My FINAL POST!!

I will honestly say that English 108 (take 2) was the most enjoyable class I've taken at Purdue. I have this cocky notion that I probably will never use any of the education I've received in college after I graduate, but this class might just have some use.

Technology is an ever evolving thing, and I have to say this class did a great job in making itself relevant to today's society. Especially with my last essay, I wasn't only writing a paper, but I was somewhat planning my future at the same time.

It's rare that I actually want to show up for class, but somehow, someway I managed to show up (most of the time) quite cheerfully and ready to engage in the day's activities.

Not to suck up or anything, but:

Thanks Laura for making this class worthwhile.

FIN

I'm OUT!!

Our final paper.

Well, this is going to be a busy summer for me. Hopefully I'm getting an internship in the 2008 Olympics in China. I also might continue to write for the Exponent and so on.

What does all this have to do with anything? Jobs.

Soon enough, I'll have to throw myself into this harsh world and make a living for myself, and honestly I am completely grateful of the websites I listed in my essay. At the very least it gives me a place to start.

I predict that I'll probably use the sites to find my first job. And I wouldn't be surprised if I wasn't the only one in the class that will use job-hunting websites in their employment endeavors.

I GOT AN IPHONE!!!

Well, in my previous post I confessed my inner nerd. And with this iPhone I can now pronounce it to the world. Honestly, it's probably one of the coolest gadgets I'll ever have. Being able to check my email every 11 seconds is definitely not a life or death matter, but it sure beats playing sudoku every class. But anyways, a couple of things I really enjoy about this wonderful little piece of technology I nicknamed "mobile internet".

Youtube: I can watch videos anywhere I go!

Weather: Pretty handy to know how cold it is, i guess.

And

Google Maps: It is immensely satisfying to be sitting in ENAD, and to find some satellite image of where you are. Fascinating.

Yes you can do all these things on a laptop with a wireless connection, but the fact that this small little device is able to provide so much information at your fingertips is amazing. I predict implants very soon.

So I'm a geek, nerd whatever you want to call it. I subscribe to PC Mag, and I jump in joy when the sleek laminated cover appears before my eyes when I open my mailbox.

A recent issue had an article that immediately caught my attention.

"Hacking Hannah Montana"

What was this about?

So you know when you sign up for something on a website, whether it be some new user account or something of the sort, and they present this mumbled jumbled letters and numbers where you have to retype into some open field box to prove you're human?

Guess what, some company has cracked this, and that product is being used everywhere by ticket sellers. So pretty much, Hannah Montana tickets were sold out within 3 minutes of their posting online because of this technology. Crime pays well huh? Well apparently there's going to be a lawsuit and now security experts have to devise a new way to prove someone is human. I fear that they'll find nothing.

Hmm, I'm going to enjoy making fun of this one.

"Salam Dear Friend,

I am pleased to introduce a business opportunity to transfer to your overseas account the sum of($10.3 USD)Ten million Three hundred thousand United States Dollars from Bank Of Africa Dakar Senagal.

I am Mr Abdullah Ali, the Auditor General of Bank Of Africa here in Dakar Senegal during the course of our auditing , I discovered a floating funds in an account opened in our bank since 1992 and till date no body has operated on the account and after going through old files in the records , I
discovered that the owner of the account died long ago in a plane crash along with his family without leaving a[Heir/WILL], hence the floating of the funds and if I do not remit this money out urgently it will be forfeited for nothing.

The owner of the account was a foreigner , Mr Hazim Ibrahim From Elexandria Egypt,He deals on Export and Buying of Gold and Diamond.

Therefore ,with a personal conviction of trust and confidence ,I wish to contact you as a foreigner , I am here to work out the release of the funds, No other person in the office knows about the account , please be assured of the risk free , I'm the one that will work it out , all I need is your
cooperation because the account content can not be approved to an indigen here as his next of kin .

At the conclusion of this project , I propose a joint investment of an equal partnership to you or we may share it in a ratio of 45% for you and 55% for me.

One more thing please; I beg you don't consider this against moral justification , they are many other aspects of life we may contribute with this funds to help the less privileged and the needy in a society than having it shared as an unclaimed bill among Government PLEASE .

I look forward to your earliest response

Regards.
Mr Abdullah Ali."

Well first of all, whatever stupid website that sold my email address, I present my one finger salute. But now an analysis of this lovely email.

I am extremely glad I'm not 20 years older and stupid. But apparently this email targeted 40-50 year olds and has managed to scam thousands of people. How can someone be so stupid as to believe any of this crap?

Spam has gotten out of hand. Previously, I only had to deal with various male genitalia enhancements, but now these people want my pity? It amazes me how some people in this world have lost even the smallest sense of decency. The scary thing about this is, some of these letters ask the people to fly out to some African country to "pick up" their reward, only to find themselves dragged into some desert and shot. Yes people have been killed by this scam. Sigh.

Ah, our 5-8 minute presentation.

Well I guess to summarize my thoughts on social networking in general.

Why?

I definitely see the need, and the usefulness, but today's "children" are completely overdoing it. I signed up for facebook early on just to see if I could find some of my old elementary and middle school friends. To my pleasant surprise I did. It should've ended there. Facebook gave me an avenue to contact them, not that I really had any reason to do so, but sure that was a nice bonus. Fine and dandy.

But, when they implemented that news feed bullshit, that's when I started getting really angry. Yes, angry. I had dim-wittedly forgot to uncheck the email notifications in the options, and apparently everytime someone did something that had even anything to do with me, I'd get a flood of notifications.

"OMG!!! BLAH BLAH ADDED YOU IN THIS GROUP INVITE INVITE TAKE THIS SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM!!!'

GAAAH!

I don't want to know this, I don't want to be added, in fact how about this. Cancel facebook. But wait! I can't!!. I am now forever a slave to this community that I really don't want to be a part of.

People, stop living your lives on a f*cking webpage. Go do something meaningful, have dinner with a friend or something old school like that.

Annotated bibliographies bring me back. Way back.

I remember first encountering them in 9th grade. My first impression? Why am I doing work for the teacher?

I love English, I love writing, in fact I aspire to use my writing to make a living in the future. How successful I'll be is another topic. Anyways, back to annotated bibs. So let's set up the scenario.

Teacher assigns paper.

Teacher requires XXX sources.

You find XXX sources.

You incorporate XXX sources into paper.

Teacher grades paper.
(now right here) Teacher determines if you use your sources well.

SEE??

It's like, doing extra work that should be delegated to the teacher in the first place!

just joking.

Recently I had an interesting talk with my mom. A little bit of background info. My first year at Purdue was not what I would call academically successful. I was into video games, especially wow, and I couldn't get a grade above a C for my life. For our second paper, I chose to write about WoW, because I thought it would allow me to get over and forget about this unpleasant time.

Well, a few years later, I've finally stopped playing video games, and I'm definitely pleased with the results. I'm on my way to possibly 3-4 'A's, and things are looking good.

I wish I could say the same for a friend of mine. If our second paper wasn't as formal as required, I'd probably just write about him. We both started off as freshman living in Young. It's probably my fault that I introduced him to the game, but at the time it was a great way to waste time and enjoy our new independence. Fast forward to now, he's been kicked out of Purdue for his grades, and in two semesters at Ivy Tech, he still hasn't been able to pull off a C in every class to apply for readmission. Technology's a bitch isn't it?

Paper 2

I can't wait to get started on this one.

Already armed with the controversial topic of World of Warcraft, I feel like I can write something amazing since I've both played and enjoyed the game to ditching it and ultimately hating it.

To be fair, there is a lot WoW can offer. I was a "guild master" at one time, in which I had to lead over 40 people to collectively accomplish a task, such as killing a dragon, or running through a booby trapped maze. This experience taught me a lot about the different responses people have to authority. Some "guild members" responded well to motivation and encouragement, while others only responded to threats and reprimands.

On the otherhand, WoW took up a tremendous amount of time, it can create this false sense of "commitment" to the other players that you play with. It can ruin academic goals, friendships, and even health. I have a friend who was academically dropped due to his obession with WoW. Scary stuff.

This is a topic that stirs an internal debate within myself, and hopefully I can recreate that in my essay.

Photoessay

The compilation and ultimate presentation of our photo essays was extremely enjoyable. Honestly I doubt I'll ever make a professional work that utilizes this medium, but the experience of telling a story in unique fashion was educational for me as an author.

Photography is one of my hobbies, and while I usually work on landscape shots, doing potraits with the intention of presenting an idea.

While taking the pictures, I had to actively simulate an audience with no knowledge of my intentions with each photograph. I had to represent themes in a way that was universal to everyone. While adding captions to each photograph definitely made each slide understandable, I felt that each photograph had enough substance on their own to represent my intentions.

Overall it was a very fun project, and I'd love to do another one with more detail.

Essay 1

Essays are not what they used to be. Back in high school you can churn out a five paragraph essay every half hour, now in college, not so much. The hardest part for me now is just organizing my thoughts. I feel like I have a lot of good points to cover, but the transition between brainstorming to writing has given me quite a few hiccups. In high school, all you had to do was cover a few points, reiterate them in your conclusion and you got an A. But when you're asked to do a four to five page paper, you need to dig deeper and arrange those main points in a way that seems intelligent. The rough draft for me was horrible. I definitely didn't allocate enough time to work on it and the result was probably the worst piece of writing I've ever inked since my book report of the Boxcar children back in third grade. There was no organization, my body paragraphs felt like bullet points and to top it off, I honestly had no clue what I was writing about. The final copy was nearly a complete re-write of my rough draft. I worked out which points I wanted (an outline helped tremendously), and then I built off the quotes and citations to express my view on Video. Finding better quality sources was probably also quite helpful. Let's see how it ends up.

Video Entertainment

So over this weekend I managed to contract the cold that was ravaging Purdue. Confined to the restraints of my apartment I started doing my daily rounds of entertainment seeking. Luckily this time around, my entertainment coincided with the paper we had to write, somewhat. The thing I've begun to notice and take a particular interest in is people with actual talent that use online videos as their medium to gain recognition and fame.

Let's start with contestant one:


After watching this, one really has to wonder what kind of untapped talent could be lurking anywhere in the world. I myself like to be impressed, and some of the videos that you watch on youtube really hit the spot. Let's take a look at another incredibly talented individual.



Simply amazing, I could watch these forever.

With all our discussion on work on images and text, I came across a couple of instances when image and text that had no right to be close to each other are indeed juxtaposed upon each other.

The first instance of this case was a newspaper article. The headline story was 3 armed men caught from armed robbery case early this week, and right next to it was a large colorful picture of three college students dressed up in Hawaiian shirts. The caption for that picture was "three students getting ready for spring break." Of course the first thought that would go through your mind is connecting the headline with the picture right next to it. It gave me a good laugh.

Another thing that I've learn to love is google adsense. So you can be looking on some website about hurricane katrina or another natural disaster in some tourist type area and right next to this article describing all the unfortunate events you have an ad from Southwest promoting their low fares. Just perfect. Irony at work.

And the last one I encountered probably one of the funniest I've seen was the publicized issues between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and what was the ad right next to it? You guessed it, Match.com. It looks like Brad and Angelina can get right back into the dating game!

I'm a firm believer in the statement that you are responsible for your own actions. Regardless if these culprits acted bases on influence of whatever TV show they orginally saw the "fire in the hole" prank on, one has to believe that they were predetermined to act in a way that's detrimental to society with or without any so called influence.

In response to the ethics of posting of the video on Youtube, this is where the free speech blurs the line. I believe the victim in the video is somewhat in the same situation as many celebrities. They are always in the publics eye with negative images by paparazzi. It's the same with the victim. If the images are public and available, there really isn't much the victim can do to remove himself from the public's eye.

The last thing I would like to respond to is the question of:

Is the media hyping the prank excessively, or is the media making the public aware of a disturbing prank?

The media serves only one purpose and that purpose is profit. It doesn't matter if the news meaningful, all that matters is if the news will interest people enough to get viewers and ratings. In this case, all that matters is if the public is interested. It's cynical but it's the American way.

So it seems like Youtube seems to be the hot topic for blogging lately, and I unfortunately will attempt to contribute to this flavor of the month.

I was lying in bed talking to my girlfriend about her work, she mentioned that she had to grow some bacteria for a microbiology class that she TAs. Well this got me started on recalling my sixth grade biology class. Our semester long project was to raise and observe seamonkeys. Now if you've never heard of these fascinating little creatures before, they're pretty much brill shrimp. Creatures that seem to only exist in large quantities to feed the giant whales who roam the vast oceans. Back to what I was saying, I had a sudden urge to read/look up seamonkies. As my girlfriend pointed out, I was extremely excited about these little things. The first thing I did, somewhat similar to what I would do with a research paper, I wiki'd seamonkies. I read a little background on the creatures and even got a little insight on how they actually manage to spring to life after you open a packet of powder which contains their eggs and food. So from there I decided to see what Youtube had to offer on the subject. It seems like there's actually a commercial specifically designed for Youtube viewing published by the company that sells and manufactures seamonkies. This wasn't a TV ad ported over to an internet video, this was actually an ad specifically made for youtube.

That really blew me away, and in retrospect it really hit hard on how much the internet affects our lives. While it makes everything so much easier, I begin to feel that I'm almost on life support. Without the internet I would quite possibly go mad of boredom. Fascinating!

Welcome

My very first post on my very first blog.


This will be my space to share my ramblings regarding the various occurences that happen throughout the course of this semester.

To start things off I'll share my first assignment.

New Media for me is a love hate situation. The concept itself absolutely revolts me, however the lure of its simplicity and ease makes it hard to resist. Coming from an international school in China, communication with old classmates has always been difficult. My high school career was during the major rise of New Media. Websites like Xanga, Livejournal and Myspace were just starting to skyrocket in their popularity. While most of my friends jumped onto this bandwagon, I myself was more reserved, preferring to keep myself and my thoughts offline as much as possible. My beliefs were always that one day, something I wrote online will come back to haunt me. I played it as safely as possible., a stealthy stalking predator if you will; carefully eyeing other people's online adventures while silently concealing my own. Recently I've been more accepting of this form of media, as I've become more accustomed to receiving instant messages in strange hours from friends in foreign places. While I still prefer to actually talk to someone in person, the benefits of New Media has caught up with me, and I myself have succomed to this dominant form of communication.