Happy Earth Day!

Many Americans look forward to a new gadget to play with for the new features and enhanced speed. This leads to an epidemic for the discarding of older devices.

Before dropping off your tech in any random box, we need to research the recycling programs of our large corporations as many of the devices are sent to China. The stripping of these goods can cause pollution and injure the workers. Other programs just consolidate the waste and throw into dumpsters at the end of the day.

Our best solution is to get more use out of the technology. Sell to others at a reduced price and donate to non-profits or people in need. We should also extend the use of the gadget another year to actually use the device.

Most of this information is listed on this link: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2012/04/22/earth-day-and-technology/

After numerous hours of research along with the insurmountable evidence that even the most mundane tasks of our daily lives can be gamified, I decided to dip my toes into online gaming. Zynga’s Words with Friends and Scramble with Friends were my entry points. At first, I was nervous to initiate a facebook friend to play a game. What if there were rules of contacting certain people in your past for playing games? A few years ago, I had tried to play Words with Friends and felt I had let my friend down as I would forget it was my turn, forfeiting the game. I did not want to create any mis-understandings with a simple past time or research assignment.

After two months and possibly the same game with people, Words with Friends can be a diminishing return as the game is quite drawn out depending on your playing style and time. Yet, this is a very popular game for most Facebook users. A smaller and less popular game, Scramble With Friends, is similar to the board game, Boggle, and lasts only 2 minutes. There is also Chess with Friends as well.

The things I learned after 2 months of playing games online:

1. People feel badly if they need to take a break from playing games. Some apologized, others ignored, and some just continued to play every few days to pacify.

2. Playing with strangers can enhance the gaming experience because no person is offended if one wants to opt out or has a busy week, forgetting to play. With Strangers, there are low expectations for a return game.

3.  It feels good to achieve something quickly. My scores improved by hundreds of points in just a few weeks. The voice would say, “Good Job”, and “AMAZING”. That is something you just do not hear every day when you run a business. It does come in a form of payments, repeat business or referrals though. However, we all need to hear positive re-enforcement and immediate gratification for small tasks. It worked when we were children! Aren’t we big kids sometimes as well?

4.  What if someone has better scores than you? Does that make them a better person? Values and judgements may be made upon a simple game analysis. However, if someone makes that kind of judgement about you, don’t worry, it is their problem, not yours. Play away.

5. Some say, how do you have time for this? I used to have the same reasoning. Yet, these games can take less than 2 minutes of your day.

It is actually quite fun and can enhance your mind, if you choose your games wisely.  Think of it as an exercise. Instead of worrying when your friend will arrive at the restaurant, play a quick online game. Some may say you are not taking in your environment and missing out on life. My response is to make sure you smell the roses, but play a few games to stretch your mind with educational games. Why be a grown-up all the time? Take a few minutes out a day. Who cares if someone is better than you. If that is an issue, then play with a random opponent to sidestep the interpersonal issues that come with playing with one you went to grade school or college. Heck, they probably have so many responsibilities on their plate that they can only play every once in a while too!

Be understanding when playing with others as you would in school and tap on.

Emma Moore

How do these stalking facebook applications work?
When you accept an application, unless every one of your friends has approved the identical app, tracking is not available for profile views. Even then, there is a nominal chance for this feature to work seamlessly. Most of the apps have the capability of pulling your friends’ names and pictures. This gives the illusion of tracking. The program just creates a random image from your friends’ list and number for views to satiate curiosity.  Each time you use the app, it could record your false stalking result, so there is continuity each time you use the program.

“But Emma, my ex-girlfriend was on my profile twenty times!  It has to be true!”  Well, Niels Bohr said that the observer can affect the experiment. Maybe you can apply this to your random result as well?  Why not? However, until you can prove that your mind can control results of randomly generated numbers, then, you may just want to delete the application.   Either way, it does not give you the feedback you wanted.

People do not feel comfortable with a public profile tracking feature and tend to browse less when this specification is enabled on sites. Facebook wants to encourage traffic to many parts of the site.  FB is tracking for its own private purposes, but it is only to know habits and patterns of demographics. I guess you are special enough to be tracked by FB  just like everyone else.

Just another rambling session,

Emma Moore

When you surrender your password to anyone, including a web company or person, make sure they have a reputation of integrity and trust. Speaking for Fundamental (gofundamental.com), we are not interested in your emails, blogs and other sites. It is not that you are boring. Your probably are not. We would have a good ol’ time if given permission to play. However, we just do not have the time nor the lack of integrity to pursue that line of living. Fortunately, we have not ever had a problem in this arena, but wanted to stress the importance of honored privacy, nonetheless.

Here are a few simple steps to help guard against hacking:

1. Use a combination of all underscores, numbers, capital and normal caps characters. It is also a good idea to make it over 6 characters long.

2. Use a word that is not in the dictionary.

3. Write down all your passwords and put them in a notebook that you will not lose. Explain the site, password, and username. If you use different emails, then write the email down along with the password. This gives you the freedom to forget your passwords.

4. Try not to use a global password for too long. If you do, change it often and write it down.

5. Keep your financial institution passwords completely separate from your social passwords.

Here is an example, Sl0m_!pAss.

Please make sure you follow these simple guidelines and you will reduce your chances of hacking.

Here are a few guidelines to help you properly separate business and pleasure.

http://smallbusiness.aol.com/2010/12/15/the-8-rules-of-smartphone-etiquette/

It was rather fun to air a lot of the feelings we had about all the recent controversy over Flash, HTML5, iOS, Android, etc. But one thing Mike Chambers said blew my mind to some degree. It really changed the way I see Flash. Up until now, if you had asked me what Flash (on the web) is, I would probably come up with some kind of canned statement like, “Flash is a browser plugin that allows you to do vector graphics, animation, sound, and video. It’s very useful for creating online experiences, games, and Rich Internet Applications.”

But Mike gave a definition something like (probably paraphrased), “Flash is what drives innovation on the web,” and went on to explain that more. What I got out of it is as follows. This expands a bit on what Mike said probably, so I may be going beyond what he meant by it, but I think I got the spirit of what he meant.

The browser has certain native capabilities. These are ideally based on standards and don’t change radically over short periods of time. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. evolve slowly. HTML5 won’t be fully ratified for another 11 or 12 years. This is a good thing. It gives a solid foundation and prevents complete browser chaos and anarchy. But it doesn’t really foster innovation. That’s where Flash comes in. Flash has an 18 month release cycle. It can try things out. Not all of those things work. If they don’t, it can fix them or even get rid of them in the next release. It can change and evolve rapidly, and innovate a hundred times faster than something like HTML.

read the rest of the article here: Bit 101

Why are you still here? Read the article.

That time of my life was filled with Napster downloads, all-nighters, and copious amounts of coffee. My heart was so filled with the exuberance of how amazing technology, in general, could be. It would be able to connect, share, and transform. And now, it does all of this to a point where our future appears to encompass databases of our details about each transaction and written word.

My love for CDs panned out well, I worked on a number of the larger movie press kits of the time: Star Wars, Minority Report, and many others. These press kits were interactive ways of downloading and selecting photos for the major magazines for their weekly publications. Now that industry has evolved as well. Photos do not have the many steps of previous years: developing from film, painting on directly, and being delivered to a PR person for posting on the internet or magazine. A new industry has been created from people who have learned the skills of website design, blogging, and digital photography, enabling many people to create their own outlets of information, press, and pictures. The world of photography has become more about content than flawless beauty that the entertainment business has worked so hard to preserve.

Yet all things change, especially now that industries are reliant on technology. The CD is just another relic in the junk pile of our accelerated techie growth spurt. However, I tend to remember portions of my life by what kind of technology I was using at the time. The next stage will be the elimination of DVDs in the next two years, but I do not have an emotional attachment to it. The collectors of DVDs will mourn as they realize that their collection will be better served as eclectic coffee cup coasters. Just for today, I am relishing in how CDs played an important role in the passion that I have today for computers, design and development.

Yet, this process needs more time. More products and services are becoming digital. This means that regulation needs to review consensus over time of the internet/mobile movements and act accordingly. It is a very sticky situation and requires many different government agencies and voting procedures. Giving corporations full control of their networks is not the solution as the internet needs to maintain a certain amount of integrity. The corporations would have a monopoly to sell result slots for each search and privacy would be even more of an issue. The reason the FCC and related commissions are taking their time is information control. When is it okay to block information? An example of the positive side effect of blocking is Prince’s album. It could only be released on the site of his choice. This would cut down on large scale theft for many industries which have suffered from the all too available information that should have been paid to view. This would help our economy. Yet, it could also create an even more complex black market, creating problems in the long run. Maybe it would be easier to create a more aggressive social campaign as they did in the 50s and 80s: ‘Made in America’ or ‘Keep America Beautiful’. The moral codes of picking up after yourself and buying American promoted an emotion that has helped in regions of this country. Then the social norm could be passed through the generations without the extra legalities. As this does not seem to be a strong trend to push new social norms other than outrageous behavior posed on many of the reality series, but it may be an overlooked possibility.

However, blocking one piece of information also means that people wonder how much more information is intercepted. One must consider the large scale costs of all the law suits and theft that could be prevented if stolen information could be blocked from one source. Are virtual fences the right way to having a profitable, open landscape for the future? With that said, the mobile networks and the internet will one day merge into one telecom system. It would be naive though to think that this network would be the only system of informational transport. We have always branched out into subcultures based on our interests. If people do not like what they are reading or begin to distrust, they move away and form their own.

In the meantime, while the corporations hash out their hopes with the FCC and the internet merges into all-access cloud network… enjoy all the sensational news! Please stay up to date and write your concerns. Be involved as much as possible.

Having a good quality design gives your site the professional edge and saves costs in the long run. Design requires more than relevant pictures, illustration, and pretty boxes. When designing for both large and small scale sites, it is important to understand the technical aspects for a pixel perfect site that mirrors your company image.

Here are a few steps that are essential to understanding the process of the technical side of website design:

These are just a few of the steps that help create a professional, clean, and congruent site. The technical side is just as important because it will save costs and time for the future!