Panther Beach

This beach is a pretty cool beach. Some friends and I went and had a little eating/drinking done as well as stuck our feet in the ridiculously cold water. There was a good amount of people there this time. It’s not as crowded as the Boardwalk which is really really dirty. I’d upload some pics but there isnt a Card Reader here at my friends house. I’ll upload them tomorrow. I’m tired from the sun and burned to hell. Ciao.

HOT HOT HOT!

The Bay Area hasn’t seen heat like this in a while. Strangely enough, it feels good to have this kinda of heat. The heat just re-assures me that summer is-or is coming right around the corner. I found my back still sticking to the seat as the air conditioner in my car is on full blast. That has got to be one of the nastiest feelings in the world. So tomorrow I’ll be going to Panther beach in Santa Cruz with some friends. We’ve been going there a lot for two summers now. It’s a really nice beach thats pretty exclusive. I looked up driving directions on google and I just found out it’s an ‘optional-nude’ beach. I didn’t know they had nude beaches in Santa Cruz! Somehow I’m not looking forward to seeing people there, as we have never seen anyone else there the times we’ve went. The sight of vaginas, penises and breasts moving freely on a beach doesn’t paint a really pretty picture in side my head. Okay enough with the nasty talk…

Are you In? Linked in that is…

After a week or so, I find that linked in provides me with no use whatsoever. It’s not because I found my mom on the site, but its because I find the interface to be rather confusing. I know it MIGHT provide something good for me in the future, but as of now, I’m tired of signing up for all these websites and my inbox hates me right now because I’m getting so much junk.

My LinkedIn page

Better late than never

Its pretty late and as I’m finishing my final project I thought shoot, I forget to blog about what it was like working on this project.

Getting Started:
When I was presented with this project, I really didn’t know what to do it on. I was pressed for time and it was hard to get inspired by something. Then I thought I could maybe integrate something I do everyday for this project. Something I do on a normal basis is DJ’ing/Producing. Why not do a multimedia project on giving a few pointers about something DJ-related.

Progressing into the project:
As I started thinking, there’s a lot to cover for the art of DJ’ing so I had to narrow it down somehow. I really swear by Pioneer DJ products as they are the industry-standard and pretty much the best there is. I decided to make my site for Pioneer DJ users. I would put up a couple videos on the site with some tutorials on how to work the gear such as a mixer or a CDJ player. I would also need to have a webpage setup which I probably was going to design somehow.

Assessment:
After working on this project I noticed a few things. One would be that WordPress is a really powerful tool. It can pretty much set up to function like a website. I designed a website on my mac but for some reason the FTP wasnt working for the school’s server so I said ’screw it’ and made a wordpress site. As far as everything goes, I thought I have a pretty cool concept which is kind of like a tutorial or a informational site about a very popular product. Even though it looks a bit bare, I’m sure with a little TLC it can look like one of the more professional looking sites out there. I think that it did utilize some of the skills learned in the class such as blogging, podcasting, photoshop, and capturing some kind of video. I actually enjoyed the whole pain in the arse feeling of typing and dealing with different types of media and I think this is a great way to get the brains working for students.

Multimedia Project Site:
Click here

Social Media Networks. When will this end?!

So after about 2 or so weeks of extensive friend adding on my Facebook page, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t particularly enjoy this type of social media website. I can hear my friend screaming at me: “Why Ryan?! Facebook is uber-cool because I get to write on your wall!” already. Well folks, I’m not too keen on the whole privacy thing. Let me explain. Everytime you update your profile with new goodies, whether they may be changing what your interests, favorite movies or music are, everyone that you are friends with, will know. Did I mention they will also know about the 3am drunken comment that you left to your crush (not that I’ve done that)? They will and theres no way you can hide it.

Comparing [Facebook] to Myspace I’d say Myspace is starting to catch on to the whole ‘add apps to your page’ thing. And you can pretty much customize and hack-away at your page to get it to what you want to look like. Facebook however offers an ‘almost’ ad-free web experience which I liked. I also praise the folks at Facebook with offering very fast web browsing. I can’t tell you enough times that MySpace takes 50-million-years to load a freakin’ page. Not to mention the extra 20-million it takes to load all the lag-shit photobucket-hosted photos everyone has on their pages.

So I have both my newly created Facebook account and my ’still running’ by comment and spam driven MySpace page. Check them out:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1197555144
http://www.myspace.com/ryanmendozamusic

Verdict: MySpace over Facebook.

Web 2.0 Anxiety [for 4/1]

In other news, I’m still trying to make up some assignments and some of which are blogs.

David Pogue’s, column about companies taking advantage of Web 2.0 was an interesting one. I liked how they used the instant feedback with the laptops. I thought it was an ingenious idea to get the audience participating in the question of why their companies are not taking advantage of Web 2.0. I thought that the responses that people made such as “not enough money”, “no resources”, “no ROI”, etc were valid reasons to not take advantage of the tecnology but it really does hurt the company because since companies are striving for excellent response from their supporters or customers, Web 2.0 can ultimately provide that information for them. Comments on blogs about company updates just to see what people think about ideas or products can be instant valuable information for a company. Companies can just moderate the comments like how people do in forums to keep the peace on their website with only educated and constructive posts.

Parsing the Future [for 2/28]

Beatblogging is a pretty cool site for you to check out some news. I think how they structure the site such as having people from different news sites blogging or sharing information all within a social network is an ingenious idea for people to utilize. With Web 2.0, social networks have broken the barrier between people around the world and the connections they can have with one another by sharing that information in a community.

Flight Delays was also a really cool little site about the amount of delayed flights to and from McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada. It basically shows data for the last 12 months and also provides information on how much time will be spent at security check point times at the airport. The map also lets you rollyour mouse arrow over airports in the United States to see how many flights do get delayed and the average delay time data for them as well as their ranking.

Living up to the [hoops] hype

With the internet slowly becoming the main source for news around the world, it’s getting harder and harder to figure out if the ‘news’ is actually from a reputable source. Is it a blog or is it from a real journalist? Can a blogger be a journalist? Is a blogger a journalist?

2. Hoopshype.com is a site which provides basketball news to people via a small (yet informative) site. With the wide varietly of topics covered about basketball on Hoopshype.com I believe that the information on the site is indeed that of journalism. These stories are not made up and since they are in fact writes of some sort [journalists perhaps?] and publishing these works on the web it should be looked at as reliable journalism. Also, many of the columnists of the site are from other sites like ESPN, LA Times, etc. Hoopshype is sort of ESPN-esque in the kinda of style of writing and reporting.
3. With the success of Hoopshype.com the future of sports journalism will without a doubt have more sites like these pop up in the future. Because Hoopshype.com has so much information about the sport of basketball, I can see it as the one-stop-shop for basketball news. Typically one would read stories from various sites like NBA.com or sports.YAHOO.com but this site really brings it all together with many views. Other sports will benefit from this idea in the future and more ‘hybrid’ sports journalism sites will appear.

Comparison: Basketballblogs.org is very similar to that of Hoopshype.com where different stories form everywhere are posted on the site.

My Lunch

I created a short little bit about what I had for lunch yesterday. I made it with iMovie so that was kinda cool.

Click here (not the picture) to view my short clip on what I had for lunch.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Right off the bat I could see that the Cluetrain Manifesto was written at a time when the Internet was in the early stages of its life, around 1999-ish. It explained how companies should communicate to the consumers and what consumers expect from the company though the internet. One point I liked was number 95 which states that everyone is waking up, getting connected, and watching but they certainly are not waiting. This brings up the particular lifestyle us Americans lead now. The world we live in is moving at such a fast pace where everyone wants to have content delivered to them ‘now’ and not later. Sites such as youtube provide people with the capabilities to view [flv] video at a high rate rather than waiting for it to download off of a server and then watching it on your computer. The Internet provides content to be delivered at blazing speeds today where as yesterday’s internet had us waiting, twiddling our thumbs, and yawning at your computer desks.