I found the Feltron reports to be quite interesting, though they made my brain hurt a little bit.  The first report I read was the 2010 report, which featured statistics from the life of Nicholas Felton’s father.  Felton’s father must have kept many things on record, because there is an overwhelming amount of statistical data contained within the report.  I guess this would be expected though, as it is a person’s entire life which Felton is reporting on.  In fact, I imagine there were many more facts about his father’s life which were not included within the report.

The other report I read was the 2008 report, which featured statistics regarding Felton’s travel methods as well as various activities (video games, gym time, beach, etc.).  It impresses me that he was able to keep track of all of this information, as I feel most people would have given up on it.  It is interesting to see all the numbers for these activities because it puts into account just how much time we spend doing small tasks like these throughout an entire year.

Overall, I think the Feltron reports were pretty interesting, but I found their style of presentation somewhat confusing.  Im not sure what greater purpose these reports serve overall, as it is essentially insignificant information they are recording.  Although, from the report based on Felton’s father, I do see they can be of importance in collecting significant information about certain figures which may be of future use.

I enjoyed exoloring the various websites for this week’s activities.  I find it interesting to study certain aspects of history when you can actually see where these events/places are located and/or took place.  It helps you to better grasp the history of that place or event because it gives you a sense of how significant it may have been to the particular community in which it is located.  I found the PhilaPlace website to be especially interesting because I was born and raised in Philadelphia.  It was a neat experience to study an older map of the city, as well as read up on some of the city’s historic/significant places.  There were many I was not even aware of.

I found many of our new exploring tools to be quite intreresting.  We are going to have access to a plethora of programs which can aid us in our work.  I did not realize that google provided so many tools to their users (I was still thinking of them as just a search engine).  Now I can definitely see why the company is as popular as it is.  In particular, I liked their map program because I found it to be efficient and easy to use, and I can see myself working well with it for future assignments.  As for the KML stuff, I am still a little confused about what exactly it is and how to export one’s map in KML formatt.  But I am sure this will come to me over time.  I look forward to getting to work with these tools for the second half of the semester.

The readings regarding the security issues with Apple and Amazon were eyeopening and a little scary.  I myself do not use any Apple products and do not have an Amazon account, so the articles do not hit as close to home with me as they may with others.  Still though, I find it alarming that other people may be at risk in the same way the author was.  Something does not seem right, that these powerful and rich companies have weak security measures, making it easy for their users to be hacked.

I have never been a big fan of the cloud system, where everything is connected and all in one place.  I feel it makes it too easy for someone to get a hold of one’s information.   However, the author did impress me when describing how the cloud services worked efficiently to help him recover his data.  The one main thing I believe I have taken from the readings is the importance of backing up one’s data.  This is not something I do regularly, if at all.  The author’s story has helped me come to understand that I could lose very important documents at any time, therefor it is crucial to have that data saved somewhere else than my computer.