Report 4: My Involvement with the Internet
by Garrett Chun

Motivational Factors for Psychology 409

Well, the number 1 motivational factor for me was to do good in this class. By doing good, I mean that I want an "A" in this class. Wait...now that I actaully think about it, I don't think getting an "A" was my number 1 motivational factor. Rather, I think it was a combination of a lot of factors. But of course I do want to recieve an "A" for Psychology 409. I think that I just listed this factor first because its the easiest to explain. Most people should understand this why this factor can motivate one to do good.

Another factor that help to motivate me was seeing how others in my class were doing. In the beginning, I totally did nothing. Everytime I went online, all I did was fool around and surf the net. (See my report 2 for more information on this subject.) For the first few weeks, I should have been working on my wib page, report 1, and my report 2 page, but I wasn't. Every once in a while, I would look at all the pages of my fellow classmates. I always noticed how much their pages evolved and got better while mines stated stagnant and pathetic. While I was pleased to see their pages improving, I also became a bit jealous seeing that their pages were better (way better) than mines. Well, I don't think that "jealous" is the correct word, but it is the only one that I can think of right now that closely relates how I felt. I then started to realize that I was falling behind fast! I definately did not want to have the worst wib page in my class, so I started to stop fooling around and to start working on my pages. So my fellow classmates, unknown to them, was a big motivational factor for me. I just didn't want to look bad because I knew all of them could see my wib page. In fact, the whole wide world could see my page (if they knew where to find it) and I really didn't want the whole world to see my page in its sorry state. That's the reason why it took me so long to submit my site (to various search engines). I couldn't submit my page because it was totally crappy! (And it had my name on it) I only submitted it after I worked on my pages for hours and it looked half-decent.

The final thing that motivated me was because I think I'm just automatically motivated to do a good job in anything that I do. I mean I always try to do my best even if I don't have to. I know that this all sounds like some stupid public service announcement or something, but its really true. For example, this past weekend, I had a paper and poster due for my Psychology 250 class. Before I started, I had calculated that all I would need on the project was a 35 out of 100 points to get an "A" for the class (because of much extra credit). I know that I could have easily gotten 35 points by doing a half-ass job. Nevertheless, I kept on working on my paper and poster trying to make it pretty good. I'm not saying that I did an "A" caliber paper, but I did way more work than was necessary to get 35 points. I knew I had enough work done to get my needed points, but I kept on trying to improve it to get a decent paper. I don't think I really noticed this until I started thinking about it. But that's just how I am. I can't stand doing a half-assed job because it kind of irritates me knowing that I could have done better. I know that I wasn't trying my hardest on my project, but I did way more than I needed to do. The same goes for this Psychology 409 class. I just wanted to improve my pages for myself. The only concrete example that I can think of with this class is that for Report 1, Dr. James told us that we should critique 5 students from each generation (10 students total). I fully intended to critique exactly 10 students, but unfortunately, time did not agree with me. Because I was so stupid, I procrastinated until the very last minute (I mean VERY last minute) before I started. Originally, I planned to do a very short critique of 10 students. But, as it turned out, I just couldn't do a half-ass critiqueing of the students. I just wanted to look at each and every file and comment on every aspect of it. If I had more time, I think I definately would have done that. But because I was running out of time, I didn't do that much of a thorough job as I wanted to do. So even though I knew I was supposed to do 10 critiques, I only ended up doing 5 fairly detailed ones. I was pissed at myself for not completing the assignment in time that I still wanted to finish writing about the other 5 pages. Even after I found out I got an "A" on the midterm grading, I still wanted to finish critiquing the other 5 students. Everytime I would say I am going to finish my report 1, but other more important things would come up. But even to this day I still plan on finishing the assignment (well, at least doing a couple of more students). Pretty studid of me, huh? I even have an urge to complete my report 2. It must be an ego thing or something. I just don't know. All I know is that I probably would just get mad at myself for not doing as much as I knew I could do.

Conflicts Experienced In Psychology 409

The biggest conflct that I have experienced was time. Well actually, its lack of time, I always procrastinated with all of my assignments for this class. I always studied and did homework for all my other classes before this one. In fact, if it wasn't for Dr. James postponing both the midterms and report 3, I would probably be failing right now! I kept putting my midterm reports off until about 2 days before it was due. Boy did I suffer trying to complete the assignments! I remember spending a total of 22 hours in one 24 hour period on the computer. And the only reason I didn't spend the whold 24 hours was because I spent about half an hour driving to school and the other one and a half hours in a class. I practically killed myself trying to finish my midterm reports. I guess I just have to learn not to procrastinate anymore. Well, even though that I said I wasn't gonna procrastinate anymore in my report 2, I still did. Like I said before, I wouldn't have finished my

Demands and Challenges of the Internet

I have experienced many demands and challenges since I embarked on this journey called the Internet. First of all, the most demanding of all demands is to just find time to work on my reports. The reports in itself, weren't terribly hard -- they just took very long to do. I just had trouble finding time to complete my tasks. And even if I did manage to find time to go to the computer lab, I would usually just end up surfing the net and not concentration on my homework. It was often very difficult to schedule in times when I could work in the lab. I mean, this class is only one out of 5 of my classes that I was taking. I had four other classes to worry about and to deal with. Plus with work, and other various chores that I had, it is hard to work around the lab hour schedule. And often, when I worked on the computers for several hours straight, I would get dizzy and have headaches. This is really bad for me because I usually never get headaches. Plus my back and neck would start hurting. My eyes would become sore and tired. I had to overcome all of these problems so that I could concentrate on the task at hand. I learned that I would have to take breaks around every 30 minutes to rest my eyes and stretch. Sometimes I would just go outside to get some fresh air and walk around a bit. Other times, I would just look away from the computer or close my eyes. Anything to help me relax a bit.

A minor challenge that I experienced in this clas was learning to understand my professor, Dr. James. Many times, as pointed out by students in my class, Dr. James would tell his other class, Psy 459 something, and think that he told it to us. Therefore, he would expect us to know or do something, even though he didn't tell us. Other problems encountered with Dr. James was that he often changed the "rules" of the class. By this, I mean that he kept changing the requirements of our wib pages. One day he would say one thing, the next week he would totally contradict himself. It became rather confusing and frustrating trying to learn what he actually wanted. My professor also had a very rigid idea of how the pages should look. In the beginning of the class, he told us of this student that he had that totally disagreed with all of his ideas and rules of the homepage. He told us that the student ended making two homepages, one with Dr. James requirements, and the other with his own. I just laughed at this amusing story thinking that the student was probably too critical and harsh. Now, I kind of agree with that student. Actually, its not that bad, but you always have to make the pages the way Dr. James wanted it to be. Its hard to be creative and have a nice page when your so limited by his rigid ways. But, he is the boss, and I knew if I wanted a good grade, I had better listen to him. It didn't take me long to realize that he wanted everything a certain way, so this wasn't much of a problem. Dr. James does have his points though. For example, he told me to get rid of my construction sign. I kind of liked having a construction sign because it shows that your page isn't complete and that your still working on it. Well, he explained to us that you shouldn't begin your pages with any sort of apology or construction sign because it just isn't a good way to start off a page. He continued by saying that a homepage is never complete. You should always be working on it and trying to improve it. I guess he was right by saying this, but I still liked having the "under construction" sign.

Overcoming many problems was also another challenge that I had. There were too many to name here, but many of them are in my report 2, and in my report 3. One problem that I had which I didn't write in a report was that on top of all the other problems I had connecting with UH, even when I connected, I only connected at a very slow rate. I had a 28,800 kbs modem, but I only could connect at a rate of 2,800 kbs. This really slowed down all of my transactions. It was so irritating waiting while my files downloaded. And it didn't get any better when I went to the Help Desk in Keller. The workers over there were trying to help me, but they just didn't or couldn't help. All the people I talked to didn't know what the problem was. One person would tell me one thing, and another person would tell me another. And most of them didn't know what the problem was. I tried everything all of them told me and nothing happened. This was a problem because I couldn't download Netscape 2.0. I only have 1.5 hours of access time with UH before they cut me off and it takes longer than that to download Netscape with only 2,800 kbs. I just gave up trying. It became too irritating.

I think that the biggest challenge that I experienced was learning to overcome my frustration. I couldn't even begin to describe how much frustration I had in this class. I will probably die at a young age with all the stress that I encountered in here. One example of the frustration I felt was with the problem with my modem that I just explained. It was just so irritating having that problem when nobody would explain how to solve it. I must have talked to 6 different workers there and none of them could successfully solve the problem. Since nobody could fix my problem, I just asked them if I could get a copy of Netscape 2.0. They said OK, as long as I bring in 2 disks. That was fine, so I went home and brought 2 blank disks. I went back to the Help Desk and gave them my disks, and in return they gave me two disks with Netscape on it. I asked the worker how to load it and he told me just to run the "install" program and follow the directions. He also gave me some other helpful information. So I go home and I try to install it and I couldn't. There was no install program. There only was one program and I tried clicking on it, but it didn't work. I sat in frustration for a few minutes trying anything. I started to feel stupid because I thought I had done something wrong. So I went back to the Help Desk and told them my dilemma. The worker told me that I need an Unzip program or something. So I told him I didn't have one and he said he could give me one if I had a blank disk. Now I don't make it a habit of carrying blank disks with me, so I didn't have one. He told me to come back later and bring one. I was so damn frustrated. First I thought I was wrong and stupid, but it wasn't my fault. The first worker gave me wrong information. It was so irritating that I haven't gone back to get that Unzip thing. I just gave up.

There were many other frustrating moments in this semester, but there are just too many to describe. One more event that totally irritated me was when I was trying to complet my report 2. I was already stressed because I was running out of time. I was doing my report 2 at home and I didn't want to waste time typing it out at home using pico because it was still early (around 8:00pm) and I didn't want to risk getting cut off and losing all of my information. Plus I figured that it would take me super long to log on at that hour. Therefore, I decided to type my report 2 in my word processor and then to ftp it over to my CSS account. So I finished half of it and decided to just finish the rest in pico and so I transfered half completed. So then I go into pico and look at it and it gets all screwed up. The lines continued off the screen and it didn't wrap around. It was totally a mess. The entire paragraph would be off the screen to the right and then there would be this huge gap between the next paragraph below it. I assumed the problem came from my word processor automatically doing word wrap. I guess it didn't transfer the wrapping or something. I don't know. All I know was that it was really messed up. You can see what I mean by going into my report 2, and view the source. Go down about half way and you'll see what I mean (unless I fixed it already). So I had to manually fix the report by going into pico and manually returning where necessary and deleting unnecessary spacing and so on. This took me forever. I think I spent over an hour trying to correct it and I still didn't finish. I just stopped because I was wasting my time. It was just so frustrating and irritating and a waste of time, especially since I was rushing to finish the report. It was a challenge to learn to get past the frustration and anger and to not give up. Many times I would think that I should just give up, but something inside of me tells me that I should go on (probably the part that says I need an "A"). I do admit that at times, I just stopped what I was doing because I was mad. But I never gave up. I just took a break and started at a later time when I was more calm. It was also difficult to manage all my frustration and anger. At times, I just wanted to scream and throw the stupid computer out the window. But for obvious reasons, I couldn't do it. So I had to learn to focus and channel my frustration into motivation. I did this by telling myself that I wasn't going to let this stupid machine beat me. I knew that I could conquer this computer, so I kept on trying.

Overall, I don't think that this class was really demanding and challenging. Rather, it was the other things that were hard. What I mean is that doing the reports wasn't too hard. I mean all we had to do was to critique other peoples pages. What was hard was getting the time to access the computer so we could critique the pages and then translate our report into HTML. The frustrating things were the things that we had to do in order to write the reports (like learning HTML, PICO, Gopher, etc.). One thing about the class itself that frustrated me was that I thought this class was for beginners. I thought that since we were going to learn to make a homepage, I figured that our professor was going to go over HTML step by step. But he didn't explain anything to us. He just briefly flew through some UNIX commands and thats it. It was very confusing in the beginning of the semester learning exactly what he wanted and how to do it. So it was kind of challenging to learn how to use all those HTML commands successfully.

How Worthwhile and Valuable is this Class?

This class must be one of the most worthwhile and valuable class that I have taken here at the University of Hawaii! One reason is that this class actually has real-world applications. Most classes here at UH are so bogus! I mean how often in the "real world" would we have to know how to differentiate polynomials? And how often would we have to explain to somebody about ancient Egypt? And I definately don't need to know what a ablative absolute or indirect statement in a subordinate clause is in Latin. All that stuff we learn in history and math and economics are all a bunch of crap! We will never need to know all of the stuff we learned in those classes. But in Psychology 409, all the things we learned can be put to use after we graduate. Nowadays, everything is computerized. If we, as students, don't learn to conquer our technophobia now, we will never be able to survive in the real world. In this class, we learned valuable lessons with UNIX commands, Netscape, Gopherspace, and computers in general. What we learned here can be so helpful after we graduate!

Taking this class added so much knowledge about computer in me! I have had some experience with computers before, but not to the extent of this class. My first semester here, I took this EE 150 (electrical engineering) and it had to do with programming. Well, I only lasted a few weeks in that class before dropping it. From this class, I learned a few UNIX commands, but since then, I forgot mostly all of them. Everytime I would tell myself that I would fool around with it to try and learn more, but I never got around to it. In fact, I don't think I had touched my UNIX account for a couple of years before taking this class. My other experience with computers comes from taking ICS 100 (Tools for the Information Age). Now, they call this class ICS 101 and they learn all about Netscape, e-mail, the Internet, video, scanning, Photostyler, and many other useful applications. But, when I took it 3 years ago, all we learned was spreadsheets, word processors, and a couple of other things. There was no such thing as Netscape and the World Wide Web back then. This class has taught me so much about computers that I feel way more confident than before.

Before, I only thought of the Internet as entertainment. Before taking this class, I only used Netscape a few times and I must say that everytime I used it, I had fun. But all I used it for was to search for pages on Teri Hatcher, or on sports or other entertaining sites. I really got into it, but I hardly got a chance to use it because I didn't really have access to computers much. So, in the beginning of this class, all I did was search for fun sites. But, now that I am nearing the end of the semester, I realize that the Internet can be used for much more. Of course it will always be entertaining, but it can also be used for research purposes. For my Psychology 250 paper, the first thing I did to find information was to look on the Web. I got a lot of useful facts about my topic that I used in my paper. Even more useful (once you get to know how to use it) is Gopherspace. Gopherspace was around before all these fancy pages in Netscape and contains a lot of information without the distractions.

Taking this class has made me much more confident when dealing with computers. Because I have learned so much, I am not as tentative as I was before. This class also made me learn to control my temper. I learned how to continue on with the task even though I was frustrated. Many times when I wanted to quit, I didn't. I learned what it takes to not give up in times of distress. And not only did a learn a lot from this class, I also had fun. I always had enjoyed surfing the net and now this class made surfing the net homework. I actually enjoyed learning things in this class!

Involvement with the Internet

I guess you could say that I now look deeper into the Internet. Like I said before, I only surfed the net a few times and didn't spend much time on it even though I wanted to (because lack of access to Internet). A couple of years ago, all I did was look through all of those Newsgroups. I had so much fun reading those things! But the Newsgroups cannot even compare to Netscape! Now, I have a lot more fun surfing through the Internet than I did with Newsgroups (for obvious reasons). I now spend so much time online that I not only look at homepages, I evaluate them (much like I did for report 1). For example, say I went into a Teri Hatcher homepage and I looked at a picture that was linked from that page. Well, if I clicked on that picture, I might think "wow, nice picture (very nice) -- but there's no link back to the homepage. That's bad HTML writing." I am now just more critical when surfing the 'net. I now look deeper into each sight.

I also now use the Internet for research purposes. Before, I only thought of the Internet as something to do for fun. But now, I know that it can be utilized for educational purposes. In the future, this knowledge can make writing papers much easier! It also can be used if I want to find out other information just for fun. For example, if I wanted to know how old Jeannie Garth is, all I would do is do a search with "Jennie Garth" and go looking around. So in a matter of minutes, I could find out that Jennie Garth is 24 years old as of May 2, 1996. Whereas if I didn't have access to a computer, who knows how long it would take me to find out her age. It would probably be several hours or even longer. The Internet just makes everything easier and more fun.

I am also more drawn to the computer. I am not saying that I am addicted to it, because I don't think I am. All I am saying is that I like being on the computer and I find myself on it more and more these days. I always had access to an e-mail account (either through ICS or through the College of Business), but I was never really into it. I did e-mail people once in a while, but now I want to e-mail people. I always want to check my mail. Before, I couldn't care less. I think that I would spend more time online if it were more convienient. Actually, I probably would spend all my free time online, but you waste a lot of time just sitting there waiting for a picture to download.

My Image of the Internet

I think that the Internet is this HUGE, HUGE source of information that are interweaved together and is accessable through a computer. It is made up of all these computers throughout the world that are all connected. E-mail, newsgroups, World Wide Web, and Gopherspace are all compents of the enormous Internet. The Internet has the capability of connecting millions of people together and it is growing by the thousands everyday. The Internet is too big to imagine.

The Internet is beginning to become a big part of everyday life for us. Before, not many people had access to it. But now, more and more people are discovering how amazing it is. You see in commercial now that they always display their company's URL address. Even on business cards are peoples URL or e-mail address. And I believe this is only the tip of the iceberg. The web only started to blossom around 2 or 3 years ago and it has already increased by a million percent. Pretty soon, I bet that all books will be accessible on the Internet. This means that instead of going to the library to borrow a book, I can simply read a copy from the Internet. What is even more amazing is that the 'net is free (if you have access to it). It is hard explaining what it is because it is just so overwhelming! Its hard to imagine what it is and what it is becoming. One day, I was talking to my friend about the Web and I found out that he didn't know what it was. I almost laughed with amazement as to how this person has never surfed the net. I know that a lot of people haven't, but its still funny hearing it. I can't imagine how they can live without even trying it out. Its so useful and entertaining.

One thing that concerns me is that the rate the Internet is expanding is unreal. We have no way of catching up to it because it is impossible. One example can be seen with all that talk about the first amendment. It is our right to post whatever we want up on the Internet. But I don't think that the pornography on the Web should be accessable to minors. Unfortunately, the Web is growing at such great speeds that the government can't catch up to it and regulate it. There will always be the conflict between free speech and government regulation. The problem is that nobody owns the Web. It's just there for everybody to use. One thing that gets irritating is with all these people trying to make money off of the Web. I think that the Web should remain commercial free. For one thing, it takes longer to download those search engine sites because there is always some sort of advertisement on it. I think that the Web should be for our use free of commercialism.

My database site is nothing compared to the entire Web. It is such a small part of it that it will hardly get noticed. But no matter how small my database is, it is still part of the Internet. It became part of it the second we created our wib file. It was pretty amazing to me how I could just type in a sentence and save it and it will be available for the whole entire world to see. It took me a while to realize that my database can be seen by billions of people. Now that I look back, I wish that I would have put in a page counter to see how many people actually washed up on my homepage. I think it would be interesting to see how much of a dent my page made. I must say that I was rather disappointed to see how little contributions I got (not counting those from my class). I even had a hard time getting my friends to contribute something to my site. In the beginning of the semesterm, when Dr. James assigned us our database, I was pleased with my topic. I think that it was one of the better ones and easiest to contribute to. I thought that I would have a lot of contributions listed, but I didn't. Part of the reason was my fault for not submitting my site earlier. But still yet, I was pretty disappointed seeing how our class failed in getting contributions. I know we all just started, but its still a bit of a downer. Hopefully the future generations will be more successful than us.

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Report 4: My Involvement with the Internet by Garrett Chun