Lil' Wayne - The Next R&B King?

Lil' Wayne's new CD Tha Carter III, hit the top of the charts last year with his top three singles, A Milli, Lollipop and Got Money. After his lateset CD release Lil' Wayne has been featured in many songs like Im So Paid, Let It Rock and My Life. He's in the midst of writing new singles, which will be coming out shortly. Will Lil' Wayne be R&B's next king?

Britney Spears - Circus

Britney Spears, pop star's princess, released her new comeback CD called Circus on December 2nd. Some of her top hits include Circus, Womanizer and Radar. There are 13 new songs on the album all with catchy beats. The album's ratings were very high after her release and had good feedback from listeners. Britneys back.

Christmas Shopping - Hot Spots in Vancouver

The shopping has already begun for this crazy Christmas holiday which is just around the corner. Every mall or store is packed with people trying to find good quality presents for decent prices. I've researched some areas in Vancouver that have the best deals on good quality gifts. The major malls in Vancouver that have the most popular stores are Metrotown, Pacific Center and Oakridge. If you don't feel like staying indoors while shopping, one of the most popular places to go is downtown on Robson St. Interestingly, Robson Street has more variety in their stores. These locations have sales on their products frequently, so if you're looking for decent prices and close-to-home locations I suggest looking into these areas!

iPhone: Game Makes Big Dollars

The iPhone has become the world's most popular phone this year. It has defeated all challengers that have tried to compete with the phone. For example, the Blackberry Storm which had a dissappointing review on its new touch screen recently. With all the iPhone's new features, the most popular program so far has been the game 'Trism'. It was created by a successful programer, Steve Demeter, who has made $250,000 in two months since the game has been released.

OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project started four decades ago when computing was not so popular. It was founded by Nicholas Negroponte who wanted to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children. The laptop is created for children specifically from the third world countries. If one wants to participate in donating a laptop to a child, just go to their website and follow their easy steps. Last year, our grade 12 ICT class purchased a OLPC XO laptop which went to a child in the third world country. Hopefully we can do the same this year.

Notre Dame Remembrance Day Ceremony

At Notre Dame Regional Secondary in Vancouver, BC, we paid our respects to those who died in the war in a unique way this year. We had our yearly Remembrance Day ceremony. There were pipe players, plays, movie clips, the band playing and the chior all participating in this unforgetable event. All the students were given a piece of paper clipped to their uniform that had a soldiers names on it who had died in the war. Notre Dame Regional Secondary always creates heart touching performances for Remembrance Day.

Visual Basic

In our last couple of ICT 12 classes, we have began to start a new language program called Visual Basic. We started off with a Hello, World program which we have been working on for the past two classes. The program is quit diffrent from Turbo Pascal. Visual Basic is a more advanced program and is very fun to work with. We will be using this program for the next couple weeks in our ICT class.

Microsoft Announces New Operating System

Yesterday (October 27th), Microsoft unvailed details of two new upgrading systems. Currently, the most commonly used operating systems are Windows XP and Windows Vista. Although frequently criticized, often by those who have never used it, Vista is actually a very stable and rich environment in which to work, particularly, when used with up to date machines.

Nevertheless, Microsoft has decided to press ahead with successors for Vista. In late 2009 Windows7 will be released. It will be much like Vista. Around the same time Microsoft will release Windows Azure, an operating grading system that lives on Microsoft servers and not on your computer. This is called Cloud Computing, the "Cloud" being the Internet. Basically, this means that you won't need an operating system or program: they will all live in the "Cloud."

Whether this works out or not remains to be seen. However, many companies are already trying this, both with Microsoft and with Google products.

"Cloud" computing is one of the most used technology buzz words at present.

Global Anti-Piracy Day Follow-Up

Surprisingly, today (October 21st) is Global Anti-Piracy Day. Technology is advancing every day in our society therefore the distribution of fakes are increasing. Piracy and counterfeiting is becoming a growing threat to the computer society. Furthermore, Microsoft has taken initiative in this problem by ensuring that consumers receive the full value of their licensed Microsoft products.

Student Blog List

Ava Balingit
Ryan Battistel
Sofia Busse
Nicole Ceralde
Nathan Chiu
Tomasz Cieslik
Jonathan De Maeseneer
Danila Di Giacinto
Sonia Di Palma
Lia Estrellado
Kimberly Francisco
Dilantha Geekiyanage
Nikko Henderson
Nikka Komisarski
Steffani Mastromonaco
Caitlin Nery
Conner Olenick
Andrea Strazzullo
Adam Troczynski
Nikko Tagle
Alannah Villella
Jason Wong

These are the blog URLs for my ICT 12 class colleagues. The class is using Blogger through out the year to record information about various programs and techniques.

This list will be updated to include several blog URLs not presently available.

iGoogle

Today I signed up for the iGoogle service and made a couple of minor custom changes. I added a custom widget to display my IP address.

My Knowledge of Binary Numbering

In one of my previous classes, Mr. Vogel also taught us a computer operation called Binary Numbering. All computers work on binary operations which are based on "switches" that are also called "bits." For example,

1111

is a four-bit byte with all the switches set to on. (On is represented as a 1 and the off is represented as a 0). These four switches represent a sequence of numbers using the same positional values as the decimal system. The values are powers of two reading from right to left.

Turbo Pascal - Number Guesser

During my ICT 12 Block G class, Mr. Vogel has been teaching us the different techniques of how to use Turbo Pascal. In class, we created a new program called the Number Guesser. We created this program to ask the user to give the computer any number from one to one hundred. Then, the program would tell the user if the number was too high or too low. If the user guessed the right number, the program would ask the user if they wanted to play again with a yes or no question. If the user does not want to play again, the program thanks the user for playing and ends. If the user does want to play again, the program re-starts from the beginning.

My First Blog!

I will be working with several programming languages in ICT 12 this year. Some of them include Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, Python, Kava, C++, Scratch and Jeroo.