TWC 401 – Free Verse 2 – Paintable Wires

The Prelude

If you’ve worked with electrical circuits, you can imagine this sort of scenario: A breadboard with wires criss-crossing all over it. Depending on the complexity of the circuit, or simply the neatness of the person assembling it – the whole assembly can be a very messy situation. I remember in one of my earlier engineering courses our Professor Told us that we’d better make sure we organize the wires on our breadboards so that they wouldn’t look like piled spaghetti. Otherwise, the next time he walked by he would run his fingers over the breadboard and basically undo all of our work. He was a pretty scary professor.

But scary professors isn’t what today’s Free Verse is about. This blog is about a set of products by Bare Conductive known as conductive paint.

The Why of Conductive Paint

Having conductive pain is a really neat idea. Pretty much all the electronics in your house form your Television to your Toaster is no doubt in the possession of wires in it’s structure. This isn’t just the wire that connects it to the electrical outlet mind you, there are actually all sorts of other electrical wires inside of them which facilitate communication between different parts. As mentioned with the previous story in the prelude, wiring can be a very messy business. if we didn’t have things such as Microchips around, then the equivalent in wires would take up huge amounts of space.

With conductive paint, you can simply draw out your circuit on a dry solid surface. It’s a very neat concept that certainly looks a lot more approachable in theory than the technical image of a student cutting wires and poking them into breadboards.

Though on the flipside, while paintable circuits are most certainly neat, I’d say that Paintable circuits as they are now sare still in the realm of ‘a new concept’. But not something that will completeley phase out wired circuits. Traditional wires don’t depend on good penmanship in order to keep things organized, and also keep the metal conductive pieces guarded with rubber. Painted circuits, on the other hand are basically exposed conductive material which can be dangerous if a bigger electrical current or voltage it put in it.

Still, I’d like to think that these new paintable circuits give people interested in playing around with circuits new tools to make us of. And it certainly look much more approachable on the surface than the breadboard and wires. It’s also an exiting new medium to compliment the artistic fields, where we’ve already seen this new product put into use.

Overall it’s still a relatively new idea – at the moment it’s definitely something that would be really awesome to play around with. But for use in more serious jobs, I think that it will take a bit more time before we see some wide practical application (on the industrial level) this versatile material beyond the hobbyist and artistic levels. But the interest to take it further is certainly out there.

 

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Source for Image: http://www.digitalme.co.uk/assets/images/DrawACircuitMOD_white.jpg

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Assignment 5 – Final ‘Portfolia’ and Presentation

Prelude

Alright, before we start off let me get one thing clear:

I am not too good with electric presentations.

Probably the best electric presentation was when I made a ‘choose your own adventure’ power-point. But that was back in freshman year of high school – and that one happened to have a good amount of enthusiasm behind it. But when you get thrown into the next level of audio-visual presentation – videos, it’s a whole new ballgame.

For this last assignment I had to put together all of my work for TWC 401 into a portfolio. Which is actually just a word document with the text assignments pasted in, and non-text assignments such as videos linked with their associated internet address. The portfolio – which I seemed to keep on spelling as ‘portfolia’ for some strange reason – was supposed have some extra text that was meant to reflect on my individual and group’s (see: this post and this post) performance in the class. That was the easy part. The hard part, was making a ‘presentation video’. To answer a set of questions in regards to the course. ‘Good heavens to betsy.’

The Execution

I’m already on the last running trek in terms of classes since summer is fast approaching. Ive seen all sorts of nice video series on Youtube that I’ve used to satisfy my cravings during bouts of procrastination. But making a video – something I’ve never done before – was a curious challenge.

Ultimately I did the best with what I had. i had a perfectly working phone camera, and a perfectly functioning notepad and marker. So, in the spirit math problem videos, I went ahead and simply read out the answers to the questions while doodling. Pretty lame, I know – but pretty much the best I could do with the time and equipment with me.

It was only after the video was finished that I realized I managed to somehow break the 10 minute time limit by 45 seconds. ‘Nuts‘ was all I could say. Didn’t really close out of TWC’s last assignment with a bang – but I got it done.

Here’s how I feel now:

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Source for image: http://www.clipartbest.com/cliparts/RiG/A74/RiGA749iL.jpeg

TWC 401 – Free Verse 1 – The Why of Webm

Prelude

So along with all my talking about my assignments, my course Technical Writing 401, calls for me to write blog posts about something related to my field. Quite frankly – would you think it’s a bit weird that I’m a bit more of a Nerf Blaster Enthusiast than an Embedded Systems Technology Proficieneer? Probably not. Probably the first thing that’s going through your head is: “What the Heck is Embedded Systems Technology?” The simplified answer I tell to most folks is: “Put computer into thingy and make it all work.”

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. Today I’m here to talk about images. moving images. You’ve heard about those fancy .gifs which have everything ranging from tidbits of amazing videos to funny reaction images, to those really annoying jump-scare images. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. But what if you could have all those images you want in higher quality and with sound?

I present you: the Webm Format!

The Why

Webm is an audio and video container format for use on the internet. It takes exactly what you loved about gif images and brings it closer to having the qualities of having a video in terms of length an quality without being the size of a video. See for yourself:

http://www.webmfiles.org/demo-files/

Your average Gif image is a short and quick animated picture. A gif of high quality and length than a couple of seconds usually takes someone very experienced with creating gif files to make. Here, with webm, it is possible to have media files that lasts longer than a minute while still retaining a quality image as well as the inclusion of having sound available to play along with it. 

According to their site, webm was first released in 2010 for use. I only really came to know of it when an article revealed that a certain website notorious for using images in conversation was adding support for webm to their website to allow users to post their own content.

Webm is a very handy new technology for us to use. After seeing it being used on this major website, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before it becomes more well known to the general public. Maybe in a few years, gifs may end up going the way of the Silent Film.

That all being said, however – having content that’s basically a video shortened down does mean that webm’s are a larger file to deal with than contemporary gifs. Meaning most websites might not like the idea of having these hog up their server space. Hopefully, as webm continues to develop we’ll see better compression – leading to much smaller file-sizes without the loss of what Webm brings to the table. But as it stands, they do inhabit the space between a short but small .gif image and a long but very large filesize of an internet video.

Here’s how webm makes me feel:

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Source for the image: http://blog.4chan.org/post/81896300203/webm-support-on-4chan

TWC 401 – Assignment 4 – The Informative Research Paper

Prelude

Probably the epitome of any English class assignment is a research paper. A project where you perform research on a topic by reading various sources and then condense it all into an essay paper of variable word count. There’s fun stuff such a making arguments, creating citations, and proofreading. Truly, an exercise of the vitality of one’s prowess in reading comprehension and writing skill – and for that reason, the bane of most normal students.

The Assignment

More or less the realization of the Research Proposal done as the last assignment. This time around we had to turn that proposal into a paper. The professor actually gave us ample time to perform research (roughly a month from the due date of the proposal, though that includes two weeks of Spring Break). The paper was required to have between 2500-3000 words in it. I occasionally said pages instead of words which garnered some sympathy until I corrected myself. Regardless – this was still a team assignment so I had to ensure that I rightly divvied up the content of the paper between myself and my partner.

But before that could happen, my partner and I needed to have sources. Together we needed to have up to 10. Now just to remind you – the topic of the paper was “Feasibility of Crowdfunding for Use in R&D departments in companies.” Surprisingly, because crowd-funding is such a recent phenomenon – I was able to find ample amounts of resources for use and then some. In short, I was able to get more than 10 sources on my own side.

Despite this, there was one worry though. My partner seemed to have gone quiet the week leading up to the assignment being due. Leading me to start thinking the worst had happened yet again: A member dropping out of the class – which had already happened before the proposal was due. So worried I was, that I ended up sending an email to the professor to voice this concern half a week ahead of the due date of the paper. Thankfully – my partner did respond to my email and we decided to meet to start divvying up the work for the paper just before the weekend it was due.

The Execution

My partner and I met one google docs to discuss our plans. We basically took the three main ideas from the proposal and further distilled them into different parts and discussions which would be the basis of divinding up the paper. Because this paper was only supposed be a ‘state the facts’ paper rather than a persuasive paper, there wasn’t too much need to ensure we where all on the same page in terms of bias, since there wasn’t supposed be anything of the sort in the writings. With the paper’s topics divided, we simply agreed to meet the day the paper was due to integrate both our parts and write the Abstract and Conclusion.

On my side of things, I already had a relatively confident set of topics assigned to me including things such as The History of Crowdfunding, as well as discussion of Crowdfunding and Government Regulation plus a general description of how to utilize Crowdfunding. Writing this paper also marked the first time I had to write using the APA format which was only mentioned in High School as: ‘That other format aside from MLA that you simply need to know exists out there.’ I actually think I found myself fancying the format, since I seemed to be able to pick it up a bit faster than I did with MLA in high school. Or maybe it’s just the fact that there are all sorts of online tools out there to help you learn how to do the format, or that I’m not in high school, probably a little bit of everything.

Regardless, my partner and I put together our parts of the paper the day it was due. The example APA paper we were given had a several graphs and data figures built into the formatting style (in other words, it seemed like it was expected.) I was actually expecting my partner to be the one handling those sorts of things since he was assigned items such as ‘success and failure rates of Crowdfunding projects.’ But those graphs never appeared. So the only figure in the paper is a table showcasing a rather sizable number of Crowdfunding Website platforms now available on the internet. But I’ll just look over that. Once we agreed the paper was good, and our freshly written abstract and conclusion paragraph were satisfactory, we simply turned in the paper. We also had to send an email to the professor detailing what we did to contribute to the paper; but most important of all: we got the paper finished even though we were short one member! Mission accomplished!

Here’s how I felt after finishing the paper:

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Source of the Image: http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/330/958/a5b.gif

TWC 401 – Assignment 3 – Research Proposal

Prelude

Stress is stressful. Being a college student is stressful. Juggling work and time is stressful. Living in general probably starts getting stressful the moment you walk out of daycare for the first time. Considering how things have gone for this last assignment I guess this should be the depressing post, I apologize in advance.

The Assignment

This week’s assignment (or this past 2 week’s as it’s been some time since it was due), was the first leg in starting to make that wonderful thing called a ‘research paper.’ Not only did we have to make this research paper, but we had to also work with a group in order to get it done. Now, pardon my French, but trying to get complete strangers to work over the internet in order to get a research paper done is pretty big leap in faith. A whole lot of things can go wrong, such as… I dunno. Someone disappearing right in the middle of things? That couldn’t possibly happen though, right?

My team was Team Blue (or team Bleu if you want to sound fancy), a group of three gentleman including myself. I’ve worked with a couple of teams in my time, so the first thing that had to be done was to have everyone establish a schedule, as well as meeting with one another. Getting the schedule down (which was supposed produce a team proposal by the end of it) was very important as things would simply fall apart if we didn’t meet at some point. There was a forum where we passed ideas and greeting but getting something as collaborative as a collaborative paper done could not efficiently be done over email in my mind.

Ultimately one of our members came up with the idea of researching ‘Crowd-funding‘ for Research and Development in bigger firms. It was more of an interesting idea than anything I could come up with, so we ultimately decided to go with that. I also set up a Google Docs for the project where we can type things on the doc simultaneously. We agreed to meet that Saturday.

What I did not expect to happen was for the very person whom brought up the idea to drop out of the class. Believe me, I stared at that email for a good long time thinking about how unfortunate this all was. We were one guy short. Plus it was the guy who brought up the idea, and we were still supposed get this all done by Sunday. Somebody HELP!

The Execution

The last remaining member and myself were mutually shocked to an extent. But we still decided to move forward with the plan. We decided to meet Saturday like before, and just work on the doc to ultimately pump out the assignment before Spring Break commenced. A single all nighter and then enjoy Spring Break for what it’s worth. Sadly, twas not the case.

I was supposed be home by the time Saturday had come. Unfortunately, the flight home experienced some strange delays. By the time I managed to log into the session, I was still sitting in Sky Harbor’s terminal. With only 5 minutes of talk with my partner, the gate was called to board. Long story short, the airport episode deeply cut into the time I had intended to use to work on the project. In the end, I wrote out the body of the proposal as soon as I got home. After a very long nap, I woke up and reviewed it with my partner, who as fine with how it turned out. Really, both of us simply wanted to forget about school for a while. We managed to turn in the assignment in the end, and still managed to review it together before submission.

All I can really say is: I hope that misfortune week doesn’t repeat itself. Sadly, the week back from spring break has basically been feeling like punishment for going on spring break in the first place…

Here’s how I’ve felt this past couple weeks in general:

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Source of Table Flipping Image: http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/006/725/desk_flip.jpg

TWC 401 – Assignment 2 – Instructional Presentation “Darn It!”

Prelude
So I did mention last time about how I tended to have bad streaks of procrastination when it comes to online courses? Well, funny story about how this second assignment turned out that turns that statement over it’s head and still makes me look a little silly in the process.

It turned out that the ‘textbook’ for this class: Technical Communication by Mike Markel isn’t as much of a gargantuan textbook as one would expect from a class about writing things. It is actually comparatively light as opposed to other textbooks and readings I’ve had done so in the past. Feeling more like a very benevolent high school book as opposed to a weighty college textbook. So I found it relatively easy to work in required readings for the class. The book gets straight to the point much of the time and had loads of examples. Loads of examples, meaning pages of straight text are balanced with example documents with meaningful commentary, as well as tables here and there. Plus, I’ve found that some of the things written in the book speak to me in my improvement in writing. Which had felt stagnant since High School (I followed the ‘if it sounds right’ ideology of writing which was enough to label me as explanatory in writing during high school some four years ago now).

The Assignment
This assignment had us make an ‘Instructional Presentation’. Big words for: ‘a how to using your desired media’. The type of media the presentation could’ve been on could’ve been something as nice as a video, down to a voiced over power-point presentation. Considering the amount of immediate capital at my disposal, I made full use of my resources and opted for a power-point presentation. Students also had a choice of what sort of topic their presentation would be about. I was rather surprised that my most humble proposal of making Microwave Boneless Chicken Wings with Ranch and Cheese on top managed to get through – so thus I had my topic.

Markel gave a few pointers relating to instructions that I took to heart. The biggest ones probably were to make good use of white space, and to give the instructions the sense of being ‘small.’ That means cutting down big instructions into parts and to make your wording clear and succinct.

The Execution
So what exactly made me betray my self declaration that I was going to heavily procrastinate, but still managed to cause me to folly? Well, it started out harmless enough. As soon as my topic was given clearance I went ahead and started taking pictures of my microwave concoction at every step, from ingredient gathering, to plate arrangement, as well as the addition of the garnishes. I soon had the set of pictures that I deemed necessary to get things working. It was then that I went ahead and made the instructional presentation, which itself was nary 9 steps by the time I had distilled it down to the most clear and essential of instructions. Formatting and wording was on the same lines as Merkel had prescribed of being short and succinct, and having plenty of white-space.

So before I get to the punchline, it is worth noting that the instructor gives us weekly communications that relay what our progress should be.
These include:
1) Things That Should’ve Been Done Last Week
2) Things That Should Be Done This Week
3)Things That Should Be Done Next Week

Each section of these include readings, and assignment due dates.

What happened to me was that on a late Sunday night I was browsing due dates, and found that it suddenly seemed like the ‘Instructional Presentation’ was going to be do in the next hour or so. In a panic, I haphazardly threw together the Voice-over of the power-point, and immediately submitted it. I was horrified to find out later that the ‘due date’ was under the ‘next week’ tab. On top of that, I couldn’t submit any new submission after the initial one. So my submission for that lab is essentially complete at the base, though I feel like I probably could’ve used that extra time to figure out whether or not my voice over was done right. Today’s lesson learned: Pay attention to details.

Afterwards, I felt like this:

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The video about voicing over powerpoints that the instructor provided was rather helpful. You can find it Here
Source of Face-palming Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Paris_Tuileries_Garden_Facepalm_statue.jpg

TWC 401 – Assignment 1 – Resume and Cover Letter

Prelude

So here I am taking an online class. I don’t particularly trust myself when I comes to online classes, though. It was thanks to ‘online math tests’ that I ended up in the lowest rung of Arizona State University’s  Mathematics course-line. Leading to an extra year or so worth of extra math. Online math homework is just devilish when it comes being exactly right with your answers, most notably was that of the infamous ‘Mastering’ online homework. Finally, there is the undeniable fact that it is rather easy to overlook work for an online class. With the only real ‘due dates’ being when to do an assignment, or particular writing in the weekly forums. Sadly, this year did not give me the liberty of choice in this matter, so now here I am writing blog posts as part of a requirement for Technical Writing Course 401 (Hereafter Referred to as: TWC 401). A pleasure to meet you.

The Assignment

The first major piece of coursework for TWC 401 was to write a Resume and a Cover Letter to go with it, for an actual job listing that students had to hunt on their own. To help us with this task, the professor assigned us readings from the textbook, arguably a teacher of it’s own without a classroom for these online classes. The readings were on the very same topic of Writing a Resume and Cover Letter. Probably the biggest thing I got out of the readings was how to properly arrange your resume. It has to look nice and neat, and make maximum use of available word-space whilst not seeming overwhelming. Luckily – maybe, I didn’t have to think too hard about what to fit in or not, twas more of a matter of digging under every nook and cranny of what applicable things I could put down, and wording accordingly.

The next major part of the assignment was the Cover Letter. A letter which addresses the potential employer and tells why the writer is qualified for a position. The cover letter itself is meant to compliment the Resume, which adds a bit of meat and humanity to the fancy looking list of qualifications known as a resume.

The Execution

The resume’s format was wholly inspired by examples and guidelines established by the book. Looking at the textbook’s examples made the whole construction of the set of documents seem formulaic, which was completely fine from my point of view. After an evening of hard work, the set was successfully turned before the due date. Maybe the hardest part of the assignment for me was looking for the ‘job posting’ that the Resume and the Cover Letter was supposed be written for. This was simply done by going to: www.monster.com

According to Requirements, I need to have at least a single picture per blog entry, so here is an illustration of how I felt after turning in the assignment:

Source of Image: http://i.imgur.com/1niGevR.gif