I find it interesting that anonymous, the often proponents of free speech wish to take down fox news on free speech. While I believe in most situations the FOX "news" network provides opinions that are close minded, I believe in their right of free speech(as long as that speech is factual) I am really not for sure what to think of this new event in Hacktivism, but I have a feeling Fox News Will "Remember the Fifth of November". #wp

Anonymous threatens to destroy Fox News on Guy Fawkes Day

With the Occupy Wall Street movement continuing to grow around the United States in various cities, hackers within Anonymous are targeting a news network…

I have been looking at windows 8 since before it was even announced. Microsoft has a ton of plans that will bring the Operating System to its next evolution. From the first time that i saw the Metro UI back in June, I felt that Microsoft was headed in the wrong direction; I know that a touch interface will not satisfy the people who interact with their computers on a daily basis. People want to be able to interact with their computers naturally, but when using a touch screen with today’s technology is imprecise. The touch screen will hinder rather than help the user in the end. When they released the developers build of windows 8 i was excited to be proven wrong, but i was not. The Metro UI is practically unusable without a touch screen. I think that tablets have a purpose and a use in our society, but they are a different market than the one that windows use. As Jason Hiner of tech republic puts it “Microsoft has always been afraid to offend any of its potential customers, so it typically piles tons of features on top of the existing codebase and ends up with a Frankenstein monster like Microsoft Office.”(Hiner). Because of Microsoft’s fear of alienating their customers, They will not be able to build a competitive tablet interface until both android and IOS have an overwhelming market share.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/first-take-on-windows-8-two-things-wrong-and-one-thing-right/8420

This is a quick post for all of you wondering what I was surveying you over. I had about 20 people who responded to the survey, with an average age of about 20.23. I am posting this because I found the results counter intuitive. I found that more people are using more devices and they are using them less frequently than I imagined. I also noticed that people want to consume news at an international level instead of at a local level. I had always assumed that local would be more popular because I assumed that people where more narcissistic, but our generation seem to be forming less of a local community and more of an international community. Anyways the persona below is developed from an mixture of what I know about my friends and what I learned about in this survey….. Well if you are still reading, enjoy!!

Survey
Results

Persona:

Paul Powers is a twenty year old male who lives near Indianapolis and is from the middle class. He is currently pursuing a four year degree in biology. Paul is pretty connected with his campus and spends much of his time at school studying and consuming news on the internet. Paul is technology savvy and owns many gadgets. Paul likes to access his news through many devices, and in many locations. He likes to use his tablet when he is watching television to view short news articles. Paul uses his laptop to comment on the news stories and consume technical articles on biology. When his is on the go he likes to view his information on his smart phone. On an average day Paul spends five to ten hours interacting with some combination of these devices. Paul gets his news from many sources, and it is rare for him to listen to just one source for his news, but rather finds a collection of news articles through sites like Google reader and reddit. Paul mostly consumes his news at home, but occasionally like to catch up during his down time at school and work. When consuming his news at home he tends to do it in the morning, but when there is free time in the evening he also like to try to catch up. The primary focus that he tends to revolve around is international news events like what is going on in Europe and Asia. Paul dislikes reading about local news like what is happening in our government and what is going on with local events. Paul likes to use his own personal devices when interacting with the news. He thinks that he would not use a public kiosk as a method of consuming the news.

Scenario:
People are less and less interested in news as we get further and further over loaded with information. To be able to consume news, news has to be made interesting through new ways of interaction. People will initially not want to consume their news from a public kiosk, because in most cases our information technology is personal. The kiosk will be touch screen tables put into areas of high traffic. These tables will operate on an operating system that handles multiple interactions at a time. A user will just walk up to the table and set down their phone, and a resizable window will pop up with whatever they were just viewing on the phone. The users will also be able to share information such as contacts and pictures with each other by just swiping the information from their part of the table to the other part. This will allow for a more social consumption of news and other content and inspire a communication between all of the users in the group. This will be technology will be slowly adopted, but once adopted it will be invaluable.

I normally feel that I have a high understanding of technology, when something goes wrong I usually blame it on the company who makes the product. I recently broke my phone while biking and shattered the screen. Other than the financial stress that it put on me, I lost lots of customizations that I had made to my phone. When I finally returned my old phone and got a new one, I ran into a brick wall. AT$T had installed the latest firmware on the device and made it very dangerous to root the phone. Eventually I decided to make the choice and go forward with the rooting process.

Many hours were spent searching sites like XDA developers to find my answer, and I came up with almost nothing. By the end of that night I felt completely frustrated and useless. I could not believe that I could not fix the problem, so I took it out on AT$T getting passive aggressive revenge by posting how awful their service is on their Facebook wall. I finally went to sleep for the night, when I woke up in the morning I had figured it out. I got the proper software and got the ROM installed on the phone. I feel like most of my problem revolved around the fact that I decided that there was no solution. I think I solved the problem by taking a step back and looking at it from the broader perspective and giving myself time to think. If I had not solved the problem, I would probably still be blaming AT$T for my lack of competency (But I still blame them a little).

Last week I was working in the IT computer lab, and another one of my co-workers had an issue with releasing a print from a system called “Pharos”. I tried walking her through the whole process over the phone, but we were missing a step. I could not figure out what was wrong. I eventually followed along with her on my computer as she did it on her computer, and I found out that she was clicking a printer every time instead of the printer spooler, so she was not able to find the print. The miscommunication could have been avoided if I had taken the theme in the first place to go through the steps with her rather than giving her general directions.

I think that when you design software you have to understand no matter what user you are developing for each and every person is going to perceive it differently that you will. When users are using software, they are solving a problem that they have. Like with my android phone, I want to remove bloat ware. With the Pharos system, I wanted to release a print. With each of this software there were almost no instruction and the user had to seek, in my case the internet’s help, and in my coworkers case she had to seek my help. If designers strive to solve their user’s problems, they will have a better product.

(This is a part of my Human Computer Interaction Class (I270))

Luckily on the first day they wore me out, and some of the anticipation was go so I was able to actually sleep for a while. We met in the lobby at about 8:00 again and hopped on the buses. Traffic was about the same as the morning before and we ended up getting to campus and grabbing breakfast from one of the cafeterias. The first presentation of the morning was on UX which stands for User Experience, we got a great view of how Google designs their projects, and how they test them. After that we got a preview of the new Google TV update (which is freaking cool, but confidential) we also got some other stuff about Google TV. Then we got a presentation on map maker and how it is used on campuses. I especially enjoyed the next talk, it was a company called talkbin that stared in January and was acquired by Google about 3 months ago. We all got beta versions for our schools to try out. After that we got some PR people telling us how to represent the Google brand and just what we do in general. After a couple more presentations we said our goodbyes and explored the campus. We only had an hour, so we had one of the interns show us the Google slide and go back to the gift shop where I purchased some more swag. We then rushed back to the buses and headed for the hotel one last time. When we got back to the hotel Google had a ball room set up and we got to just chill for an hour or so. We then took the shuttle up to the airport and then hopped on the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to go to San Francisco (mainly to say that we did) it was about a 30 minute ride to the center of the city. We hopped out and saw the trolleys, and grabbed dinner not too far from the metro. We then went back to the airport and caught our planes. Both of mine left on time and the transfers were pretty easy.

The hotel that we stayed in was extremely nice; it had every amenity I could ever ask for. The bed was easily better than my own on comfort, but for some reason I did not sleep a wink. I felt like a kid a Christmas, I just kept on waking up and wondering: “is it time yet?” 7:00 finally rolled around and I hopped into the shower and got ready for the day. I then went to the lobby and we met at about 8:00 and signed in. we then got on tour buses and they took all 140 of us to Mountain View. It was about a 25 minute drive because of the famous California traffic. When we got on campus I could see the immediate culture change, everything seemed open. We walked into a building and we got our first look at the inside of the googleplex. We went into this large room with about 140 chairs and on those chair our Gmail bags. We all got seated and they immediately got started with some basic orientation things, and why we got called out. Like every event there was a lame ice breaker!! We play a rock paper scissors competition. After that the Google apps for education team gave us a presentation about the current adoption rates, and where they want the future adoption rates to go. This gave me an insight that while IUPUI does have Google apps for education, they do not take anywhere near full advantage of the system. We were told some confidential numbers about real adoption and then we went onto the former ambassador panel. This consisted of several students that participated in the program last year. We quickly shot out some questions and in no time we were off to lunch. The Google campus has a model like none that I have ever seen. Everything is just available to the employees, and you can just get about anything, anytime you want. I ended up getting chicken and pizza and various vegetables. The lunch was delicious. Lunch ended and we went back to our meeting to get a presentation about Chrome and the Chrome book. We got several demos of the power of chrome and then they showed off the chrome books. He explained how they were a different form factor that might be changing the way that we interact with computers. Right now they are more useful to people who just use the internet, but more and more things can be done with just an internet browser. He got to the last slide, and in a jobs like slide it said “One more thing…” The presenter broke out yelling in a more Oprah style “YOU GET A CHROME BOOK, AND YOU GET A CHROME BOOK”. We all started cheering.  They began passing out a little info sheet saying that we could get the chrome books from amazon sometime over the next week. With the knowledge of the chrome book in hand we went onto the next presentation. This presentation was the one that I was personally waiting for; Google Plus. The Google plus team passed out some swag and talked about the product and some confidential numbers. We then got a short presentation on the features that are new to YouTube, followed by a presentation on android tablets and phones, and their useful new features. After that we got to fill out paperwork that made us official Google employees (my personal favorite part of the event) we got security keys and LDAPS. We had some free time, so one of the interns decided to take us to main campus. We hopped on some Google bikes that were free for use, and we were off to the headquarters. We stopped by the Google store and took a peek around. We saw all sorts of t-shirts and other just cool stuff we did not have enough time to buy stuff so I took quick mental notes for the next day. We raced back to campus barely making it in time and we sat down in a logistical meeting about the next afternoon’s transportation. After that we had the Google ambassador social. I was thinking it would just be some food and us sitting in the main room with some cheesy music. I was way wrong. As we went outside they separated us into separate teams with head bands and they sent us off to do everything from sumo suit wrestling to a bounce castle fighting game. They also rented out a traditional San Francisco street car and had them serve us sliders, fires, roasted corn and funnel cakes. Just when I thought I could not get any better they had our teams go over to the other side of the field and play a game of tug of war. My team was outmatched by blue team, but we ended up coming in seconds. We then went and hung out by the DJ that they rented. We hung out there till about 9:00 and we were shuttled back to the hotel. We hung out by the pool until the hotel kicked us out of the area, and I got to bed relatively early.

I woke up at 4am, and I got my stuff together.  I ended up getting to the airport about 5am and i got to stand in line for about 35 minutes because the wonderful people of employees of United Airlines were extremely slow. I eventually made it through the line and through security uneventfully. I got to chill at the gate for about 20 minutes and then boarded. I flew on an Embraer 170 and we made it to Chicago in about 45 minutes. I then had about 25 minutes to catch my next flight, I barely made it.  This time i was on an Airbus A320 which was ok, but not my first choice. I got stuck in the middle of two people, and i got the privilege of sitting behind 2 babies. That flight was long, but not as long as the one to Greece. We finally landed about 30 minutes early, and I ended up grabbing mocha a Starbucks and just hanging outside the terminal. After about 30 minutes I went running from terminal to terminal looking for my fellow Google ambassadors. I finally met up with Andy and Amanda, and we hopped in a cab. I got to talk with the two of them for the duration of the cab ride, and then we got to the hotel. We waited in the lobby for a while and eventually got rooms. After we got our rooms we went wandering around Sunnyvale, we walked about2 milesand found a Chinese restaurant. We went back to the hotel, and we went to separate rooms and chilled. I eventually went outside and hung out by the fountain till my roommate showed up. After that we met up with the rest of the group and had dinner at the hotel restaurant. The hotel restaurant had a Greek theme, and i had a beef kebab, which i have to say was not too far off from the real thing. We talked for a while and then we hung out by the pool until about 11:00. I finally crashed, and got to sleep till about 6am PST.

The first things that we did as a group was layout and design the site. The first design did not look anything like what we ended up with. Some of that to do with language barriers and other design philosophy errors. Once we all had a vision for the project the three of us working on the project each took a part. Heather took the part of deep design, Umesh the part of Backend data base and me the part of front end JQuery (http://jquery.com/). I had a few basic parameters when working on the site. We had to use Google maps, with the gmap3(http://gmap3.net/) plugin. We also used JQuery with a plugin called Sliderkit (http://www.kyrielles.net/sliderkit/) to control the animation effects in the popup box.  All of the content is generated by a JQuery call to the django (https://www.djangoproject.com/) back end. Each location has its own entry in the database that populates each of the popup boxes with content. The beta of the site is at iupui.parosweb.com

After the long flight back I got into Indy about an hour early. I was tired and i just wanted to go home. I was happy to finally be home in my bed, but a part of me still feels like this all was one big dream. All of it seemed like an instant and not a month, and I just have this surrealistic feeling when i am sitting in my own room trying to convince myself that i was across the world only a couple of days ago. While I am glad to be home, I am having a serious issue with keeping busy. Everything seems kind of boring now, video games con only keep my attention for a couple of minutes and TV just seems so mindless to me. Well for better or for worse I think that I have and will be making several lifestyle changes in the near future. I guess that the biggest thing that I learned from the trip was how much you can do in such a small amount of time and the many things that you can accomplish.