The final presentation went very well I thought and I can say that I have come a long way since the beginning of the class.  As I look back this class was extremely helpful with creating my online identity and making myself known to the world.  I would recommend this class to anyone that is interested in technology.

On a lighter note that drives the point home, during graduation, every speaker mentioned Facebook and Twitter at least two times in each speech.

I am getting ready to head to class for my final presentation.  The butterflies are definately present.  I am ready to my college legacy to end and it will in about 2 hours.

Today James is giving his final presentation in our CIT 499 class.  He tried to do a presentation on creating an iPhone app and soon found out that it’s programming language is very hard to learn with no formal training.  Opting out of that he created a Facebook page for the CIT department.  He was able to do a mashup through xFruits to update the CIT page with RSS feeds.  He also integrated Twitter and Flickr onto the page as well.  The new CIT@IUPUI page on facebook is very cool and thanks to James should be used by the department for a long time.

Today my paper will be turned in.  This is the last paper of my college career but seems like one of the best ones.  It hasn’t been easy by any means but the topic has been taught very well and I am starting to understand what is encompassed by it more and more.  The last and final hurdle will be my presentation.  It is supposed to be 20 minutes but I don’t think mine will be that long.  I can’t even talk about stuff that I do everyday for 20 minutes.  I will do my best and I know that I will succeed.

As the school year is coming to an end we are starting to wrap things up in class.  We talked about an article called Attention Economy: All You Need To Know.  In this article it talked about the Attention Economy and how it “is a marketplace where consumers agree to recieve services in exchange for their attention.”  It expounded on the ideas that news and everyday life is personalized to us.  News reports still tell the news but they also show us advertisements.  The same is true with search engines and other items that we use everyday.

Next we discussed how one small little incedent can lead to a major disaster for you online identity.  How one man was seen reading a book about anti-KKK and how they were defeted by Notre Dame students but interpreted by someone else to be something completely different and how that can cause other people to judge you wrongly.  Inevitably destorying your reputation and changing your life.

I was prepared to come home and get cranking on my CIT499 project and I walk into my office and notice that there are about 200 IE windows open and my computer has locked up.  GREAT!!  I was able to restart in Safe Mode and copy my paper to a thumb drive.  I scanned it on my Mac and there were no threats found.  Thank God!  Running anti-virus and anti-spyware now.

We watched a video today from TED (Technology Entertainment Design) that was of Ted Berners-Lee talking about the “New Web”.  He is the person that started the World Wide Web writing code as a side project.  He said that the Web needs more data and explained the difference between Information and Data.  Information is like your name, where you live, and your eye color, but Data is like a hyperlink on where you live that will take you to another page to learn about where you live which will take you to another page that talks about the economy in your area and so forth.  He said that Government Data will be on the Internet as linked data soon.  Also explained that everyone puts data on the Internet all of the time and doesn’t even realize it.  Everytime you link anything on Facebook or MySpace you are contributing Data to the Internet.  Every aspect of our lives is linked data.

I started writing my paper for my final project.  My plan is to write one to two pages a night.  This feels weird because I’m usually doing this that weekend before it is due.  Good thing I finally got this figured out during the last class of my college career!  Anyway, I am learning more that I had ever though I would from this class.  As I get further into these references this stuff gets really deep.  I am taking some side notes on ways to take this further at work so hopefully this will lead to bigger and better things there too.

All I can say is that it was a big waste of time and money for me to go to NJ.  The plan was to convert seven people from Treo’s to Blackberrys on Thursday and Friday.  I was able to convert one on Thursday and none on Friday because of computer issues with other parts of the conversion that were out of my control.  At least I can say that I’ve been to New Jersey now.  That place is not a nice place and was happy to leave.  Now it’s back to writing my paper for class.

So, I just found out that I will be traveling to New Jersey on Wednesday so that I can train some people on Lotus Notes and setup about 6 Blackberrys.  I am excited because I have never been to New Jersey and sad because I am going to miss the first softball game of the year.  I guess that I should count this as a blessing because I have a secure job and love what I do.  Look out NJ because Memphis is coming!