Poverty at SJSU

Poverty where we are
When I used to take my kids to school at our home near Los Gatos, California, there would often be lines of SUV's built by companies like Lexus and Cadillac waiting to get into the parking lot. But here at San Jose State University, if you look in the morning, you can see that reality is not shared by all. SJSU is between a public school and some relatively low income housing. Parents here do not have Lexus's or SUV's or even cars. They get their kids to school any way they can, and on their way they cross right through the heart of our campus.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, Campus poverty, Cycling, Bicycling, CSU, San Jose, California State University, San Jose California, ssloansjca

Podcaster's Meetup Tomorrow

This is from Here
Here’s your chance to attend the Silicon Valley Podcasting Meet-up — the next meeting is 7 p.m. this Thursday, May 10, and the meeting will be held right here in DBH 226!

It’s your chance to meet and mingle with some local podcasters, get tips on audio recording, and on how and where to post your podcasts, etc.

Be there or be square!

More on the Long Tail

Important terms for this conversation:

• Disintermediation: "Cutting out the middleman."
• The Long Tail: "Products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters."

Topics of conversation:

• Amazon and the death of the corner bookstore
• iTunes and the death of the music store business
• Craigs List and the death of classified revenue.

Related Commercial Moment
"We have every movie ever made, in every language, any time, night or day," "Qwest - Bandwidth - Roy's Motel Cafe (1999)".

Places to Go, People to Know:

• The Long Tail Dot Com
• About The Long Tail
• The Long Tail Wired Story
• The Long Tail Book
• Chris Anderson: Wikipedia, Biography

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Hodson and Dedman on Video Blogging

Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman at SJSU
On April 25, 2007 Hodson and Dedman came to SJSU. They spoke to Professor Cynthia McCune's Journalism 163 class about videoblogging. Devon Thames, from my class, was there and she shot a video of their presentation. It is being made available here in multiple parts. Here is part one of their presentation.

The Long Tail

Technorati Tags: Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, Longtail, Long Tail, Web 2.0, ssloansjca

Happy Birthday To Us

Grey skies bright future
Despite inclement weather the university concluded Founders Week with a big birthday cake and a free lunch for all employees and students.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

More CERT Training Coming

Greetings (From Spencer Wong),

The University Police Department is holding another Campus Emergency Response Team Training. For those of you who are already CERT trained, this is an opportunity to come back and refresh your training or help teach a section of the 24 hour course. Please remember that skills are perishable unless used on a frequent basis. We will also be starting up a SJSU CERT newsletter and hopefully a SJSU CERT website pretty soon.

For more information on the CERT program please visit: http://www.sjsupd.com/pages/special/cert.html

This course is FREE to all students, faculty, and staff; if you are an instructor, please disseminate this to your students. SBC's please print out the flyer and post it in your building.

Please view the attached flyer (removed.)

If you have any questions please feel free to call or email me. I will email out an itinerary to those who contact me and are interested in helping out or taking the course.

Thank you for your attention.

Spencer Wong
Emergency Preparedness Assistant
San Jose State University Police Department
408-924-2230

Takin' Me Home

SP Commutes 1985, Volume 1
In the summer of 1985 the Southern Pacific Railroad's commute equipment stopped operating on the San Francisco peninsula and was replaced by Caltrain. This ended over 100 years of SP commute operations on the San Francisco peninsula. This short Track Warrants video, converted from silent Super8 movies, captures that period. As well as the film, this video features the music of Heather Sullivan.

• This video is in Quicktime 7 format. You can download the free Quicktime player for Windows or Mac here
• This video is also now on YouTube.
  

About Me

Transparency: About Me
I had been a newspaper photographer before coming to SJSU. I also ran my own business doing photography and media production (primarily for labor unions.) My BA was in photojournalism. In 1987 I was hired by the School of Journalism and Mass Communications (JMC) as a photo lab technician. I became an Information Technology Consultant (ITC) as a result of JMC’s purchase of computers for desktop publishing. An ITC is a very general job classification used for technicians who are generalists rather than narrowly defined specialists.

After my hire in JMC I went back to school under the fee waiver system and received my MA in Instructional Technology, with a concentration in Media Design and Development. I am an Instructional Designer by training. Having an interest in operating systems and especially content creation applications, I studied my passion mostly on my own time. I was certified on Windows 2000 by Microsoft. I started blogging, podcasting and video blogging.

After years of desktop and application support in JMC and the College of Applied Sciences and Arts (CASA) I was assigned to Academic Technology to a position that has been described as “running the help desk.”

I am a believer in collective bargaining. The fact that the CSU system had a union was a primary reason I sought employment with SJSU in 1987. You might say I am a philosophical trade unionist. Others may not agree with my pro-union views but it is not just a philosophy at SJSU. Collective bargaining became the law of the land in the CSU system with the passing of the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEERA).

Technorati Tags: SJSU, CSU, California State University, Education, ssloansjca

New Windows More Secure Than Mac?

Macworld says Vista is More Secure Than Mac
According to a recent post in Macworld, users of Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system may be more secure than users of the current version (10.4 "Tiger") of Apple's Mac OS X operating system:

I have found the code quality, at least in terms of security, to be much better overall in Vista than Mac OS X 10.4. It is obvious from observing affected components in security patches that Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) has resulted in fewer vulnerabilities in newly-written code. I hope that more software vendors follow their lead in developing proactive software security development methodologies.