Author: James

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LaGuardia Event: Ryan Charles speaks

Over the past few months I have been working with Janice Karlen, a colleague of mine from the LaGuardia Business and Technology Department, to arrange for a guest speaker to come in and speak to our students. Janice thought it would be a great idea to collaborate on a joint event since there is a natural synergy between the Business and Technology and the New Media Technology students. As a result of Janice’s connections we were lucky enough to secure Ryan Charles, the Co-Founder of Consmr.com and former head of mobile strategy at Zagat. Ryan was Continue reading “LaGuardia Event: Ryan Charles speaks”

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Launch

So last night I get in late from teaching an evening class and my son meets me at the door in damn near a panic. He tells me they are finalizing the pre-order sales for “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” right now and we have to get to Gamestop so that we can get in line number for the 12am launch. Now keep in mind that I was hungry and tired before I started earlier teaching that evening, so at this point this is the last thing I wanted to hear. Son or not I almost told Continue reading “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Launch”

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HTML 5 and CSS 3 Training Class

In order to enhance the knowledge that I acquired in January when I took the WordPress theme design class at Noble Desktop,  I decided to sign up for an HTML5 and CSS3 course. The industry is rapidly moving towards these new standards due to the advanced feature sets in HTML5 and CSS3 which allows for advanced animation, as well as for audio and video files to natively be supported in the browser without the need for third party plug-ins like Adobe’s Flash. While I didn’t feel like spending the money for the class, I needed to get up to speed on the new standards in order update the LaGuardia New Media curriculum, and to complete a much needed design update to my own web site. The class was once again held at Noble Desktop, and was once again, led by an amazing teacher named Victoria Torres. The two day course took us through the process of building an site from scratch using these new standards.

One of the unforeseen benefits of the class was that HTML 5 and CSS 3, when used in conjunction with a new mobile framework called PhoneGap, is becoming an excellent way of building mobile applications for both Android and iOS devises. PhoneGap was recently purchased by Adobe and was integrated into the latest version of Dreamweaver, release 5.5. This is a huge development for me since I can leverage our existing curriculum and begin to instruct students in the basics of mobile application develop by using PhoneGap.

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The 2011 NYC Comic Con

The NYC Comic-Con was in town so the kids and I engaged in our yearly ritual. They had been looking forward to it since we went last year. The wife tagged along again for her second year. She will never admit it but I think she is starting to enjoy the madness as well. The kids had a blast as usual.

I was shocked how many people that ran into at the event that I knew from academia and business. I guess being a nerd is no longer a bad thing. The photos from the weekend can be found below….. Continue reading “The 2011 NYC Comic Con”

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Adobe eMagazine and Digital Publishing Training

In one of my earlier posts from a few months back I discussed how I took a group of my students to Noble Desktop  to view a presentation on digital books and ePublishing. What I didn’t mention was that the following day I signed myself up for two of the courses the Noble Desktop offers on creating eBooks and digital magazines with the new tools available from Adobe. Well, I recently completed both classes and was highly impressed with the tools currently available. Adobe has made some interesting strides in creating software that will enable designers and writers to easily publish contents in numerous formats on multiple platforms.

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9/11: Ten years later

The Towers

I can’t believe that it has been ten years since the 9/11 terrorist attack. So many things have changed since that day that I sometimes have a hard time remembering how things were prior to the attack. About four years ago, in one of the first posts I made on this blog, I spoke about my recollections of that day. In regards to that day, not much has changed for me since then. I am still uncomfortable in large crowds. I still don’t like traveling on public transportation. And I still worry whenever my children are out of my line of sight.

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Norwegian Birthday?

I am not sure that Norwegians understand the whole concept of “birthdays”. Usually on birthdays people take it easy and relax. However my wife and mother-in-law got a real kick out of working me out on my day of rest.

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DJ Offbeat on the one and two!

I seriously think that I am addicted to sites like Groupon and Zozi. Since the wife and kids left for summer camp I have been buying trial memberships to about half a dozen places like Bikram Yoga and City Wing Tsun. Well yesterday I indulged myself in yet another of my secret desires, to become a world class DJ by taking an Introduction to Digital DJ’ing class at the Dubspot with DJ Reborn and DJ Spictacular.

I have always Continue reading “DJ Offbeat on the one and two!”

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Everybody have fun tonight…. everybody Wing Chun tonight!

City Wing TsunLately I have been eager to get back into the flow of training regularly in the martial arts.  Due to the ongoing physical therapy my knees have been feeling better. So yesterday I decided to visit the headquarters of City Wing Tsun to take a look at their curriculum. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Wing Chun, it is a highly dynamic fighting style that makes use of unconventional hand and foot strikes that are excellent for close quarter combat. It was originally designed by a woman and stresses speed and precision over pure brute force. The unorthodox hand and foot techniques, when applied properly, tend to cause fits for opponents during fights. I had trained in Wing Chun many years back under Sifu Rick and had been eager to try the style again. I have incorporated some of the basics of the system into my own fighting style with some limited success, but I always felt that I was missing some important components and wanted to expand my knowledge of Wing Chun further.

I had been looking for a decent school ever since Sifu Rick moved away and stopped teaching Continue reading “Everybody have fun tonight…. everybody Wing Chun tonight!”