Politicians taking the virtual world by storm - week 10

I am quite sure that internet has change politics in many ways. And i would believe that it will change the way politics is done in Singapore more than ever. In Singapore, before the internet and social media, opposition team had little ways to reach out and communicate with the citizens, thus making it hard to convey their ideas or policies across. If they are caught rallying or out publicizing openly for the party without a license or permit, they will be caught and dealt with.

As a result, many has condemned the current ruling party and saying that this is not fair play. Contesting parties are extremely upset and fought for the rights to be able to reach out to their supporters and also to gain better recognition. Today, our government has somewhat relented or loosen the law (or were there simply no laws governing this) and has allowed opposition political teams to "connect" with their supporters via the internet, meaning that they are allowed to set up their own website or use various forms of social media to create awareness of their existences.

With only one means of legal medium to reach out to the public, i do believe this will still need some time to take off, but i believe, with so many young people being connected to the internet these days, this will bound to make changes to our political system, sooner or later. Concerned youths who serve the internet on local politics will get to know them, what they represent and their policies. And with the internet's popularity on the rise, it won't be surprising that internet MAY very well be our main source of information in the future, especially for the future generation. Having said so, this is the place to start "propagandalis-ing" the youths of tomorrow, and with its reach growing broader (and soon over taking the television), I really believe that if anywhere, internet is definitely a good place for politician to reach out to their supporters and potential supporters. The power of internet must not be undermined.

Those who undermined it, may very likely not emerge as victor, like hw McCain of the US had totally neglected it.

Internet Security - Week 9

If you are a frequent web surfer or browser, internet security is definitely something that a user should neglect. Negligence on internet security can cause a user a lot of problems and if serious can even end up as police cases.When we talk about internet security, we are talking about firewalls, virus protections, internet scams such as phishing, spams and many many more.

Without the help of virus protection softwares such as Norton Anti-Virus, AVG anti-virus, users

are much more prone and susceptible to viruses. It was said that the are millions of viruses online, if we go online without the use of firewall and anti-virus softwares, we will be said to be playing with fire, exposing ourselves to the million of viruses out there and before we know it, we may be hit with one which can cause your computer to malfunction, depending on the severity of the virus.

However, viruses do not necessary have immediate impact on the computer, some can take a few days, or ever a few years to act up. Speaking of which, some viruses are also less prominent or visible than the other. Take phishing and spyware for instances, which works hand in hand. Phishing is defined as "a form of internet fraud that aims to steal valuable information such as credit cards, social security numbers, user IDs and passwords.." Malicious websites that you stumble upon will secretly 'plant' and spyware into your computer, so when you enter personal information into forms, these spywares will be able to obtain this information. When fallen onto the hands of evil, these personal and private information can be used against um such as credit card theft and etc. Hence, when we install firewalls, anti-viruses softwares, we will be better protected against such harms like these. However these softwares are also not 100% foolproof.

The advice to safe online practices when disclosing personal information is for you to clear your cache and delete browsing history. Also, we should keep our virus softwares up to date and do a full system scan at least once ever fortnight . It would be good to install a software such as Ad-Aware because this is a software which helps you to clear all those spywares planted in your computer.

Multimedia - Week 8

For a person like me, it'll be hard for me to live in a world without multimedia. Multimedia, as the name suggest, is a broad and wide aspects of various media, such as videos, music, animaltion, graphic and etc.

I graduated from Singapore Poly with a diploma in multimedia, therefore one can understand why i said it'd be hard for me to live in a world without multimedia. Multimedia is my passion, and we live in a world that relies on multimedia these days. Everyday, we will have some form of experience with multimedia, such as watching or streaming a video clip or a trailer online, listening to music, creating animation and so on. Back in my poly days, my world really did revolve around multimedia, i am always editing or designing animations, videos and graphics. Although i wouldn't say i am a professional, i dare say that i am pretty competent with softwares such as final cut pro on mac for video editing, audacity and pro tools on windows for music editing, adobe master suite (flash, photoshop, dreamweaver, image ready, illustrator and premiere pro).

Being competent in these softwares have brought about much advantages and conveniences. I am able to create entertainment for myself or others, and i am able to digitally beautify or enhance many things. Attached in these posts are 2 videos and 1 image of how i am able to beautify things. Knowing how to use these multimedia tools or softwares have also in a way equipped me with a skill which has enabled me to feed myself or earn some extra cash. I do some freelancing for people to design collaterals for their events or even design and edit the webpages and video. Best of all, freelancing can pay pretty well too, so one can really consider picking up such skills. However, i feel that this could only be temporary because these days, people are becoming really tech savvy, meaning that many people can edit and enhance things themselves and no longer require engaging a professional to help them do

things like these. So maybe the moral of the story could be that, pick up the multimedia skills while there is still market for it, because when everyone becomes tech-savvy and can do the job themselves, you may already have earned enough to conquer some other markets!

Some of my works below:

Video done for Com 101 in UB, May 2009. Using Adobe Premiere Pro.

Animation Video done for Year Two Modelling and Animation Project in Singapore Poly, using Autodesk 3d Max and Adobe Premiere Pro.

Digital Imaging + Enhancing for freelance job using Photoshop.

Internet Tools - week 7

Sooo.... Internet Tools, what are they ? Some examples of internet tools would be search engines like Google and Yahoo, and those tools you can find in google.

I used to be a Yahoo! User... until Google came along. Of cos i didn't switch over immediately, when Google first came out, i didn't like it, because i thought that there

wasn't much functions as the

User Interface was too plain, but boy can i be so wrong. Anyway, it always take me quite a while to like and get accustomed to new interfaces, so like i said, i think i didn't switch over to Google until it was perhaps at least 2 or 3 years old. And when i did, i realised how much i've missed out.

Today, like many people would have said, google is my new found best friend. Almost literally. One of the first Google tool i've used was it's email. If i didn't remember wrongly or at least to my knowledge, Google's Gmail was the first email services to offer 1 GB of mail storage space. At tha

t time, that kind of storage was enormous! Hotmail, the hottest online emailing tool then offered much lesser, probably about 500mb or less. People who send out and receive attachments welcomed and were very thankful to Google, because this means they could h

ave stored more stuff than ever before. And so once again, i bade farewell to hotmail. Hello Gmail! But of course, in the competitive world of the internet, the others followed suit. And so now we all have large storage for our emails.

It was not until i've tried their email tool did i switch over to its search engine. Nowadays, anything that i don't know, or need assistance in, i simply over the browser and google it. Oh by the way, google's set as my homepage. That probably already says a lot. As Yahoo! main cust

omers or consumers are its advertisers, the first few results that it returns when you search for something are usually those paid by their advertisers, meaning you may not find what you are looking for exactly or in other words, it may take you longer time to get to what you are really looking for.As for Google, their focus and consumers are on its users, so the results that they try to return can be generally more related to a user's searches and thus, save more time. That is one of the very important reasons why i decided to switch over from Yahoo! Google is my best friend because anything that i need to know or things that i need to find, it has them ready for me, almost everytime. It never fails me.

And then it jus got bigger. There were google Maps. Goo

gle Translate. Google Scholar. Google News. Google Docs. To

day, I NEED to live with all these tools. Without them, believe it or not, i feel so lost. Today, Google Maps have been incorporated into mobiles/cell phones, i cannot say how brilliant this can be, especially for a direction idiot like me. Everytime i need to go to somewhere new, i just need to turn on the Google Map app found in the iPhone and it leads me to it. I no longer know what getting lost or walking round in circles means anymore! This is really a savior for mankind, i may exaggerate, but i'm not kidding. Even before the app was on iPhone, we could still log onto Google map and type in the directions and it would still give us step by step directions to get to our intended destinations! And the last i heard, there are now even webcams on GoogleMap to assist you in monitoring situations such as traffic and perhaps even the weather. How sweet.

And if you're w

orried that you stumbled upon some website in foreign languages, fear not. Google is again, here to the rescue. With that tool, it will give one a basic or general translation of a word you've entered. It may not always be accurate though, as we know that there are some puns in our languages, but it works pretty well for me. Sometimes, i have friends who want to act mysterious on facebook, and they will type in other languages like french, japanese or korean in their status updates. With Google Translate, it's SO easy to "decipher" what they are saying. HAHA. Gotcha! Oh, and if you are using Google's Chrome, Google's web browser, if you stumble upon a website that is of foreign language, it even offers or prompt you to let them translate the entire website for you!

The last thing that is really worth mentioning will definitely be Google Scholar. I never knew of such tool until i went into college. With research paper due every month or so, this tool is ESSENTIAL to all college students. It helps you to collate and find reliable sources or scholarly journals which you can use to reference for your research papers. And if you have access to your college's e-library, that's even better because Google Scholar can also link it to that and generate even more results for you.
Really! Talk about convenience, Google has it all. Thank you Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page! What would we have done without you!