Haha ok, i tried out the Habbo hotel (http://www.habbohotel.com.au) i thought it was hilarious, it is so different from using MSN or any of the other normal IM chatroom. SO many people are talking at once! honestly i think these things are a bit pathetic, i mean why cant people just go outside and make real friends? or go to real parties or experience real life? im not a big fan of the virtual worlds. BUT i do admit, it gave me a laugh. I guess it could be fun if you were that bored you had absolutley nothing else to do. hehe. I think the 3D aspect makes a bit of a difference but not much, its more like a computer game than a chatroom. Id much prefer MSN over these types of sites because on msn you know who you are talking to and you have more control over the whole situation. I think maybe they would appeal to a younger audience, like 14 or 15 year olds, but not to me.
I dont think there are many qualitative differences between programs such as Msn and sites such as habbo hotel, but rather more of a personal preference. If you would prefer to construct a character that represents you and move around in different rooms and situations meeting different people, then i guess virtual worlds would be a good fit for you. If you just wanted to have a chat with friends, or meet people online, then regular chatrooms and Msn would be a better fit for you. Maybe i just don’t like change, but personally i’d much rather be able to have a decent chat with someone on Msn than pretend to dance with some random at a virtual bar.
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Tutorial task two: week four
Aswel as the scavenger hunt, we also had to answer the following questions:
How do search enginges rank the stuff they find on the internet?
haha apparently back in the day search engines ranked searches by the content and formatting and the ‘metatags’ on a page, but people used to trick them inot giving them a high rank on the search results by formatting pages so the search enginge could see words that were repeated thousands of times but the people couldn’t. That’s pretty clever lol. But these days search results are found by a pages relevance to a particulr topic, or for google, searches are ranked by how popular that site is, or how many other pages link to that site.
my favourite search enginge is google, probably because it is the search enginge i am most familiar with. Ive used others like yahoo and bing etc but i guess just learning to do things a different way is annoying, its easier to stick with what you know . 😛
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Tutorial task: week four
Scavenger hunt.
!) What did Alan Turing wear while riding his bicycle around Bletchley Park?
Alan Turing wore a gas mask while riding his bike around Bletchley park in order to prevent himself from having a hayfever attack.
*found through using the search engine www.bing.com using the search term ‘Alan Turing bicycle Bletchley park’.
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/museum/tour28.rhtm
2) On what date did two computers first communicate with each other? Where were they?
Two computers first communicated with each other in either September, October, or november 1969 in America.
http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/timeline.asp. this question was very difficult to find 😛
3) What is Bill Gates’ birthday and what age was he when he sold his first software?
Bill gates was born on the 28th of October 1955. He was 15 when he sold his first software, it was 1970 and him and his friend Paul Allen developed a computer program that monitored the traffic patterns in seatle. It was called “Traf-o-data”.
http://www.biography.com/articles/Bill-Gates-9307520?part=1
using the search engine bing with the searh term ‘Bill Gates biography’.
4) Where was the World Wide Web invented?
The worldwide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/berners-lee.htm
using the search engine www.yahoo.com, with the search terms ‘where was the world wide web invented?’.
5) How does the power of the computer you are working on now compare with the power of a personal computer from 30 years ago?
Computers from 30 years ago could practically fill up an entire room, they were chunky and very heavy! computers today are incredibly small and fast! they are efficient and some of them can do pretty amazing things that 30 years ago nobody would have though possible! Computers these days are so powerful, they are capable of doing so much at once, back in the day computers would take soo long to even load a picture, now we can watch movies while surfing the net, while typing an essay without a single glitch. i think its incredible!
6) What is the weight of the largest parsnip ever grown?
I cant believe this is one of the questions but hey, lol. The largest parsnip ever grown was “over 40 stones and called colin”. haha can’t believe they named it! lol
http://www.thevoiceofreason.co.uk/2009/08/Parsnips.htm
7. When did Queensland become a state and why is the Tweed River in New South Wales?
On June 6th 1859 Queen Victoria signed the patent that made Queensland seperate from NSW. The tweed river is in new south wales because it is past the border of queensland.
http://www.about-australia.com/facts/queensland/history/
8. What was the weather like in south-east Queensland on 17 November 1954?
There was a tropical cyclone on the gold coast.
http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/cyclone/about/cyclones-eastern.shtml
9. Why is Lord Byron still remembered in Venice?
Lord Byron is still remembered in Venice because he wrote and published many literary works there. He also caused some scandles by the sounds of things, boy was he a womanizer!!!
http://englishhistory.net/byron/chronology.html
10. What band did Sirhan Chapman play in and what is his real name?
Ha ha ha is this a trick question? lol. WELLLL Sirhan Chapman played in the Black Assassins and his real name is Steven Stockwell. You just became a little cooler 😛 aha
Just to finish off this blog, i’d like to add that this was HORRIBLE!!!! and if i ever hear the words scavenger hunt again, i reserve the right to have a little tantrum. 😡 humph.
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Lecture three
Last year i studied a course on media literacies, so we learnt a lot about what certain types of camera angles and shots are saying to the audience. I find it quite interesting that so much of what i learnt in that course translates over to this one aswell. Considering i already knew most of the content in the lecture, it was more like a refresher, just getting the brain thinking about those concepts again 😛 My summary of the lecture was, it was alright, the content wasn’t hard to pick up and it didn’t go for too long. Sometimes it got boring because most of the content was pretty straight forward, but having known most of it already would have contributed to that im sure haha. Otherthan that it was pretty good. oh, and for the summary of the content; it was basically talking about how film makers and producers employ different camera angles and shots to say different things to the audience, or in the lecturers words “shots as words”, basically answering to the audience the five W’s (who, what, when, where and why) and the H (how).
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I first began using the internet in grade four or five, I remember how easy it was to pick up, my favourite thing to search for was information and photos of the spice girls! haha. I remember my mother was going to university at the time (yes, she went when she was fourty) and i used to tag along just so i could have the chance to search for pictures of ginger spice. To my mothers surprise before she became famous she was a model that did rather risque photoshoots 😛 I wasn’t allowed to come along very often after that. The schools started to involve more and more internet and computer usage into our curriculum, but i didn’t get to use the internet at home until i was fourteen. Back then the most common thing i used the internet for was msn, at that stage i dont even know if myspace and facebook were invented, but msn was a regular every night activity. I can’t stand it anymore, i find it so impersonal, however back then it was the shizzz. It wasn’t until grade twelve that i found out about the glories of myspace…i got pretty good at it too, i used to build layouts from writing the hypertext myself, at that stage i thought i wanted to be a website designer, i could spend hours just creating layouts and changing things around, learning about new cool tricks. I only switched from myspace to facebook this year and am still to make the switch to twitter. I can easily say that i am 100% addicted to facebook….its sort of like my escape…when i have nothing to do, ill be on facebook. recently i worked out how to use torrent files and peer to peer exchange….which is cool, but naughty at the same time. lol. In regards to the ‘have you made any friends you have never met before over the interet’ question, well i met my boyfriend through mutual friends online, and i also made a really close friend in america online…so, yes i guess i have 🙂 I’m not very concerned about privacy, although i have had a few internet stalkers which was scary and stupid on my behalf. I guess i learnt my lesson from that. I find that i use facebook the most out of all the sites available because its just so easy to keep up with people you hardly see, and also your closest friends.
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Lecture Two
Due to personal circumstances I didn’t actually make it to the second lecture, but from reading the lecture slides i gather that the lecture was about the birth of the computer and also the internet. Honestly, I’m not remotely interested in either of those topics (even though i use the technology on a daily basis) mainly because I have the concentration span of a flea, and for me to really get involved in a lecture i have to force myself to concentrate on every word….(usually doesn’t happen) but also because i dont like theory..i like to do do do. Since my dad told me that he finds both of those topics fascinating and my boyfriend thinks i need to know more about ‘things’ I will try and take an interest for the purpose of this blog. From this lecture (or should i say these lecture notes?) I learnt that technology goes back a lot further than i originaly thought. Charles Babbage and Ada Byron must have had amazing minds, i mean, imagine just thinking up an idea like the computer! It’s also interesting to see the oringins of PC and Apple, before this i didn’t even know that PC stood for personal computer! haha. I found it quite inspiring to learn that Bill Gates dropped out of uni to start his company, and that the two steves became so rich from their work with computers, makes me wish that i could find a purpose in life that would not only bring me happiness but also pay my way…:P I already knew that the internet and the web were two different things, however i didn’t really understand how as often people just say the two interchangebly, but from the example of msn and a web page being run at the same time but not appearing on the same browser helped me understand that the web is a lot smaller then the internet…its just looking at certain parts or files at one time.
I find it interesting that even though i use the internet and computers everyday i dont really know too much about them, i mean it’s very easy for me to navigate my way around the net, but it just makes me think of what other things in my life that i have ‘learnt’ and not questioned its workings and its origins….i seem to just accept everything i’ve been taught without a second thought to why, or how it came about.
I found this guy on youtube, he explains the difference between the internet and the web in everyday terms, he rabbits on a bit but the basic analogy is good 😛
Overall, i have learnt a fair bit from this lecture…
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Uni
I really don’t like uni, never have and i dont know if i ever will. it’s just so boring! i’m such a hands on person, i hate all this theory and reading. I just checked how far behind i am and its crazy how much i have to catch up on! so this is the first step, another blog lol…oh the joys of writing endless crap in a blog so everyone can read it lol…sorry for the boring post, but hey…another one down! yew.
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Just bloggin’
I’m going to start with a blog about myself since i haven’t done this before, and it’s easier to talk about yourself than pretty much anything else in the world haha. So, my name is Sarah, I’m 20 and I’m studying communications majoring in Chinese, marketing and maybe journalism. So far i’ve found it incredibly difficult to find a course that i actually want to pursue. I guess i never really gave much thought to it while i was in school, and then when i left school I was just expected to know right then and there what i wanted to do for the rest of my life. Well, obviously that didn’t happen, and so three years and 8 unfinished degrees later here I am. It feels good to finally have some peace about my future; it was hard feeling as though everytime I changed degrees it was adding another failure to list, and not to mention the ridicule I got from those that had just eased their way into a career, or a course, or even just another niche in society. I really don’t understand why society puts so much emphasis on people having to ‘know’ what they want to do with their lives right after they graduate high school. I mean, at just seventeen how well can you really know yourself and the world to be able to say, yes, this is what and who i want to be. I know from personal experience and from watching many of my close friends, that in most cases, it doesn’t happen that way. Why is society in such a rush? who are we racing against? ourselves? I don’t understand why everybody has to be such a big shot, or why everybody is expected to want the same things in life. It really gets to me because lately i’ve been watching my closest friends go through exactly what i went through two years ago, and all because they don’t know what they want or where they fit into society now that all they knew for twelve years has been striped away from them. For example, one of my friends is so talented and beautiful and creative, but she didnt get a good OP. So now she can’t get into uni, she has tried multiple jobs, but none of them are her, and the jobs that she does want, she cant get. so she is sinking lower and lower and losing hope for herself and her future all because things haven’t happened straight away, as society preaches they should. She is a perfectly capable girl, but because of all the pressure and the ridicule from those around her she has lost sight of what she is capable of. In my opinion, i think society and the people in it should lift these people up instead of bringing them down, and let them know that it is okay to go at your own pace, because ultimately everyone is different and everything in life has its own season.
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This video runs through the evolution of online communication. I found it interssting and relevant to the content of last weeks lecture 🙂
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