U-Blog 10

This week I read the Computer World article "4 New Mini Laptops -- Which is Smallest, Lightest, Best?". I've been watching these new laptops, casually called "netbooks" for the past year. I myself would love to have one of these to carry around while traveling, that way I wouldn't have to carry my larger notebook. The netbooks in the article are really nice, but Dell has one called the Mini 9 that I believe tops the others. The Mini 9 has a long battery life, larger keys, and is able to hold larger hard drives if you choose not to go with a Solid State Drive. The thing to remember with these machines is that they are netbooks, not production PC's. They are only meant to be used with casual web surfing, emailing, and creating and editing documents.

U-Blog 9

This week I read the article "Companies Warm Up to Social Networks" from the Interesting Articles link in our Blog folder. I chose to read this article because the company that I work for has actually asked if we could set up a company group in Facebook. The reason being is so new employees could get a better idea of who is who in our company. We actually have around 20 or so employees that have Facebook accounts and are friends with each other. Some problems introduced in the article were to keep a close eye on employees putting too much information on their profile page that gives company competitors bits and pieces of valuable information. I believe that with rules set in place, employees could use these social networks to share company events, meetings and friendly comments on jobs that they have accomplished successfully.

U-Blog 8

Lately I have been gaining a strong interest in using Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects. I have been doing sermon slides for our church for about 8 months now and have used most of the free swag that came with our presentation software, Media Shout. Just recently, I have been spending more time searching for creative, inspiring, and relevant media to use for Sunday services on Google Images. I decided that I should spend that time making my own media, the kind I know in my head I want to use, instead of searching hours for something that looks kinda close to want I want. As a extra push towards that desire, I happened to come across a podcast that gives people such as myself information, tips, and tricks on how to make my own media. I have downloaded the 100% legal trial of all three softwares from Adobe's website and now, I can't stop creating random stuff. Its really cool to see the final product after hours of miticulous work. I plan on preposing to our church finance team to purchase this software so that I and hopefully others (if I can teach them) can use it to create new and inspiring media for worship.