Interview with an assault victim

The creator of the facebook page 'I was assaulted by the Vancouver Police' made an appearance via the internet in our class last friday.

I wasn't 'present', as they say, as I was residing in a classmate's computer like a skype sprite, but because I was tethered in I could participate and listen just like a student physically present.

It got me thinking about how the internet has been good for bringing crimes against people to light. From being able to shed light on police abuse, it also keeps other injustices from being swept under the carpet, like the case of Kiera Wilmot who was expelled and charged with a felony for a science experiment gone wrong, which burned up the internet. The charges were dropped, and she and her twin sister are getting a trip to space camp thanks to a NASA scientist. But it's not really a happy ending (Kiera Wilmot tells us what happened in her own words), because she's still expelled and is attending an expulsion school where she is unable to take the classes she once had the opportunity for, and the challenges she once enjoyed.

It's a lot harder to go unheard now, thanks to the internet. This goes for victims and for perpetrators alike.

Distance Education

Throwing my back out hasn't prevented me from attending class, even if I can't leave my house. I've been skyping in to participate. The sound isn't so great for hearing the rest of the class, but I can hear the professor perfectly.

It has made me a bit self-conscious, because I can see myself in the little video in the corner. So far I've noticed my chin seems to be inflating like a bullfrog attracting a mate AND my hairline is uneven. Then I get distracted by how many funny faces I can make.

I am a terrible student.

The next day I skyped in, I actually got to be useful and set up a ustream channel to show how easy it was for someone to set up their own internet television channel. From account creation to broadcasting, it took five minutes and most of that was waiting for the confirmation email to come to my email account.

I did the trick again with my ipod. In fact, everything we've done in this class except anything heavily flash-based, I could have done on my ipod, a tiny device as small as my hand. And my hand is tiny.

Like the professor said: We're our own press on the internet. We can present any way we want. The only thing we don't have automatically is an audience.

Try out making your own channel over at Ustream (or one of its many competitors).

My brainshark adventure

Testpresentation

Lots of discussion of terrorism-related issues

A youtube video contrasting Dixie Chicks and Pussy Riot was the cornerstone of journalistic slant today.

Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas

The Dixie Chicks were vilified for saying that in the Bush administration, but years later Pussy Riot has wide western support for their own protests. It was our object lesson in Worthy and Unworthy victims. The Unworthy were the Dixie Chicks who insulted president Bush, while the Worthy were Pussy Riot, who insulted the untrustworthy Russian government.

Of course, according to the American media, Bush was a Worthy victim, while Obama is an Unworthy victi. I see regular death threats to Obama from public sources that seem to see no consequences:

Nugent, who last April said, "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year," and in 2007 stated, "Obama, he's a piece of s**t. I told him to suck on my machine gun. Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless b***h," (Source)

Nugent saw no jail time, no media demonizing, no wide-scale boycotting, and was even invited by a Republican politician to sit in on Obama's state of the union address.

I like Obama a lot more than Bush, to explain my bias, although I'd like him a lot more if he wasn't, you know, droning people to hell, but it's still an interesting contrast.

The Wayback Machine

Over at Archive.org, there is a magical device called the Wayback Machine, which contains a lot of the internet of days past. I've used it extensively, but not exactly for scholarly purposes.

I've actually had an easy time in this class learning all the materials, because due to my particular internet prescence (spending too much time on the computer since 1998), I've actually used most, and if not all some very similar services, over the course of my internet 'career'.

It's my mom's fault, really. When I was 12 she told me about fanfiction. And being as into X-Men as I was, I immediately alta-vista'd it. The first result was a story about the New Mutants character Wolfsbane committing suicide. Apparently that wasn't traumatizing enough to keep me off the internet.

Anyway, how this relates to the Wayback Machine is I've read (and written) and enjoyed a variety of fanworks and original fiction over the past decade from that inauspicious beginning, but! Nothing is permanent on the internet. Sites and posts go away. Hosting isn't renewed. Files are deleted. People leave. But the Wayback Machine has helped me re-find almost all of them, if I can just dig up the original link.

Webpage building, file organization, information organization, information sharing, are all part of participating in fandom and anytime what I've done all these years as a hobby turns out to be useful I'm a little surprised. But it's good. It means you're always learning.

Also, it turns out I can't write so great when there's other voices going on.

More collaboration

We collaborated some more. Oh god.

New uses for google drive

I already use it for documents and slideshow presentations (for story ideas), but google drawings is a new one. The teacher opened it up for all of us to edit and it immediately ended in horror.

Filled with drawings, doodles, and layer after layer, until someone suddenly started deleting everything.

RIP tiny star I made.

For funsies, here's our other group 'work':

Sorting myself out with Mindmeister

Create your own mind maps at MindMeister


Working out what I'm doing on Mindmeister. Beyond an expose on my cat, I'm not sure what to do about another youtube video.

Yesterday was a wash

I woke up with a migraine, and so apparently did the city. I'd intended to skype into class, but the power had been knocked out and with the sometimes update from Aaron, I discovered class was canceled. So I slept.

My own internet was spotty so all I could do was plan a future post.

This class is teaching me about the importance of information presentation, which influenced me to revert back to a more old-fashioned sort of internet communication platform for an upcoming collaborative writing project with my friend and sister.

Specifically, I created a forum. More on this later.

Please enjoy this quality map with extra quality

View My Class Area in a larger map

That smile, that grace, that face!

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:

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.

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.