Daily Blogging for Thursday 10/9-Monday 10/12

(I would like to apologize, I went on vacation for this entire weekend and was not able to be around a computer to blog daily for this assignment, I hope this will not penalize me...I can account for my experiences with technology for these days.)

Thursday 10.8.09
The first thing I thought of when I had to do this assignment was using technology for school. I see that schools/teachers are relying more on technology to post information about their classes and assignments. I feel that high school introduces the concept of using technology in the classroom however, it is not until college that this integration of technology and education is becomes fully exposed. I feel that schools using technology is very convenient (for myself) and environmentally friendly. I like the fact that if I needed to look up my assignments they are provided for me in a website or via email, however the only downfall is that I am not always around a computer and cannot access my assignments, therefore I always keep a hardcopy somewhere.

Friday 10.9.09
At work we rely on using computers to do all transactions, I currently work at a bank and the way I see it if our computer systems fail then the whole bank cannot function at all. Or perhaps the process becomes much slower and more difficult when we don't have our systems running properly. We encounter difficulties with technology all the time...we even have a saying at work..."that's technology for you" just because it's so common for something at work to not be running correctly be it a fax machine, the ATM, or our systems won't upload fast enough. We rely on the function of our technology so much that if they fail to work correctly it becomes incredibly frustrating.

Saturday 10.10.09
We were on our way to Oregon and we knew it was going to be a long ride. As part of our music we attached our phone to the car's stereo system to listen to the streaming radio system that is provided by our Blackberrys. There was a tape deck that has a cord that connects to the headset part of the Blackberry and then also a Blackberry charger, the streaming radio station playing on the phone is called Slacker mobile. The cool thing about this streaming radio station was that you can choose the kind of music genre you want to listen to and it will only play music from that genre, it will go as far as to give a selection of a year (if applicable). So for the entire car ride we listened to comedy...it was taped comedians during their sets and it was a great way to pass time. I think this is much more convenient that having to purchase many CDs or even downloading and then uploading into a music player. The downside that we had with using our Blackberry's was the radio would stop playing when we lost reception which was really annoying when we were listening to a comedian who had a really funny set.

Sunday 10.11.09
We played golf today and my encounter with technology was the golf carts that we used. =) I don't like carrying my bags around the course especially since we were playing all 18 holes today. I feel that using a golf cart is very advantageous because I don't have to worry about being tired with dragging my clubs around and having to walk for the entire 18 holes. But since these carts are battery powered we had a minor scare that we wouldn't finish the course before the battery runs out---you see there were many hills and the weight that each cart was carrying wasn't the extremely light so the cart was eating the battery as we slowly climbed each mound at about 4 mph...we can tell that the cart was struggling to get up seeing as though we had "the pedal to the metal" over each hill.

Monday 10.12.09
We visited the Tillamook factory on the way home from Oregon, the technology I encountered here was the actual cheese factory. We got to see the factory workers as they turned out cheese on the cheese lines...we basically saw large blocks of cheese cut down into smaller blocks that are then packaged and labeled into marketable items (as we see in grocery stores). They also play a video of how cheese was made before it became mass processed and with this comparison it can be easily seen how technology had made it possible for companies to expand and become profitable.