My CS 404 Thoughts

The movie we watched in class today really hit home to me. It's funny to watch how ridiculous people sound when they say that 3 seconds between songs on a CD is too much blank time, or that most people hung up if the person they were calling didn't answer within three rings. It's a little less funny, however, to see some of that impatience in myself. For example, slow internet connections drive me crazy. Until very recently, my wife's parents had an AOL dial-up connection for internet at their house. It was so slow that I couldn't even stand to use it to check my email. When we stayed at their house for any period of time I just resigned myself to not use the internet for that time because I couldn't stand how slow it was. Watching the little segment on how our brains measure time the time taken to complete certain tasks helped me to make a little more sense out of why that slow internet connection bothered me so much, but it also provided pseudo-scientific evidence that whether or not we are actually wired for speed we are creatures of habit. Is this dependence on speed good for us? Does it make us more effective or productive? I don't know, but I do know that for thousands of years humans didn't count the seconds like we do today, and even ten years ago waiting a few seconds for a web page to load was no big deal. Knowing that this is a real issue and is grounded in how our brains work, I have now resolved to remember that next time I catch my foot tapping while I wait for a web page to load.