Saturday, March 26, 2016

Start blogging to show your knowledge and passion - March 25, 2016

Your name is going to be Googled. Maybe it is a prospective employer, your current employer wondering what you are up to, perhaps a customer or prospective customer, or maybe even someone you want to date.

What these people want to find is evidence of a thoughtful, interesting person who is knowledgeable in their field and passionate about something.

The best way to show this knowledge- and passion – is by having a blog or blogs. You might have a blog about your passion and another about your profession.

Then when someone Googles you, they will find positive evidence of your capabilities. This can only help to build your reputation, may lead to new jobs, promotions, new customers and more.

Having positive information on the web, even if you create it yourself, can go a long way to diffuse negative information that might be out there.

For example, a restaurant with negative Yelp reviews can redeem itself somewhat with a blog by the owner talking about the challenges they have had and how they overcame them. The blog could have photographs and positive stories written about groups or special customers who have enjoyed the restaurant.

A project manager might have a blog that talks about the challenges of his job, the solutions he had found, the extra education he has sought and perhaps stories about trade shows he’s visited and lesson learned there.

And I have the FamilyTechOnliine.com blog with these columns and also with the occasional extra information families would be interested in.

Anyone Googling me will find out pretty quick I like technology. And, if they read my blog, they’ll find out I’m interested in aviation history, journalism and many other things.

I read a wide variety of blogs. One is written by a movie lighting tech talking about the grunt work in that field. Another is by a noted writer of “Frasier,” “Cheers” and “MASH.” He gives lots of insights into that business.

Before starting a blog, search for blogs of people in professions like yours and your hobbies. Figure out ways to have a unique voice.

Creating your own blog is fairly easy and often free. Blogs do not have to be updated daily, although it is good to be fairly regular in posting. Weekly, even monthly is good enough.

You could simply create a Facebook Page dedicated to your writings. I am not a fan of that. Facebook does not show all your posts to all your subscribers.

I use Google’s free Blogger platform. It offers easy to use authoring tools and built-in analytics so I can see how many people are reading my blog and what entries are being read the most.

It has integration with Google’s AdSense, so if you want to monetize you blog with ads, you can.

Wordpress.com is another popular free, hosted blog platform. You can also download WordPress and run it on your own server, but the hosted platform saves you from having to do frequent security and feature updates that can get involved.

Tumblr is another free site. I’d stay away from it as a home for reputation building content. It is used by a lot of casual content. Some is adult-themed and others often just silly.

Tumblr is to blogging like Hotmail is to email. A Hotmail email address will get you your email, but it doesn’t exactly inspire leading-edge tech knowledge.

Blogger and WordPress let you use their domains, or you can buy a personal domain to give your blog a unique, professional address. You can add media content like photos and video easily. Comments can be turned on to enable conversations with your readers.

Be sure to link to other information about yourself on your blog. These can be your LinkedIn profile, your videos on Youtube, your Twitter account and of course, an email address for people to contact you.


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Thursday, March 24, 2016

Links for Start blogging to show your knowledge and passion - March 25, 2016

Google Blogger Platform

WordPress.com Platform

Tumblr

This column will appear online Saturday, March 26th, 2016 at 9 AM EST.

When it is posted, it will be on this website.

It is available before in the March 25th issue of Prince William Today on sale at these retailers beginning this Thursday, March 24th in the afternoon.

Saturday, March 19, 2016

Serious gaming becomes a career option - March 18, 2016

If you ask kids these days what they want to be when they grow up, you do not hear astronaut, firefighter or police officer as often as you would expect. They all want to be video game creators.

Working on a major video game, like they all see themselves doing, is about as long odds as working on a blockbuster film. The competition is fierce, and the talent expectations are astronomical.

What can you do to encourage your child’s dream if game creation is the dream, yet help them to find a way to make a living?

There is another kind of gaming in technology, serious gaming. George Mason University defines serious gaming as being a way to train or educate the player about a topic, that it might enable the player to investigate an area or the game might be advertising a product or cause.

It adds, “Serious games have been developed in a number of arenas, including defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, politics and religion.”

Recently my son and I went to an open house at the George Mason campus in Manassas and visited the Mason Serious Game Institute.

The institute is the only one like it on the East Coast and is affiliated with similar endeavors in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Singapore, Australia and Mexico.

We have world-quality training for serious gaming right here in Prince William County.

The institute offers undergraduate- and graduate-level training. And soon, some Prince William high schools will offer some serious-gaming classes in association with the institute.

The institute admits students from a wide range of disciplines – not only programming as you might expect, but also the arts, education, business and more.

The coursework is diverse. There are the expected programming classes, but also ones on game design, writing for games, story creation, character development, animation, music and sound creation, and much more.

The admissions program is rigorous. Applicants are expected to provide a writing sample that delves into why they want to be in gaming. “I’ve been playing games since I was three,” won’t cut it, said one speaker. Applicants are expected to describe a game and characters of their own design or break down a game they are familiar with.

The institute also has incubator space. Students who start a company to see one of their visions through to a product can receive a year of free rent space. The space has conference rooms and mentoring from the institute’s staff, and the institute’s contacts in the industry, including venture funding contacts.

During a recent tour, I saw a company producing a simulator to help train Fairfax County fire personnel and other first responders. Another company was a teacher that had created educational board games and was now at the institute to bring the games to tablet and phone apps.

One of the speakers during the tour was Doug Wright, Prince William County schools career technical education supervisor. He outlined plans to bring some serious gaming classes to many county high schools that would help prepare students for the George Mason undergraduate program.

The county schools have done an admirable job teaching students about technology. Robotic clubs thrive in many of our schools.

Marsteller Middle School is again hosting their event designed to introduce girls to careers in science, technology and engineering. My wife was asked to speak at their conference a few years ago and I tagged along. It is a wonderful day for kids. Information is on FamilyTechOnline.com. It will be held April 2 and girls and their adults are invited.


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Thursday, March 17, 2016

Links for Serious gaming becomes a career option - March 18, 2016

Success Conference for Girls

Serious Gaming Institute and here.




This column will appear online Saturday, March 19th, 2016 at 9 AM EST.

When it is posted, it will be on this website.

It is available before in the March 18th issue of Prince William Today on sale at these retailers beginning this Thursday, March 17th in the afternoon.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

There are other ways to communicate over the internet aside from email - March 11, 2016

Ray Tomlinson died March 5 at the age of 74. Tomlinson invented email back in 1971 while working for a Boston company that helped develop ARPANET, the precursor to the internet.

Email has been both a boon and a curse. While we love the ease and speed of communicating, we also have to constantly battle spam. Be careful of emails delivering harmful malware as attachments and greetings from Nigerian princes and other cons.

The blessing and fault of email is that anyone can contact us through it if they know our email address.

There has arisen a multitude of communication tools where we first have to approve or like someone, before they can communicate with us. That makes for cleaner communications.

So now when I want to communicate with someone, I have to figure out their preferred contact app. For example, I know a young professional woman who responds just fine to email, but responds even quicker to a Facebook Messenger message.

With Facebook Messenger, the message pops up on her phone’s screen instantly and makes a sound. If she’s free and my message is compelling, I get a response quickly. I in turn see it quickly and we can thus have a brief conversation and get the issue resolved in minutes instead of a day.

With Facebook Messenger and the others, a person has to ask to be your friend before they can send you a message. This makes spam, phishing and emails trying to con you are all but eliminated.

With Facebook Messenger you can also place phone calls. The calls do not eat into your minutes because the calls are carried entirely over the internet using VOIP or Voice Over Internet Protocol. So if you are on your home Wifi and the person you are calling is also on the internet, no one’s phone minutes are being consumed.

My wife has been out of the country for the past couple of weeks, and she and I have found WhatsApp to be a great way to communicate.

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, which purchased it for $19 billion. It works like Facebook Messenger. While messenger is popular in the U.S., WhatsApp is phenomenally successful outside the U.S.

Working over the internet, we can easily text one another without worrying about carrier texting costs on either end. The texts can contain photographs, something that standard carrier texting does not always support.

The app also lets us make phone calls without using minutes. International calling and texting can cost. With WhatsApp we do not worry if her service or mine has international calling costs.

The calls have had wonderful clarity. WhatsApp also has a web-based interface.

My wife and I also have daily video calls using Google Hangouts. We could also use Skype, a Microsoft product. Both work well, as we discovered when she was visiting Indiana last summer and we did a lot of testing getting readying for her overseas trip. The quality is amazing and the cost is free, except of course for the cost of the internet.

In the work environment, many now use Slack to communicate among teams. Slack allows everyone on the team to see the conversation. There are mechanisms for communicating publically, privately, to teams and to individuals. It lets users share files and comment on those files. It works both on the desktop and on phones.

It maintains the conversation, so if someone joins a team late, they can see the conversation to that point. Search makes it easy to find past information as well.

Slack can also be integrated with a lot of other tools, such as Dropbox, Hangouts, Twitter, Google Drive and many more.

Slack requires you to approve a team member’s participation first, so no strangers can access your steams.

There is a free tier to Slack, so it could be used by parents organizing children’s athletic teams or homeschool parents coordinating joint outs and learning opportunities, or any other group collaboration efforts we are involved in.

This week’s link post has a link to a video explaining Slack.


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Thursday, March 10, 2016

Links for There are other ways to communicate over the internet aside from email - March 11, 2016

Facebook Messenger






There are more videos on the Youtube Slack Channel.



This column will appear online Saturday, March 12th, 2016 at 9 AM EST.

When it is posted, it will be on this website.

It is available before in the March 11th issue of Prince William Today on sale at these retailers beginning this Thursday, March 10th in the afternoon.

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Mobile conference showed upgrades, but you might be fine with what you have

Many times in the 1980s and 90s, I thought it would be cheaper to have a drug problem than to be enamored with computers. Technology was changing so fast in desktop computers, enthusiasts felt compelled to buy new computers every couple of years.

And they were not cheap.

You could not get out the door for even something like an Apple IIe or a TRS-80 Model III for less than $2,500.

I felt the compulsion come over me again when I bought my first smartphone in 2008. Long before my two-year contract was up entitling me to an upgraded phone, I came to loathe my current phone and pine for the latest and greatest phone. There was always one that was much faster, had a better camera and less buggy software.

Thankfully, that impulse eventually passed.

Computers got faster, and hard drives had more than enough storage. You could actually go several years on the same PC. My current laptop is about three years ago and meets my needs quite fine. I’ve been known to have the same one close to 10 years.

My current smartphone, an LG G3, I purchased more than a year ago. When my son’s iPhone gave up the ghost, he wanted an Android phone and chose an LG G4, the upgrade from my phone. I was delightfully astonished when I played with it. While it was a bit better than my phone, it was not enough to provoke any envy on my part. I was still content with my LG G3.

When Mobile World Congress drew near, I thought for sure I’d see a new phone from LG or someone that would make me feel disenchantment with my phone. Held the week of Feb. 22 in Barcelona, Spain, MWC is where manufacturers show off this year’s phones.

And LG showed the LG G5. It had some amazing features. The mandatory upgraded faster processor and a slightly better camera.

What was really cool was that you can switch out the battery without taking off the back. You can do it simply by sliding it out from the bottom.

You can also slide out the battery and slide in a camera module that gives a wider view than the normal lens. Another module gives improved audio. Third parties might come up with other innovative things to slide in.

The easily replaceable battery got my attention. I usually have to swap out my battery once a day. Then it occurred to me. You cannot easily replace the battery if the phone is in a case, and I’m clumsy enough that my phone has to be in a case – a big, beefy, drop-resistant case.

The screen resolution was the same as my phone’s and more than I really need. And while a future Android version might need the faster processor, the processor in mine is more than good enough.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the LG G5 and would buy it if I was looking for a new phone. I was just gratified to realize for the first time ever that I’m going to finish out a two-year contract without counting the days to a new phone or loathing my current one.

The G5 is a good phone, with the latest Android version and a fast processor to make it sing. It has two cameras, with 16- and eight-megabit resolutions. And its display is of higher resolution than any TV you are likely to have in your home.

Samsung’s S7 phone has the same Snapdragon 820 processor and Android Marshmallow that the G5 has. It also supports very high screen resolutions.

Either phone will do you well if you are looking for a new high-end phone.

LG also brought out a few interesting accessories. They have a 360-degree camera similar to the popular Ricoh Theta S. One snap and you have a photo or video taken 360 degrees around you, and over your head and feet.

LG also released a remote-control ball. It is a small robot that you control with your phone. It rolls around the room, returning video to the phone. Other than for a little brother to torment a big sister, or to amuse your cat, I can’t think of a use for it.

It also announced a virtual reality headset for its phones. Instead of putting the phone in a holder like Google Cardboard, LG’s headset has its own screen and cable to the phone.

Most manufacturers had some sort of virtual reality product to show this year. This is the year of virtual reality. There will likely be a lot such devices under trees next Christmas.

The big takeaway for me from MWC was that if you are dissatisfied with your phone, invest in a high-end phone such as the Samsung S7 or LG G5. It will likely keep you content for several years.

And if your current phone pleases you, don’t feel like you are missing out on anything significant by not upgrading now.

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Thursday, March 3, 2016

Links for Mobile conference showed upgrades, but you might be fine with what you have

Samsung Galaxy S7


This column will appear online Saturday, March 5th, 2016 at 9 AM EST.

When it is posted, it will be on this website.

It is available before in the March 4th issue of Prince William Today on sale at these retailers beginning this Thursday, March 3rd in the afternoon.