Excel

Before this class, I did not know very much about Excel and the things it allows. Looking back now, I was lost in ignorance of the privileges of Microsoft's technologies. I leaned a few of the many formulas that Excel can do. Among them are the functions Average, Sum, and the formatting options. I will be able to use everything I have learned in future business and career situations as well as in such classes as Business Statistics for sure. I really like how knowledgeable, ergonomic, and predictable it is. Thanks Bill Gates, you've outdone yourself again.

Copyright Question: Youtube

In class this past Tuesday, we received an informational lecture on copyright infringement. One very interesting case which I had yet to fully analyze myself was the question of copyright infringement that Youtube was hypothetically doing. They have thousands (tens of thousands, maybe) of illegally copied and uploaded videos on their site. Anyone can see these videos from anywhere in the world and it provides what could possibly be a major hub for video piracy (anyone with video recording software could pirate and redistribute more copies for profit, if they were so inclined). But on the other hand, Youtube is a great tool to share videos than are legal too and, quite unlike the case with Napster, they have space between themselves and the illegal acts made on their site. Since they have tools implemented to aid against illegal uploading and do not do anything that blatantly breaks the law, they have a good gray area cushion on which to sit. I personally side with Youtube. Some of the super-rich artists have a slice of their profits taken away and have it given back to the people of the world! The horror!! I hope they'll live. Poor Lady Gaga, T.I., Lil' Wayne (young moolah, babay?), Michael Jackson's estate, etc.. Now they only get 150 days out of the year for vacation instead of 200. Plus, Youtube provides a means in which starting, struggling artists from anywhere in the world can post their creations online to potentially be viewed by millions (billions, now?) of people.

Yeah, I side with Youtube on this one.



Copyright Question: Youtube by Peter Helmick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at Copyright Question: Youtube.

My Trinity Network Diagram

This is a diagram of the network at Trinity! I was watching football and realized that I could multitask :). The research involved with making this diagram was a tour of the servers in Halsell. It was very informative and it was pretty cool to see everything down there. Enjoy!

Trinity MYSTERY Spot

This location is somewhere the most studious of Trinity students (most everyone, actually) see every day. I really like this location as it is also near a place said to give you good luck if one were to study there before tests (hint hint, nudge nudge). You may not be able to tell, but I added the apples, blue lady bug, dog, and flowers to the picture. It adds some confusion to where this location actually is and the stickers fit in nicely with the picture. I also added some text to the background to make it seem like this is a "Park" instead of somewhere else on campus. Finally, I auto-touched up the picture to make the colors stand out more and bring the focus to the foreground tree; it is the center of the picture. Please leave comments as to where you think it is! Happy hunting!

Best Tech Tip (6)

The information given to us by Joe Hatch was rich. When he came and talked to our class yesterday he had some pretty great things to say, spending most of the time talking about computer security and maintenance. When he left and class had ended, I walked back to my dorm room and immediately logged on to my PC (because I'm 30 and work at IniTech, apparently). After quickly bringing up my Facebook page and being immediately bombarded by ads and holier-than-MySpace commercialism, it seemed like I should probably check my computer for any extra junk on it.

Download CCleaner -> Install -> Analyze -> CClean -> CCleaned

This program got rid of everything I needed it to, made my desktop look less cluttered and FIXED MY FREAKING REGISTRY that has been in bits and pieces for the past 4 months. Yeah, Microsoft couldn't fix it with the built in fixer and this did.

Needless to say, CCleaner was the best tech Tip of the Day.