Egyptian Internet Communication Blackout

Troy McQueen — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 22:22:45 +0000

I find it very interesting to read this morning on cnn about the Egypt riots and how the Egyptian government has ordered total blackout of all internet service and cellular connections throughout Egypt. This is the first time since the history of the internet for a government to deliberately disconnect a country of more then 80 million people. One online quote from cnet says, “Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide,”

I’m thankful that the lines of communication between us and God are always open. No man or offline technology can ever sever those connections.

Here are a couple bible texts that remind us, God always hears our prayer.

Psalm 17:6, “I call on you, O God, for you will answer me; give ear to me and hear my prayer.”

1 John 5:14, “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.”

Internet Safety and Education for Children by Zoodles

Troy McQueen — Thu, 13 May 2010 20:36:30 +0000

I am always concerned about my children’s safety online when using the internet and about the content they may see. After watching the Cnet Loaded news video for today, I was happy to see that there is a new web browser and parent dashboard designed for kids online safety. It is called zoodles and is a safe online service that adds a learning and fun element.

Zoodles allows parents to create a profile for each of their kids that can be monitored and configured on the parent dashboard.

Zoodles has put together a selection of games that are displayed on the child’s profile for fun and educational learning. These games are age appropriate and are updated as your child gets older.

Zoodles is free with a basic membership but is currently offering a premium one year membership at a discounted price of $29.95 which is normally $60.00.

I have signed up for the one year membership and am going to give it a try.

I’ll keep you posted.

My Observations So Far

Well, after having yesterday and today to get a chance to look around the zoodles platform, I was able to formulate some first impressions.

Simplicity of setting

First thing I noticed was the simplicity of setting up the zoodles platform to work on my mac os x computer and Windows 7 computer. All I had to do was login to the zoodles website with my created user name and password (created with I registered for the service). I was then taken to the parent control access area and was able to setup profiles for both of my kids within 2 or 3 minutes.

Loading the Zoodles Program on Windows and Mac OS X

To load the program on each computer, I just logged into the zoodles website, clicked on play games, the system asked me to allow adobe to be installed, I agreed and about 1 minute later the software was loaded and ready to be used. This step only has to be completed once on each computer since the program can be loaded after the install by clicking on the zoodles program icon.

Parent Controls

Another thing I am impressed with is the parent controls that the system has built in such as:

the ability to promote specific educational subjects for each child,
ability to control the type of games shown on each child’s profile,
ability to set different levels of action/violence limits in the games,
ability to block specific content,
ability to add content such as access to a specific websites,
and what I like most of all is the ability to set time limits.

I set the time limit of half an hour for both my kids and when that limit was reached the system displayed a message telling them that their time had expired for the day to come back tomorrow.

Progress Reports

The parent section also displays information about each child’s usage and progress reports.

My kids are really happy to be using the system and have said, “Thanks Dad” a few times now.

Overall

I like what I see so far from the Zoodles platform and content managment system.

Online training options for web ministry

Troy McQueen — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:01:13 +0000

Adrienne at the Computer Forensics Training blog has put together a remarkable list of 100 Open Courses to Make Yourself an Internet Whiz . These are free downloadable courses from major universities and training institutions, on a wide range of internet and communication topics.

See original here:
Online training options for web ministry

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