Final Project

            As a final project we were tasked with creating a digital portfolio.  Before creating the actual site, the biggest challenged I faced was finding a website that was easy to use, would allow me to create a suitable page in a timely fashion, and allow me to post it online for free.  First, I tried using Wordpress.  After playing around with it for awhile I came to the conclusion that I disliked the interface it used so I moved onto Circlepad.  At first it seemed as if it would be my choice but after a short while, it began freezing on me and after having to restart my project several times because I never got the chance to save it, I decided to move onto a less buggy site.  I returned to Google to search for a portfolio making site when my eye was caught by a link to Google's own Google Sites feature.  Deciding to give it a try, I quickly realized that I couldn't ask for a better utility for creating my portfolio site.

            Now that I had my medium decided on, it was time to decide on what kind of content and layout I wanted to utilize in my portfolio.  Through Google sites I was able to view several different templates that I could use on my site and, after some time, I decided on one.  Once I had selected a template I began browsing through the available themes.  I wanted to find something interesting but not so intricate as to be distracting and I found it in a notepad styled theme.  As far as content went, I decided to include pages for past and future projects.  The headings I decided to use for each page were Audio Production, Media Communications, Video Production, Web Design, and Web Technology.  Under the Audio Production heading there are no projects currently, but as I take courses dealing with things such as Protools, I will add them to the page.  Under Media Communications I plan on putting essays and powerpoints I have made in Ann Catalano's Media Communications class.  Under Video Production I will place videos made using movie making programs such as Windows Movie Makers, iMovie, and Final Cut Pro.  As of now however, I have no movies to post so for the time being that page will remain blank.  Under the Web Design page I have included links to website I made in my Intro Web Design, Advanced Web Design, and Javascript classes.  Finally, on the Web Technology page, I included two videos; one being a project completed in Second Life and the other being an example of animation using GoAnimate.com.  I also included a link to my blog at the bottom of the page.

            Outside of the pages relating specifically to classwork I included a sidebar addressing my PLN which includes links to my personal Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and LinkedIn accounts.  These sites will allow me to stay in contact with professionals in my field to build relationships and make connections.  I also included a link to my resume which lists my past job experience as well as my education.

            The last thing I did was organize all of my information into an easy to digest configuration and added a picture of myself to the main page.  All that remains to be done at this point is to finalize the site and hand it in.  I know that I will be able to use the skills I learned from making this portfolio and in this class in the future to better myself and my career.

IP Addresses

Every node in a network must have its own individual and unique address so that data transmitted over a private or public network reaches its correct destination.  As well as having a physical address in a network, each node also has a logical address, or an IP Address.  The IP is made of of 4 groups of numbers ranging from 0 to 255, each separated by a period.  These 4 groups are called octets. 

Originally IP addresses were divided into classes to increase the number of addresses available.  Using this system addresses were classified by network.  Networks ranged from Class A through Class E.  The classes define which octet in the address define the network.  Typical A classes include large educational networks, businesses, and government entities.  B Classes also includes large educational networks as well as business and government entities.  C Classes are made of small-to-medium size business and ISPs.

As the demand for more IP addresses increased, the development of a classes routing system occurred.  This allowed network administrators to expand the number of network nodes assigned to a certain address.  In order to view your networked computer's IP address you can use the command prompt window and the "ipconfig/all" command.  This will display your machines current IP address.

Current IP addresses are called IPv4, containing 32bits of information defining the address.  A new version called IPv6 is expected to replace IPv4's 32bits with 128bits, allowing more addresses.

Networking Basics

In order to expand the usefulness of internet technologies, it is imperative that one understands the importance of networking.  Networking is the connection of two or more computers using devices such as cables or wireless media.  Networks allow users to share data and devices through it.

Local area networks or an LAN, is a computer network supporting users in a small geographical area such as a home, office, or single or several buildings, such as a college campus.  Each computer or device used on an LAN is called a node.  LANs are configured in one of two basic configurations, peer-to-peer or client/server.  A peer-to-peer LAN is made of a small number of computers linked together, oftentimes to use a peripheral device such as a printer.  Peer-to-peer networks proliferate small businesses and home offices across the nation.

  Larger organizations will quick outgrow peer-to-peer LANs and may need to implement a client/server set up.  Client/server networks consists of multiple computers or workstations, one or more servers, and other tools such as printers.  The server allows users to share data, file space, peripheral devices, and internet connection.  

Outside of LANs, metropolitan area networks (MANs) connect clients and servers in a region larger than a single office or building.  A wide area network (WAN) is a network covering a very large geographical area such as several locations located in England, Canada, and Japan.  WANs are oftentimes made up of several LANs connected through the network.

Digital Portfolio

-I plan on going into web design and my portfolio will reflect that.  I plan on using websites such as Diigo and programs such as Jing to include highlights and markups of my past work so that potential employers can easily view my portfolio. 

-I plan on using flavors.me as my main source of templates and designs for designing my portfolio. 

-I plan on using techniques I read about in the textbook such as advanced searching and viewing other people's portfolios through social networks to get a better idea of how it should look. 

-Furthermore, I could use these social networks to get in contact with others in the field if I have any questions about assembling my portfolio  .

Special Interest Websites, Personal Finance Resources, and You

   The internet is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools we have at our disposal. Taking full advantage of all the websites and resources available through them can help people to attain knowledge and live better lives. From life advice to video games to financial tools the internet has tools for anything and anyone under the sun.
   Special Interest Websites are websites devoted to specific hobby or activity such as cooking, museums, or genealogy. Other Special Interest Websites include how-to sites and movie fansites.
   One popular area of Special Interest site are healthcare and diet sites. The rise in obesity in the United States can likely be acknowledged as the cause of this increase in interest in healthcare and dieting information. Furthermore, these sites can be used for information regarding specific illnesses and conditions. Examples of health websites include Discovery Health, Mayo Clinic, and WebMD.

   Across the web there are also thousands of websites devoted to hobbies, entertainment, and various other services such as cooking advice, movie reviews, and finding jobs. Examples include vegetarian.com, Yahoo Entertainment, IMBD, and Monster.com respectively.

   Another highly useful web feature are the wealth of personal finance tools available.  Such tools make the frustrating task of trying to balance monetary funds a little more easy and a little less frustrating.
   The most common form of online financing is online banking.  In the past, banks were largely brick-and-mortar businesses; customers had to be on location in order to perform transactions or ask bank related questions.  With the advent of the internet however, it is entirely possible for an individual to do their banking entirely online.  From balancing ones checking account to managing funds for financing a new car to paying bills automatically each month, it can all be done online with the click of the mouse.  
   Other popular finance sites include credit score websites, insurance websites which very often allow users to obtain free quotes, and financial calculators.  Shopping for insurance usually involves calling several companies and asking for quotes.  With websites such as Insweb, Insure.com, and Insurance.com, one can compare several rate quotes all at once from competing companies by simply filling out their information just once.

Creating My PLN

In order to effectively build a useful Personal Learning Network, I plan on joining

additional social networks and utilizing the ones I currently use (Facebook, Twitter, and Cinch) more effectively. Within these social networks I plan on expanding my contact lists and attempting to make useful connections in the field I plan to get into. Furthermore, I will hopefully be able to look to these new connections for assistance should I come across any issues in my career. Lastly I will try to maintain contact with my classmates because they will no doubt become very productive in their chosen fields and having them as contacts will prove very useful.




My iGoogle

Portals!

A portal is a web site that serves as a gateway to web content and services. Portals are often classified by their targeted audiences. Examples of such portals include general consumer portals, personal portals, vertical portals, industry portals, and corporate portals. General consumer portals offer broad areas of content such as search tools, news and weather, stocks and reference tools amongst others. Examples of popular consumer portals are Yahoo, Lycos and MSN.

Personal portals, also known as horizontal portals, are consumer portals whose content can be customized to suit your needs. Examples of such portals are My Yahoo, My Lycos, and My MSN.

Vertical portals, sometimes called Vortals, provide gateways for users with more specific interests such as video games or gardening. Examples of Vortals include National Cancer Institute and the Penn State Youth Portal. Vertical portal that target viewers interested in a specific industry are called industry portals. Examples include Web Host Industry Review, EARTHWEB, and Farms.com.

Finally, corporate portals or enterprise information portals (EIPs) can be used to access a company's business information, work with each other through email, or conduct business transactions.

Cinch Test

Social Networking

One of the most useful ways people use the internet to keep in touch is social networking. Traditional social networking requires physical space for a group to meet, such as a library, restaurant, coffee shop, etc. The beauty of social networking is that anyone can get in touch with anyone, anywhere, at anytime as long as both parties are willing to be in contact. Today millions of individuals stay in contact with family and friends through sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. Social networks generally offer a combination of communication tools and chat applications so users can actively socialize. When a user first joins the site, they create a profile in which they list some information about themselves. Other users can, through using the information about themselves and other users, find people with similar interests with which they can hold conversations with. Users can also invite their friends and family to join the sites.

Filtering Junk Email

One of the most annoying things that can happen to email users is spam. Spam is defined as unsolicited emails regarding any number of things ranging from simple annoyances and advertisements to harmful malware. One of the easiest ways to combat spam is to set up filters that will look through incoming mail and dispose of messages that do not meet guidelines set by the user. To set your filter options, you can select the Tools command on the menu bar and click the Junk E-mail Options command. From here you can select various parameters which will control exactly what kind of messages will be seen by you. By default, blocked messages are sent to a Junk folder, but the location they are sent to can be changed by the user.

FINAL VIDEO

Second Life Phase 3: Recording!!!

At first I thought the recording process would be easy.  However, after many failed attempts to record our video, I began to grow discouraged and began to realize that recording things are not nearly as easy to make as some people would lead you to believe.  After about an hour and a half we finally successfully recorded a decent take.

Our second major problem in the recording process was the overdubbing of sounds, mainly our voices.  The way one of our group members wanted it done was all in one take.  This proved to be particularly troublesome in that many times, halfway through our recording, we would all break out into a fit of giggles.  This compromised our entire take, leading to vast amounts of frustration and in some cases anger.  However, in the end we finally managed to do our entire sound recording with no errors.

Second Life Phase Three

In our search to find a way to record our video, our group first opted to try to use the screen capture program Jing, to capture our video.  While Jing works exceptionally well at screencaping, it doesn't do very well at taking videos, framerate suffers the longer you record for and when I used it to record a test video of about 15 seconds, the framerate was unbareably low.  Second I tried using a program called camstudio.  This program proved much more useful than Jing for capturing videos.  While the framerate was still a little jerky, it was nowhere near the poor quality of Jing.  Our script was also finalized at this time, as well as our deciding of each group members role in the production.

Mike - Cameraman/Scriptwriter
Debbie - Character/Scriptwriter
Brendon - Editing/Character/Scriptwriter
John - Character
Vanessa - Character

Second Life Phase Two (II)

One of the first things I did when trying to come up with a story was looking up already made ones on youtube.  At first I was a little overwhelmed at the complexity of some of the videos I was watching and began to wonder if we could possibly make something as such in such a short period of time.  Moving on from this, the group began our task of coming up with a story. 

Continuing from our previous idea of walking through the house, we decided to have ourselves lead through the house by one of our avatars, and be killed off in typical horror movie fashion as we progressed.  In the end, noone would be left alive and our undead avatars would dance the monster mash.  Now that a story has been formulated, the most difficult part, filming and editing it needs to be done.

Second Life Phase Two

During class time, my group decided that we should start working on our project rather than just playing around as we had in the last class.  However, after a short time, we all ended up doing our own thing, exploring the virtual world.  During my own exploration, I came across several Halloween themed areas, my favorite being a theme park with rideable rides. 

After searching for a while, our group came up with a few areas which we decided we would use in our project.  The main area of interest was a haunted house that contained scenes from several horror movies including The Ring, The Shining, and Jaws.  At first we discussed simply walking through the house, but as our group leader pointed out, we needed a story.

Second Life Phase One (II)

After getting used to how to control my avatar and configuring him to look how I wanted, I decided it would be a good idea to learn how to move quickly from place to place.  After messing around with the controls for a while, I learned that you can teleport to various areas in the world by using the world menu and clicking where you want to teleport.  This makes it exceptionally easy to explore the world in a timely manner. 

As I explored the world, I came across a number of areas that were restricted due to my "maturity rating".  I can only imagine what kind of...activities occur within such areas but I'm not about to spend real money to find out if I'm right or not.  Furthermore, you can spend real money to obtain money in the virtual world, something I can't imagine ever doing.  I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone would spend real money on a game like this, but I suppose if it's an option, and the game remains (for the most part) free to play, someone must be paying. 

Second Life Phase One

In class everyone created avatars in the virtual world Second Life.  In the virtual world you can interact with numerous areas, encompassing anything from haunted houses to nightclubs, to seaside getaways.  Inhabiting these areas are users from all over the world.

The first thing I did when entering the virtual world was learn how to control my avatar.  This was fairly easy thanks to the easy to follow and readily available guides found throughout the area in the virtual world where you start out.  I also found out how to change my characters basic appearance like the size and shape of their various body parts.  I had fun with this and made my character as ugly as possible.

Managing Your Messages

As you receive more and more emails, the need to have some form of organization will become apparent.  Thankfully, most email clients have a number of tools you can use to help keep track of things in an orderly fashion.  In this blog we'll be using Windows mail as our example client. 

Now that you have decided to take on the task of organizing your messages, you must first create groups to sort them into, called folders.  Once they are created you can name them, usually something general yet meaningful, so that you can easily find a particular message in them.  To begin, right click on the Inbox folder and select the New Folder command.  You can now enter a name for the folder and select it's location, in this example we are placing the new folder inside the inbox folder. 

In order to move a message from the inbox into the subfolder we just created, click the message you desire to move, and drag it to the folder you wish for it to reside in.  When you open the folder, the message will now be displayed inside it.  Clicking back to your inbox will verify that the message is no longer displayed there. 

One of the useful features of Windows Mail is that you can instruct it to organize messages automatically base on a message rule.  For example, you can have messages from one or more particular contacts be delegated directly into a specific folder.  To set up message rules, click the Tools command, highlight Message Rules, and click New Message Rule.  In this dialog box, you can select the conditions and set the actions to be taken when messages fall under a certain rule. 

When organizing your messages, you will no doubt come across messages you no longer need.  In order to delete such a message or messages, simply select them and press the delete button.  You could also highlight them and press delete.  Once deleted, messages will be moved to the Deleted Items folder.  Items in the Deleted Items folder can be moved from the folder into others.  Once they are deleted from the Deleted Items folder however, they are gone for good.

Another useful feature of Windows Mail is its ability to flag and watch messages.  Flagging messages that require attention in the future is extremely useful in that it keeps you from forgetting to respond or perform actions dictated in a message.  Oftentimes, many messages will be sent in conversation, to watch mark these as such, select the message, click Message on the toolbar, and click Watch Conversation.

A final useful feature of Windows Mail is the ability to sort messages by priority.  Mail allows you to assign a Low, Normal, or High priority level to your messages.  By default, all messages are Normal priority.  When using High priority, a red exclamation mark will appear next to messages marked as needing immediate attention.

Communicating Online Through Email

  Email is one of the most common means of transmitting information between people in today's world.  The main benefits of email are its speed of delivery, its low cost, accessibility, convenience, and ease of use.  When sending an email, the first thing one must know is the email address of the recipient.  Each address is unique to its user and so extra care must be taken when entering the address of a recipient.  An email address is composed of two components, a user ID and a host name.  The user ID is a unique identifier of the recipient; the MBOLDT in mboldt@gmail.com for example.  The host name is the name of the server where the email accoutnt is located; the GMAIL.COM in mboldt@gmail.com. 
  An email client is a program that is used specifically for the purpose of creating, sending, and receiving emails.  Examples of email clients include Microsoft Outlook, Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, Opera Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird.  On top of creating, sending, and receiving messages, most email clients include ways to organize received and sent messages in files. 
  In order to initate the creating of an email, first you must open your client.  Once the program has been opened you must select "create new message", "compose mail", or something to that effect, the exact wording varies depending on the client.

In order to send an email, one must understand the functions of the tools available.

When one has finished filling in the necessary fields, clicking the "send" button will whisk the message away to its destination.  Clicking "save" will save it in a folder for future sending or editing.  "Discard" will delete the message. 
  One of the interesting features of most email clients is their ability to allow the user to include a signature at the end of their emails.  In order to add a signature in gmail, from your inbox you click the "settings" link.  From their scroll down until you see a text box marked "signature".  Type the desired signature text in the box and hit save.  Now any message you send will feature your signature at the end.

My Major and Future Plans

My Major

My major is the web development track of Digital Media.  Thus far I have taken courses in Javascript, (x)html, and CSS.  I will hopefully be taking classes in my final semester on C++ and Flash as well.  I hope to make a living designing websites for people. 


How Can Technology Help or Enhance It?


Using the material learned so far in this class I plan on making better use of my time when searching for information and using screen captures and markups to greater effect in order to give clients more control over specific fields and areas of their sites.  Furthermore, I hope to learn more about RSS feeds and how to integrate them into websites in order to make sure my clients stay up to date on what is going on with their sites.