Fabian Hemmert: The shape-shifting future of the mobile phone

This was a video on ted.com that I thought was incredibly interesting. His whole idea was to create a phone that was more "human" and to have technology be more physical instead of remaining in the virtual world. This new idea for a phone would consist of three different parts. The first part being weight-shifting. The phone would be able to change where it weighed the most, changing its mass in different places, so if you move around the content on the screen you can also feel where it is in your hand. The second idea is having the phone be able to shift its shape. It can be thin in your pocket, but when you place it in your hand it can lean toward you, thickening a little. It can also alter its shape so it can be placed on a flat surface, sideways to be used maybe as an alarm clock. The third and final idea is the living mobile phone. It has a pulse. You can feel it in your pocket and you can tell its calm. BUT say you miss a call, well it can get all excited and its "pulse" increases. Don't worry though, you can calm it down by just giving it a little pat.

Helpdesk

I worked in the helpdesk for a little while at the beginning of this year. While there I learned that we have a copier machine. Seriously, I had no idea that was there. But more importantly, I learned how to re-image a computer. Now listen here very closely. The most important thing to remember is to PAY ATTENTION TO THE COMPUTER WHEN IT IS STARTING UP. When the flashdrive has been successfully put into the computer, you may turn the computer on. Do not walk away after you have done this. Do not start talking to others. Stay right there and stare at the computer with your hand hovering over the enter button. When you see the magical letters Toshiba come up, press enter. Then you go to boot menu and then USB and continue with the other many steps of re-imaging. Also during the final processes of re-imaging make sure that there is never red inside the black box. We only want yellow. I also learned how to install different softwares into laptop computers. Overall, I rather enjoyed my time in the helpdesk and felt as though I have accomplished some learning there.

Google TV

Google has now come up with the most spectacular technology so you can access an amazing variety of things from your TV. First of all with Google TV you can search the web from your TV, along with the web you can search your TV and any apps on your TV. Wait apps? On your TV? Yes that's right you can have apps on your TV! You can access the internet from your TV, so that means you can update Facebook, watch a video on youtube, or listen to Pandora. If your phone is an iPhone or Android, you are REALLY lucky because you can use your own phone as the remote control, and say you find the neatest video EVER on the internet and just have to show everyone in the room, YOU CAN FLING IT TO YOUR TELEVISION. Thats means you can watch this video from your phone on your TV with the press of a button. Also your TV can become a slideshow of fantastic pictures. There is no end to what Google TV can do!!..............Well technically there is, but we prefer not to think about that.

Possibly the Most Horrible Story I Have Ever Heard

Lori Drew is a terribly overly protective mother it seems to me. Her daughter was friends with this girl, Megan Meier. Megan moved and told Lori's daughter she no longer wanted to be friends. Well this mother went a little crazy and thought Megan was talking negatively about her daughter, so Lori decided to create a false MySpace account of a sixteen year old boy named Josh. Now "Josh" got to know Megan and complimented her, becoming a very close friend. If you can call a satanic fake boy-mother-lady a friend. Well then "Josh" started insulting Megan telling her "the world would be a better place without her." Megan ended up hanging herself in her closet because of this cyber-bullying. Lori I hope has gone to jail for a very, very long time. The internet can be used for evil and it is up to you to resist the urge to harass someone because they can't find out who you are. The repercussions of these thoughtless, cruel actions can be terrible as you can see.

Justin Long and his Texting Adventure

This is a funny post about teens and there strange way of typing when texting. Justin Long is a not incredibly famous actor, but my favorite thing he has ever been in is Dodgeball. Here is a picture.

Well he is has an iPhone and iPhones receive texts mesages and he was so lucky as to receive a text from a girl with a wrong phone number. She mistook Justin for her friend Eduardo and being the wonderful person he is, Justin did nothing to correct her in her wrong assumption and went along with it. He noticed her bizarre way of spelling words in her texts, such as dat for that. Is it really that hard to type two letters instead of one? So Justin decided to continue with this terrible spelling. Here is an example: "Okay foin. i read it WUNSC so sue me!...it was actually kyweet elnightening wat. do u reeeeeed?" Here is the translation into real English: "Okay fine. I read it once, so sue me!....It was actually quite enlightening. What? Do you read?"
While Justin was purposefully making these terrible spelling and grammatical errors the girl also continually used an obnoxious amount of misspellings and shorthand as well. She never did realize who she was really talking to, even when he tried to tell her he wasn't actually Eduardo.
Well from this I have learned some kids today feel the need to text in a very strange and unorthodox way to "minimize" the amount of energy expended typing. Dat is y sum peeps just dont eva tipe anythin out correctly.

How Xbox Live Works

So how does Xbox live work? Well first of all what IS Xbox live? Xbox live is this handy-dandy little thing that allows you to communicate with people all over the world (who also have Xbox as well). So you can leave a voice message for your friend in Whales and then turn around and play Halo with a dude living in Arizona. Nifty right? I thought so. Now there are two ways to be on Xbox live: Live Aware, where you can talk to other people and receive messages and Live Enabled, which is the good one where you can talk to other people AND play in tournaments and games with/against them. You can also use Xbox live to buy and download games. For Xbox live you have a "gamertag" which is technically your name during the game. Now don't get too excited because it's not free. You have to pay for it per year and also need an Ethernet cable to connect your Xbox to a modem because you must have the internet for it to function. Some modems have been deemed "Xbox Live Compatible" so you know those will be able to connect, but if you want to use the internet on say a computer while having your brother play on Xbox live, well your going to need to get some new fancy mechanisms. You'll need a router. This will allow you to hook up more than one Ethernet cable to the internet. Then you'll need another Ethernet cable for however many connections you need to make. Once you get all of that settled well you can go play Call of Duty with your friends in Britain. Have fun!

Pixar: How They Do It

Okay, so Pixar as we all know is a company that creates animated movies, short films, and such, and there is a nice long process as to how to create these lovely animations. The first step is to merely pitch a story idea, and then a text treatment is created which is a summarized idea of the story. Thirdly they draw storyboards to see emotion in the characters as they go through the idea. Then they record a "scratch voice" which is just a rough draft of the way the characters will actually talk. They then make an reel (video of the storyboard). For the sixth step the art department comes up with visual look of the movie, characters, and setting. Using the pictures created by the art department, they then create 3-D illustrations directly on the computer. Once the set is created in 3-D on the computer they then add little details too it, such as books on shelves or curtains, to make it more believable. In the ninth step the shots are laid out and the pixar workers use a virtual camera to capture the scenes made on the computer. They then take all these shots and animate them, stringing them all together. The sets and characters are then shaded to give them detail and color as well as texture and depth, and then lighting is added. Once all of this is done, the data is then "rendered", a process in here that means everything just made is translated into one big long frame of film, and then after that final touches are added and voila you have an animated movie. Also some of these processes need special software to be created.

Patch Cables

So we have learned how to make patch cable in this lovely computer architecture class. I have successfully made a B cable (BB) and a crossover cable (BA). (They have to go into a certain color order) Whenever we checked to make sure the cable's wire was connected correctly we used this special orange machine that lit up to tell us if it was right or wrong.

For the B it lit up in the order of 1, 2, 3, etc and was fairly easy to check if it was right, but unfortunately for the crossover the A side had to light up in this order: 3, 6, 1, 4, 5, 2, 7, 8 because the wires were rearranged differently than on the B side.
One VERY important thing to remember when making a patch cable is to have the little lever thing on the jack facing the ground when putting the wires in otherwise it shall be backwards, which I know from experience.

Grade

I think that I deserve an A in this course for the first quarter, because I pay attention and have learned various things in this class. I have worked in the helpdesk for a week and half-ish. There I learned how to reimage and install different devices into old laptop computers. I understand how and can make a patch cable now and let me say that was pretty exciting to see the numbers light up when we checked if the wires were correct. I can also work with other programs such as sketchup and prezi.