Daniel Greene

Category: Communication

I got my BA in English with a concentration in Communications / Media Study. These posts represent my interest in those fields of study, including: Movies, Television, Websites, Blogging, HTML, CSS, Social Media, etc.

  • My sexting blog post published in the book Sexting by Cengage Learning!

    My sexting blog post published in the book Sexting by Cengage Learning!

    The UPS truck delivered something today that brought tears to my eyes: my own hardcover copy of the book Sexting including a chapter by lil’ ol’ me. Gale Cengage Learning approached me a year ago about including a blog post of mine, Sexting highlights society’s issues with privacy and shame, in one of their textbooks. I agreed to publication with a writer’s fee and copy of the book. They complied with a check and a copy of the book as promised. My article appears as chapter two titled “The threat of sexting has been exaggerated” on page 15 of the hardcover edition. The book is part of the At Issue: Social Issues series.

    Here is the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

    Sexting / Stefan Kiesbye, book editor.
    p. cm. — (At issue)
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    ISBN 978-0-7377-5161-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-7377-5162-8 (pbk.)
    1. Internet and teenagers. 2. Internet–Safety measures. 3. Teenagers–Sexual relations. 4. Electronic mail systems. I. Kiesbye, Stephan. II. Title. III. Series.
    HQ799.2.I5.S49 2011
    004.67’80835—dc22

    Purchase At Issue: Sexting on Amazon.com.

    I am excited to be a part of this compilation and I look forward to reading the other chapters!

  • How I like using Google+ (plus)

    I got an invite to join Google+ a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been using it a lot and enjoying it very much. It combines the privacy of Facebook (even more privacy than Facebook, actually) with the openness of Twitter. It’s better than Twitter in that you can have longer than 140-character conversations — like on Facebook — yet it’s open like Twitter in that you get to meet a lot of people by viewing people’s comments and profiles. It’s really more than the sum of Facebook and Twitter, though. Just like any musical artist you might say is like so-and-so meets so-and-so, Google+ has its own vibe and unique contribution… it’s just too new a genre to put a finger on yet. Still, I like it very much and I am using it more than Facebook these days. I’ve been using Google services for a few years now, and I integrate them with my Android phone, so Google+ is a natural extension of all that. I like that it has a toolbar that contains all my other Google services like Gmail, Calendar, Documents, Photos, YouTube, etc.

    If you would like to circle me on Google+, search for Daniel Greene or go to my Google profile.

  • I want a Chromebook; in fact, I want a Chromephone. Easy on the OS, and hold the apps.

    The coming of the Chromebook–the web-only netbook that boots in less than ten seconds–has me thinking how nice it would be if my Android phone booted up in 10 seconds instead of 60. But if it did, it wouldn’t be an Android phone, would it? It would be a Chromephone, and that’s all right with me.

    If the telephony could be worked out, I don’t see why a phone couldn’t be made to run on a thin, browser-like OS that accesses almost all its content on the Cloud. As HTML5 is helping web content become more app-like, and as more of users’ content is stored online, there may soon be little need for onboard apps at all. We may be doing everything we need with Web apps. This may be the end of the OS as we know it. No more bloated platform-dependent apps. Microsoft never was a trailblazer, and Apple isn’t blazing trails anymore, either. Apple is announcing iCloud and OS X Lion tomorrow, and I’d say they’re just playing catch up. Microsoft say Windows 8 is going to have an HTML5 panel screen instead of a desktop, and by the time it comes out in a year or so, it will be as old news as Windows 95 = Mac 84.

    As someone who embraced platform-independent Web development before it was popular, I am thrilled to see that HTML and CSS have now taken us to the point where just about any app can be a Web app. Pretty soon, there won’t be a need for five different Facebook apps; there will just be Facebook as a web app anyone can use the same way on any device. You won’t have to wait for your favorite Website to come out with an app for your device’s operating system, because web standards and powerful web functionality will make the question of device and OS moot.

    I’m already doing just about everything online with the Chrome browser now except for editing photos and videos and opening Office documents on my iMac. The only thing I do on my laptop other that the Net is Microsoft Office if I have to, and I’m already using that less as I use Google Docs more. I’m ready to move away from bloated software and over to something simple, fast, and standard. Chrome is the OS of today.

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  • I love my new blog theme!



    I love my new blog theme!
    Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

    I changed my WordPress blog, danielgreene.com, to the Mystique theme. I love it! It has this widget on the top with links to my RSS feed, Facebook Page, Twitter profile, Flickr photostream, and YouTube channel. It has a combo widget on the right that shows recent comments, top posts, archives, tag cloud, and category lists. And it uses a beautiful font that has true italics. I like!

  • Yes, I am the kind of person who spends 15 minutes searching for the multiplication sign. 8-}

    Yes, I’m the guy who just spent 15 minutes searching for the Mac keyboard shortcut for the mathematical “times” or “multiply” sign [×]. There is no shortcut; however, I did learn that the official name for this glyph is “multiplication sign” (who knew?), the Unicode identifier is 00D7, the HTML name code is “times”, the HTML number code is 215 (but I can’t show the HTML code without WordPress converting it, apparently), the Unicode identifier is 00D7, and the Windows keyboard entry method is Alt+0215. For my Mac, I opened Edit, Special Characters, typed in “multiplication sign”, and saved the glyph to my Favorites.

    If you’re interested, some of my other favorites are the “beamed eighth notes” to symbolize music [♫], the “black heart suit” sign [♥] to symbolize love, the French quotation marks, or «guillemets», a.k.a. “left-pointing double angle quotation mark” [«] and “right-pointing double angle quotation mark” [»], the proper characters to denote the feet and inches in my height, 5′ 11″, called the “prime” [′] and “double prime” [″], and the “trade mark sign” [™] which I like to use sarcastically to represent that something that should be bottled and sold, such as doing typography The Right Way™.

    Thanks to Arnold Winkelried aka Noodles for his webpage, Keyboard Shortcuts for special characters, which answered my question about the multiplication sign that I had read at least a dozen other pages in search of.

    And now, with the (at least) 15 minutes I spent on writing this blog post, I have spent a half an hour more than the average (and maybe saner) person who would type 2 x 2 and be done with it. But I console myself with the knowledge that there are hundreds of nerds like me out there who will be glad that I shared this seemingly trivial information with them. So there! 🙂

    P.S. I just spent another 20 minutes trying to write the HTML name and number codes without having them converted to the × character itself. Fighting with technology before 8 AM on a Sunday morning, oy!