South Park

Ive been a fan of South Park since somewhere around season two when I first started watching it (It's in season 11 now). While watching a recent episode I couldnt help but be reminded of this class. In this particular episode, a parody of the show "24", Cartman, Stan, and Kyle, use the internet in every way imaginable to track down a terrorist that is planning to attack South Park. They use everything from Myspace.com to youtube.com to mapquest.com to find at who and where the terrorist is. Season 11 has been great so far, and is only getting better. If you've got a childish sense of humor and can take a joke, then you'd probably love South Park too.

Impossible...

Yesterday in class we brought up the idea of doing vanity searches in google, that is searching for your own name to see if you can find yourself. As soon as it was mentioned I knew what the results would be for my name "Justin Running", can you guess what the results were? The first page contained the results "Justin running cross country", "Justin running marathon", and "Justin running from something?", the last one having a picture of someone running from a pink hat sitting on the ground. I tried adding on things like "UWT" "White River High School" or "Bonney Lake" on to the search, none came back with any results. After trying to find myself for sometime I labeled it impossible. Now, finding my alias online, thats easy. I can search for any name Ive used for posting on a forum or any character Ive played in an online game and I can show up somewhere on the first page with the right search parameters.

Publishing

On Wednesday, in class, we had another discussion, much like the email discussion. This time we were talking about publishing on the internet. It was a lot harder to come up with things that are published, since I really didnt know anything about publishing. I used the easiest idea possible while naming off published thing, it was "Books". But then when we had to find a specific thing, published on the internet, it was a lot harder. My first idea was the "News Tribune" newspaper, it was one of the first said. My second idea was "Time" magazine, it too was taken before my turn. All of a sudden it hit me, books are published on the internet and Professor Fry loves "1984", so why not find "1984" on the internet. So, I did a search in google, and the first result was a website with 1984 online, the chapters are listed on the left if you want to read it. The publishing discussion was much more difficult than the email discussion and because of its difficulty had me and probably much of the class very nervous for our turns.

An HTML Reminder

Today in class we got an assignment to create a website. We were given a list of steps we could follow to build this simple webpage. Back in High School I took a class on HTML, so I figured this would be easy and I wouldn't need the instructions at all, of course I was wrong. I remembered the simple parts right away, like "html" and "i", but I couldn't remember a lot of the other tags. It took me about 5 minutes to create the page, but for whatever reason the heading was the same size text as most of the rest of the text, despite following the instructions. I remember back in my HTML class that we started by using notepad and typing out all the tags, then about half way through the semester my teacher told us that we should be using Dreamweaver to design our websites. I continued to type out the sites by hand because I was used to doing it that way and I felt that I could customize my websites better that way. This assignment served as a good reminder of how to work with HTML and of the fun times I had in that HTML design class. I'd love more assignments similar to this one.

The Beginning

So, here's my blog. I plan to make a post every few days that relates to the things that I do in my Living and Working in a Virtual World Class. The class seems to talk a lot about the way the internet works, and the past and future of the internet. The other day we talked about ways that normal mail (Snail Mail) and E-mail differ. The only thing that I could think of by the time it was my turn was that normal mail keeps people employed, such as mail sorters or mailmen. After thinking about it for a second, I realized that Email keeps people employed too, the first thing that came to mind were the people who maintain servers, or even the companies that produce computers and provide internet. It was interesting to see that almost every "difference" between snail mail and email had a counterpart in the other form of mail. Overall, it was a pretty fun experience and I'm really looking forward to the class.