So What Inspires You to Do What You Do With Computers?

[alexander]

What kinds of things inspire you to do what you do with computers?

 

I'll start with a recent inspiration of mine, read this article on wired... seriously cool stuff:

 

From the Eye of a Legal Storm, Murdoch's Satellite-TV Hacker Tells All

[Moontanman]

For me the inspiration to use computers was conversation with other intelligent beings, so far it's been kind of hit and miss...

[BrianG]

Downloading.

[alexander]

For me the inspiration to use computers was conversation with other intelligent beings, so far it's been kind of hit and miss...

 

i like the "and" part.... and i know that i fit in the later, but, would you say there's a few hits with a lot of misses in between or is it about even or is it another way around? What fits your criteria of an intelligent being, at least generally?

 

Downloading.

hmm, well, surprisingly you are not the only person i know that decided to figure out what this whole internet thing was because they could get content that they couldn't get before...

[Buffy]

Downloading.

 

Downloading what? How does it provide inspiration?

 

Do you pay for what you download? Does that provide any satisfaction?

 

What is life but a series of inspired follies? :naughty:

Buffy

[Moontanman]

No Alex, you are definitely in the hit column. When i first started out it was a lot like the guy in the commercial who found the end of the information super highway. I looked up stuff almost 24/7 for weeks, months even. Then i started to look for Groups and Forums to discuss the things I liked. Aquariums and fish were probably the first focus of my activity then on to plants and other parts of the natural world. For an information junkie like me the Internet is almost drug like.

[BrianG]

Downloading what? How does it provide inspiration?

 

Do you pay for what you download? Does that provide any satisfaction?

...

I download four hours of American radio shows a day, I pay for it. It inspires me to keep up with American culture.

[C1ay]

For me it was the allure of a programmable machine. When I got my first, a Sinclair ZX80, programmable calculators were not even commonly seen and here was this machine I could program to do math and much much more. Coding is still an enjoyable part of it all but it is something that has been diluted with all of the new features and capabilities that have come about.

[Theory5]

I would have to say computer games. As far back as I can remember, my family has always had a computer. At first it was one of the ancient (though not at the time) pc's that ran doom-like games. I remember the first computer game I had was some sort of mystery game where you ran through a maze finding different clues. I also remember being scolded for repeatedly shutting the computer down by hitting the on-off switch in the back :-P

Then came the Dell with windows 95, and after a while my mom and sister were asking me computer stuff because my dad was at work.

[SamSpeedo]

I like porn. Arousal inspires.

[nevaeh.aaric]

I too believe it is God who gives us the ability to create fresh and original design. I think, as designers, we need to get back to basics and focus on designing with our own imagination and passion. Like you said, the existing design we use for inspiration was created out of a passion and its this passion that should drive the rest of us to create our own design. Many design out of necessity to pay the bills and sometimes that’s unavoidable, but lets not get caught up in the paycheck. Let’s make a commitment as a community to put our heart and soul into what we do. I am the first to admit that I’ve poured through other design work to gain inspiration or tips k of our design. I don’t think we are at a point in history where any future work will be similar to, or based on some other original work, but I do think many people choose the easy way out(myself included). Personally, computer is one of the greatest sources of inspiration for me.

[LaurieAG]

Hi C1ay,

 

For me it was the allure of a programmable machine. When I got my first, a Sinclair ZX80, programmable calculators were not even commonly seen and here was this machine I could program to do math and much much more.

 

Wow, I had a HP25c programmable calculator in '77, I still have it and all the books but its as dead as a dodo now (battery leakage on the circuit board after I replaced the rechargeables with normal ones and forgot to remove them). It had a couple of programs including a moon landing simulator that I could never really get the hang of.

 

That was the first 'computer' I programmed (I was lucky to avoid punch cards at high school) for work purposes. I wrote a program to calculate the density of concrete cylinders for a lookup chart. I sat there for a couple of hours and wrote down all the numbers that popped up at 5 second intervals.

 

Coding is still an enjoyable part of it all but it is something that has been diluted with all of the new features and capabilities that have come about.

 

How true, remember when almost everything was written in dBase or Clipper (and all of the different dialects). The thing that coding really inspired me to do (via structured techniques) was writing poetry because you basically use the same process to generate tight and readable code.

[alexander]

Learning new things, aside from the informational aspect of the internet, i like to do new things i have not done with a computer before...

 

like using it as a pillow, or reading to it, to see if it reacts to it by derandomizing the random data, or seeing if it will sustain a 400 foot drop off a cliff, or teaching it how to swim...