White Christmas came a little too early for me.
So my flight was supposed to leave around 10:30am this morning. Over nine hours later, I find myself still "stranded" in St. Louis. Apparently there was a huge and/or incessant snow storm in Minneapolis that prevented us from leaving St. Louis. Originally we were delayed until noon but then that delay lasted until 2:45pm, at which time they boarded us because they needed the gate for another flight. Then after hourly updates on our likelihood to take off, they canceled the flight around 4pm and we got back into Lambert Airport around 4:30pm - of course we had to wait again to rebook our flights. Assuming what happened today doesn't repeat tomorrow, I should be back home sometime tomorrow night.
The lyrics "Oh the weather outside is frightful" and "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas" have a slightly twisted/not-so-cheerful ring to them right now. The biggest disappointment is not being able to go to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra concert I had planned on going with my family today as well as the NFC North-clinching Vikings' game tomorrow that I had planned on going with a college friend. I guess the upside is that I got free lunch (when I did not expect to) and I got my first canceled flight experience out of the way (kind of like getting over that fear of falling during ice skating).
While stranded in the airport, I read an article (http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/publications/33-3/editorial) that I got from a friend at church and I thought this quote was pretty interesting:
"Because the Internet is spectacularly accessible, almost anyone can voice an opinion or make a claim. In this sense, it is the most "democratic" of the media. Occasionally this means that voices otherwise silenced, voices that should be heard, are indeed heard. Much more commonly, voices multiply that are ill-informed, opinionated, often pretentious and arrogant. A higher percentage of these voices were weeded out when the distribution was via print, radio, or television; by democratizing the delivery system, every voice can be published, and it becomes culturally unacceptable even to suggest that some voices are not worth publishing. This does nothing to enhance either discernment or self-discipline. As Michael Kinsley likes to ask, "How many blogs does the world need?"
I enjoyed the rest of the article as well. Good stuff!
Saturday, December 20, 2008
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Its kind of funny because I think in the long run, the editor will eventually come back into play. There's so much crap out there, that people are overwhelmed. So eventually, we all begin to select a few key sites we trust, and those sites tend to adopt the role of an editor or filter for us. Its still early, which is why we have this anarchy, but I think as the Internet matures, we're going to start evolving in this direction.
Choice anxiety: the more choices you have, the more anxiety it creates. So we go find people who narrow it down to a digestible number, whether it be Drudge, Slashdot, or some other source.
I guess what is new is that you have a much greater choice of editors. We're becoming more specialized and fragmented. So while in the past physical geography did that for us, we now have intellectual geography as we all float toward our own choices.
Okay, I'll stop with the random info dump. Good luck getting home!
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