JerseySmarts.com

Video: The Trailer for Cyber-Seniors Documentary

Joe — Sat, 16 Jan 2016 18:07:28 +0000

I saw this video on YouTube and I loved it, so I’m sharing it here. There’s something really interesting about trying to connect a senior population to modern technology.

I’m going to look into this documentary to see if there is a way that I can watch it. I think it looks interesting!

Start the Weekend Right Link Series – Volume #1, Edition #5

Joe — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 03:21:55 +0000

Here are another set of links to help you start your weekend the right way. Again, just a reminder that if you find that you visit several websites on a daily basis, then I recommend you consider signing up for a free Feedly account. I don’t get anything for promoting Feedly – I just love the service and I think that it’s really a great RSS aggregator (even better than the old Google Reader). And if you’re using another RSS aggregator, then please consider following JerseySmarts.com at http://www.jerseysmarts.com/feed/ or if you’re already on Feedly, then you can follow us by clicking here.

Now, enjoy the links! If you come across any interesting links, then please share them with us in the comments section below.

Start the Weekend Right Link Series – Volume #1, Edition #5
Monmouth Slated For Four Games on ESPN Family of Networks, Home Schedule Set, The Hawks Nest
After Tony Graham retired from the Asbury Park Press, a host of new writers were tasked with updating his blog following Monmouth University sports. One of those writers is Josh Newman. Josh recently posted an update regarding the upcoming basketball season and when you can see the Hawks in action. If you’re an MU basketball fan, then you’ll want to check out this update.

With Practice Opening Friday, Five Things to Watch at Monmouth, The Hawks Nest
Another update on Monmouth basketball from The Hawks Nest. This update focuses on what to look for now that the practice season is upon us. Check it out – Josh Newman did a good job of what to be aware of heading into the new season especially as it relates to which players to keep an eye on and what positions they are playing this year.

Rutgers-New Brunswick Named Among the Ugliest College Campuses in the Country, Long Branch-Eatontown Patch
As an alumnus of Rutgers University, this one is no surprise. Rutgers University ranked #26 on the list of the ugliest campuses in the nation – and that’s the truth. The New Brunswick campus is a wreck of buildings strewn all over the place in and around downtown New Brunswick and points north. There’s barely a “campus” feel to Rutgers, rather it seems more like you’re trying to navigate between college buildings and random buildings. Of course, it still looks better than Rowan University down in Glassboro… they were ranked as the #10 ugliest campus in the nation!

Kula Cafe Thriving on Springwood, Asbury Park Sun
Some good news coming out of the West Side of Asbury Park: it looks like the new Kula Cafe is doing great things for the residents on the West Side and the Midtown neighborhood of Neptune Township. If you haven’t heard of the Kula Cafe and you live in the area, then you should read the story above and check the place out. I had a business lunch there a few months ago and it was fantastic. The service was great and the food was phenomenal. It was a very enjoyable experience and I would go back again.

Symbols, DoghouseDiaries
This was just a fun little game to play. It’s not so much of a game as it is a memory test. Give it a look – I think you’ll really enjoy it!

The Worst Thing You Do Before Bed, Men’s Health
I’m always trying to learn more about getting better sleep. This short article in Men’s Health talks about the worst thing that we do before we go to bed. And it’s no surprise – the worst thing that we do is engage in electronic forms of entertainment that stimulate our brains when we should really be trying to relax and calm down. Check out this quick article – and get some sleep!

How Hyper-Threading Works (and When You Want It In Your PC), Lifehacker
As you may know, I’m writing this entry on my brand new laptop. One of the things that sold me on buying this laptop was the fact that it had every single bell and whistle that is currently offered on the market (except for a touchscreen, which I didn’t want anyway). Well, I’m aware enough to admit that most of the technology behind these machines has passed me by, but videos like the one linked here help me understand what these bells and whistles actually mean. So if you’re like me in that you used to be the king (or queen) of technology and now you find yourself more like a silent, somewhat knowledgeable observer, then you may want to watch this quick video to learn what hyper-threading means.

Don’t Cheer the Rise of the Adjunct, Minding the Campus
A recent study came out suggesting that tenured professors do a poorer job of educating their students and keeping young students in their disciplines than adjunct professors. As an adjunct professor, this is good news for me because it means that my services should be in higher demand! The results of this study really don’t surprise me because anyone who has ever been to college and run smack into a stodgy old professor who received his/her tenure decades ago knows how incredibly horrible they are at teaching. I can tell you story after story of horrible professors that I had to endure when I was going to college – many of whom are still teaching at the campus! For some of these professors I’ve been told in confidence that certain other administrators and faculty members have complained and tried to get the poor performers fired, but tenure is a pretty hard thing to break. Anyway, this study was interesting – if you like this stuff, then I think you’ll enjoy reading this one.

Revitalizing the Church, His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan
Recently, Father I. Michael Bellafiore wrote an article in the Washington Post about revitalizing the church. Father Bellafiore writes about ten ways to revitalize the church and those ten ways do not include the things that we normally hear from local reformers. I read the blurb through His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s blog, which is linked above. You can go straight to Father Bellafiore’s article by clicking the link in this blurb.

Update a Vintage Boombox with a Line-In to Play Music from Your Phone, Lifehacker
To end this week’s update, I thought I’d provide a fun link for those of you who are looking for a cool do-it-yourself project. If I had the time and materials, I’d give this a shot. It looks like it could be fun to try to make this contraption!

Get your weekend started right by checking out these links, starting a new, free Feedly account, and/or adding the blogs above (and JerseySmarts.com, too) to your existing Feedly or other RSS aggregator account. Enjoy!

Yahoo is Shutting Down GeoCities?!

Joe — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:30:12 +0000

Yahoo! is shutting down its free website service – GeoCities. For those of you that don’t know, GeoCities is/was one of the oldest free website companies on the internet. It was a website system that tried to build “communities” of different web pages which had similar themes. For example, many of you know that I started creating websites with a personal homepage called The Balrog’s Lair. At the time I started it (sophomore year of high school, I think) I was a huge wrestling fan and I intended to write some type of wrestling stuff on that homepage. As such, I was categorized in the “sports and recreation” neighborhood which was titled, “Colosseum.” In fact, the URL of my first web page was www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Track/5869/ Pretty unique, huh?

Literally thousands of young web entrepreneurs started out with free websites built at GeoCities. Most of us, of course, started on the site when it was privately owned. However, after a number of years (and a healthy number of subscribers), the entire system was sold to Yahoo and things went downhill from there. Yahoo cut the amount of bandwidth allowed to users and immediately instituted a pay-for-service option that gave the user essentially what they used to have for free. Lucky for me, it was around this time that I started dabbling in the actual purchase of domain names and hosting packages to manage my web needs.

Yahoo also shortened the URLs (which may have been best for everyone involved), but they shortened them to your user id. I don’t think that I hide my name from anyone on this blog, but I didn’t want my wrestling website to become geocities.com/jpalazzolo. How weird would that be?

Anyway, here is the message I received from Yahoo about the closing of GeoCities:

Very sad. Hopefully, someone will come along and try to buy the GeoCities asset from Yahoo and breathe some new life into this once great service for young web entrepreneurs and people who were just looking for a little place of their own online.

Is the PC a Thing of the Past?

Joe — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:16:15 +0000

USA Today had a great article a few days back that talked about the rapidly declining PC and laptop sales in the Japanese technology market. It’s a pretty interesting read so you may want to check it out if you get a few free minutes.

The article makes a great point regarding the growing internet capabilities of handheld devices like cell phones and video game systems. It also points out the new abilities for digital cameras to connect directly to televisions and to printers without having to go through a computer.

Again, it’s pretty interesting so take a read if you get a chance, but from my view – I don’t think that the PC is going the way of the dinosaur any time soon. There are too many uses for the machine for it to become obsolete. I do, however, think that prices of new computers need to drop dramatically. And I’m not talking about paying $250 for a personal computer with a 15 inch LCD screen and substandard parts, either. I mean when Dell announces a new XPS and HP announces a new high-end laptop, these things can’t be priced at $2,000! There’s no way to keep the larger home computer market sustainable at that price range – it just can’t happen.

Granted, there are increased costs with creating a higher-end computer and that is understandable, but when computers that were high-end 3 or 4 years ago are still priced out of the general consumer market, that’s a problem. That said, Best Buy is offering a $200 computer for Black Friday, but the specs on it don’t look all that exciting.

First of all, it’s an eMachines computer. I know many folks (old college buddies) that have had problems with these computers, though I also know fewer folks who have not had a problem with them. As the article linked above says:

Don’t expect the world though. The PC is rumored to be powered by an Intel Celeron running at 2.66 Ghz (meaning no efficient and powerful ‘Core’ for you), comes with 512 megabytes of RAM (which is the bare minimum for doing just about anything on a computer these days), has a measly 80 Gigabyte hard drive, and it has no DVD burner.

No DVD burner? It’s 2007, right?

Anyway, check out those articles – they are pretty interesting reads.

Trying Ubuntu 6.10

Joe — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 16:04:40 +0000

Ubuntu is an operating system based off of a Linux platform that is offered for free download at the company website. Since my desktop computer crapped out on me this summer (I lost just about all of my saved e-mails going back to the late 90’s when it died), I thought that it might be time for a change – at least for the desktop. My laptop that I’m writing this on is still running Windows Media Center and I plan to upgrade to Vista when that system is available.

Anyway, downloading Ubuntu was a bit of a pain because it began downloading at incredibly slow speeds on Firefox and after waiting an hour and a half and getting only half of the system downloaded, it just stopped. At that point I flipped over to Internet Explorer and the 700MB system downloaded in about a half an hour. Hmmm…maybe Microsoft knows when you’re pissed off about their operating system and they try to impress you on the way out!

The next step was to burn the Ubuntu .ISO to a DVD, which was easy enough. I used this DVD to install the software on my desktop computer in a process that was simple enough to do, yet was not as graphically-friendly as the Windows installation. By that I mean the computer just sat there and installed the system without letting me know whether or not anything was happening. Having a Microsoft-mindset, I figured that no news was bad news and almost turned off the machine! But, as it turns out, the operating system did install on the computer.

The only thing left was to try out the new system…which I couldn’t even do! After restarting my computer to give the new OS a shot, the “Bug Buddy” continually popped up and told me that the Gnome interface wasn’t working. What does that mean? It means that the equivalent of the Windows Start Menu and toolbar would not load. I struggled with this problem for about a half an hour and then I had to go to sleep, but not before I submitted a report to the Ubuntu folks. Oh, and through my browsing on the internet, I’ve found that others have had the same problems.

So my thoughts on the Ubuntu 6.10 operating system are none. I do not suggested downloading it or installing it until these basic bugs are fixed. I may try downloading and installing the 6.06 version of Ubuntu, but I think it’s a little disingenuous to put up a “new” operating system that doesn’t quite operate!

I’ll post more on my Ubuntu experience when there’s more to post.