Response to Kids online

Well I guess I should start by saying that I think that the Communication Decency Act is pretty much useless. Seriously, how hard is it to put a page up before your page that confirms the age of the person about to visit your site. This is something I could make after a few classes of experience in web programming. I guess the only thing easier than this is the ability for a user to bypass this page by putting in a false birth date. I often view trailers on ign.com of video games that are going to be released or are already released and some of them are age restricted. I simply just put two numbers in the for the month and day and type my birth year and I am able to see the content. This is in no way would have been difficult for me to do when I was 11 years old. I certainly think this law was made with the best intentions in mind, but it seems pretty useless to me.
I think web filters do a good job, but at the same time they are just as easy to bypass as the forms where you need to enter your date of birth.

I think the best two ways of filtering content for children are browser filters and computer knowhow on the parent's part. You can choose sites to exclude from a browser, but I am not too familiar with how to do this because I've never needed to do it. I know at my junior high they had software on the computers that flagged you if you entered a certain keyword and you would get in trouble for that. I have never investigated any software like that, but I'm sure one could find it pretty easily. In the end the best method of censoring what your children see is to know what they are doing online. Luckily I'm a computer science major and I spend a lot of time around computers, so I would be able to track my children's internet behavior quite easily. Alas, not everyone can afford to spend as much time around computers as I do and they may not know how to track their children. This could be solved by having classes at local colleges that teach parents how to track what they want to track. Parents can't expect to have legislation come about to make sure their kids are safe on the internet, they need to take some initiative and protect their kids themselves.

Crappy Flash Final

Well here it is. The culmination of my five weeks of learning Adobe Flash. I'm gonna go ahead and state right now that the green button does not work because this is not the final version of the project. In the final version the green button would show a leg stepping on freddy the football and smashing him into the ground. It's quite entertaining, but I'm afraid you will not get to see it. I probably spent the most time on the most useless part of this animation. The bottom bar with the buttons took me at least twice as much time as anything else. I was very happy with the end result, although I inadvertently made this bar look almost exactly like something out of a Mac operating system. To me it looks better than any bars on leopard or tiger or whatever large cat Apple has named its newest OS after. Obviously the smiling football is a piece of crap that I spent very little time on because I didn't want to try to make something look nice only to realize that I couldn't possibly do that. Well that wraps up my three part series on my crappy flash animations. I hope you have enjoyed.

My foray into uploading real videos

Well I now have the knowhow to upload real videos instead of the crappy flash stuff I made! I'm sure glad that someone was videotaping this because this was my best throw of my collegiate career. This is much more fun than creating flash stuff because I don't have to come up with my own stuff. Well I suppose there's nothing more to say than enjoy my discus throwing.



Add to My Profile | More Videos

Crappy Flash part Deux

Here goes the second attempt at making a flash movie. I was able to incorporate characters in my crappy animations that now call my crappy animations crappy. As you can see, my walking people are a little too stiff. It think I should've at least made their arms in a lower position because nobody really walks with their arms at a 90 degree angle. I also thought it would be cool to put my old animation in a tv within the new movie so I went ahead and did that. The lava lamp is also something that I really liked. Although a lava lamp doesn't really behave in that manner I was still happy with it. I probably should've had the sun move and daylight turn into night, but I wasn't that motivated so I did not. Well I only have one of these bad boys left to show you all.

Can't see my 490 homework

I have been making some spectacular JSP's for my Computer Science 490 class, but I don't think I will be able to post them anywhere online because I really have no clue how to. I tried putting them on my W drive and linking to them from my main page, but I couldn't get it to work. Oh yeah, I suppose I should tell you all what the heck a JSP is. Because I don't think I need to go in depth about what a JSP is, I will just tell you that it is a web page that is capable of being generated dynamically. This just means the web page can be displayed different based on actions you take in the webpage. The best example of dynamic web pages I can think of is Amazon.com remembering what products you have looked at and it dynamically generates a list of other things you may like based on what you have looked at. If you'd like to learn more about JSP's you can visit here. If you would like to see why it takes me forever to finish writing these JSP's you can visit here. I suppose you don't really want to hear anymore about cool things that I can't show you so that will be all for this post.

Crappy Animation Part 1

Well I was asked to show some of what I considered to be my "crappy" flash animations so here is the first one I made for class. I modified it since it was graded so that the mountains move slower than the cactuses, which move slower than the road. As you can see my artistic ability is quite terrible by looking at the driver. You can see him closer by right clicking and zooming in on him. I thought the truck wasn't incredibly terrible, although it could've been better. I shall post more of my crappy flash work as I complete some more.

MUDs are for puds

Why on earth would anyone want to read text in probably the most boring interface ever. I understand it's like a story and such, but seriously, can't you just read a book? Sure a book doesn't have the sort of interactivity of a MUD, but after a while the command line just hurts the eyes. If I wanted to stare at a command line all day I would become a Linux programmer. Now I consider myself to be a computer nerd by default because I am a csc major, but the command line is just not fun. You can change the background color and the font of it, but that really doesn't make it any more exciting.

The Digital Divide

Upon listening to the description of the idea of the digital divide in class I saw that I not only am on the privileged side of the divide now, but I would've been when it was first created because I am a white male who is majoring in computer science. Although I am highly privileged in the divide, I do feel that people like me should do something to make the digital world accessible to all. At the same time I feel I am only really responsible for helping people in this country and the rest of the world can go figure it out themselves. In this country I feel that access to the internet and new technologies should be on par with driving a vehicle. Now this doesn't mean that I think you should have to have a license to use the internet, rather you can use the internet as long as you have the right tools. The tools for driving would be a vehicle and insurance and the tools for accessing the internet would obviously be a computer and an internet connection. Just like driving, if you do stupid shit on the internet you should be punished. I don't think people realize how much programming goes into making things idiot proof and then someone comes along and screws something up. One other similarity between driving and using the internet that I see is that old people should not be doing it. The one thing that would have to be done would be to make sure that if we are pushing to allow everyone to use the internet that we make sure that they aren't using it for dumb things. There is no advantage to me being able to watch stupid crap on youtube than someone who can't because they don't have the internet. If we give people the internet and all they do is screw around on it then I think it's too bad for them.

IMS Minor

If I've learned one thing from the IMS courses I've taken at college for my minor it's that I have little to no artistic ability whatsoever. I'm currently taking a flash animation course and saw some of the stuff that other people were doing and realized just how bad mine was. I have also taken two courses about designing websites that have ended up in good grades for me, but I can't help but think that the garbage I made would never be allowed on the internet because of how bad it looks. One of my computer science teachers recently discussed how user interfaces should be left to graphic designers and the code should be left to programmers and I certainly agree with him. I suppose I will finish with my IMS minor and be happy if I never have to try to create something visually appealing, because I really can't stand looking at the crap I've created so far.