010. We’re going to start giving back – to you and to others.

In the meantime, I’d like to reflect on 2009, the year the Practical Nerd was born, with some of my favorite posts. These aren’t necessarily all the most popular posts, but they were ones that I really enjoyed writing and thought were useful to anybody:

• What’s YOUR $500 La-Z-Boy? A look at one of my favorite all-time dumb purchases.
• "Wait, so we should be engaged by now?" In April I shot down all the talk about getting engaged… then I got engaged in October.
• Use Goal Setting And An Attitude Adjustment To Overcome Adversity The post that made it onto Zen Habits.
• 7 Steps To A Complete Money Management System – For Free! Ditch all that expensive software and outdated checkbooks.
• 6 Ways The Average Person Can Use Twitter Without Feeling Like a Loser I still feel that Twitter is one of the most underappreciated and underused services on the market today.
• The Most Important Article on Hype You Will Ever Read (It Will Change Your Life FOREVER!!!) One of my favorite article titles of the year.
• 10 Things Major League Baseball Teaches Us About Life The metaphors are endless.
• Even Dr. House Can Be Happy Sometimes This picture still makes me laugh.
• Are You Choosing Unhappiness Over Uncertainty? How the status quo is killing us.
• 8 Ways To Ditch Bloated (and Expensive) Software For Free Seriously, why are we still paying for software? (These are all legal solutions, by the way!)
• Why You Need An Online Backup Solution, and How To Make It Dead Simple Learn from the horrors of my failed hard drives.
• You Don’t Get Rich By Spending a Million Dollars Seems rational, doesn’t it?
• 3 Icons Dead this Week: Let’s Remember Them For The Joys They Brought Us When Ed, Farrah, and Michael died, lots of people just wanted to talk scandal. I wanted to talk about the good times.
• How I Hurt My Back, and The Difference Between Taking Chances and Being Stupid In other news, apparently a 24-year old in decent shape can still throw out his back.
• Cable/Satellite TV is an Outdated, Broken System: How a TV Addict Can Liberate Themselves If there was one tip I want to share with the world, it’s this one.
• Google Sync: Is There Anything Google Can’t Do? Easily my favorite Google tool, and such a simple one at that! Set it on your cell phone, and forget it.
• Are You Living Up To Other People’s Expectations? Other people are annoying. It’s a scientific fact.
• 9 Life Lessons My Two Cats Can Teach You One of my more popular posts of the year – Chandler and Rusty take us to the School of Life.
• If You Want the Freedom To Be Lonely and Grumpy at Society, Don’t Read This Post Seriously. It will just make you less lonely and less grumpy. Who wants that?
• One Of The Simple Joys of Life Bill Cosby tap dancing.
• The FREE Tool Everyone Can Use to Rock Their Lives and 7 Ways To Use It Right Or as I like to call it, “The day I discovered the library.”
• You Suck at Life, And How to Change That Right Now My entry into Chris Guillebeau’s writing contest.
• A Look At My Firefox Setup: It’s Productive, It’s Quick, and It Rocks I keep trying to switch to Chrome, but I just can’t do it.
• How I Use Netflix and an XBox 360 To Save $676.12 Every Year I live in my parents’ basement now, and I have free cable. I don’t even have the cable hooked up because I love this system so much.
• iPod Fans Show We All Need To Learn How To Debate Respectfully Hey, want to know how to piss off the entire Internet? Tell people you don’t want an iPod. They’ll crucify you right then and there.
• How The Internet Went From "Waste Of Time" to "Essential Tool For Your Life" My history of the Internet.
• Pointless Headlines and Ungodly Interfaces: Why Mainstream News Websites Are Obsolete The time I railed on the media. You know, that one time…
• What Your Vacations Are Trying To Tell You, Featuring Calvin and Hobbes I love the fact that I wrote this headline and then couldn’t find the right Calvin and Hobbes strip, so I just put a different one in, anyway.
• The Brewers, The 0-Hour Workweek, and The Value of Having Fun I can’t believe I have to defend fun.
• I had a new post all ready in my head, but instead… The night I got engaged to my fiance!
• The Jeff Foxworthy Guide To Happiness If you’re not going to read it for the advice, read it for the jokes.
• In Life and In Football, Don’t Be a Tom Brady He’s a turd.
• Are You Forcing Happiness In Your Life? Are you actually happy, or just pretending?
• Let’s Be Positive Today I open up my heart and list a bunch of things I’m happy about in life.
• The Wasted Potential of your iPod, Zune, or Whatever Your media player does a lot more than music.
• A Smart Christian’s Attack on "Organized Religion" I’m so disgusted with the whole concept of “organized religion”. I had to say something.
• The Practical Nerd Rule #1: Do Not Accept The Status Quo. My preview of our newsletter, “The Practical Nerd Rules For Life”!
• 21 Things That Should Be Kicked To The Curb My rant against stuff that sucks.
• John Mayer Sums Up How Stupid The 2000s Were John Mayer is another reason you should be on Twitter.
• Use Facebook Without Wasting Your Life Facebook is awesome – in doses.

Whew! That’s a lot of great stuff! Thank you again to everyone who has supported this site, and I look forward to making The Practical Nerd bigger and better in 2010! Stay tuned!

Now, they are in reverse-chronological order, so they start at the bottom. Also, please try to ignore the side picture of him wearing a t-shirt with a plunging neckline and looking deep into your eyes. Unless you’re a lady, because I think that’s what he’s going for. What’s your view on the 2000s?

Since I was born, I was raised to be a Christian. I’ve been a Christian for all my 24 years. In that span of time, I have left the bubble of my family life and went off to college, where I was surrounded by those who didn’t have faith. I was challenged for my beliefs, and I even doubted them sometimes. It forced me to take a step away from simply believing something because I was raised to, and I had to take an honest look at my faith and the world around me. As I watch American society today, I have come to a startling conclusion:

I cannot stand “organized religion” anymore. In fact, I hate it. “Organized religion”, in my opinion, is why society is in the toilet. I think the world needs to be rid of “organized religion”.

No doubt some of you who know me personally are shocked at that statement. Allow me to clarify: I think we need to rid the world of the term “organized religion”.

When somebody uses the phrase “organized religion”, and normally I mean celebrities like Brad Pitt and Alec Baldwin, they are being derogative. They are putting your faith down. It’s an insult. Think about this: anytime somebody publicly alludes to the idea that they believe homosexuality is wrong, the media explodes. CNN is full of headlines with exclamation points (and boy, is that channel a joke!), and the world turns them into an outcast. But people regularly go on television and into interviews and puts down entire belief systems, and nobody says a word. They hide behind the publicly acceptable, politically correct phrase, “organized religion”.

I hate it. Look, this is a free country, and I am allowed to be a smart, well-read, Lutheran man. I respect everyone’s right to have their own faith. So why don’t people respect mine? Why can celebrities go on the air and basically say that Christians are idiots, and everybody just lets it go?

No doubt some of you are wondering what this rant has to do with The Practical Nerd in general. Well, I say a Practical Nerd believes in something. A Practical Nerd has faith and stands up for it. If you want to improve your life, take a good, hard look at your belief system and defend it until you are blue in the face. Don’t hide behind the “What’s right for you is fine, what’s right for me is fine” argument, because it inherently says, “Hey, we’re all wrong!”

I’ve written about how I think “open-mindedness” in its current form is crippling American society. I had a subscriber to The Practical Nerd Rules for Life unsubscribe over it – they said it proved how “closed-minded” I am. My reaction: so? Why is that a bad thing? I have beliefs, and I stand by them. What good is your faith if you just roll over and default to whoever’s around you?

We live in a fantastic country. There was a time in this world when just speaking out for your faith was an instant death sentence, and I don’t mean lethal injection. I’m talking about being bludgeoned with rocks until you’re dead, getting tied to a scrap of wood and lit on fire alive, and yes, crucifixion – getting nailed to a piece of wood and left for dead. Today, you can’t do any of that stuff. The worst thing you can get is somebody yelling at you or rolling their eyes. So what are you afraid of?

There’s a difference between being “tolerant” and “accepting” other people’s beliefs. “Tolerant” means you understand that they are there. I understand that there are plenty of people who believe differently than I do, and I can’t/won’t force them into believing what I do. But “accepting” their beliefs means you think it’s okay, which is not. I don’t think it’s okay at all. My beliefs are exclusive of their beliefs, and vice-versa. That means, by believing what I believe, I think they are wrong.

That doesn’t mean that I have to preach to them at every waking moment, or disassociate myself with them. I don’t look down on them or treat them differently. I’m talking about a very important mindset and attitude.

So what do you do, as an aspiring Practical Nerd?

First, you don’t ditch out on your faith because Bill Maher thinks it’s stupid. Celebrities already sway our political vote despite being wildly unqualified. They already show us what to wear and how to act. They teach us to leave this country and adopt kids from other countries. Don’t let them take away our faith.

Second, you do not insult somebody for their beliefs, nor do you treat them differently because of them. Even if you don’t believe in what the Bible says, take a look once at what Jesus did while he was around. He hung out with tax collectors and prostitutes and treated them with respect. He didn’t tell them he thought they were okay. In fact, he flat-out told them they were sinning. But in the face of society, who had treated these people as awful outcasts, he dined with them and befriended them. You do the same. If the differences in faith come up in conversation, have a respectful, calm exchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion is a beautiful thing when done respectfully.

Third, take a good, hard look at your faith. I stand before you today a Lutheran, just as I always have been. But that doesn’t mean I blindly follow it. I continue to educate myself in the faith and take an analytical look at Lutheranism, Christianity, and the world today.

Finally, take a stand. Develop a backbone. Be confident in what you believe in. Regardless of society’s attempts to undermine its importance, your faith makes you who you are. It is the moral compass that drives your actions. It is your foundation. Build on it. Don’t just stand up for it when it is convenient. Defend it against opposition.

Yeah, yeah, it’s not popular. It’s not cool. It’s not what society wants you to do today. But why are we listening to so many people whose sole intents in life are to entertain us and drive up ratings and movie revenue? Get some substance to your life, and remove the term “organized religion” from your vocabulary.

Wise Bread rocks another great post, this time from Vince Scordo. What's great about this article is letting it blow away all the materialistic garbage that the media has forced on us about what it means to be happy, smart, and rich. Today, the word "immigrant" is assumed to be "illegal immigrant", but there was a time in our country where swarms of people were coming from all over the globe for an opportunity to be better. Here's a taste:

Lesson 10: “Ignore your neighbors.”

I’m convinced that many individuals lead their life according to the goings-on of their neighbors. For example, if Doris next door leases a shiny new German sedan, you may be compelled to question the worth or legitimacy of your 10-year-old Ford sitting in the driveway. If, by the miracle of home refinancing, Doris adds another 800 square feet to her over-leveraged center hall colonial, you may all of sudden feel cramped in your tiny Cape-Cod-style home. What is my parents’ opinion of neighborhood goings-on? Make friends, and be a good neighbor, but don’t follow the neighbor into debt and materialism.

It's a beautiful, even touching, look at our history. Take a look!

Posted via email from tommeitner’s posterous

The internet is awesome. There’s no denying it. What was once a breeding ground for dorks everywhere has turned into a social gathering place for millions of people of all ages. What happened? What caused those changes? What made the internet so gosh-darn inviting for so many people? Let’s start at the top.

The Early Internet

The internet of the mid-‘90s was something else. Dominated by *shudder* America Online, the Web browser was the afterthought, because AOL wanted to be its own gathering place for people with common interests. If you wanted to hop on the internet, you likely went through AOL at the time (50 hours for FREE!). Here’s what you wound up getting:

I hope you like text!

Computers and servers weren’t as far along back then. We’re talking the days of processors in the MEGABYTES (and hey, if you don’t know what that means, just ignore it and move on to the next sentence. I’m trying to say “They were SLOW”). So as a result, once you got past the header of a web page, the rest was usually text. And I’m talking about all-the-same-font kinda text. Sure, they tried to mix it up with underlining some words or maybe making some words bold, but in the end, it was just flat-out boring. You were there to read, and pretty much nothing else. Graphic designers hadn’t started on the concept of “Web design” just yet.

Forums and chat rooms? We got ‘em!

If you wanted to interact with other people on the internet, you did it through forums and chat rooms.

Forums were, initially, the only thing on the internet. And they were called “bulletin boards”. You and other people that generally resembled the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons would go on there and wax intellectually about the latest episode of The X-Files or something. It was a place to share opinions with a bunch of people who won’t listen to you, not unlike many forums of today (I guess not everything’s changed).

Chat rooms were a whole ‘nother beast. They were real-time, and generally useless. You went into a chat room to really just insult each other and marvel at who you were talking with, or who they were pretending to be, anyway. You’d go into a chat room, type “hi everyone a/s/l”, and then get bombarded with people saying stuff like “hi there! 19/f/Honolulu”. Riveting. Regardless of the fact that the person was probably 29/m/Detroit, there was zero point in any conversation in chat rooms. You didn’t go there to communicate with people you knew. You were there to, again, talk about the latest episode of The X-Files, or watch people lob insults at other people.

Really… really crappy web pages in general.

When I was 12 years old, I thought it would be awesome to have a web page. With sites like GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod offering free web pages, I thought it would be the coolest thing ever. So I put together a web page about pro wrestling (I was cool), with some of the pre-loaded backgrounds and stuff from GeoCities, and I had myself a web page! I cannot stress to you enough how useless this web page was and what little value it had to other people. I was 12. I had nothing to talk about.

And I wasn’t alone. That was the bulk of the internet at the time – a bunch of kids who knew nothing about stuff like “graphic design”, “HTML”, or “being interesting”.

The Turning Point

Thankfully for all of us, the internet changed for the better. But it wasn’t immediate:

Napster pulls music sharing out of IRC

The first CD I ever burned was through my oldest brother’s computer in late 1999, using music I found through his IRC client. Internet Relay Chat was the first way to get music, and it was the most tedious, mind-numbing process around. You went in to a music-sharing community, had to request a song, and wait for somebody to respond by sending you the file. It was clunky, slow, and generally awful. But I was able to put together a CD of my own mix. It was a huge moment!

Once Napster hit the scene in 1999, all bets were off. Napster was, at that time, easy to use and a lot quicker. You were still waiting 20 minutes to an hour per song, but the interface was something you could conceivably understand. You now had a logical reason to own a computer hooked up to the internet.

“I’m on the phone with you AND I’m on the internet! How cool is this?!?”

Ah, dial-up internet. When you wanted to hop online, you first had to sit through this (click "play" and then shudder a little). The biggest problem with sitting around on the internet? You were tying up the phone line! Unless you were rich and had a second phone line, you were paying per minute on dial-up, and you couldn’t make calls in the meantime.

Broadband changed all of that. First, it set up an entirely separate connection for your computer’s modem. Instead of paying per minute, you had a continuous connection to the internet at a flat rate. Then, it was about 87 billion times faster (approximately). Now you could sit on the phone with somebody and talk about the web page you’re looking at! Wicked!

Today: So much awesomeness for so many people.

The stage was set: file sharing, legal or not, was on the rise. Computers were getting faster. You had a continuous connection to the internet. It was time for things to boom. And boom it did. Here are the things that make the internet of today the most awesome thing since… um, the last awesome thing that happened:

Search engines help you find stuff quicker than anything else ever created.

It started with Yahoo!, and then Google perfected it. Heck, even Bing has it down pretty good. As more and more people were connecting to the internet, more information was being shared. For you to find that information, you need a search engine. While Google has become the Kleenex of search engines (how many people ask for a “tissue”, anyway?), several companies out there all make it dead simple to find whatever you need, and especially stuff you don’t need. Whenever somebody is looking for an answer to something, what do you tell them to do? “Google it.”

For example, I dropped my cell phone in the toilet yesterday. No, I wasn’t texting while doing my business. It literally flew out of my shorts pocket and square into the toilet – nothing but net. In the old days, I would worry that my phone was ruined forever, and that I needed to shell out another $200 to get another phone (phone insurance? peh.). But I hopped on Google and typed in “cell phone in toilet”, and got about 5-6 different strategies for drying out your phone, along with endless testimonials from people saying their phone works as good as new.

[Side note: if you ever drop your phone in the toilet, pull it out immediately, take out the battery, clean the thing, then throw it in the oven at 150 degrees for an hour or so. Dries the sucker right up and you’re back in business.]

Online shopping means freaking cheap prices.

So many people resisted it for so long out of fear for their credit card numbers, but as secure transactions rose, internet shopping became hotter. Amazon is the de facto place to get just about anything. Struggling to find whole, fresh rabbits for dinner at the supermarket? Amazon’s got it. Thinking about getting a little romantic on your next camping trip? Get your tips from this great book! She won’t get intimate because your back hair is thicker than Sasquatch fur? Amazon to the rescue! 

On top of all that great stuff, sites like eBay and Craigslist make it easy for you to get top-dollar for that antique peach de-fuzzer that you’ve had in your family for generations. Instead of trying to unload it at a garage sale, you can snap a picture of it, put it on eBay, and get $475.24 for it. On the flip side, your search for antique peach de-fuzzers is over. [Note: here's what a search for "peach de-fuzzer" turns up.]

BitTorrent: Making Napster Look Like Tape-Recording-Off-The-Radio Since 2001

Peer-to-peer file sharing has certainly evolved since the days of Napster. Your Limewire, your Ares, your BearShare, KaZaa, and WinMX are almost all but dead at this point. BitTorrent allows you to not just download from the person who posted the file, but from everybody else who’s downloading it or has downloaded it before. You know what that means? That means the latest album to hit the shelves can be downloaded inside of a minute. The latest episode of The Office (premiering tonight!) can be on your computer within 20 minutes of it hitting the Web, and under 2-3 minutes the next morning.

This is not a discussion of the legalities of BitTorrent use. The point is, downloading from the Web has completely turned the corner and become near-instant. Add to that the legal methods like iTunes or my Zune Pass subscription (so awesome and so few people use it!), and music is everywhere these days.

Streaming stuff lets you watch “FAIL” videos without clogging up your computer, and makes cable TV obsolete

We all know parents and grandparents who have no idea what they’re doing on the computer. You wonder why their computer is so slow, then you find a “Downloads” folder with over 350GB of videos that somebody emailed them ranging from a guy setting himself on fire while wearing a banana suit to that stupid dancing baby from Ally McBeal. You know why? Because in the old days, when you wanted to watch a video from the internet or listen to an audio clip, you had to download it. The first video I ever saw that was from the internet was the music video for “Buddy Holly” by Weezer.

Once YouTube rolled in, streaming video became easier than ever. In fact, you can even embed the stuff right into web pages, so now you can watch all those great videos I just mentioned quickly, without having to put anything on your hard drive. Observe:

[Warning: before you hit “play”, the first video is the banana one, then there are like, ten other examples, many of which are riddled with profanity, a naked butt, and hundreds of idiots whose parents were too busy to teach them not to do stupid stuff like this.]

And for cable TV becoming obsolete, I submit the following examples: Hulu, network television websites, and Surf The Channel. I rest my case.

Wikipedia answers your endless questions about Small Wonder

I discovered Wikipedia as a giant time-suck a couple years ago, and I love it. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is generated and monitored (for the most part) by its users. While it can be edited to reflect false information, it does cite most of its sources and also allows you to check out random information about little-known stuff. Wikipedia is one of the most influential sites when discussing the power of collaborative thinking. It also is really useful when you didn’t read the novel you were supposed to write a paper on for your class on 19th-century British Literature.

And if you are wondering about the reference to Small Wonder in the heading there, click here to check out Wikipedia’s entry on this ‘80s television series featuring a little robot girl.

WordPress and RSS syndication make everybody an author, for better or for worse

Obviously The Practical Nerd would be an example of “for better”, but WordPress made it insanely easy for anybody to start a real web site, and customize it in a way that people would actually want to look at it and read it. There are literally millions of blogs on the internet right now, and many – not all, but many – of them offer some interesting and useful advice. In the old days, you had to go get a book based on newspaper book reviews for this stuff. Now, you can just Google it and find a blog that caters to your interests. Done and done.

In addition, the development of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds offer a method of subscribing to a web site’s content without having to check in on it every day or every couple of hours. It saves many people time and energy.

Mozilla Firefox lets you control how you want your browser to look and act

Remember Netscape Navigator? Ugh. Ugly, slow, and clunky. Internet Explorer? A little better, but slow and behind the times. Enter Mozilla Firefox. Firefox lets you add plug-ins and install different “skins” for your Web browser. There are an infinite number of ways you can alter Firefox and make it work the way you want it to. As I previously wrote, plug-ins and add-ons make Firefox the best browser around, in my opinion. They let you create the experience you want for your internet surfing (do people still “surf” the internet, anyway?).

Social media breaks the mold of how to share your life with your friends and family

When I took my last trip to Taiwan, I took about 300 pictures over the course of two weeks. In the old days, if I had done that, I would have to get home, develop all that film, and then get together with everyone I wanted to show the pictures to. Instead, in a hotel room in Los Angeles on the way home, I plugged my camera into my laptop, uploaded all of the pictures to Facebook, added captions, and sent everybody an email with a link to the album. People saw my pictures before I even got home.

Facebook and MySpace let you keep in endless touch with your friends. Flickr and Google Picasa allow you the opportunity to bring pictures to anyone you want. YouTube makes showing people that video of your kid doped up on laughing gas a cinch. Twitter lets you do any of those things to anyone who’s on Twitter, as easy as possible. All these things are now going real-time, too. Scheduling with your family or friends can be easily done with a shared Google Calendar, and you can get reminders of anything sent to you via text or email from Google Calendar or Remember The Milk, or just about anything that helps you organize and schedule your life.

Knowledge that you want to share with others is easier, too. There are bookmarklets and plug-ins that make sharing as easy as clicking a button. If I find an interesting political article that I want my friends to see, I can click a button that says “Share on Facebook” that will do just that. If I see a cool game or blog post about personal finance that I think is useful for the general public, I can click “Tweet This” and it will go to all my Twitter followers. Knowledge and information is being spread quicker than it ever has in the history of the world. Word-of-mouth can go across states, countries, and the entire globe in seconds, instead of years.

“Dude, I just met Hugh Jackman!” “No way, I don’t believe you.” “Okay, well check out the picture I just sent you!”

Mobile computing is taking instant communication to unheard-of levels. And if that Bill Curtis guy from those “get the internet anywhere” commercials are any indication, you can send and receive anything at anytime, anywhere. You can snap a picture on your phone and send it to your Facebook account, or email it to your buddy, or send it directly to someone via MMS. Everybody is with everybody, all the time.

Mobile computing also has lots of business implications as well. Entrepreneurship continues to rise as people can take their laptops anywhere and log onto their Google Apps to write up a document or edit a spreadsheet. The big, envious symbol of a successful blogger is somebody with a laptop on the beach, sipping a drink with an umbrella in it. While that’s not every blogger (and certainly not me!), it can be done. Computers have gone from the size of warehouses to the something that fits in your pocket. All the coolest things you can do on the internet can be done on your phone.

The internet isn’t just a meeting place anymore. It’s a method of delivering an endless stream of content, knowledge, and anecdotes of your life to the people you care about. It’s no longer necessary to get emails with “Fwd: fwd: fwd: FWD: Fwd:” at the beginning of them. It’s no longer necessary to sit and wait for downloads. The internet has made computing easy and fun for anyone. It has a purpose now. That’s why it’s so awesome.

What makes the internet awesome for you? Share with us in the comments!

Weird News has not only a bunch of cool stories, they’ve got this one about some of the treasures of the world that are widely believed to have existed, but somewhere down the line – stopped. It’s a great read with plenty of details, and it’s a fun history lesson for the day. Enjoy it.