Overall

Overall this quarter in TINST 207, my experience went well! I didn't know what to expect from this class and what I gained, I am happy with. Having Professor Fry as my teacher was great! Everyday his interest, passion, and attitude towards the topic for the class kept me interested and always paying attention. I consider myself a decently tech-savvy individual and after I took this class, I learned about different aspects of the technology world that I never would have known before. I'm very glad I took this class for this quarter! It was a great way to start the day.

Group project

My group's topic was on privacy and security. In my group we focused on an array of aspects within this topic. For example, sex offenders and their access to you online, antivirus and spam updates/installing, https, entering your financial info online, and many more. For my contribution to the project I researched CAPTCHAs and HTTPS. Both of these provide security for users online and are used daily, more often than once. HTTPS is usually used on sites where you enter private information and use ecommerce. CAPTCHAs are used to protect websites from webcrawlers, spam, and computer generated programs in infect websites/users accounts.

Online entertainment in 10 years

What will I think online entertainment will look like in ten years... There are two ways I think it could go- either crazy, new inventions and ways of accessing online entertainment or just little advancements that don't seem like much of a change. Online entertainment could evolve to holograms from laptops when using your internet browser, or since the internet and being online is growing constantly, more and more websites could start to charge for their entertainment services. While some already do, if it becomes standard for say, social networking sites to start charging, we could very well see that happen. Little changes that could happen are more and more concerts, tv shows, movies, etc could be broad casted online. Or, just making browsers, sites, etc more user friendly.

Snail Mail

Earlier this quarter we had to make a blog post in regards to snail mail versus email. I don't use the postal service as much as I use email anymore. When I was watching the news last night, there was a segment on the new budget cuts that the postal service is going to make. There is going to be $3billion in cuts and for the first time ever in 40 years there will be no chance of next day delivery with usps. I google searched this topic and came across this article.

http://www.newson6.com/story/16186024/us-postal-service-to-announce-details-of-budget-cut-monday

What makes a community?

Belonging to an online community myself, I don't think a physical aspect applies to having a community. The most prominent community I belong to is a musical fandom for a band hailing from England. It seems as though there are rules, but almost implied rules. The most structure the community I belong to is on the forum on the band's main webpage. There are moderators that make sure the message boards stay regulated. There is a "leader" in this community which also results in the community having common interests. There is a lot of reliability and knowing that other people in the community will be there for you. It's remarkable to think about just one, silly little band being able to unite people together like that. This community is very strong and I've only met one person in real life in this community- in yet I have many friends I've made. Some people may judge it from the outside- but they just really don't understand. And that's okay with me. They don't need to.

P.S. I posted about this topic on my tumblr blog and a ton of people from this community I belong to gave me their opinions. Very interesting. They reminded me that when we go to concerts when the band is on tour, that brings a physical aspect to the community. Even though we don't talk to all of them, their presence is just enough. Both the band and the community members/fans. There have also been many "meet ups" in this community (and others) where members from the same area gather in a certain area. Most of the communication I take part in in this community is on the website Tumblr.

Presentation topic

For my individual presentation, I presented the website Tumblr. It is a microblogging platform that allows you to post many different options of blog posts. For example, you can post text, pictures, audio, chat, video, quotes, or a link. Your archive of blog posts is called a "tumblelog." There are many different features on Tumblr for you to use to find new blogs to follow and have them appear on your home "dashboard." With Tumblr's head quarters settled in New York City, it is the 10th largest social network site.. I'm sure by now that number has changed. There are over 30 million Tumblr's. There are many celebrities on tumblr and was founded in 2007.

P.S. I guess you have to capitalize Google for it to be considered a word... Yay for bad grammar! That's why this is my blog... Right??

Net Worth

When calculating my net worth, it wasn't very "hard" per se, but more so difficult for me not to be lazy to actually calculate it out. Since this is an assignment (blog post, whatever), I decided I should probably search through my items, documents, etc to actually figure out my net worth. Since I still am a dependent of my parents, it was confusing as to whether I should count our house and cabin in my net worth- I opted to do both. Also, finding out the value of my bonds and how many stocks I have took some work i.e. having my mom open the safe and give me which ones were mine. It was easy to find a website that would calculate it. I just did a simple google search that said "net worth calculator," and the first hit that popped up worked well.

P.S. I'm surprised google isn't considered a word on spell check yet! Especially when I'm using a google browser?