Imagination, Visualization, Planning and Action. Do you have what it takes to remove your blinders?
I remember when I was in grade school, seeing punch cards, you remember, the tan looking cards with green lines on them? Yes those. I didn’t really know what they were for at that time, just that we were all handed one of them, and we had to put our name on them and then pass them back to the front of the class. Since then, I think that process now is taken care of by being “Registered” for classes and we no longer have to fill in such information on a punch card.
I still can’t believe that I was born in an era to which there were no cell phones, no fax machines, no printers, no scanners, no tablet pc, no laptops, no workstations or desktop computers. Heck, there was not even an internet. Well, not for public use.
It was not until I was in my first year in the Army when I saw my first real computer. It was a military system in which they called S.I.D.P.E.R.S. That stood for (Standard Installation and Division Personnel Reporting System). That system was green, huge and very heavy. It was all command line based. The screen itself was black and green. Whenever there was a movement, and the Tactical Operations Center (Toc for short) had to move, that was one of the few things no one really wanted to help out with. Now, if you go into a battalion, or an in processing station, they will either have a laptop, or a workstation, and when going out to the field, it’s just that simple, taking the workstation or laptop.
I’ve been very impressed and also perplexed at the complexity of how mankind has been able to achieve these advances in technology. Such is the example of a packet that travels from one system through the ISO layer, then out through a physical connection, traveling many different paths, and routers choosing the most efficient path. Having the ability to detect a path that is down, or slow and choosing a much faster path reaching its destination, and traveling through yet another physical connection going up through the ISO layer and then yet again, the receiving unit sending a signal back to the sending unit that all packets were received is truly amazing. It then shows its information to the end user in a GUI format that is readable to the human eye and not in the format of a binary language.
So every day, I look around, and notice things that make me think; how is that device communicating? Where are the packets traveling to? How much information is actually in the air that we cannot see, hear, feel or touch? How is this all affecting the human body in the long term? Will we one day look back, as we had looked back on the early times of when people traveled to new and distant lands drinking from cups made of lead, and truly not knowing that with every sip, they were slowly poisoning themselves?
Are we now also slowly sipping on “Technology” and poisoning ourselves as well? If so, will that day come, when we look back, and will say, “How in the world did they not know that they were doing this or that to themselves!” and then in the future having a totally different technology to use instead of RF signals, or satellite signals or any other means to distribute such information that we are using today. Will it be something as easy as changing a lead cup to a cup made out of pottery and finishing it in a kiln? Who knows, but for right now, there may not be an answer, because we have not yet even begun to even see beyond the means to which we truly depend on. It’s that dependence of technology in life, that has put on our blinders so that we cannot see any other possible solutions to such problems, and it’s those problems that we’ll continue to struggle with and continue to blame other resources for such issues.
Someday, someone will step aside, take the blinders off, and will see a path that has not been traveled and will be brave enough to take the first few steps to allow those new connections and neural pathways to connect deep within our own minds that have been waiting to connect for so many millennia. It will be only at that time that our ways in life will be forever changed, and our eyes will see a different way, a new path in life. Hopefully though, that information will fall into the right hands and will be given freely to all, so that everyone on this planet will benefit from such a life changing discovery……
-Roger Archuleta, PEI
