Erik Emery Hanberg

Erik Emery Hanberg was the first guest speaker in our TINST 207 class.   He is an acclaimed author of short mystery and sci-fi novels.  He serves as one of the five elected Commissioners for the Metro Parks of Tacoma, WA.  Erik Hanberg also holds a position as a Clerk of the Board of the Zoo Liaison Committee and the Joint Municipal Action Committee in Tacoma.

Erik gave a power point presentation focused primarily on his background and his career as a part time author.  He started writing and selling short story novels and took advantage of the internet and online market.  He sells his books on iTunes, NOOK, Amazon.it, Google Play and Scribd and had them translated to a few different languages.  He keeps up with his audience through Twitter, Facebook and blog posts to advertise his new publications.  That is a smart way to keep your audience in the loop. 
            A few years ago it was very hard and competitive to find a good book publisher for the new books, but now internet has made it easier for authors to bypass the new book screening process.  You can create and self-publish your books online through www.lulu.com and www.Amazon.com etc. without having to write book proposals and pitch your book to the publishers.  With the ease of self-publishing books you can put your book out faster and choose between the print and eBook versions.  The only downfall is that you get paid a little less than publishing through a major bookseller.  But it evens out eventually as the time progresses because you make more money or more money per book sale as the book sale volume increases.

Three things I would not buy online

Online shopping has made our life very convenient, but here is a list of three things I wouldn’t buy online.

Amazon and some other websites offer grocery shopping but I wouldn’t buy online groceries, specifically produce.  One of my friends worked as a personal shopper for an online grocery store.  They had to follow the policy of picking up the items that are about to expire soon instead of a late expiration date.  For example, if you place an online order of meat and bread, they would pick up the ones that would be expiring in 2-3 days vs the ones expiring in 8-10 days.  This wouldn’t happen to me if I were shopping in a real grocery store.  I would always pick my grocery items with latest vs the earliest expiration date.

You live and you learn.  That’s what comes to my mind when I think about online shopping for clothes.  You cannot try out the clothes for size or feel the material that suits you.  I once bought a shirt online that looked great but caused an allergic reaction.  I got a horrible rash on my skin after wearing that shirt.  The online store only specified it as blended material shirt but not how much.   That shirt had more polyester and synthetics than cotton.  Another time I changed size more than once, either due to being a little too big or too small.  I have not shopped for my clothes online since then.

I would not buy a car online.  You need to test drive it before investing huge money in your car.  I recently bought a car from a dealership and was able to get it two thousand dollars cheaper than their online listed price.  You cannot negotiate with a website.   

 

        

 

Online Scavenger Hunt

I had the most incredible experience searching things online for the scavenger hunt.  Most of the answers took just a few seconds to find while others a minute or so.   I was lucky to have partners who worked fast.  We all split assignment by the page.  It was eerie to find vast amount of information about our topics so fast.

This definitely gave me a new perspective to not post so much of my personal information online as it can easily get in wrong hands and used for wrong purposes.  Most common bank or email account passwords are based on your best friend’s names, school you attended, your pets name, your middle name etc.  All of these things can be searched online using Google search, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc.  

Online information or online presence is both good and bad, specially for businesses.  The sites like Yelp help people post their experiences but all reviews are not legit.  There is no guarantee that someone is not lying, twisting the truth or posting things online out of spite due to the competition.    

Epic 2015

“It is the best of times, it is the worst of times” opening line is very catchy and gave me chills.  It is very true that we have access to an incredible amount of information right here on our fingertips.  We can find a real picture of you, your family, the house you live in, your parents and siblings, your marriage records, your job, your buying habits and so on.  There is an online trial of everything on the web and some of these trail records cannot be changed.

This video talks about how technology has crept up so fast on us and how our privacy has been greatly compromised because of it.  This was a long assignment because we had to check a lot of facts.  Even though I did my best, I am not very sure about the validity of the fact checking because Wikipedia was the primary research source.   Here are some of the things I found to be accurate. 

-Tim Burton-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.  
-Amazon was founded in 1994
-Google was founded in 1998
- Blogger was launched in 1999
- Friendster was founded in 2002
- Google News beta version was launched in September.

- Picasa was created in 2002.
- Google  started Gmail service in 2004.

The more accurate statement is that Microsoft was not born in 2007 but it was born in 1975.  Google news was launched in 2002 AND released officially in January 2006.