here is me messing with macro with an extension tube and a 50mm f1.8 lens.

As per the advice of Trey Ratcliff I will be posting one photo per day, and making a short post about it. So today is a picture of my grandparents after we went out to dinner downtown and did a bit of wandering around the areas that will be up for the super bowl. without further ado:

My Grandparents Downtown

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”.

Original Story:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/anonymous-threatens-to-destroy-fox-news-on-guy-fawkes-day/

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…

If you could not tell by my previous posts, i am really excited for Ice Cream Sandwich. It really appears to fix all of the flaws that have had with my phone over the years. Android is now presenting itself as the leader and innovator in the smartphone market. Now I just want to know when they will release the source code for it, and let the great guys at #cyanogenmod and #xda get to work!! #wp

I am going to try using Google + as the primary source of content for my blog, using the google + Importer(http://goo.gl/uo3V0) #wp

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.