Week 8 - Political tasks

Politics and New Communications is the topic this week.
First off.
1. 'Sign an e-petition'
I signed an e-petition at Queensland Parliament websiste here.
I signed petition 1266-09 named Parking for Skilled Stadium at Robina.
It was related to parking bans near the Gold Coast Titan's home ground.

2. 'Respond to a professional blogger at a major news site.'
I responded to Antony Green's Election Blog at abc.net website here. The subject related to signs placed around new road developments and so forth. I signed the post as 'Zie (NCT09)' and put my blog as the website. I just sent my comment in, and as of writing is currently waiting to be approved by an administrator.

3. 'What is Barak Obama up to today?'
Well, first of all it's Barack Obama, it was spelt incorrectly on the NCT09 blog, I did comment on the blog post tho, which seemed to be the first comment on the entire blog. So go me!
Now. http://www.whatisbarackdoing.com/ told me what Barack is up to today. No, he is not going on The Jay Leno show like our Krudd would. But today, He "released a groundbreaking strategy to spur long-term high-wage job growth, in part, by "laying the groundwork and ground rules to best tap our innovative potential." Source.
So that sounds swell.

4. 'Find out who your Local, State and Federal representatives are.'
My local one is the Mayor of Gold Coast: (Mayor CR) Ron Clarke
State is: (MP) Peter Lawlor
Federal is: Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff)

5. Local member last spoke in Parliament...?
As of time of posting, Peter Lawlor's last speech in parliament was on September 4, 2009. The issue was Responsible Gambling.

6. Let your local member know what you think about their last speech.
Using the 'Contact Peter' section of Peter Lawlor's website, I sent Peter my thoughts on his speech, and the Responsible Gambling issue. Click here for the Contact Peter section of the site.

Clean feed and Lecture followup:

I really struggled with the lecture this week, and thus the lecture notes weren't much help either. I found none of them particularly interesting, some were just outright confusing, while some seemed rather arbitrary and pointless. From Plato's confusing fire cave wall thing, to Stockwell calling me a hacker, it was annoying. For not only was I confused, but I felt inadequate that I was hacker, and yet still can't work out why ever time I add an image to my blog, it goes up to the top of the post, meaning I have to move it down. Apparently I'm a hacker, yet I can't even do some of the simplistic tasks, thank you Stephen Stockwell for making me feel completely inadequate.

As for the Clean Feed. I think it's fairly stupid. Honestly, I don't think pornography harms children very much. If they are feeling low self esteem about their sexual parts, it informs them, if they are lonely, it helps them, and as for teenagers, well, how much angrier would teenagers be without porn? I imagine that porn helps relieve stress and calm down hundreds of thousands of teens worldwide. So why ruin this for them? And then.... I see angry people all the time, I wonder how many more angry people I would see, and how much more rage their would be, without porn.

If you are going to censor anything, censor bestiality porn, images of pre-pubescent kids of a sexual nature (child porn), and Chris Crocker. That is three things I think should be censored. But apart from those immoral things (to which I believe are), censorship shouldn't be taken to the extremes of banning porn. I like film/television ratings however, because I know what to expect, but I watched my first R movie when I was about 14 - Kill Bill Vol. 1 - and it did not affect me for the bad. So there are mostly stupid in restricting ages. The same for what content can air on television at what time. I generally dislike that.

Lecture 8

This lecture was really really confusing. Stephen Stockwell is a good writer, but as far as speaking goes, he's not very good. He has major problems with phrasing, and getting his ideas across. I know some of my friends in the lecture theater also had this problem, but I think they were going to lie on their blog and say how great he was. As I've said in previous posts, I don't telling lies. So I'm just being truthful.

Hopefully my inability to understand him won't stop me from getting good marks in this blog. I've worked very hard this semester, especially in this subject, but the mere fact is that I could not understand almost anything he said. Maybe I just have poor comprehension skills when it comes to people speaking like he does, it probably also doesn't help that I hardly understood what he was even trying to say after reading the lecture notes. Overall this lecture just confused me, and I hope I don't get marked down for this. I tried hard, but I failed. I've accepted this, and tried going the further mile in my other tasks, and doing extra work to not only make up for some shortfalls, but also make my blog really really good.

iReport

I thought that with my iReport video I would go meta, and make it tounge-in-cheek with meta-humour. I think I did a great job, with good framing and lighting. I love this sort of video, as opposed to an alien attack or something like that. The video on blogger is below.



Edit: I tried uploading the video to iReport at the time of posting, but it failed.
Therefore, I have tried again and have posted the link to the video on iReport just below. I have noticed however that the videos can take a very long time to finish processing. It makes me think that by the time its processed, the news has become olds.

EDIT:
Second edit, but it worked! Some people were having to wait weeks for it to work. But my worked straight away! Yay for me. Still annoying it didn't work all those weeks ago.
Oh... And I also made it so at the start of my video, iReport says 'Discretion Advised' because it may contain disturbing images. Mainly.... Me. :)



Direct link here. But posted above too.

Week 7 Lecture and Expansion

As I said before, I was sick for a few weeks and missed out on the Week 6 and 7 lecture. Thus I am limited in what I can talk about, Even more so as there is no lecture information on Learning@griffith. But the lecture was about Freeware, thus I shall talk about my experiences with Freeware.

Freeware can be very handy, and to me it is. Free software, it's great!
Some of this freeware I use weekly, other is when I get around to it.

For example. Last FM (Wikipedia article here) records all the music I listen to and puts it into a nice little graph and charts and stuff. See http://www.last.fm/user/ZEXK or click here to see my profile on that site, this is more of a plug in however. But it is free. As is this TuneUp add-on/plug in for iTunes I just downloaded. That one is hard to use however.

I'll just quickly use that great plug-in and then website, to post the music I've been listening to the last week. I just discovered NeverShoutNever! ahahah, Sooo good!


CLICK HERE FOR THE LAST.FM WEBSITE.

Then there is ComicRack and ComicBookLover. Those freeware programs read my digital comic books for me, the .cbz files. Although the latter is a free trial that has limited use. The first one I used when I had a windows computer and was freeware, not a free trail, and no restrictions. So ComicRack is one useful Freeware application, and is described as 'The iTunes for Comics'.
A picture of ComicRack in action:


COMICRACK WEBSITE HERE.

Then there is VLC Media Player(Wikipedia article here), that little Traffic Cone that helps me soooo much. My annoying iTunes, quicktime and RealMedia player can't play those great '.avi' files. And this can. So I am going to choose this freeware program to talk about, not because it is new to me, but because it is so amazingly good! I would have so much trouble without it, and what's even more, it's portable!!!!!
VLC Thumbnail:


Plus, it can play DVD's from all regions! No more having to check the right region, i watch DVD's on my computer anyway, my TV is rather small, so screen size doesn't bother me there. So that's great!

Even better, my great analysis of Nick and Norah from weeks ago that I posted in this blog(see it here), was all possible because of VLC. It let me take screen shots which I feel greatly improved my analysis.
Picture from my analysis:


So there we have it. I think everyone should use this program, and I am so happy that I heard about it about a year ago. It revolutionized the way I watch TV and DVD's. Sigh, how great it is!
ahahah. I'm really into this whole VLC thing. VLC 4TW! ahaha
Picture of VLC in action! Watching one of the Ice Age movies:



PS. Posted below is a song by NeverShoutNever!. This is a song I have recently found.
It's called JaneDoe, it's a love song without being one of those lame sappy love songs. It starts about 28seconds in... I know you can make a video start a certain amount into a video but I forgot ahaha.

Week 6. Extra Work.

Here is some extra work as I was rather intrigued by that persona website, and I realised that it had comedic potential.

So, using the persona website, (located here), I wanted to search something humorous. I ended up with some 'Adult' results. So read something else if you don't think you can handle it.

In class, I searched 'Porn Man' to mildly humorous results. But later it came across me, so I searched, for humor value, 'Free Porn'. But this was more than me wanting to laugh, my essay relates to porn, and thus this was a valuable exercise. It actually taught me some stuff... I also signed up for a Flickr account to make it easier to upload images. Clicking on the photos will send you to the photo on Flickr.
End result:


NOW.... I'll show photos of the humorous results I received.
Starting with my favorite:

I love the fact that there's spelling and punctuation errors in this. As well as the last sentence.


People have done studies on this? Also, i think the final word of 'combined', makes it sound rather dramatic ahahha.

But this next one cracks me up. SOOOO Much.


Let's speed these up....

Great response by the porn industry:


Interesting viewpoint:


Insightful:


Honesty:


Then some truthful, if not outdated, truth. (Truthful truth? Yup. you bet.)


Dramatic nonsense:


Truth?


Nerd jokes anyone?


And I guess I'll finish up with one last thing:


Well there it is. Some extra work for you. Rather nice of me.... Hope this has cheered you up a bit. Personally, I thought it was rather hilarious.

Zie out!

Week 6. Google Map, Persona and Sketchcast.

Uploaded here.
Done with my nickname. CLICK ON IT to make it larger and readable. This wasn't very big at all. I saw some other people's and they had heaps of different categories. My birth name came up with no results however, how odd.


My little sketchcast. I sorta just drew some trees, a possum thingy, and an hunter hunting the possum. I don't eat meat very frequently but I thought it fit in better. Funny thing is that when I was doing the first tree's leaves, I got distracted talking to the tutor, so i just drew a trunk under it (i went to the left heaps), I think I covered it up rather well ahahahaha :).



And my little Google map.
This map I labbelled the places that I have been to, sometimes It was a bit harder because of I went on road trips with my family before I new better. But I've to UK, Australia, New Zealand and France. I've been to some other countries, but not outside the airport. So I don't count that :).

View Places I've Been too. in a larger map

Lecture 6

Unfortunetly, I was sick for a few weeks and missed out on the lectures in week 6 and 7. Thus I am limited in what I can talk about, but I will briefly rehash what is on Learning@Griffith, and then EXPAND ON THE LECTURE and talk about a certain YouTube videos that people create that use Professional content that has been produce, and remix them to create more content.

Back in the old days, consumers would 'take', by viewing movies and television and give nothing back.
But lets skip here.... because it started to change, 'The Internet' changed everything.

People would give back, produce there own content, but more importantly, change content that already existed.

Let's break this down.
Three Big Screens of life
Cinema
TV
PC

and the Small Screens of life
Personal Media Players (MP3 players, iPod's)
Mobile phones/Smartphones (HTC touch, iPhone etc.)

But you read heaps of lecture summaries. So I'm going to do some extraish work.

PEOPLE ON YOUTUBE ANNOY ME.......

People take professional produced content and remix it for their own reasons, more specifically, love stories. People make love videos for couples from their favorite TV show.

IE..... 7th Heaven? Gilmore Girls? people make horrible videos about two characters from a show they love, mash up scenes, and put it to love music. This is one thing i really really hate about youtube.
Sometimes they create things that well..... Odd.
Example.... Seth and Ryan from 'The OC', in a video entitled 'Forbiden Romance'

The editor took things that Seth said to his girl Summer in the show 'I Love you, and I think you love me too' and made it seem as if Seth was saying them to Ryan.

The editor also got footage of two guys kissing, with the same hair colour as Seth and Ryan, and subtly cut it inbetween the scenes, to make it as if these two characters had a serious sexual relationship with eachother.

This whole video is rather bold....

But there are much worse ones.....
The dopecore and awesome Peter Petrelli from the first season of Heroes.
Someone made a mash-up of clips from the show, and put them to the song 'Sex Bomb'


Now some people are really sexually attracted to this guy....

And these two examples are good examples of how consumer, is now mashing up and using footage and are effectively producing stuff. All because of the internet.
Personally, I hate these videos.

But in the same vein of these videos, they are two I do like. 30 Rock one, mainly just because I love the song ahahha, and then theres a Seinfeld quote one.