Anth 142
Field Notes @ Villa de Guadalupe
1:00pm – 3:00pm
22 November 2005
Description:
I entered the apartment at 1:00pm. There was a mid-aged man who walked to the entrance door at the same time I approached to the entrance. He asked me, “Did you come for the computer lab?” So, I replied, “Yes.” He opened the door for me, and I signed in at the counter. When I entered the computer lab, I met Andy, an Asian man in his 30s. On the whiteboard, there was one sentence written in large characters: “Google Search” and the second line “Try the language tools.” I sat at #2, this time, there was two males, at 4th and 5th sheets. I think I saw the man sat on #5 before. After my arrival, he worked away from the lab for a while and when he came back, he smiled at me, so I smiled back. At 1:10pm when I walked in to the lab, Andy sat at #1, and playing Spyder Soliter, the game comes with Windows. The TV was on in the Room #A. Since the TV was faced to the computer lab, I could watch what kind of program was on. I think it was set to Channel 2, Fox. A woman sat on the couch seemed watching the program with someone else, because I could hear she was talking with someone.
At 1:15, the man sat on #4 started conversation with the man on #5. From what I heard from them, they were talking about something “50 bucks..” “60 bucks..” At last, the man sat on #5 said, he lost some money. MTM: Are they gambling? At 1:30pm, a woman came in and put her tote bag on #4 seat, and she left the room. Some people passed by the hallway, one of them was a Asian man with a red baseball hat. I saw a dog with some people walked around the room #A. At 2:05pm, the man at #5 walked out. People in the living were talking. Everyone seemed talking in English. While other people in the lab was working silently, I figured out that there were bunch of consumer games were installed in the #2 PC (see Fig. 1). Some of them are GTA series, and racing games such as Nascar Raching and Tonka Monster Trucks, and some table games like Pop Cap games. The trend of the games are: action games, sports, and table. MTM: Who installed those games and what they are for? MTM: Who owns the master CDs for GTA and other consumer games? Without CD, they might not work alone. At 2:27pm, two women walked by and waved to the women at #4. They asked her “How are you?” and she said “Good.” Then they walked away. At 2:30pm, a man with a red bandana came in and took the red vacuum from the room. MTM: I saw him at the first day. At 2:38pm, the woman at #4, behind me, complained that she could not hear music from the speaker. She was trying to listen to a Hawaiian music and Andy helped her. He worked with her computer and could not fix it. So, I tried to see what was going on and checked the speaker connection – the code and the power switch. It seemed fine. Then Andy said that they might not working properly and moved back to his chair at #1. I was curious what was the problem and tried to check the Windows Media Player. It was set to the smaller version with the fancy skin, so I tried to set it to the original size and clicked the play button. Somehow, it worked and the woman and the man at #5 was excited about it. The woman asked me what I did, so I showed her the steps I took and told her I was not sure why it worked since I had no clue why it did not work in customized mode. It was simply beyond of my knowledge. They really thanked me about my help, so I told them I was glad that I could do some help since it was what I was there for. Andy seemed not happy about it, so I stressed that I had no clue why I could fix the problem. Andy was playing Solitre again. When I looked around the room, I found the coffee was ready in the coffee maker. The date on the whiteboard was “11-19-05,” and it seemed no body changed it from that day. At 3:01pm, I finished my observation.
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