Thursday, May 18, 2006

Graduation Day

Well, I just got my Bachelor of Arts from Utah State University. Several years ago someone asked me what I was going to do with my degree when I got it. I responded, "I'm going to hang it on the wall!"

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Screencasting

Here is a screencast about Google's translation service.

I tried linking to the html file, but it just lagged and didn't show up on either firefox or IE. So, linking to the swf, it works fine.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Video Sharing Assignment

Though the lessons were taught out of order, I believe this is the assignment to post for today.

I would have posted the other video, but I don't know if anyone else in the commercial wants to be available to the world. So I made a silly little video to meed the requirements.

my video on youtube

Monday, March 27, 2006

Video Podcast

This is the first commercial I was in that was broadcast all over Utah. We entered a contest for the 107.5 radio station in Salt Lake City. We won the best-use-of-nudity award. It didn't pay anything, but we were aired on the WB.

Show Us Your End 107.5 FM

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

My first podcast

Here is my first podcast. It's got my "wanna-be-a-dj" juices flowing. I love farce and satire so I think maybe one day soon I'll get a podcast feed going of radio spoofs and parodies.

Shannon's first podcast

Thursday, March 09, 2006

podcast subscriptions

Video podcasts tend to fill up the hard drive pretty quick. In just a week I have over a Gig of podcasts. It obviously requires some maintenance or the drive will fill up fast. I subscribed to several podcasts. The one that I will mention here is the Izzy Video podcast.

www.izzyvideo.com

I like how his kids are always sick of being on camera. In episode 22, he finally makes an apearance but promises his kids will be back. Since I work with video productions at Fast Forward Charter High, I thought this was a great set of podcasts. It's very good for newbies in the video world.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Personalized Maps

mapbuilder.net is where I went to create the map of all the places I've lived in the US. I thought about listing all the places I've been, but for the sake of time, I stuck with the former. Here is the link to my personalized map:

Places that I've lived

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Photo Sharing

I've tried photo sharing and I have some reservations. I like taking pictures, but I don't trust the privacy of the web. I think if I get too much info out there I could end up making life really easy for an identity thief. I looked at some photo albums of different people and if you were in the business of ID theft, it would be pretty easy to steal their ID. I know a person should be safe, but they also shouldn't be conspiracy theorists. So, I'll try to relax a bit as I share these nondescript photos from my collection.

www.23hq.com/slimwhitman

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Del.icio.us

I just spent a week using del.icio.us and I have mixed reviews. Over a long period of time, it is much more useful than the "bookmarks" available in a browser. For the sake of making bookmarks of commonly visited websites, I prefer using the links toolbar and abbreviating them. It's more accessible having the links right there at the top. For the sake of being able to find popular sites the del.icio.us site is helpful in that it offers you the ability to search for other's bookmarks. It's also a nice way to log an important site when you are out of the office. I like the portability of the del.icio.us site. After a week of trying the bookmarking tool I think I will use both the links toolbar and the delicious site.

del.icio.us/shannonthurston


P.S. This was my favorite part of the superbowl.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Wiki Wiki

Well, for this weeks assignment I had to find a way to contribute to Wikipedia. I looked at a subject I knew well, Charter Schools, but then I realized it is edited by a lot of teachers and there shouldn't be any errors. Then I tried searching for words that could have been misssspelllled, but to no avail. Finally I found the Utah State University page and found a couple of miniscule grammatical changes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_State_University#Media

I'm sure if I searched a few more pages I would have found more errors, but it seems to me that wikipedia is well cared for. It is nicer than a textbook or page that is created by Encarta or Britannica because if there is a typo I can change it right away. Most people wouldn't be willing to send an e-mail to the webmaster of the others to tell them of errors. That seems to be a big advantage of Wikipedia.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Information Overload

After a week of subscribing to almost twenty RSS feeds, I have learned that there is too much information available. I like having all of the latest news available, but I need to trim the fat out of my aggregator. I don't know if I can handle more than one or two feeds per topic.

On my bloglines account I found a couple of feeds that repeat stories two or three times, or the same story comes up each day for a couple of days in a row. Then, there is the issue of sorting through all of the uninteresting garbage. Though RSS is troublesome at times, it's definitely better than reading through all the different sites, or sorting through several newspapers.

Here are some things I found during my first week of RSS:
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson

http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/20/autonomous-non-violent-agents-protest-bots-who-spread-peace/

Monday, January 16, 2006

How to get people to read your blog

After writing my first entry, I was naively hoping someone would visit. I figured at least a spambot might be interested in my opinion, but nothing. So, I decided to research a little and try to find some information about "getting traffic to your blog". There was one thing that stood out to me which seems to be true about most publicity. Make it controversial!

So, in order to get traffic to this blog, maybe I should talk about sexist or racial subjects. If I were to say that I hate someone or something, maybe people would want to read it. Blogs seem to work like the nightly news; It has to have sex, violence or controversy or it just won't sell to the audience.

Maybe it's better for me to be in solitude, or maybe I will open up and actually start some controversy.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

The First of Many

This happens to be the first blog entry I have ever made. That might not sound strange to some, but to people that know me, it seems a bit weird. Since I am a professional computer geek people think that I would be doing everything that involves technology. Honestly I get burned out at times and I just want to do something that doesn't require electricity. So, instead of blogging, I have taken up a hobby of woodcarving. I have carved some pacific-islander style faces into a birch cane that I found right after the spring flooding this last year. I really enjoy it, and it's a great break from the constant connection to the information world. Don't get me wrong, I like technology, that's why I've based my career around it, but sometimes you have to get away.