Brickfish experiment

I am doing my Web 2.0 company project on Brickfish, which allows users to submit their original work, competing to have it featured in a campaign for various topics.
To experiment, I submitted a photograph that I took last year to the campaign called "Photoshoot Out 2". After I submitted it, a page came up suggesting that I post my submission to a blog of social profile, so I decided to embed it here.

Photo Shoot Out 2 Brickfish

Anti spyware programs

I used Ccleaner and Ad Aware to analyze any spyware on my computer, and clean it up. I knew that I had to have some spyware because I downloaded the latest version of AIM, which comes with a lot of unfavorable programs. So when I ran CCleaner and Ad Aware I was expecting them to find a lot of malware. The top screencap is from ccleaner, showing which unnecessary files should be deleted. Most of these are cookies and other temporary internet files. I was quite surprised to see files having to do with music on my computer. These .lnk files are shortcut files for executable programs on my computer. What surprises me the most regarding these is that as I was loading and using them, I did not even realize that these are pointless files for my computer that need not be there. In fact, for the short amount of time that I have had this laptop, the sheer amount of un needed files is appalling. Of course as expected further down the list on Ccleaner were my AIM spyware files, that I was very excited to get rid of.
As for Ad Aware, I was very surprised because...it found nothing! Though I do not understand why the results of the two programs are so drastically different, I am not complaining. Maybe I should be complaining, though, since this could mean that Ad Aware is a less intensive program than Ccleaner

Crossloop in business?

This week I explored a program called Crossloop, with which I accessed a classmates computer and made a video tutorial of how to use a new feature in Windows Vista. Crossloop is a very safe and powerful tool that can be very helpful for tech support, and projects that require group collaberation.
In the case of technical support, as technology gets more and more complex, it becomes increasingly harder to describe over the phone. With Crossloop, a technical support representative in Texas could take over and control the computer of a client in Boston, and see for themselves what the problem is. Sometimes experimenting for ones self is much easier than doing so transitively through the client.
Group projects can also reap benefits from Crossloop. If two people can not physically be in the same location at once, Crossloop is one of the several methods that the team can collaborate on a project simultaneously, especially if the project involves programming a complex piece of code, or any other computer based task.

One entrepreneurial thought to close with. One might venture to start a business fixing and or customizing people's computers without the need of the client's presence. Of course serious contracts would have to be involved prohibiting the entrepreneur to access the client's personal information: the transaction would take place on a professional strictly business level.

Using Jing to create a video tutorial

http://www.screencast.com/users/sweetyulz/folders/Jing/media/e270c364-82bf-4e73-b522-df30274f3bc6

Thank you to Brandon for the instructions on how to use the new sound mixer option in windows Vista!

And for a video of me actually using crossloop:

http://screencast.com/t/PCG7fROt

First video post!

Suffering from a lack of ideas regarding what to say, here is what I came up with:

First Class Thoughts

I am very excited to be a part of the IT101x course. We all just created blogs specifically for this class, and at the same time learned about OpenID. I just created my own from claimID even though I get an OpenID by default with the creation of this blog. I am very excited to learn more about technology and web 2.0!