So Much Fun

I will start by apologizing for not posting on time. It has been confusing, crazy, and fun all at the same time.

So this week, I meet with my adviser to discuss my plans for the internship now that it has officially been confirmed. There was this period of time where I was unsure if I could continue with the internship since the company was facing financial trouble. With that said, let me explain what I did this week. This week I had to finish the outline for the NHD website, read a book titled Computer Networks by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and learn HTML.

The NHD competition is closing in soon and so I had to finish my part of the work. In case I forgot to mention it, I am participating in the competition with a close friend of mine. We split up the work and I had to do more research into some of the work that Edward Murrow did during his time in the European CBS network way before he joined television broadcasting. This included understanding how he created the "Murrow Boys" who were war time reporters that worked with Murrow to cover WWII from all areas, understanding how Murrow got introduced to radio broadcasting when his job at CBS only entailed persuading European officials to use CBS to broadcast over rather than their competitors NBC, and listening to more of Murrow's radio broadcasts of WWII. All this research made me understand how time, effort, and research really goes into creating a single broadcast. On an episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver explained how in no means was he a investigative journalist in his video on journalism. He does not do the research on his own (he has a team to do that for him) and whatever evidence he does use is simply cited from other sources. In retrospect, that is what journalism has came to be today. All these late night shows, and morning news channels, simply use what is already been researched by others as a source for their own commentary. They do not do the research themselves. Yet, a lot of people mistake them for investigative journalists. However, nowadays the press seems to be the real journalists as they are the ones who ask the questions, rather data, and compile them together. Still, asking questions seems to be a great problem since it has been so easy for the White House to lie and still not understand that they are lying. Last year, Spotlight was won the Oscar for Best Picture and that movie revealed that the time and effort that goes into real journalism is much more than we think. Newspaper companies have been downsizing for years and people do not understand the consequences of this since most people get their news from Facebook, Google, and Twitter. These places are only distributing work that was down from newspapers themselves. You may say you do not read the newspaper but every time you watch CNN Live for example you are since the sources they cite are coming from print sources. Newspaper companies are going out of business but people are essentially getting their news and the accurate information they desire from these print sources.

Last Week Tonight John Oliver video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq2_wSsDwkQ

Sorry about my little rant there but jumping back to what I did this week let us discuss the material I had to read for training. I had to read Computer Networks by Andrew S. Tanenbaum to understand why  and how the Internet was built, the different layers that are used for both standard models of computer networking: the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) , and how the security of a system works. I won't bore you too much with the details but it essentially comes down to this. United States Department of Defense, DoD for short, had to create some type of flexible architecture so that the network could survive loss of subnet hardware without existing conversation being broken. This way even if the routers and internetwork gateways get blown off by the Soviet Union, the DoD can still have its connections intact. After all, the best way to cause chaos in a nation is to breakdown their infrastructure. Furthermore, the DoD initially built the Arpanet which became the basis for the Internet in the late 1950s at the height of Cold War to have a command-and-control network that could survive a potential nuclear war. At that the military was using the public telephone network that was not at all secure enough and was too vulnerable to outside hacking. With the creation of the Arpanet, the DoD could easily protect its infrastructure were a nuclear war to happen.

This week, I also learned some HTML using tutorials found on Codeacademy.com. I highly recommend this site to anyone interested in learning how to program be it for fun, to create an app/website, or for school purposes. The lessons are super fun and do not require previous experience of programming. The reason I am trying to learn HTML is so that I could create a timeline in my NHD website. I know a very silly reason to learn HTML but I finally finished the timeline and it looks so cool. Here is a link to my NHD website but please keep in my that it is still a work in progress. http://15158537.nhd.weebly.com/

Furthermore, HTML/CSS are helpful in learning how to code an app on iOS since I will be using Swift, a programming language created by Apple. I will discuss more on this in my next blog so see you then.