Category: Technology

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Tech Training – Summer 2014

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The summer is the time when I brush up on old skills or take the plunge and develop new ones. The plan for this summer was to initially focus all of my time on Objective C and iOS app development. That was until Apple announced that they were migrating to a new programing language called Swift. Since the info on Swift is still in the preliminary stages I will now either brush up on my mobile responsive design and JavaScript animation or try and tackle Ruby on Rails. I am leaning towards the responsive design and JavaScript because it would better prepare me to finally get started with PhoneGap and cross-platform application development. Continue reading “Tech Training – Summer 2014”

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New Media Technology Class of 2014 – Project Lab

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Last night was the end of the semester for the Spring 2014 LaGuardia New Media Technology capstone class. Over the course of the semester we covered a great deal of material and developed some interesting final portfolios. This semester we even had one student with limited mobility participate remotely in a mixed hybrid/traditional format. I am amazed when I realize that this would not have been possible a few years ago.

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New Media Tech: LaGuardia Graduation 2014

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Another year has gone by and another group of New Media graduates are ready to move on to the next stage of their journey. After 13 years of teaching this never gets old. My students are the absolute best part of the job.

To all of the New Media Technology graduates, past and present, congratulations! Your old professor is proud of each of you. Be bold and do big things, because I still have my eyes on you!

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The 2014 LaGuardia Publishing Reception

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President Gail Mellow holds a publishing reception every year to acknowledge faculty at LaGuardia Community College for their academic and creative accomplishments. Once again I was happy to be counted among the scholars from the Humanities Department. The main article that I was being recognized for writing this year was one that was especially dear to me.

The peer reviewed article was highlighted in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy on the need for the academe to expand the definition of scholarship include the contributions of faculty engaged in digital media. I had invested a fair amount of blood, sweat and tears in researching this article and it was a great feeling to have it pay off.

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Mid Year Technology project: 2009 MacBook Pro Upgrade

2009 MacBook Pro

The majority of the weekend was taken up with birthday activities for the wife so I had to wait until Sunday evening to finally upgrade my old 2009 17 inch MacBook Pro with a new 1TB solid state drive (SSD). I love the design of the MacBooks of this era because the internal component are easily accessible. The upgrade took all of about 2 hours, and that included the data migration. I did the same for my 2007 MacBook Pro a few months back but it was far more difficult to install the SSD due to the construction of the case.

I decided it was time to upgrade since the price of SSDs are dropping as their Continue reading “Mid Year Technology project: 2009 MacBook Pro Upgrade”

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Facebook look back: Cool or not cool

In recognition of their 10th anniversary, the team over at Facebook added this new feature that enables users to automatically generate a video montage of the most memorable posts, pictures and events that they have shared since joining the popular social network. Considering that the video was probably compiled and edited via a set of programming based algorithms, I have to admit that I was impressed at the end result of my video. However, many of my friends had different takes on the new feature.

One of my friends likened the automated video creation to coming home and finding a stranger going through your photo albums and pulling random pictures out. Another friend called the videos Continue reading “Facebook look back: Cool or not cool”

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New Year Technology project: 2007 MacBook Pro Upgrade

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I am upgrading the standard hard drive in my 2007 17in MacBook Pro to a solid state drive (SSD). “Winona” has been showing her age in recently years and I wanted to spruce her up a little bit. And yes, I name my computer equipment (shout out to all of those Farscape fans out there).

The ram in “Winona” was already maxed out so the best bang for the buck upgrade in terms of price and performance was a solid state drive upgrade. Now that I have more leeway in my research and profession endeavors after receiving tenure, I am planning on doing more work with Apple related programs such as iBook Author, Adobe DPS, and xCode to develop interactive teaching applications for the students in the programs that I oversee. It will help to have a decent backup machine for basic tasks, and baring Apple Continue reading “New Year Technology project: 2007 MacBook Pro Upgrade”

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I shall call him…… Mini Me.

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The new Mac Mini I bought last Christmas is finally hooked up and added to the network. I waited because I wanted to use it in a shared dual monitor configuration with my custom built Windows system. I will be leveraging the quad core i7 Mac Mini with 16gb of ram more in the coming weeks. Because while I am more than capable of building and maintaining a Windows/Linux DIY desktop, I don’t want to spend time dealing with conflicting dll files, viruses, and system corruptions when I should be building something creative. So now I have been using the Mac Mini over the past few days and the only thought going through my mind is why in the hell did I wait so long to hook it up.

The Mac Mini  can’t play games for crap because of the under powered graphics card, but everything else is great. The system is Continue reading “I shall call him…… Mini Me.”

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I got 99 problems and this glitch is one!

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I hate having to spend time troubleshooting system problems when I need to be working on projects. I have some type of system corruption on my PC desktop so now I have spend hours either repairing (which rarely works) or reinstalling the OS. I really hate windows right now. I have stayed away from Windows 8 precisely because of the problems with it. While it isn’t as bad as the infamous Windows Vista, it is still pretty bad. Thus when I built my newest desktop I decided to stay with Windows 7. But even Windows 7 is still Windows.

So I spent the better part of the last two days troubleshooting a problem on my PC only to find out that there was a minor glitch in the system that caused a process to over consume memory. The process was spawned as the Windows 7 OS tried to generate thumbnail previews for the mp4 movie files in my library. I disabled the thumbnail process and replaced it with a third party freeware app to generate the previews and it fixed one of the major problems in about two minutes. My system is still only able to use half of the memory in the machine, but it is a start. Oh, did I mention that I am learning to hate Windows again.

The glitch had the system trying to generate the thumbnail previews until it got stuck in a loop. The loop caused the system to continue Continue reading “I got 99 problems and this glitch is one!”

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I might need to hit lotto

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Apple finally got around to offering pricing and purchasing options for the new MacPro on their web site. Unfortunately the listing is just before the Christmas holiday and a tiny bit too late for me to ask Santa, or my wife, to put one of them under the tree for me this year. This is probably a good thing since the fully maxed out version of the MacPro with a 12 core Intel Xeon E5 processor, 64 GB of ram, Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs,  and a 1 TB internal flash base hard drive clocks in at Continue reading “I might need to hit lotto”