Week 4:Clear as FlipVideo!

The information found in the lectures and text of chapter 3 for week 4 was actually rather entertaining and informational. I did find it rather ironic that I was having major issues with the streaming of video for a lecture that discusses how to properly record, compress, and then stream video! I can't find myself making fun of the professor group for this considering the laptop that any of there children have are probably more expensive and better technology than the PC that I could buy tomorrow! Instead I will assume my ram and connectivity were the issue. I did however just download the last 2 lectures so that I could play them smoothly, and possibly at a bit faster speed. This of course is not was I wanted to discuss for my rookie bloggin page. Instead I was interested in some more camera purchasing information.

My wife loves to take pictures and video and this of course is made more intense by having a "almost" 2 year old at home. (Notice I didn't say 21 months because I find that many people prefer if you just round to the nearest age. The whole 12 month math thing really starts to screw with people.) I purchases a flip video camera for my wife for Christmas and she didn't return it so I figure that is good news. I have however overheard her discussing in four letter words how parts will or will not work as desired. So I took my knowledge from this class and did some hunting for a tutorial video for her. I found a couple of useful videos that I have added to this blog and I also emailed them to her and sent them via Facebook. Adding video to something like this would never have occured to me before I simply would have sent a link instead of imbedding it in the actual message.

Reel Tech TV Episode 1

That video gives a good basic overview of the functions of her camera but I found that this additional video showed much more that was relevant to our Week 4 learning. Some very indepth discussion as to what kinds of formats should be used and which ones work the best.

Reel Tech TV Episode 3

I think that overall I have learned enough about video and images that I will be able to easily attach them to my blogs, emails, webpages, and presentations going forward. This has the makings of some incredible Blogging like a Sophomore work in the future.

Week 3: OH What a CLEAR review

I took the advice of the IT genius's that are teaching this class and took week 3 very serious. I read the chapter, clicked on all the links, and watched all the lectures. Of course I was excited to see a new face behind the web cam this week as well. I have searched hi and low for something that I really didn't understand but considering my background, this was a great review of material for me. Knowing that all of my faithful readers on Blogging like a Rookie would be eagerly awaiting my take, I knew I had to find something to bring back to them. I found something very unique at the end of the chapter on page 108 discussing the issue of anonymous postings on the web. Seeing that all of my loyal followers hear appear to be anonymous, (you see where I am going with this? I don't have any blog friends) I decided that I would weigh in.

The Internet offers us so many freedoms of perceived privacy that we would not have access to otherwise. The ability to journal and send personal messages to each other, to pour our hearts into web pages and designing "art online" that frees the soul of the worldly troubles (see Avatar). Unfortunately that anonymity can become troublesome when it is anger directly toward others and this is called Cyberbullying. According to http://www.cyberbullying.org/,

"Cyberbullying involves the use of information and communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others." -Bill Belsey

The idea that somebody anonymous can harm any of us virtually is a rather scary situation and it is becoming very common especially on many social websites. This is an issue that clearly I could write a book on (or maybe just read one that somebody else wrote) but I think there are just a couple of steps that we can all take to protect ourselves these situations.

1. Make your social pages private and only allow those who can have a positive influence on you as a person have access.

2. If somebody makes you uncomfortable, block them, un-friend them, do whatever you have to do to stop the communication.

3. DON'T GIVE OUT YOUR PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESS!

4. If you are the victim of a bullying situation, report it to the website or host moderator or creator. Most of these individuals are required by law to handle these situations and they are also human beings.

5. Do not get involved in blogs or chat rooms or situations where anger or hatred are a normal part of the posts. Anything you post or respond to another person could set you up to deal with some crazed computer whack job who lives in his/her mothers basement and plays a lot of role playing video games.

As somebody with absolutely no training, or authority to have even made those suggestions, and based on the name of my blog probably lacking in credibility, file those not under fact but under CYBERSENSE. In case you want to know if you can use that word, sure, I mixed Cyber, and COMMON SENSE together to give you a word I am now going to trademark and sue whoever wrote this rambling blog. He will soon be Blogging BROKE.

Week 2: Muddy Muddy Mind

Coding schemes and number systems has given me a headache. Let’s just call it like it is. This stuff is confusing for me and probably for a great portion of computer users who don’t right programs or code. I have read the Appendix a minimum of 6 times. I see dancing 00011010100 and (1x2)^10132103 as I try to type this vary blog in Microsoft Word. I feel guilty knowing that some poor man is currently in a pink straight jacket in the Sun Valley Mental Health Ward trying to sort out his brain from the computer code that he had to master in order to make this possible. So to you “Mr. Computer Coder Man”, I salute you and promise to kiss my index and second finger and raise it to monitor each every time I successfully submit and spelling and grammar error free paper. Now let me see if I can take just a little part of this and try to make sense of it before I join computer coder man.
Seeing that the book explained this almost as clear as mud, I have enlisted my friends at Yahoo to help me sort this out. (Having done the research what the book has to say makes sense now so I don’t want to hurt the author’s feelings just in case you are reading this). Kirupa.com has a nice experiment where some genius decides it will be sport to see if he can teach it to us. I must admit he was successful. Here is what I gathered (http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/binary_conversion.htm). The orders of places are multiples of each other.
1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024
So if I gave you the code 010101010 you could figure this out with a calculator and scratch paper. Just match the 1’s and 0’s to the appropriate numbers above (remember to go in reverse order. If there is a 0 in its place, simply ignore it. However if there is a 1 in its place, we are going to take that associated number and start a running total. So if you were following along it would look like this:
2+8+32+128+512=682
Now I waited till the end to tell you about the best part of this particular web page. Zelwyn tells me that the Windows Calculator when in scientific mode will do the transformation for you. Simply put the calculator into Bin type in the 010101010 and then change it to Dec mode and just like magic, headache avoided. (Please see screen shot below to see calculator lay out.
Now obviously this little research is not going to have me creating the next DOOM on the computer. It will however help other parts of the coding and schemes make sense. Maybe if I am lucky someday I can write code for my next blog; “No longer blogging like a rookie!”

Week 1: CLEARLY should have known this!

How many times have you entered something into a search engine and had 9.25 million returns and 9,249,999 are not appropriate to open at work? How often was the term you searched for baby? Well in Week 1 of the Computing in the Business Environment I learned a little something from a Google Help Cheat Sheet (http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html) that will really help to narrow down my searches in the future.

For example, using the sign” ~” before a search word will also return synonyms. Another great find was the ability to type “site:” and then a search term. This could be very helpful when searching for sites for governments like cities and counties as well as colleges. Instead of returning 7.23 million responses for the search of Chicago, if you type “site: tourism info for Chicago” it will return you useful information. When I did the search just Chicago, 2nd item was a YouTube video of Chicago police shooting somebody. Not really the tourism research you were looking for. I have also researched and found that Yahoo also provides a similar assist to narrow your searches (http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-04.html). Using this information will have me save time in the future when researching everything imaginable. Now I can enter the term "blogging for beginners" into Google and hopefully it will teach me how to really Blog Like a Rookie!