Myspace/ Social Networking

It seems like in today's time that everyone and their mother has a myspace. I first came across Myspace in 2005 and have been using it since than. It is said that Myspace gets more page views than Google, with Facebook. I just recently became apart of Facebook but I find that more difficult to use and never take the time to login to it. Social Networking offers a variety of ways to communicate with others through chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, and discussion groups. I prefer email or messaging over chat. It's an easy way to keep in touch with friends that have gone off to college or family that has moved away. Saves on postage and a long distance phone bill. I also wanted to add a personal experience I had on phishing. It happened through Myspace, and I'm not exactly how people go about making them but one day I noticed that bulletins were being posted under my name about adult sites and comments were randomly being left on peoples pages. I was told that if you login in on Myspace when there is a red bar above the login square that, that is someone copying your information to get inside your page. But in order to fix the problem I just had to go back in and change my password.

Fantastic Voyage Inside The Cell

I chose to view David Bolinsky's speech on the voyage inside the cell. I thought it would be rather interesting. It was but sadly it was rather short. He spent the first 6minutes out of ten explaining how there is truth and beauty in things and that some don't quite see that when you talk about science and cells. The studies that are being done at Harvard are coming up with animations of the life inside cells and visually displaying what is going on. The three minute clip that he shared was amazing. When it comes to learning I need to do it visually and that is exactly what the video was teaching. David Bolinsky said that they only know a percent of what is going on and that they plan on continuing this for the next 4-5 years. I'm taking online biology this semester and I know that if videos like his were made available to the course it would make it more enjoyable and much better to understand.

Web Time

WOW! I spend a lot of my time on the internet. Somewhere between 30-35 hours a week. I'm taking four online classes right now which is where most of my internet time is going to. I do have a life outside of my room on the internet I promise. These are the websites that I visited this week:
www.thomsonedu.com - this is for my online biology class and for the online labs that we do.
www.myspace.com - to keep in touch with people and just for fun.
www.rcc.vccs.edu - pretty self explanatory, blackboard and email.
www.google.com - research purposes and help with studying for classes.
www.pheer.com - a website that displays shows going on in this area.
www.purevolume.com - a website that has signed and unsigned bands that you can check out by genre or alphabetically and download or just check out some of their music.
www.ticketmaster.com - for purchasing tickets, which wouldn't allow me to purchase my ticket.
Again I try to stay away from the computer as much as I can when I don't have any assignments to work on, but these are the websites that I usually check on, on a regular basis.

TED Talk

I chose Dan Gilbert's talk "Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?" He brings up a very important topic that I don't think many people have taken the time to realize, or I believe that there would be many more people who were happy. Dan believes that synthetic happiness is better than natural happiness. Synthetic happiness is what we make of a situation when we don't get what we want, and natural happiness is where we do get what we want. Being the selfish race that we are many would agree that it's always better to just get what we want. That is when Dan supported his idea with graphs and research. He put up two pictures, one of a man winning the lottery and the other of a paraplegic and asked the audience which would they rather be. Of course everyone wanted to win the lottery. But taking a poll a year later the paraplegic people were equally as happy as the ones that had won the lottery. I think that you will find a genuinely happy person from someone that uses synthetic happiness. Being able to accept the things that you can't change and finding a way to just be happy with what has happened, I believe will make you a stronger person and will also be able to cope with negative situations a lot easier than those who feed more off of natural happiness. William Shakespeare said, "Tis nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." I really enjoyed listening to what Dan had to say and I recommend it to those who believe that happiness can be found in not always getting your way.