Hello, how are you? I’m fine. Today, I’m going to do a listening and post what I write down here. I think this is a good idea because I need to practice listening a lot.

Well, I’ve chosen one listening stored in the Languages Courses section of UPV Intranet. The way you have to follow in order to access to the listening is (inside Languages Courses section): English Courses —> Upper Intermediate —> Listening —> Listening Comprehension & Note-taking course —> Unit 1 —> Stage 1

I’ve post what I’ve written below:

Unit 1, stage 1.Listen carefully. Some of the problems facing learners of English. The problems which face learners of English can be divided into three categories: psychological, cultural and linguistic. The largest category seems to be linguistic. As regards linguistic factors, students often have great difficulty in understanding spoken English. Possible reasons are, firstly, it seems that English people speak very quickly. Secondly, they speak with a variety of accents. Thirdly, different styles of speech are used. Now look at your workbook.

I hope it is completely correct!

Hello. Today I’m posting a summary of the ideas we (the class) have exchanged about computer security in the UPV. We have ordered some topics in order of importance.

Legal issues is by far the most important topic, since it involves teachers’ salaries, information about bank accounts, and other problems that can become illegal actions.

The next thing following legal issues in order of importance is Database Hacking, because if someone gets into the UPV internal database, they would have the entire control of all the information stored in there. So they can change it, erase all the data… This could lead into other problems such as spamming, password cracking, email lists hacking…

The third topic we chose is Viruses & Malware because a virus can delete all data from the database or override it.

The next one is Hacking Tools (student use of). This is important because hackers can change their grades and, what is more, decrease the grades of other people.

The next issue we put in order is Phishing. Some people would enter in a webpage that seems the original page of EPSA without checking its URL and then they would type user and password there. Definitely, Phishing is about people getting deceived.

Privacy is less important than the previous topics because the data stored involved with personal issues can’t be used against us.

A thing that is not so important is Network & Wireless Hacking, because this only involves accesing the Internet in a free but illegal way, which cause a decrease of the bandwidth for students and teachers but, related to personal data, there are (almost) no danger.

Hello again! In this entry I’m going to post one of the three exercises that Gari told us to do. I’m talking about exercise 7 in page 57, whose wording (in Spanish: enunciado) is:

The table on page 172 contains selected rankings of the world’s busiest airports by passenger traffic. Write a short description summarizing the information in the table. Try to use some expressions of comparison and contrast.

And this is my short description of the table:

The 2006 statistics for passengers traffic at international airports make interesting reading.

Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, O’Hare Airport and London Heathrow (ranked 1, 2, 3 respectively) have maintained its position, but with a small decrease in the total number of passengers.

On the other hand, Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport, ranked seven, decreased its ranking by one place between 2005 and 2006, despite total number of passengers increased a 5.6% in comparison with the previous year.

Beijing International Airport, in China, has a dramatic increase in its total number of passengers, dealing with 48,501,102 total passengers, and an increase of 18.3% from the year 2005. It also increased its ranking by six positions from 2005.

Similarly, Suvarnabhumi Airport has increased its ranking and the percentage of total number of passengers, but figures are lesser than the Beijing Airport ones.

And I’m going to post exercises 3a and 3b in page 56 too. Here they are!

And that’s all.

Now I’m going to do mylanguageleaderlab.com exercises. It seems all of them are listenings!

In the last class, high-intermediate English students did an interview based in things about the use and likes of students cursing low-intermediate English class about social networks. We obtained the following results that I have classified in some sections:

Usage and popularity

All the students know what a social network is. This means that social networks phenomenon has appeared in the whole young society, in one way or another. In order to see what is the most used social network in the class we asked which social networks they belong to. 75% of them use Facebook, 70% use Tuenti, 20% use Google+, 10% use Twitter and 20% use others social networks. The most popular social network is Tuenti, although Facebook is closely near. Both are the most widespread of the bundle of social networks that exists nowadays. The entire part of the students log in a social network every day at least one time, and 50% of them spend between one and three hours in front of the computer using this kind of services. 85% have been using at least one social networking service more than one year. 95% of the students think that social networks have a remarkable influence on people. The results about the activities that the class does the most inside social networks are that 55% upload photos to share them with their friends, 45% play games offered by their social networking service, 70% use chat to talk directly with their friends and 40% use this kind of services to gossip (I think more than 40% of the class do this, hehe). 40% of the class meet new people through social networks every day, so we can see that social networking services are not used only to maintain contact with your current friends, but to increase the number of them!

Privacy and information

75% of the students don’t trust in the information that belongs to social networks and 55% thinks that privacy is not reliable in this kind of services. So we can deduce that young people don’t trust in social networks, but they use them a lot and, what is more, without reading the policy terms and conditions of the social network they use! In the class, only 3 students have declared that they had read them. And what about the adverts that appear in social networks? Well, there are no students that think they are useful.

Access

95% of the students access to their social networks with their computers and laptops, 65% with SmartPhones and 10% with other devices. So we can say that the “tradicional” way of accessing social networks is the most used nowadays.

And that’s the result of the interview! See you!

Hello! Today I’m not going to talk about today’s English class but about a blunder (in Spanish: “metedura de pata”). My great blunder.

Ok, let’s go. I think I should start with the beginning. I use a program called FLStudio for producing my own song. Inside this program, there can be used a great number of synthesizers. I like many of them but my favourite is the Nexus one. Nexus is a really powerful synthesizer: it has a lot of predefined presets (with preset I refer to the “native” instruments that come with the base version of the synthesizer), its own arpeggiator (it means that you can create arpeggios with all the instruments), its own delay filter and pre-defined resonance parameters (all of these parameters can be redefined to your liking), and many other things. Well, this synthesizer can import expansions in order to increase the number of instruments that can be used with it, and I have to say that all this expansions have a really magnificent presets: its instruments sound very very nice. So I decided to download all the expansions, and… All of them (the ones that have been created by now) take up more than 20GB! I planned to burn all the expansions in DVDs when I have them downloaded.

And then here comes the blunder. Yesterday I had the wonderful idea of, instead of only burn the DVDs for my personal use, create a disc image for each DVD and share them with other people in the Internet. Because of this, I decided to design a picture that would contain a descripcion and the icon of each expansion. In order to do this, I installed Photoshop CS4 in my computer. But I realized that it has been installed some useless components in my computer, so I decided to unistall them with an utility called “Argente Utilities”. When I choose these useless components to unistall it, the program asked me if I wanted to erase the components traces. I check “Yes” and the computer got hung up (in Spanish: “se colgó”). I went to have dinner and later I came back in front of my computer. My surprise was to find out that what the “Argente Utilities” was been actually doing was erasing all my C: drive! Inmediately I restarted my computer and when it turns completely on I checked the data and… only 1.5GB remained into “Program Files” folder and some Windows’ utilities had been erased too. Afortunately all the data stored in my personal folder remainded with no changes. At least I’ll be able to save all the important files before formatting my computer!

Hello! How are you? Today I’m going to talk about the English last class. Here I go.

First of all, I have to say that I’ve enjoyed a lot the class, because we practised pronunciation a lot, and I like that. The first of the things Gari told us about pronunciation is that this is pronounced  /ðɪs/ (with our mouth totally relaxed) and these is pronounced /ðiːz/ (a long “i”). Afterwards, he also told us that /s/ is what is called a voiceless consonant, that means that there is no vibration in our vocal chords, and /z/ is a voiced consonant: there is a vibration in our vocal chords when we pronounce it. And for a complete information, the consonant /ð/ (in “this”, “they”) is called an interdental consonant, and it is pronounced in a different way that the consonant /d/ (in “day”).

During the class, appeared a word again that was used in our first class in order to introduce ourselves: commute, that means to travel to go to job (in Spanish: “desplazarse para ir al trabajo”). I didn’t remember this word until I heard it in the last class.

We talked about words that are combination of two words. I am not refeering to compound words like “database”, “fire-fly” and more (an interesting page that shows this kind of structure is http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/compounds.htm). I’m referring to words like “smog” (a combination of “smoke” + “fog”) and “bit” (a combination of “binary” + “digit”).

Other things that I didn’t know is that the plural of “sheep” is “sheep” too! And that the word “funny” means “gracioso” in Spanish (“fun” means “divertido” in Spanish, by the way) but it has a negative connotation.

To finish this entry, I’m going to share a webpage that Gari showed to us. This webpage is very useful when you don’t know how to pronounce a word. Here is the link: http://www.howjsay.com/

Well, it has been enough for today. See you next time!

Hello, I’m here again! How are you? I hope you be fine, of course. In order to not to break the routine, I’m going to (I use the construction “going to” because I’m talking about an intention, that means, a thing I plan to do) talk about yesterday’s class.

I was very glad about Gari’s return, but I have to say that I’ve enjoyed the classes taught by Ana. Firstly of all, we did a summary of what we had done in the last three weeks. We told him the better than we could the things we had talked about and then we started the reading about malaria in section 4.2. Gari told us that the noun “bacteria” is used like a plural of “bacterium”. I didn’t know that, as well as (in Spanish: “así como”) “media” is the plural of “medium” (in this context, I don’t know whether I should say “media IS the plural of medium” or “media WAS the plural of medium”. When I say this kind of sentence in Spanish I always say “media ERA el plural de medium” if that information was told to me in a past time, even though the meaning of the sentence is timeless). Although when I studied the 1st year of Audiovisual Degree in the Gandia Campus (which is a Campus of the UPV institution, like Alcoy Campus) we used a lot the term “mass media” to refer to the broadcasting transmission of information. Later we talked about the use of future continuous, going to, and present continuous. At the beginning, It seemed difficult to me, but we did some practice and then I began to understand more or less in which sentences I should use each construcion. I think that was the most difficult part of the lesson we had yesterday. In section 4.3 we spoke about organ transplants because the reading was about the world’s first partial face transplant. And finally we did some listenings.

I noticed I must improve my English listening level. I borrowed a terror film from the university’s library yesterday. I’m going to watch it tomorrow in Spanish and, if I like it, I’ll try to get round to (in Spanish: “sacar tiempo para”) watch the film in English.

See you in my next post!

Hello! I hope you’re fine!

Firstly of all I want to mention that modal verbs have been the most difficult thing to me since I started this course, so I know I have to improve that. Well, in the first two hours i did nineteen exercises in the web platform. Well I have a problem with my eyes which is that they become dry too quickly and, therefore, spending more than an hour in front of a computer hurts my eyesight. I think the term for describing my problem is “eyestrain” (in Spanish: “vista cansada”).

Well, later we started unit 4 with Ana. It was about Medicines, a matter that interests me (but not in the way Computers Engineering does, you know *blink*).

We had lunch at 2 o’clock. Meanwhile, my friend Juan Jesús said to me that a lot of friut fly. Oh, and that was true, of course. When I went to get rid of the peel of my banana (the fruit) to the organic litter bin placed in the university’s snack bar, I opened the lid (in Spanish: “tapa”) and… It was full of them inside the bin. Oh my God, I HATE those insects. They are in my home too, flying around their beloved fruit.

Ok, so I hope to see you reading next week’s post! (although actually I could’t see that, hehe)

Hi to all who read my blog!

Today I’ve learned a lot of things and I’ve practised English a lot too. At the beginning of the class, I had one doubt (I don’t remember exactly what right now) and I asked for it in the way “What *insert_name* means?” Ok, the first class Gari told us what is the correct way in order to ask this kind of questions. Ana has made me remember today that the correct form is “What’s the meaning of *insert_name*?” So, I’ll try to keep in mind this next week.

I didn’t know what “coal” means until Andrés told me it means “carbón”. Well, it is supposed that the word “coal” would have rung a bell because it appeared in a game called Minecraft that precisely we played some months ago. But don’t worry because another word that I didn’t understand at the beginning (“outstanding”), when Ana said to us that its meaning was “sobresaliente”, I remembered that this word appeared in the game Mortal Kombat when I had completed succesfully some missions.

Afterwards, we did a meeting and we were talking about the installation of a wind farm. Actually, a determined role was assigned for every student and we had to play that role according to the point of view of the character each individual had.

And this is a part of the things we’ve done in the 29th September English class. I’m really tired right now. I have been in the university since 8.30 A.M. and I’m still there now! But the friend I’m waiting for is about finishing his class and we’ll be going home soon.

See you!