Yesterday: The Google

Yesterday we learned about various google products, but mostly the dead-man-walking Google Reader. It's a shame they won't be keeping it, it was good and easy to use.

I love google products, I use docs, gmail, and gchat daily, but now I'm wondering if they're heading their way to being canceled at some point in the near future.

You can't make me change all my contact information again. You can't. I had a hard enough time switching from yahoo to gmail last decade.

Googlebooks exists to give me a headache, though.

Hostage post

We learned podcasting tricks before, consider this my cut off finger proof that I know how to use it. Real post tonight once I've made a good file:

Discussion of bias in reporting and checking sources.

Reminds me of one of those pointless little internet arguments I had once, where a young lady on a forum I was on claimed that it was proven that homeschooled kids were smarter and more successful than public school kids.

A quick 'citation please' got me a link to a study that through the citations showed me that there were a lot more homeschool organizations out there than I'd previously known.

Zotero

Today's class was mostly troubleshooting Zotero before going 'we'll get back to this later'.

The groups function seems to be haunted by angry ghosts, like Windows 8, but I love the bibliography function. That'll be useful in the future. I'm intrigued by the option of 'Vancouver style', which I don't want to ruin by actually looking up what it is.

Right now we're learning about RSS feeds, so here's my post for my feed. Please enjoy its posty goodness.

I have no idea what my final project will be since I'm not wholly sure about the guidelines. The death and aftermath of revealed story of City of Heroes, CNN's total botching of the Boston bombings, or some other thing that will be a better idea when the teacher gives more details?

Or I suppose I could do something about Amanda Palmer's horrible Boston bombing poetry... but that wouldn't be objective. I really hate bad poetry.

On the topic of my comments about the Brandon Sun...

Three headlines from the day after the Boston Bombing:

bomb, bomb, cat.

Leah commented in this post about my feelings over the Brandon Sun:

I did a work experience with them in high-school and it was the running joke that minor car crashes trump almost anything... except big car crashes.

My exact thought: I KNEW IT.

Shiny computer scrubbing programs!

Today we are installing Ccleaner, Malwarebytes, and PC Decrapifier. I've used all but the last one, so I'm googling the various things it wants to uninstall on my computer.

PC Decrapifer brought up my new acer netbook's netflix app and mywinlocker suite, one of which I didn't recognize at all. A google led me first to Acer's website, which said:

MyWinLocker Suite is a preinstalled program available on selected Acer products to help you protect your private data. It includes two applications: Yo-Safe, a password-protected virtual drive, and Shredder, a secure tool to remove files.

The Yo-Safe virtual drive acts as an extra hard drive in your system. You can access it only with your password, so the stored files are kept safe.

EgisTec Shredder is a data shredding software to help you delete your sensitive data permanently. EgisTec Shredder is a limited trial version. The first time you launch the program, a pop-up window will notify that you are running a trial version.

Seemed decent, until I clicked the next link:

In short, it is Trialware; Spamware; "I didn't ask for it yet it came w/the system"-ware.

Lovingly brought to you from Acer (in my case) and EgisTec: 

I decided to uninstall it. This has not gone smoothly. As of the writing, it's opened up two unclickable tabs at the bottom of my screen.

I fear the worst.

Remember me and my darling little netbook.

First day of class!

The most important part of the first day of Journalism II we covered today was what we actually had to do to get our grades, but it wasn't the most interesting part. That belonged to the visiting professor, not to disparage our actual professor.

See, the Brandon Sun has been an object of fascination to me for years. As a kid, I knew it as the crappier Winnipeg Free Press, but it was interesting hearing parts of its history and how it had become the paper it is today. The fact it's part of some chess game of corporations wasn't very surprising. I'm just waiting to find out that the Sound Off column is a method of finding out which citizens to weed out.

Not that I could pull any examples of the column for this post, because the entire Brandon Sun is locked down to anyone without a subscription and hell if I can remember my login.The useless, unreadable, page is still slathered with ads, however.

I'm not in this course to become a journalist, my school goal is archaeology, but I want to learn about journalism. It's important, it interests me, and it'd be a good skill to pick up. I already have the computer skills - in fact I was surprised how much of what I spent most of my evenings doing applied for this class. Which means I'm here to learn theory and method.

Or embark on my secret plan to become Clark Kent.