Nelly’s Musings

As many of you know, I am a fan of True Crime books. Just yesterday, I was browsing www.Amazon.com for new true crime books to buy. While I was browsing, I happen to see a book about a rescue of 37 girls, ages 5 to 14 from Cambodia whom were being held in a brothel against their will for money making purposes. The name of the book is,”Terrify No More” by Gary Haugen.

Here is a picture of the cover of the book:

I quickly decided to buy it but as you know, Amazon encourages people to buy more things to get free shipping and handling. So, I browsed all books in this topic and ordered a total of three books on this subject. I was pleased to get an email today telling me that my order had already  shipped and was eagerly awaiting the arrival of these books. I was also thinking that while Human Trafficking does occur in the US every once in a while, it was a problem that did not involve children as young as five years old.

Therefore, you can imagine my shock and horror when I saw the headline shown here: “Did North Carolina mom hand over five-year-old daughter for prostitution?

http://www.vancouverite.com/2009/11/15/did-north-carolina-mom-hand-over-five-year-old-daughter-for-prostitution/

At first I was in denial hoping that this was a tabloid type website. I quickly did another search for this story and found out that it was really an actual case happening right here in the US. Some of the reports are also stating that she might have been sold to a Pedophile ring.

Omg, what is wrong with some people? I just cannot understand how a mother can turn over a precious 5 year old little girl for this purpose especially here in the land of the free and the brave. I also do not understand why this case is not getting more media attention. In my opinion, Google show have this case featured as one of their top stories.

I will pray that the police find this little girl soon and arrest everyone involved in her disappearance. I am hoping that my readers will join me in prayer.

Here is a video on this case which is available for free embedding from this site; http://www.wral.com/news/local/video/6422092/

Update: 11-16-2009 Police are now looking for the girl’s body and I am just so heartbroken:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/16/north.carolina.missing.girl/

2nd update: 11-16-2009 Girl found dead:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33945506/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

This is so incredibly sad. Please keep this little girl’s family in your thoughts and prayers.

3rd update: Nov. 18th, 2009

Today I decided to do yet another search on the topic of human trafficking in the US. I quickly got another shock when I came across this article:

North Carolina is the Prime Destination for Human Trafficking in the US ??

Wow, what an education I seemed to have acquired quickly. The story also states that around 200,000 children in the US are at risk of getting trafficked into the sex industry every year.

Here is a video that is freely available for embedding on this same site:

I would have say that the information in this video is just so so shocking and that this is a real wake-up call for me. Human Trafficking is not just mostly a third world country problem as I originally thought. I hope to get more educated on this subject so I can become more aware of my surroundings and hopefully someday I can make a difference in someone’s life.

I currently have one of my freshman level classes blogging and doing other web2.0 type activities to earn 40% of their class grades. I have thought about how I should grade the blogs and decided to ask my Twitter Personal Learning Network (PLN) for help.

Received a response from Professor Wendy Drexler whom is teaching a graduate level class and she shared her rubric blog checklist with me. I thought it was pretty good but it did not fit my needs as her class was blogging to earn their participation grade. I then decided to do a little research to see what I could find.

I found several great rubrics which were freely shared and after sharing them with Professor Wendy Drexler, I decided to blog and share them with others.

Here were my findings:

From Professor Barbara Nixon’s blog here whom I follow on Twitter:

Professor Barbara Nixon demonstrates how she uses Google Forms to allow her students to self evaluate their own blogs before she grades them. Great idea, I will be revising this for my own class.

She also provides a link to the actual rubric that she will use to grade her student’s blog. Again, another awesome idea which I will adopt.

Here is a blog rubric from another professor who teaches, “Using Tech in Education” at a University.

Also found another blog rubric used in an Education class at the Univ of Regina. I later found out that I do follow Professor Alec Courosa who created this rubric, on Twitter.

Here is another provided by a Tech ed consultant, Tony Vincent for free on his site here

Lastly, I found another freely shared rubric from
this site which is a higher education rubric creation site.

I plan to revise one of these to use with my class. As you can already see, most of these resources came from the wonderful colleagues that I follow on Twitter. I cannot say this enough, I have learned so much from my PLN and the members just rock!! Hope this collection helps someone find the perfect rubric for grading their student’s blogs.

Last week, I decided to make up a very small assignment for my college level Multimedia Presentations Class. The assignment was to use a royalty free picture site such as Http://www.sxc.hu to find 10 Jpg formatted photos in a topic relating to multimedia. For example: 10 photos of musical instruments to represent sound.

They were supposed to download them to their desktop and then use the MS Paint software to save 2 each in the following formats, Tiff, Gif, Png, Monochome BMP and regular BMP. Our book chapter concerning graphics had discussed all of these. After converting these, they were to use their Google sites , create a new page and insert a table that would display one photo in each cell.

Well, at first I was thinking that this assignment was very elementary and probably an insult to their level of graphics related knowledge because most students in this class were digital media majors. However, I was in for a big surprise.

As the students started working on this assignment, one student called me over.  She had just converted the first photo to a Gif format. She asked me why the image did not look as good as before and seemed blurry.

Well, this gave me the opportunity to tell her and the class that the Gif format should never be used for regular photos. It should only be used for logos, thumbnails and small animated images. It had a limit of only 256 colors which were not enough to create sharp looking photos.

The next student quickly called me over and asked me why the photo she just converted to the Monochrome BMP  format was now black and white. I quickly told her and the class that this was exactly what Monochrome BMP format was supposed to do.

Still another student called me to her workstation and asked why she could not upload the two .Tiff format images to her Google site to insert into her table. This gave me the opportunity to tell the class that when you convert a .jpg to a .tiff format, the image sometimes gets corrupted and that is why it would not upload.

Of course, most of this information was covered in the chapter in our book but I guess that the information did not hit home until they actually completed the hands on assignment.

So I guess I learned a valuable lesson.  I should never overestimate what my students already know as doing so might result in a missed opportunity for my students to learn new things. I am now more confident that none of the students are going to miss questions about these topics during the midterm exam.

If you read my 7 Meme blog, you might remember that I grew up in the South Bronx. What I did not reveal in the blog was that my family was only one of two Hispanic families living in the building where I lived. All of the other families were African American. Therefore, I grew up listening to Motown music and knew who the Jackson 5 were by the time I was 8 years old and in 4th grade.

During that time, the Jackson 5 were the most talked about and admired music group in my elementary school and in the neighborhood where I lived. All of the kids in my class and I knew the names of all the boys in the group by heart. Everyone would bring magazines that were popular at the time to school so they could share articles of the amazing Jackson 5. All of the boys in my school wanted to dress like the Jackson 5 and all of the children wanted to dance like them.

Informal street dances were very common in my neighborhood at the time and the Jackson 5 music would be played frequently. To the kids in my neighborhood, the Jackson 5 were our heroes and there was nothing that would make us happier then dancing to one of their songs.

I was on a European vacation when I heard the breaking news of Michael Jackson’s death. I turned on my cruise ship room TV and there on CNN was the headline informing everyone of his death. I read the headline aloud. My 2 sons and husband were shocked. The first thing my oldest son said was, ” I wish I could post on my forums right now”. I responded, “I wish I was able to Tweet right now”.

I guess our reaction was typical since I read on Google news later that the Internet was overwhelmed with people online trying to get information about his death and communicating with others about it: http://tinyurl.com/lqgfsc I also read, that Google thought they were being attacked by all the searches for Michael Jackson: http://tinyurl.com/mmmvlo

Well, we were not able to go online along with the rest of the world because we had pre-paid for an expensive all day excursion which was non refundable so we proceeded with our original plans for the day.

Since then, the news of his recent death has profoundly effected me in many ways. I have found myself crying on and off and talking about him to anyone that will listen. I have been listening to his music on YouTube, downloading many of his music videos from itunes for my iPod touch and reading everything I can about his life and death.

I was just telling my family at dinner time tonight that many people all over the world are grieving for him right now. These are people of all different colors, nationalities, and religions. That it was amazing and rare for one person to cause so much international grief and manage to break down so many barriers that keep people who are different from communicating with each other. I also mentioned to them that I wished I lived closer to LA than I do as I would love to attend the public memorial that is being planned for him some time next week : http://tinyurl.com/muygjm

As I was talking to my family, I realized that there is magic and power in music.  That beautiful music has the ability to make people happier when they are already feeling good and lift people’s spirits who are feeling down. Hence, moments listening to and or dancing to great music, create powerful memories in people’s lives and a connection with the person who wrote and or sang the songs.  So I guess that music is really an extraordinary universal language.

So Michael, if you can read this from the beyond, I want you to know that you will live in my heart forever. I will never forget you or your music. Thanks for lifting my spirits on days when I did not think I could make it through. Thanks for making me feel happier when I was already feeling good. Also, regardless of what people may say about you, I have always felt you were 100% innocent of any wrong doing and had such a pure heart and great spirit. As far as I am concerned, you have always radiated both inner and outer beauty.  I hope that you rest in peace and perhaps someday, I will meet you on the other side.

Here is a picture of Michael Jackson taken by Time’s Magazine in May of 1986 and provided free to the public for non commercial use. He is attending an awards ceremony where he got a certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records for being the person that has given the most money to children charities:

This blog is about a dream that I had many years ago. My two sons were ages, 6 and 1 at the time. I believe that the dream was a warning for me about a terrible event that was about to or could have occurred.

My husband was out of town when I had this dream. I was home alone with my two kids. In my dream, I was asleep in my own bed and bedroom. I awoke suddenly and found a guy I have never met standing by the side of my bed holding up a knife. He apparently was ready to stab me. I was so frightened in the dream that I woke up very scared and I was very happy it was only a dream.

I am usually a very deep sleeper and it takes a lot of noise to wake me up. However, because of this dream, I was sleeping very lightly for the next few nights. My bedroom faces the door of the entrance to my house from my two-car garage. This garage also has a side door in which you can enter the garage from my side yard.

Exactly two days after my dream at about 3:30 AM in the morning, I awoke up to the sound of the side garage door opening. I then heard footsteps. I immediately jumped off my bed, grabbed the handle of the door that faces my bedroom and yelled, “Whose there”? Usually I do not have a lot of courage but I was alone and I thought of protecting my children. The person got scared and I heard the person run out of my garage through my side garage door. I stood by the door that faces my bedroom for a minute because I was terrified. I however knew I had to get to the phone to call 911. I did not want to scream as to not wake up my children as I thought that if I did, they would never want to sleep in their rooms alone again.

I finally decided to go to my living room, got my phone and standing back by this door dialed 911. I stayed by this door holding the door handle until the police arrived. I did not trust the strength of this door handle because it was not very sturdy and I thought the person might be back. The police finally arrived, checked out my garage and found the side garage door wide open. The person was long gone. I quickly called my husband to let him know what happened and then my neighbors to warn them in case the person tried to enter their garages. I calmed down a bit after that and just laid down in my bed wide-awake until morning.

The next morning, my best friend called to see if my kids and I wanted to go to the beach with her and her daughter. It was summer time, my kids were not in school and I was off work for the summer as I teach. I said I would love to go and then quickly told her this story.

She got pretty excited and said, “oh my God, what time did the incident occur”. I said, 3:30 AM. She said that at that very moment, she had woken up really scared, woken up her husband and told him that she felt someone had just invaded the house of someone she knew and she thought it was her mom’s home. Her husband said, “honey, don’t be silly, just go back to sleep”. I stated that I thought it was amazing that she was able to sense that someone she knew was in danger. She said that this had never happened to her before.

Since then, I called a locksmith and had professional locks put on both doors. To this day, my kids still do not know what happened that night and I hope they never do until they are at least adults. I also hope they do not read this blog anytime soon.

For months, I have been frustrated by the fact that suddenly and unexpectedly I could not log on to several sites that I logged on to easily in the past.To my knowledge, It was only happening on one of the six computers that I owned. This particular computer is a lap top and is running Windows XP SP2.

Some of the sites gave me a message that my internet browser must be configured to allow cookies. I would double check my browser and found the this feature was enabled. I tried other types of browsers without success.

I wondered whether if was a hardware related problem at first. This is because I have attached an external USB keyboard and thought that maybe the sites in question sensed that the keyboard was external and would not accept a log in from an external keyboard as a security feature. I however tested this theory by disconnecting the keyboard and trying to log in using the built in laptop touch screen, I again had the same problem.

Finally, this week, I encountered the same problem on another of the 6 computers that I own. This particular computer is a dual boot Intel chip based Mac that can run both Windows XP SP2 and the Mac OS 10. I had not noticed this problem on that particular computer since we rarely boot it up to run the WinXP OS.

I did several Google searches on the problem and found that many people were complaining about the same problem and that there were no posted solutions for it. I then started to think about what other things other than the OS did the two computers have in common. I finally decided that they were both running the CA Internet Security Software Suite. Here is a link to the software site:

CA Security software

As a customer of Bright House Networks internet service, we get this software free for all of our PC’s that run WinXP or below. Here is a link where you can register to receive your free copy if you are a Bright House Customer:

Bright House Software Registration Site

It occurred to me that maybe the Firewall on this software suite was somehow causing this problem. I did a few more Google searches listing my problem and adding the name of the security suite. I only found one promising lead. This was a review of the this software suite and the review said that this software prevented the user from using Window remote login feature until he went into the advance Firewall settings and turned off this restriction.

This gave me the idea to go to the advanced settings of the Firewall section of this software suite. Low and behold, when I went into it, I found that it also had three settings to control how your browser accepts cookies. They were high, medium and low . This must have been a new feature which was in the latest upgrade which I did not know about. Since I get a free copy, not only is my virus definitions automatically upgraded but also the version of this software suite.

I quickly decided to change the setting to medium and then try logging in to the sites which were blocking me. To my surprise, I logged on perfectly. So, I went to my other computer and changed this setting again and got the same positive result.

So, these are the steps and screen shots on how to change the settings:

1. Double click to open up your CA security software, you should be a window appear that looks like this:

2. Now click on the double arrow button on the right side of the screen next to CA Personal Firewall, your window should now look like this:

3. Now click on the link underneath the Firewall which states, “Open Advanceded Settings”. Your window should now look like this:

4. Now click on Privacy on the left side of this Window, it should now look like this:

5. Make sure to set the cookies to medium. Close your program and now you should be able to log on to the sites that you were not able to to previously.

Hope this blog helps someone to resolve this problem. If it did help, please consider leaving a comment to let me know.

A few weekends ago, my youngest son’s Apple Power Macintosh G4 867 DP Mirrored drive Door Model # M8787LL/A computer crashed. The specs for this computer can be found on this site: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/stats/powermac_g4_867_dp_mdd.html

He was running Mac OS Tiger version 10.4. 6. The OS somehow got corrupt and kept booting into single user mode and presenting the Darwin Command Line shell. If you have never seen it, it looks like this:

In this stage,the terminal would appear, cover the entire length of the monitor screen and it would present a black login command line window. When the user types in the login name and password, it seemed to start to boot normally but would promptly just come back to the same terminal. It seemed to be locked into an endless loop.

I thought I would be able to fix the situation quickly since I had previously installed AppleJack troubleshooting assistant software from: http://applejack.sourceforge.netwhich can be run in the Darwin command line window. Here is a screen shot of it:

I ran all of the tests shown on the screen shot. All worked correctly except it would not repair the disk successfully. At first, this led me to believe that my son’s hard drive was defective. However, since I teach Computer Programming, I know that error messages may not really mean what they state. A lot of times, a error message appears because it is the default and the program really doesn’t know what is wrong.

However, to double check, I quickly did a Google search on one of my other computers to find out which hard drive had originally shipped with the computer and found out it was an IBM 60 GB Ultra 7200rpm ATA/100 hard drive model # IC35L060AVVA07-0. I then did a search on this particular hard drive and found the shocking information found on this page about IBM hard drives: http://www.datarecovery24.co.uk/IBM%20IC35L060AVVA07-0.html Wow, what a eye opener. I guess this time, the error message was correct.

I quickly searched for a replacement hard drive and found a good alternative, I ordered a 80GB Western Digital Caviar 7200rpm UltraDMA 100/ATA drive for a very reasonable price. I used the video instructions shown on this site to install it: http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/index.cfm?page=Video/harddrive/g4mddata66/g4mddata66h.html I installed it as a secondary drive but made it the master drive. I left the original drive in the case and just pulled the cable off of it that connects it to the mother board.  Since the new drive is now the master drive, the original drive is now no longer recognized nor used by the system.

I decided to get my original OS OS Jaguar v10.2 G4 CD’s that came with the computer, put the cd in the DVD drive, held down the C key on the keyboard and started the install. I chose to install the original OS since it has some of my favorite apps that have been removed in Mac OS Tiger v10.4. 6. such as Iphoto and a few others. I then used Google to find instructions on how to update from this version to Tiger. I did so because there is another version of the Mac OS which is between these two and it is Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and I did not currently own it.

Found several pages that said to install Apple update fixes to Mac OS Jaguar v10.2 and that then I would be able to just skip the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther OS upgrade and just use my OS Tiger v10.4. 6 DVD to upgrade directly to it. They also stated that all I had to do was boot from my OS Tiger v10.4. 6 DVD to finish the upgrade. I followed these instructions which were unfortunately wrong.Everything crashed as soon as I tried to boot from the DVD and the computer started again in the Darwin Command line shell. The same situation happened again as in the beginning of this blog.

To make a long story short, this is what I learned about to completing the upgrade:

1. First boot from the Mac OS Jaguar v10.2 CD by holding down the C key on your keyboard. When you get the screen that states,”Welcome to the Mac OS System”. From the Installer Menu Bar, click Open Disk Utility. You will then see the Disk Utility window. Now complete the following instructions:

a. In the left pane of the Disk Utility window, click the drive you want to erase.

b. In the right pane of the Disk Utility window, click the Erase tab.

c. From the Volume Format drop-down menu, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

d. In the Name field, highlight the existing text and type in a name for the hard drive and click on ERASE. Now quit the Disk Utility and then click on CONTINUE to start your Install.

2. After it gets done with the first CD, will ask you for the second Mac OS Jaguar v10.2 CD and it will finally boot. When it finishes booting. Remove the Mac OS Jaguar v10.2 CD from your DVD drive and insert your Mac OS Tiger version 10.4.6 DVD. You do need a DVD drive to do this.

3. The Tiger OS cd will start automatically and open a Window. Now click on INSTALL. You will get a message that it will require a restart and then start the install process. Click on ok.

4. After it finishes installing, your version will now be Mac OS Tiger version 10.4.6. You should download the five upgrades for this version.

5. Here are some do’s and don’ts:

a. Do not install any third party applications yet such as Firefox. Use Safari to download the upgrades. This is because third party applications may cause a conflict with the upgrade installs.

b. Do not use the automatic Apple Update utility to do this. It does not work well and may corrupt your OS system again. For example, if it is used to upgrade Java only, the next upgrade that contains the same version of Java will corrupt your OS system when you try to install it.

c. Do not use the combo update download packages available on the Apple site. They also do not work well and may corrupt your OS system again for similar reasons listed above.

d. Just download each update individually for your computer system which is either an Intel or PowerPC based system, directly to your desktop. The last OS upgrade you need to download will be 10.4.11. When you are ready to download, just go to the Apple page located here:

Apple Support Downloads

and type in, “update 10.4.7″, to get started.

For example: the first PowerPC upgrade is located here:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/Mac_OS_X_Update_10_4_7_PPC

the first Intel based upgrade is located here:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/Mac_OS_X_Update_10_4_7_Intel

6. After downloading Mac OS X update 10.4.11, also go to this site:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/x11update2006113.html

and download the X11 Update 2006 Version 1.1.3 . This is the latest update and will be the last one that you will install manually.

After you download all of them, double click on your internal hard drive and then on the Applications folder. Then open up your utility folder and double click on Disk Utility. Select your hard drive from the left when it starts and then click on REPAIR PERMISSIONS.

7. Now double click on the first install and install it. When the computer restarts, then use Disk Utility again to Repair Permissions again. Sometimes they will be right, but do not take chances, do this every time after an upgrade install.

8. Continue with this routine for each upgrade.

9. Once all the upgrades are done, now start installing third party applications if you like. Do not install Adobe Shockwave Player as I believe that one of the updates from Apple already includes it. Once you get done installing third party applications, repair the permissions again. After all the third party applications are installed, now use the Apple Update Utility, to install all Java related updates ending with Java for Mac OS, version 1.4 release 9 which can be found here: Java for Mac OS  Version 1.4,  release # 9. Also install all security related updates.

Your computer will now run efficiently and correctly. Hope this blog helps someone out there who may in the same situation.

Note: This blog was revised the day after I wrote it because I did further research and found out that the original hard drive was indeed defective.

This is an amazing video created as a keynote for the Net Generation Education Project

In a nutshell, students are asking today’s schools to stop the practice of blocking websites. They state this practice is preventing the future from being a part of their education.

I have to agree with these students 100%. I believe that educational institutions should teach students how to navigate the web safely instead of pretending that it does not exist.

Since the Internet has only been available to the public since 1994, most parents are not web savvy enough to teach their children cyber-safety skills. This means that if schools do not teach this, then students will have no choice to learn cyber-safety lessons the hard way.

As a nation, we cannot and should not let this happen. So, as these students state, lets start allowing our student’s futures into our educational institutions.

My Twitter friend, Alec Courosa was recently interviewed by a reporter from a Canadian TV news show concerning Twitter. He then posted a copy of the video shown on TV, on a few of his social networks sites.

I watched the video and  thought he did a great job.  However, I was especially excited when I saw that my Tweet and picture were shown. I was also thrilled when he mentioned that he recently attended a conference where he met a lot of his Twitter contacts face to face for the first time and that he got many hugs. This is because I was also at the same conference and was one of the people that hugged him.

Here is the video from the CBC TV channel:



On that note, be careful what you Tweet because you never know where it may show up.