Pete Hindle

I’m eating a lot of pop tarts at the minute. So let’s have a quick diversion into the history of pop tarts.

Pop tarts are a form of sugary pastry sold by Kellogg’s. The achieved a small amount of notoriety in the early 1990’s, in the UK at least, for burning the hands of a kid who’d microwaved his. The site of this child, waving his bandaged hands at the camera, was probably a sigte of great pathos for many people. I never saw it. I did, however, hang out a lot in Stevenage, with people who knew the poor pop-tart scarred kid, and therefore pop tarts are forever linked in my mind to people doing unpitying renditions of the words “I didn’t know it was going to be hot” in the most moronic Stevenage accent possible.

According to wikipedia, the US Forces dropped 2.4 million pop-tarts on Afghanistan in 2001. Currently, you can only buy two out of the total of forty-three flavours of pop tarts in the UK, those being Chocolate and Strawberry. There is no information on wikipedia as to what flavours native Afghan’s received in 2001.

My presentation was done with the entire aim of reproducing my thinking structure. I did consider adding a distracting audio element to it as well, in order to allow people to experience the jarring cuts in concentration I seem to suffer, but I thought that it would be taking it a little far, and anyway, I needed to be talking about my program, rather than anything else. Sadly, as noted in part one, I didn’t have a great deal of success to talk about.

In terms of the presentation and it’s marking, I have to feel some regret that I couldn’t have produced a working version of the program at that point. Nor that I could show a clarity of aesthetic; however, I think my aesthetic sympathies during the course of the taught module have run more towards the conceptual idea as represented by text rather than the visual. What use is the visual in the age of repetitive machine-produce images? And how can the aesthetic idea compete against the barrage of the new?

I think that the best of communication in this period is to resort to clear thinking and simple communication. To that end, showing text to others is the clearest way, so that your thought processes can be evaluated in a simple way at the leisure of others. Whilst I have some issues with essays as a form of academic measurement, I do not have a problem with a longer or shorter form of idea and expression; where original thought can be laid out for the use of others.

It is this projects aim of laying out original thought in a special way that I have been aiming for. My lack of ability to achieve that with programming is not the issue for me, except in terms of earning marks (and without those marks I’ll not pass the course, something which does give me ‘the fear’). What I have achieved is an ability to deal with and understand lumps of text that I have generated. You can read the presentation as I planned it in the attached file, and I’ll discuss the knock-on affects of this text assimilation in part three, the grandiose titled “Life, NCL.AC.UK and Everything”.

PDF Download of Presentation:

basic_tech_pres
ADDENDUM: The reason that this article/blogpost talks about poptarts – as I forgot to mention why I spiralled off into such a diversion – is stress. During times of biological and physiological stress our bodies seek out sugary and fatty foods, which are not necessarily the best thing for us to eat at such times. However, having just moved, I treated myself to a packet of Pop Tarts whilst restocking my kitchen, and found myself hooked on their sugar content. In between starting woefully at code that I was growing to loath, I occupied the vacant space in my belly with glucose and inverted syrup, and felt almost like a true hacker (although the last true hacker I met was just coming off a vegetarian rice-only diet, which is far away from the stereotypical programmers food consumption as depicted in media).