What makes a community?

I don't know.

I've been asked this twice in different classes. I've come to the conclusion that a community is a group of people. That is the only thing that they have in common; from communities in your neighborhood or city, to threads and online games. They could have an interest in common, like: living in a particular city, playing the same game online, knowledge or interest in the same topic in a thread. But does that mean two people are a community? No -- maybe. It depends on one's definition of a community. League of Legends, a game a play online is supposedly a community. But many of them are trolls, and people who put other people down, or don't ever interact with other people in the "League community," can we say that it is a community then? Or do we just not count the people who don't contribute? Maybe a community also consists of people who contributes to the so-called "community." But either way, a community is whatever one deems it to be.

Dot.Com to Dot.Bomb

The boom and the bust disappoints me. I wish that the bust never happened, the world would be a very much more different place today if it didn't happen. It is disappointing that people pulled out when they heard of things such as Artificial Intelligence. Sure, it is a scary thing, but we'll never know until we try! I'm sure that, as a novice programmer, we could somehow "shut down" the program we made if given the programmer made an emergency shut down button in case the AI does not function as wished, or starts to take over the world. Imagine if the market never crashed; imagine if the research for AI started earlier. Where would we be today? And how many AI's would be around us? These questions makes me more excited and scared for the future as a beginning programmer. I hope to contribute immensely in this world of rapidly growing technology.

Startup.com

I'm not really sure what to say about this movie. It gave me a lot of insight on building a company. I might want to start my own one day, hopefully the market doesn't crash when I do. I shook my head at Khalil's management of the security of the company. I couldn't believe that someone broke in. We take care to secure out belongings but he didn't think about investing in a good security system? Blasphemous. 

I'm disappointed that the market crashed and took down many companies with it. I try to imagine how the world would be if every company that started during the time this movie was being made survived. Technology, the internet, the web, and everything related would be booming and changing our lives every minute!

HTML Adventure

Yesterday, I made a webpage for an assignment in my class. It brought me back to the years when I used to use myspace and customize my page however I wanted. I thought that it was difficult but now that I have more experience in coding, it's fairly easy. It only took me a few minutes. My friend actually gave me a book on HTML & CSS, and I'm really excited to study it and get better at making webpages. I'd like to experience being a web developer one day, I think that would be fun. I can't wait to be able to make complex webpages.

What I would not buy online

A question was raised in my TINST 207 class, "What wouldn't you buy online?" As I pondered about this question for about a week... I realized that I was taking a while to come up with an answer! Why? Because personally, I wouldn't mind buying my things online. It is safe-- safer now compared to when e-commerce was a new concept. We talked about how when e-commerce began, the only thing people ever bought were books! Why? Because they knew what they were getting and it wasn't too expensive to risk sending your information from one place to another where sniffers might find your credit card information. Somehow I never thought of my information's security twice anymore when buying things online. Even though, I am well aware of hackers and people who are trying to take take information from other people online. Businesses have made the transaction more secured, or have they? Back then, a person that takes the information that we send them has to manually input the information sent to them into another database. What if this person takes the information and keeps it for himself to use? That person has now been eliminated through the process of the transaction online. Most of the processes are now done by the machine therefore people became more willing to buy online.
After a lot of pondering, I thought I wouldn't buy my food online. I like grocery shopping and I want to choose the things that I eat. I need to make sure that they aren't rotten or as ripe as I want it to be. Maybe one day, we will be able to choose all of these things and select them online.

A Visit from Derek Young

On Oct 29, we had a visit from Derek Young. He is a very successful entrepreneur, being one of the founders of Exit 133 and the core runner of the Tacoma Runners.I thought Exit 133 was a very interesting swing at journalism. They strive to create dialogue on news between people; to create positive conversation, eliminating toxic environments of conversation that usually revolves with news; to enforce civil dialogue, without negative and hostile attitudes. I thought that it was great because when I think about the news, many will have different opinions on each news report. Political beliefs and social expectations by each person is different which will turn some dialogues into somewhat dialogues of opinions or sometimes people try to force their opinions on others. One of the most interesting things that came up in conversation was that Exit 133 tries to eliminate the yelling between people through banning quotes. They want people to listen and think about what others say, and not focus on a quote that could just distract people.

Derek also shared how he made his non-profit organization, Tacoma Runners events successful. He mentioned that they are a fast growing organization because of social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. They are now planning to have events abroad and I thought it was an exciting thought. It made me want to think about how I could help my club here in the University of Washington, Tacoma grow. I thought to myself, we have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and this year our club has grown twice its size since the previous year! Social media is a powerful tool if it is used properly. Also, he mentioned that he managed to get people to show up to a movie and fill the movie theater with people he mostly knew, it's crazy! After this visit, I definitely need to talk to my club's Public Relations officer to encourage using all of our social media accounts.

Scavenger Hunt Rush

Today in class, we had a scavenger hunt to look for information on many things. A quick glance at the sheet made it seem impossible to find any of the information. However, Andrew Fry says that it will be possible. so we searched for information in groups of three and lo and behold, every little thing that was on the sheet had information for us to find about the subject matter. Even the married sur name of someone's middle sister! However, when we think about this a little bit more... when we forget our passwords, some of the questions are "What is your mother's maiden name?" or "What city were you born in?" how hard is it to look up those information online? Should we be using these questions to retrieve our password? If it's this easy for someone to look up information about anyone, should this system be improved?