IT (un-)enabled Group Projects

Four subjects – three group projects. A nightmare for most of the students, including me. Countless meetings, even more mails and a million different documents containing the work of several people. As a Business and IT student I am lucky to have some insight into solutions that make life easier, but unfortunately most of my fellow students (especially the business ones) use a laptop and Office 2003. That’s it. Versioning is a nightmare and real IT enabled collaboration is just not existing. I tried to foster the use of Office Live where groups and work together online – the perfect solution and it’s free (for now). But most people say we don’t need that and that it’s too complicated. Bull*?$!. It’s so easy and it safes time because you don’t have to meet every other day and follow up with countless emails. Especially as a student no matter what your major is, you should know and use the new solutions for collaboration. Everyone’s using Facebook, hardly anyone uses Google Docs or Microsoft’s Office Live.

Common Sense and IT

<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> ********* see!
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
<Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> awesome!
<AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
<Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******’s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
<AzureDiamond> oh, ok.

Back in the Saddle!

My second semester at Bond started on Monday. As part of my assessment for Web Applications I’ll be posting topics of interest for this course regularly from now on.

This post is intended to provide an overview over my level of knowledge with Web Applications. Studying Business and IT I’ve always been interested in computers and the web. I started designing some web sites back in high school and used these skills throughout different internships. In 2005, I redesigned the website of the Boston-based non-profit United Planet. In addition to that I designed a Joomla! based portal in order to stay in touch with my friends. The site can be found at here. I mainly used Macromedia software (now Adobe) and Photoshop. I am particular interested in Adobe Flash because the possibilities with this software are nearly endless. I’ve spent some time programming basic games in Flash but couldn’t really find the time for it lately. My diploma thesis back in Germany was about Web 2.0 and the new possibilities it offers for organizations to communicate both in- and outwards. If you are interested in this topic and fluent in German I’ll be more than happy to send you a copy…

Make sure you check out this video which explains the concept of Web 2.0 and a lot of topics we are going to tackle in the upcoming weeks.