Access Project

I had never used Access before doing this project. I understand why Databases are more useful than just plain spreadsheets, but for this project I could have done it a lot easier in Microsoft Excel personally. The queries and reports gave me the most problems. Getting things to filter and sort properly took a lot of trial and error. Still not entirely sure I did that part correct actually. The form worked, but seemed to add the new members to the queries section, not the original table. I think that may be because I had selected the queries group when I made the form.

If you couldn't tell already, I do not have much of a knack for Access yet, and I'm still not sure of all its' functionality so my ability to upgrade this database would be limited. I guess the ability to auto-add the join date into the database, instead of manually typing it would be one improvement. Maybe you could hide non-essential information from the employees as to prevent abuse.

Week 12: Muddy

Two muddy posts in two weeks. I didn't quite understand all the different planning systems that Systems Analysts use. That would not be a good career for me if you have to do so much planning. Call it a personality flaw, but I've never been one for well-thought out planning.

The change management idea was kind of muddy as well. I understood that changes are difficult to make, one of the reasons why IE6 is still ~20% of internet users I've read is that companies have been too lazy to upgrade their intranets to work with anything but that. I can also understand that there can be a lot of 'noise' when the commands come down from the top, through middle management to the main workforce. Most of the time at my job, the only way I hear of rule changes is through other employees warning me. Sometimes they get things wrong and it just makes the situation worse. Properly informing people is definitely important when making major changes.

Avatar

This is an Avatar created for Xbox Live. The avatar creating tool started off with a randomized person that I thought looked a lot like Jack Lemmon from Grumpy Old Men. So it had a section for accessories and one was a fedora that I thought would accent the look. Along with a suit that I figured suitable for an old man, I completed the Avatar. The program allows for a lot of variety, and there are even animations. Recently I unlocked an ability to have my avatar barbequeing. Doesn't show up in the picture I could upload to here. I don't really understand the point of avatars, but they definitely have increased in popularity. Probably with the start of that 'Make your own Southpark Character' that I saw a long time ago.

Week 11: Muddy

When starting the lectures I had no idea just how little I knew about Access. I had opened it up before but never really done anything with it, and most times when installing Office, I'd uncheck the box for installing Access. New names for rows and columns, and the tables are nothing like I've seen as a table before. This was going to be an entry into foreign territory.

I kind of understood the idea of a primary key. That is what I understand to be the unique object to which all other things are relevant to. Everything else is just describing what is in the primary key. However I am using Office 2010, and getting to the default design view that I saw in your lectures was a trial in itself. It defaults to database and didn't realize that there were 4 different types of views. Then you get to the different types of data that can go into the fields. Access obviously has a lot of features, most of which I'll probably never learn. However I did make sure to play some Access games http://www.happy2-island.com/e/access.shtml

Week 10: Clear

I never realized before the intricacies of setting up fiber optic cables. Although I have spent many nights hoping for them to reach where I live. I do a lot of downloading, usually have a couple torrents going at any certain time, and to keep my uploading ratio even close to my downloading ratio is a serious chore. My ability to upload is at about 60kb/s compared to the 1.5mb/s that I'm downloading at.

Google realizes that a lot more things could happen if everyone had better internet connections and that's why they're putting Gigabit connections in a city somewhere in america and see how it affects life there and what benefits people put it to use. http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/public/options is the place where cities, and the people that live in them can apply.

I remember finally moving from dial-up to cable back in elementary school, and the difference in my ability to find and retrieve all types of data on the internet was greatly expanded. Now I've got multiple routers in my apartment, running over a dozen computers.

Excel Project

During the Excel project, I was originally put-off by the large amount of data to work with. However Excel is unusually user-friendly for database software. It's like it has thought of everything you might need, and put it there. If only other programs were designed so well. I'm using Office 2010 but I didn't notice any large differences that would change anything.

I already knew most of Excel through previous computing classes, and my own experiences in trying to organize data. I had not used Pivot-tables ever before though, and they are an extremely useful add-on that made sorting the data by your specifications much easier. The ability to just drag things to column or row, and then set them to Average or Sum or whatever you feel is surprisingly comforting. I can rest assured I will be using that function many times in the future.

Week 9: Clear

I really liked the setup of the lectures this week. It was broken down into very understandable excel tips, and I can easily see myself returning to double-check things in these videos in the near future.

I had never heard of the pivot table thing before, and I just took a business computing class at Santa Fe College a year ago. It's a very interesting feature and I can definitely see it's inherit value in Excel. I had already had a good basis in the functions, and logic formulas, but the videos were a nice refresher, and even went further in-depth in the date things than I had previously known. Like how it counts the days from 1/1/1900.

http://www.excelgames.org/ is a website based off games you can play in excel, I've played a couple before and it's very ingenious.

Week 7: Clear

The lecture on the booting of a computer was very interesting. Learned a new acronym, MBR (Master boot record), and reminded of what POST stood for.

Unfortunately lately, the computers I've been buying always cover over the POST and so all I generally get to see is a big ACER advertisement every time I turn the computer back on. I realize it's able to be turned off, however I'm too lazy for that.

Back when I was big into overclocking my computer hardware I spent a lot of time messing with the blue BIOS screen. Generally I don't have to use it at all anymore, as college has reduced my ability to buy new parts.

Web 2.0 Project

I'm still not entirely sure I've done this correctly, however what is done is done. I went through Vuvox, x-timeline, and finally settled on onetruemedia as my story tool because it was better suited to automatically making the story more interesting. Creating an interesting presentation has never been my forté. Onetruemedia was definitely easier, however the premium feature warning, and settings were definitely annoying and left me slightly annoyed at times. However, it seems a lot of others also liked onetruemedia, so they apparently know what they're doing.

I chose formspring.me as an interaction method because it allows a quick, and anonymous response to the story, and is in a minimalist format.

http://www.onetruemedia.com/shared?p=a5f993cc56c125d146cd89&skin_id=601
is the Story.

http://www.formspring.me/ism3004 is my interaction method.

Week 6: Clear

As far as fast-paced technological advances go, I consider myself very lucky for growing up in this time period. At the core (pun alert) of this advancement are transistor-based processors. My first processor I bought was a whopping 133mhz intel. I moved onto an AMD chip that was around 1ghz, then I upgraded to an AMD 3200+, which is around when companies stopped going by the clock-speed of their processors as the main benchmark and things got a lot more confusing with naming schemes. Those are all on just single cores, and now I'm running an Intel Q6600 which has 4 cores, and is way faster than I could've ever imagined originally when I was young.

Recently they've discovered how to use graphene instead of silicon in processors and IBM made a 100Ghz processor out of it, they say 10x faster than the maximum of a silicon one! Although I've read this technology is years away from the mainstream (it always is). Eventually it's said that they can reach upto 1000Ghz on a graphene-based chip!

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9152960/IBM_details_world_s_fastest_graphene_transistor?source=rss_news

Week 5: Muddy

I feel like the book didn't really go that well into the technical parts of most of the storage devices, hard disk drives especially. While it was better covered in the lecture I was befuddled on certain questions on the quiz.

However, while I've heard of degaussing (used to love pressing that button on my old CRT monitors and see the screen go wild), I didn't realize it's application to recycle hard drives. I assumed that it rendered it useless afterwards. Also, looking up the picture of a degausser was a very interesting machine.

Week 4: Clear

I just recently reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows 7. I was moving from the Release Candidate/Beta build to the Professional Edition. The beta goes inactive in March, and this class had that MSDN E-Academy deal for 23$ dollars for the Professional Edition. I hope I can use my UFL email to get cheap software forever!

Usually, after installing I'd have to go spending hours to retrieve and re-install all of the programs I had on the computer before that. Thanks to web 2.0, and other modern software improvements I was back to normal in less than 10 minutes after Windows finished updating!

I used Ninite.com to automatically find, download, and install my music player (Zune), my web browser (Chrome), my utility programs (Spybot, CCleaner, uTorrent, Flash, FoxIt Reader, and WinRar), and also Steam. Steam is sort of like Ninite for PC Games. When I login to my account, it knows all the games I've bought, and I can download them from their servers and play them within the hour. Chrome also allows you to login wherever you are and get your bookmarks, and I have an addon that also collects my usernames and passwords wherever I am as well for it.

I might reinstall it more often just to keep things clean when it becomes this easy to be up and running again in no time.

Week 3: Clear

An interesting anecdote about the name WiFi. It's amusing that even the text book says WiFi (Wireless Fidelity), guess they haven't read the article! There is nothing that causes more anger in me than a bad router. It's like they have no quality control at those factories. I bought a 20$ Belkin a couple years ago when I first moved to Gainesville. It lasted me perfectly up until the beginning of this semester. I could access the control panel, it never dropped my connection, etc. When it failed due to the power connection losing its functionality, we switched to my roommate's fancy Netgear router. This thing requires it to be restarted at least a couple times a week. Sometime it doesn't let me even reach the control panel, and I have to factory default it. However the Netgear I use at my parent's home works perfectly fine.

I also found it amusing that the company considers Yahoo! to be on the cutting edge. The website still looks like it was made in 1998.I use it as an old email address for spam, and every time I login, they've stolen yet another feature from some other website (i.e. Status updates, and Avatars). I'd change email, or forward it but I don't really use e-mail for anything other than signing up for things, only every couple months do I actually send someone a message over it.

The website I visit most often would have to be Reddit. It's an aggregator, and much more up to speed than Digg. Also you can customize what appears on your front page by certain topics.

Week 2: Clear

I could listen to the history of computing for days on end. My subscription to Netflix has been used to watch every documentary it has on the subject of science and history (and the history of science). Most of my time is spent wondering why I'm a Business major instead of History.

The progression of computer technology was a nice refresher, and I chuckled when he noted the statistics of a modern day computer, and even though the power point was only a few years old I imagine, the stats were horribly out of date.

On the computer coding schemes side, the reasoning behind the hexadecimal system was an interesting note. EBCDIC is something new to me altogether, but UTF-8 is something I found out quickly after connecting to the Internet. Whenever someone would type something with an apostrophe and it would show a c instead of the ' I learned to set my browser to read in UTF-8. I've been learning Python as a hobby for the last couple months, and better learning these coding schemes should help me along the way.

Week 1: Clear

I've had a connection to the Internet for as long as I can remember. My father always kept me up to date with the latest and greatest computer technology. Like magic, my childhood disappeared. I was turned into a cave hermit, illuminated by the glow of my old CRT monitor.

As such, I've grown accustomed to the way things are communicated. I tell my Aunt that I don't have an email address anymore, as to avoid the forwarded emails.

FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW: CAN U BELIEVE THIS?

I don't believe that Netiquette is adapted by the denizens of the Internet in any way though. Even in work-related e-mails you will receive the garbled transmission of what appears to be a new-born baby, though is actually your boss.

Respect is generally lost for them when that happens, and that's why Netiquette is an important part of the business environment. Unless your boss or customer is a grandma that loves pictures of kittens it's best to leave those for your friends (or no one at all).

As for copyright laws, I had not realized the length that it lasted for. A lifetime + 70 years seems like a long time. In my opinion holding on to something for that long just hinders the spread of knowledge and is terrible for society. I realize that they exist to allow for people to profit from their works, however 69 years past when they've died?