All posts by Michael Cox

We Don’t Know Social Media Etiquette

July 18, 2014 Michael Cox Leave a comment

When was the last time you saw one of those clickbait-y Facebook posts and thought “I NEED TO REPOST THIS RIGHT MEOW”? Did you immediately hit “Like” and “Share” it to your (dozens? hundreds?) of followers? Did you stop to think about the content of that post? Did you even read it all the way to the bottom?

Maybe you’re a conscientious user who always checks the facts before responding. Good for you! Maybe you’re like my fiancée, and you get around to Snopes-ing that Kony 2012 rage two hours after you already retweeted it. But think about all of the Friends on your list, all of the Tweeps that you follow, and all of your #Instagrammers (including that guy) and apply this logic to them. It’s no wonder that all grandma’s chain emails from the 90s are making a comeback…

One of the major problems with social media is that people don’t feel responsible for fact-checking what they see. They submit to the greater powers of The Internet and Share away. When it’s things like “Look at this cat in a shark costume riding a roomba while chasing a duck” or “You won’t believe how this army buddy changed his friend’s life,” Sharing because of the emotional response (either joy or awe) that a post gives you can be a great way to spread that joy even further. Hey, you might even spread a smile to a friend who is having an awful day at work and just needs some loveable fuzziness in his life right now.

I love the kitten reposts just as much as the next guy. But I want to shine a spotlight on the unending onslought of ignorance and rage that stems from people reposting “articles” without reading through them to the bottom and thinking critically about these issues. Critically engaging with an article on social media is perhaps a misappropriation of the platform, but bear with me for a moment. I suppose when you share an adorable image (for instance, this one), you’re engaging with it in such a way that Sharing is natural. It makes you happy, you don’t have to engage with it on a deep intellectual level, and you want other people to feel that. *click* Shared.

Articles, especially on Facebook, are treated the same way as images. You get a popout image in your News Feed, and you get a little blurb that goes with it. It gives you all these feels. *click* Shared. But there’s the problem. The article, which needs to be engaged with on a different level than memes was just given the same *feels* > *comment* > *click* > Shared brain process. But everyone loses when people read the thumbnail and share without thinking. The reason that lies and slander get reposted again and again isn’t because people are trying to make things worse. I propose an amendment to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” or in this case, laziness.

Oh, and just in case you don’t believe that people don’t read what they repost… I’ll just leave this here.

Author’s Note: A couple days after writing this article, this BuzzFeed post came across my News Feed. Case in point.

Photo by Andy Sutterfield

Home

Concerning Cats

July 7, 2014 Michael Cox 1 Comment

The most important thing to learn from my experience will be the first and the last thing I say in it: if your pet has a sudden change in behavior, get help immediately. Don’t walk—run to the nearest vet and figure out what’s going on.

It all started in March. For the two years that I had been living with my fiancée and her adorable, feisty furball India, I was greeted at the bed by a head-butt and a purr every evening when I got home from work. Head-butts and purrs usually lead to a happy kitty having attention lavished upon her. So when I came into the room for a week straight without being greeted, I was worried. What was even more concerning was the fact that she was sleeping alone under the desk, rather than nestled between our legs like usual. Well, everyone has an off-week, right? Besides, it was a particularly warm week; I figured that India just didn’t want to heat herself up any more than absolutely necessary. But when I got the chance to break out the laser pointer, then the catnip mouse, and then a long colorful shoelace with no response, some small voice of panic inside of me welled up and shouted that something was wrong.

A quick Google search told us that severe lethargy in cats can be capital-B Bad. Or it could mean nothing. But when it comes to the lives of pets (a.k.a., family), always err on the side of caution.

It was already after-hours at the vet when we were incited to action on Friday night, and our normal vet was out of the office for the next week on vacation. So, we found the next closest vet with the next closest appointment—I worked from home Monday so that I could bring India in as soon as the clinic was open. (My boss and coworkers were extremely understanding throughout this process, allowing me to work remotely. In any case, it wouldn’t have stopped me from getting India the attention she needed.) Into the carrier and off to the vet we went!

When your cat is healthy, you don’t necessarily pay attention to things like their urination or defecation. This is especially the case if you have a closed litter box and clean it on a regular schedule instead of checking daily. But these are things that the vet wanted to know, and they were answers that I couldn’t readily produce. As an indoor cat, we thought that the vectors through which India could be hurt were minimal. They told me to keep an eye on her and bring her into our normal vet as soon as possible since blood tests and x-rays showed no problems.

Rallied by the “all clear” that I received from the first vet, we thought that maybe India was just feeling a bit older and didn’t feel like moving around as much in the heat. Regardless, we got an appointment with our vet and brought her in together. Once again, blood tests and urine tests were performed, and everything came out as “normal.” Our vet asked us about a few common household chemicals and whether or not India had been around them. Of course, she hadn’t. The vet thought that maybe she had gotten into something and just needed her system flushed, so we left her at the clinic overnight to get some extra observation and IV fluids, and were hoping to pick her up the next day.

After observing her overnight, the vet decided that they wanted to keep her an additional night. On the phone, the vet asked us once again if there was anything that she could have gotten into. “We don’t even have human food where she can get to it. The only things that she can easily get to are her food and water. She gets a catnip toy when supervised, and we give her flea medicine to her every month…” The vet took some notes and said that she would get back to us the next day. We picked her up two days after dropping her off, and the vet gave us the likely culprit: her flea medicine.

Our vet had gone through the flea medicine’s ingredient list and had done research on each item. The “organic” and “green” flea medicine that we were using (stocked at a small child’s eye-level at Safeway and Petco) contained an ingredient that was so toxic that humans were required to wear skin- and eye-protection when handling it. This wasn’t the typical “IRRITANT” label that anyone who has used sunscreen is used to. As for the products claims of being “green,” our vet helpfully pointed out that arsenic and cyanide are “natural and organic” as well. If the medicine’s ingredients can cause such severe harm in humans, how much worse is that damage for a being that’s a tenth of our size? Quite a lot worse, as it turns out.

Had we had any previous indications or reactions, we may have looked online and seen the hundreds of reviews of this particular product, many claiming that their pets were poisoned almost to the point of death (or were sadly killed) by this product. Since this happened as a result of the build-up of over a year’s worth of applications, we never suspected that something that hadn’t caused her any issues before was the culprit of her sudden health problems. How were we supposed to know that counterfeit and bogus flea medicines are some of the pet industry’s top money makers? The vet informed us—our mouths agape—that some popular flea medicine brands are counterfeited so convincingly that grocery suppliers often can’t even tell the difference, leading them to be stocked at your friendly neighborhood corner store.

For a week after we got her back, we had to give her daily subcutaneous fluids to help flush out as much of the poison as possible—this meant we had a giant bag of saline hanging from our ceiling fan, and every day started and ended with one of us holding her down while the other shoved a needle of cold fluid into her neck. We’re now almost three months after the fact, and India still hasn’t recovered. Because of her lethargic response to the poisoning, not moving around caused severe muscle atrophy in her hind legs and she now has a hard time getting around and doing normal kitty things—holding herself up in the litter box, jumping on anything, walking across the room. We have done everything we can to make sure that she’s comfortable and happy, including replacing her litter box with one that has a lower wall so that she can get into it easier and adding a set of kitty stairs to our room so that she can get off the bed easier. We’ve taken her to a feline physical therapist, and now have a set of rehabilitation exercises that we perform with her morning and night.

Even though we’re still working through the mechanics of this ending (and it isn’t exactly the happiest), we now have a story to share with all pet owners: only trust the flea medicine you get from your veterinarian, and if your pet has a sudden change in behavior, get help immediately.

Photo by Sara Slattery

Health

An Alternative to the Unacceptable

May 16, 2014 Michael Cox Leave a comment

Waiting on the bench in an 8’x10’ white-walled box was not exactly how I’d planned on spending my Friday afternoon—least of all in a gown that made me feel more naked than if I hadn’t been wearing anything at all.

I’d been having some back pain for the few months leading up to this appointment, and this was supposed to be the solution to my sleepless nights, spent tossing and turning—looking for sleep but nagged by a persistent tightness across my shoulders and my lower back. It was supposed to be an in-and-out, “here’s how you fix this,” with a laundry list of things that I should and shouldn’t do, followed by no more pain. Instead, I was told “we’re going to fuse your spine, and that should stop this from getting any worse.” What kind of a solution is that?! “Oh, no big deal, we’re just going to severely limit your mobility for the rest of your life by performing a surgery that will impact most of the rest of your senior year of high school with a flat-on-your-back recovery.” How about no, thank you.

Of course, I was very polite to the doctor at the time, as was my shell-shocked mother. Scoliosis runs in my family so it wasn’t exactly a huge surprise, but the severity of my scoliosis and the solution described by the doctor (and the urgency with which he described our next step of the recovery journey) caught both of us flat-footed. We said that we would call back in the coming weeks to set up a surgical consultation, but my mind was racing to find any other viable solution. Up until this point, to say that I was a firm believer in Western medicine would be an understatement: I used to laugh at all of those people who would go to accupuncture, who would rely on massage, who would change their spiritual lives to impact their physical selves. Well, at that point I was just praying for the chance to eat my words and find some alternative treatment plan that wouldn’t involve inserting surgical steel into the central support of my nervous system.

I started out with Google. After reading 20-30 pages of life-changing stories, I was no more ready to take the plunge than I was in the office. So I called up my aunt, who had worn a back brace for years in order to deal with her own scoliosis, but the outcome of that conversation led me no closer to believing in the all-powerful solution of major surgery. So when my sister woke up for work that evening, I talked to her, defeated, unsure of what to do. She had recently gone through a series of chiropractic visits to deal with a lasting whiplash injury after doing a 360° kickflip in a Camaro at 75 MPH on the freeway. So, of course, shetold me to give chiropractic a try. Considering how horrified I was at the prospect of becoming a cyborg at the ripe old age of 17, I thought “why not?” and set up my first appointment for later that same week.

I had brought my x-rays from the doctor’s visit with me to the chiropractor, and he outlined a plan that would free me of pain and arrest the progression of my spinal deterioriation. He could tell that I was skeptical (and terrified), but what did I have to lose other than some time and some money? If it worked, then I would be able to avoid some life-changing surgery. And if it didn’t, then I was no worse off than I was before. So, here we go on a whirlwind chiropractic adventure! Pop-crack-snap!

Ow, was my thought the following day, and after the next appointment just a week later. The chiropractor had shown me what he was going to be doing: how the different decompression techniques he was using would limit the pressure on my slightly bulging discs and alleviate the strain on my lower back that had been plaguing me for quite some time. He gave me some exercises (which I dutifully took to), some recommendations for maintaining better posture, and activities that I could do that would be beneficial for my spinal health, and my well-being overall. Once again, the skeptic in me couldn’t overpower how much sense he was making. I had horrible posture, thanks to my habits of gaming too much and studying too late. While I regularly ran and tried to lift weights, I had never targeted any areas that might actually help my back (like my core). So, I gave it all a try.

While the western medicine approach of throwing a few nuts and bolts at the problem would likely have been effective, it was lacking in some key areas. The doctor didn’t even talk to me about changing my habits to make things better—the first and only option was to make with the choppy-choppy. The chiropractor worked through my daily habits and routines to come up with a total life-routine makeover that would mitigate my pain, improve my well-being, and help me develop the habits that would keep my condition from getting any worse.

Within three months, my pain was receding and we could tell that the treatment was working. I continued some regular appointments, just to keep tabs on things, but within the year almost all of my pain was gone. I still have the curvature in my spine, but it hasn’t progressed in the last couple of years, and I’m hoping that it will keep me going until some other alternative medicines are available. (Nanites? Stem cell therapy? Who knows what the future holds!) Sure, trying to do a backwards somersault still hurts (and I was never good at those to begin with), but doing the things I love—like sleeping!—didn’t hurt any more, and I could run, jump, swim (until I got mono… but that’s an entirely different story), and play to my heart’s content.

Even though it took me weeks of going through the treatment before I truly began to accept that it could be worthwhile (and not merely a method of procrastinating the inevitable surgery), I eventually came to understand that non-conventional methods of treatment for chronic pain and illness can be effective. Growing up in the holy halls of western medicine, I never gave alternative treatments like accupuncture and chiropracture the time of day. What could any solution not founded in science offer me that studied, peer-reviewed, proven-to-work solutions couldn’t? Well, it turns out that this particular solution offered me more control in my life and an option to mitigate my pain while preventing further degeneration without the risks of major orthopedic surgery. Not too shabby!

Photo by Meggyn Watkins

DIY, Home

Home (Theater) Improvement

February 7, 2014 Michael Cox 1 Comment

“This is the end of life as we have come to know and love it.” I thought as I watched thirty five square feet and 1080 progressively scanned lines of glorious television walk out of my life forever. My roommate, along with his beloved projector, was headed for greener pastures, leaving the rest of us to languish away into sad, lonesome, standard-def obscurity.

The Projector

There’s a lot of good literature out there on the Googles that will help guide you to the perfect projector. Since we had become accustomed to a certain standard of television, we were looking for a 1080p projector, 60Hz would do, with a minimum contrast ratio of 1:2000. But In terms of what kinds of projectors are available on the market (from the $200 VewSanic knock-off to the $20,000 3DMax Sound-O-Vision Extreme), the price range we were expecting was between $500 and $1000. But for us our wallets, we were just looking for something to “scrape by.” So, when we found an $800 projector that hit our minimum requirements, but was available for $580 through a special refurbished program, we jumped at it. BOOM. And we had a projector again.

Everything was hooked up to the cable and DVR—we turned it on and… there’s no sound. Maybe we should have thought this out better. With a trip to RadioShack for a ⅛” stereo to ¼” mono adapter, we were able to jury rig my fiancée Meggyn’s bass amp in as a temporary sound system. Well, at least it was loud and thumpy!

The Mount

Bliss settled in, until we realized we were merely maintaining the status quo. Like cavemen watching the firelight flicker across the wall. With the projector haphazardly settled on an end-table with a book underneath to prop it up, the risk of inebriated guests leaving open-topped drinks on the same table and toppling them into the delicate internals—the horror, the horror!—was just too high. Of course, I’d just dropped an inordinate sum of money on a brand new projector, so I wasn’t keen on the idea of dropping even more moolah on a television mount that wouldn’t directly affect the viewing experience.

One of the nice things about living in a leased house is that you never know what surprises you might find! After hunting around for extra shelving, I came across an old television mount up in the back corner of the garage (the kind for those tube TVs that could smash toddlers to atoms). And so began the next obstacle: the mount was bolted into a high wooden rafter in the garage, but we only had drywall in the living room… To Google! It turns out that as long as there’s a stud behind wherever you’re screwing in the mount, it should hold weight. After a trip to the local Ace hardware to buy some screws that could be used to drill to China and a quick download of the Bubble Level app—to make sure we weren’t setting ourselves up for a neck kink—we got to work. (Contrary to Meggyn’s expectations, the level app did a good job!)

And then failure struck—we broke two of the screws because we thought we could get away without drilling pilot holes. It’s TOOL TIME! We borrowed a drill (thanks, mom!), and we raised the projector up like the Mennonites raising a barn. Then we cracked open a few beers to celebrate exactly like the Mennonites would not have.

The Connections

Now we were getting somewhere! We could no longer inadvertently destroy all of our wonderful video goodness without some extra effort of lobbing liquids towards the ceiling. The next failure, of course, being that we couldn’t actually connect the cable or the power to our ascended projector. Who wanted to get lost in the details of connecting this, right? What are we, rocket surgeons?

To solve our connection problems, I repurposed some unused bookshelves I had bought for my room. With a few more marks and holes in the wall next to the projector mount, I added a shelf in the living room that we loaded up with every bit of television-related electronics. To paint the picture for you, we now had the projector on the old TV mount (in the dead-center of the wall), an overburdened shelf stacked with enough boxes with blinking lights that it may have been flagged by the NSA, a bass amp on the floor, and so many power cables and audio/video cables strewn about that they might as well have been vines in a nightmarish Lovecraftian dystopian future of cybertronic Amazonian forest… Let’s leave it at “messier than a dorm room during finals” and be done. But now that everything worked, I was at: “Please, for the love of God and all that is holy (and not blinking lights at me), let me be done.”

The Organization

Now we had a beautiful 1080p picture taking up the front wall and plenty of loud thumpy sounds to accompany it. Except if you changed the input from the cable to the Wii. Or to the Chromecast. Or to the Xbox. Was I the only one around here who understood which colors get connected to which inputs on the back of this thing?! Rather than attempting to teach every person who came to the house which cables to disconnect/reconnect to switch the audio whenever you switched the video feed (I just wasn’t up for writing the Connectionist Manifesto), I decided that another trip to RadioShack was in order. There I found an A/V switch for under $20 along with a few new A/V cables and a shiny new sound bar with subwoofer for definitely not under $20 (Meggyn was complaining about wanting her bass amp back and, hey, it was payday!). I returned to our humble, if electrically dangerous, abode armed with my new equipment, a sharpie, some wire ties, some labels, and as much determination as I could muster. I tackled the monumental task of improving our sound system, organizing our A/V shelf, wire managing all of the dangly bits (can’t leave any extra 1s or 0s), and setting our theater system up in such a way that at the press of a (CLEARLY LABELLED) button, my roomies, or any of our guests, could switch between video and audio streams at will.

The Finishing Touches

Life almost seemed perfect. It was simple enough to use the newly organized system, the new sound system was much more balanced than a 15 Watt bass amp, and whatever we watched was beautiful (except the Wii… stupid standard-definition output). But if you can’t find a problem to fix, then you aren’t looking hard enough. Some of the darker colors were being washed together by the projector, and it was sometimes hard to tell what was going on during scenes that took place in the dark. Blackout curtains became the next addition to the room. We got these thanks to a generous donation of leftover fabric from Meggyn’s mom. They just barely cover the full width of our window, but it works. Now, we can watch the projector during the day as if it were the middle of the night (without that pesky bedtime thing). Our last improvement was to go to OSH and buy some cinder blocks, push the couch forward so that it was closer to the wall (or rather, the screen), drop the cinder blocks behind the old couch and ADD ANOTHER COUCH. Because couch. Now, we’ve got theater-style seating to go with our home-theater!

I still don’t think we’re done making improvements, but for the moment we’re pretty happy with how everything turned out. And the only really spendy parts were the projector itself and the sound bar—things which will be following us to our next house! Thanks to some successful craigslist foraging, the new couch was free, and the cinder blocks we used to prop it up were a few dollars apiece. We used five blocks for the couch and another three to make a recycled-plywood footrest.

All-in-all, we could have done a much worse (much more expensive) job of converting our living room into one radical home theater.

Photo by Michael Cox

Geekery

Forays into Laptop Land (by a Desktop Builder)

September 11, 2013 Michael Cox Leave a comment

Photo by Meaghan Morrison

*beep*

<black screen>

Welcome

…

COME ON ALREADY!

I was sick and tired of the 15-minute boot-up times on my old computer—and I didn’t think it had much life left in it, anyway. I knew that I would need something that I could take to my engineering classes, but I had never looked into a laptop before. Ugh… where do I even start? Well, with the basics, I suppose. Operating systems, ahoy!

I decided that a Windows laptop would be better for my future classes (he typed on his work MacBook Pro at 35000 feet, with said Windows laptop safely tucked away in the overhead bin for use at the hotel—I’m not as biased as I once was). I decided on Windows because of the wealth of programs that are exclusively available for it, including some of the applications that I would need while pursuing my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering. Many of my alums chose MacBooks, or even wiped their Windows laptops and dropped in their favorite Linux distro (Ubuntu, anyone?). And, to be honest, I wanted to be able to run games on my new laptop in-between classes, and at the occasional LAN party. I knew the Mac would struggle with gaming, not because of any hardware deficiencies but rather due to a lack of developer support from some game companies. So, the slightly better-rounded of two evils… Microsoft, it is. Okay, what’s next?

Having built my own custom desktop computers for years, I knew a fair bit about the internals of the machine. I also knew that it would likely cost me more than I had in my skeletally thin piggy bank to get the specs necessary to use the machine for everything I wanted. I did some begging, made a withdrawal from the Bank of Dad, and ended up with a budget of about $1400 in exchange for a promise to my parents that I wouldn’t need to buy another one in the next year (five years going strong and it still plays Starcraft II, so I’m happy!).

For me, choosing my specs revolved around restricting my budget to $1400 and getting the fastest processor I could—while maintaining a dedicated onboard graphics card (because integrated graphics at the time just couldn’t support graphically intensive applications).

Here’s the techie blow-by-blow of my thought process:

I knew I needed a dual-core processor, so I went with the Intel Core 2 Duo because I read a lot of reviews and found it to have adequate performance at a not-so-prohibitive price. I went with 4GB of RAM at the time, in order to support switching between engineering programs and the basics (32 different chat windows, at least three Chrome tabs, and no less than four Excel/Word documents in the background—you know, just the necessities).
Having a good track record with NVIDIA graphics cards in my custom-built desktop PCs, I went with one of the NVIDIA mobile graphics cards with 512MB of dedicated video memory. I knew that for gaming I’d need something with decent graphical processing power under the hood.
The standard HDD at the time was 256GB, and that was enough for my needs at the time. (I have since dropped in a newer 512GB HDD that is also moderately faster, just because the original started making horrible grinding noises after three and a half years).
14” seemed too small for a screen, and 17” way too big, so I took the middle-of-the-road 15.6” screen. My Goldilocks choice ended up being perfect—I constantly complain about the 14” on my work’s MacBook, and I can hardly lift my dad’s 17” work laptop without straining something. Also, 15.6” was a perfect fit for both of the backpacks I have since purchased (with those fancy laptop ease-of-travel pouches).
I have since learned much more about batteries, which may have tempered my choice, but back then I didn’t even care—I figured that I’d be in the classroom for 50% of the time and at the library for the other 50% with no lack of available AC outlets. Oh, to be young and naïve again… It has since been revealed that the best way to extend a battery’s lifetime is to not leave it charging 100% of the time. If I could, I would go back and educate myself (and spend the extra $90 to get a spare battery).

It’s important to note that all of my research was spent picking parts piecemeal from different laptops that I had searched on Newegg.com—which was effective at teaching me which parts were good, as I was voraciously consuming reviews, but I hadn’t yet found The One Laptop to Pwn Them All. I knew that it was possible to custom build a laptop, but I also knew that it was out of my price range—I was starting to grow worried that I wouldn’t be able to find any one laptop that would fit my needs.

By far, the most important thing to consider when looking into a new laptop (or any product that you’re buying online) is the wealth of reviews from consumers like you. Never rush headlong into the fiery chasm of an impulse-buy. Your wallet (*ahem* or dad) will thank you. I read reviews and comparisons for two weeks straight before I even had a Top Five list of candidates. Many of the options that I looked at were awesome from the perspective of the specifications and the price. But, of course, what good is the thing if it spontaneously bursts into flames (like I read in one review) or has to be exchanged five times before one is found without manufacturer defect?

What I ended up with was an Asus M51Sn, and at the time it had stellar reviews (4.5 out of 5 eggs, now up to 5 out of 5 eggs since it has gone out of stock). On top of that, it was only about $1200, and the $200 I saved stayed comfortably in my parents’ savings account. I used it for years as a gaming machine between classes, and during class ran AutoCAD, the Autodesk Suite, three different flavors of IDE for C/C++, Java, and even used it as a server for a Databases class project. Sure, there were a few complaints along the way about the gimmicky fingerprint sensor and the inevitable crapware that comes with any modern computer purchase; however, I was able to minimize the impact that it had on the system by strategically uninstalling services that I knew I would never use (who really has or knows what a Smart Card is, anyway?).

As with all things in the church of planned obsolescence, it is certainly showing its age now (five years later). As it happened, a couple of years into owning it, the HDD started making noise and slowing down, and the computer would get so hot that I couldn’t leave it on my lap. For the typical user, these problems would likely spell The End for my silicon-hearted companion—but not today! I was able to open the laptop, clean out the fans, and drop a shiny new 500GB HDD in it. The new HDD was larger, faster, and quieter, and with the fans cleaned out I was no longer cooking an egg on my graphics card.

Now that I’ve got a job (and many, many games waiting on my shelf to be played), I’m thinking about a new laptop, and I’ll follow the same process I did before. I’m going to be patient, do my research, and find the next laptop that will take me another five years down the road.

Geekery

Getting Started with Android

April 10, 2013 Michael Cox 1 Comment

So, you’ve just picked up a bright, shiny new Android smartphone. Now what? Many people are wary of the highly customizable Android smartphones (in favor of the ubiquitous iPhone) because of the rumored learning curve; however, you can learn the system and you can make it work for you, instead of you needing to work around it.

Photo by Meggyn Watkins

The Basics

Some simple things to understand are the gestures: everything on the phone is accessed through tapping, swiping (sliding a finger across), or long-pressing (holding your finger on for a second) the screen.

Here’s some terminology to explain the Android environment:

Application: A program on the phone, usually represented by a small shortcut in your App Drawer or on one of your Home Screens.

App Drawer: This is an icon on your Home Screen (located in the Dock) that opens an area where you can search through your installed Apps. Notice that there are two tabs at the top of the App Drawer: one for Apps and one for Widgets.

Back: This physical button can not only be used to navigate backwards through visited web and App pages, but will also take you entirely out of an App and back to your previous App or your Home Screen.

Dock: A static bar at the bottom of your Home Screens for the App Drawer and four customizable shortcuts.

Home: A hardware button on your phone which will take you to your Home Screens from any App. Use this if you want to quickly exit an App!

Home Screens: You can think of these like your computer desktop. You can customize the background image by long-pressing the screen, and add App shortcuts to the Home Screens by long-pressing an App’s Icon in the App Drawer. The App Drawer will close, allowing you to drag the icon across the Home Screens to the location where you want to drop it.

Notification Pull-down: What was that pinging sound that your phone just made? If you drag your finger from the very top of the screen down towards the bottom, the Notification Pull-down will open. From here, you can select a notification to open its parent App, or you can swipe across a particular notification from left to right to ignore it.

Recent Apps: Not every phone has this button! This is another hardware button that will launch a thumbnail view of your recently launched Apps. Use it to switch quickly between Chrome, Webster’s Dictionary, and Words with Friends (wait, are you cheating?), or to jump back and forth between your texts and a web search for movie times.

Menu: This is another hardware button. The Menu button is context-sensitive, so it will do different things (or possibly nothing!) in different apps. Google now encourages Apps to have an in-app Settings screen, so this button will be removed from future Android phones in order to provide users with a more fluid experience.

Widget: This is an advanced Android feature. From the Widgets tab of the App drawer, drag and drop the Widget you want onto a Home Screen. Widgets are often interactive and will sometimes update depending on location, weather, or current applications, and can even launch Applications or web pages!

Now I know how to interact with it. But how do I use it?

Right out of the box, many popular Android phones (like the Galaxy S III and the HTC One series) include a simple tutorial to help you sign into Google—they may even explain some of the above vocabulary. This will give you instant access to your all-important Gmail, the generally ignored Google+, the misunderstood Google Talk instant messenger (and soon Google Babel?), and the powerful Play Store. Of course, there’s also a generic Email app so you can access Yahoo!, Hotmail, or whatever flavor of email you prefer (for those of you who have resisted the Google hive mind). Thanks to the Google integration, some things will be provided automatically.

Here are some ideas to consider when customizing your shiny new smartphone:

You now have access to all your contacts stored in the Gmail web client. Any time you add a contact, be sure to select Google Contact, as this will back up the newly created contact so you can’t accidentally lose it! You can see them from the Contacts or People app, depending on your phone.

If you like to send surprise pics to your lover, be sure to open Google Settings and turn off Instant Upload in your Google+ settings. Or don’t, if you’re into that sort of thing…

The Play Store allows you to download apps, music, e-books, magazines, and videos. You can search within each section or across the entire Play Store in order to find whatever you like!

One of the best features of Android is Google Maps, which you can download from the Play Store. Enabling location access from the Settings menu will allow Google to customize search results for you and will provide you with turn-by-turn voice navigation as an added feature for free.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Google without integrated Search capabilities. You can use the Search Widget to launch a Voice Search and simply speak your command or type in a search. If you have one of the newest devices, then the Search App becomes something more—Google Now. Google Now allows you to opt-in to all sorts of extra notifications (called Cards), from updates on your favorite sports teams to traffic warnings for events in your calendar.

Your Android can take pictures and videos, but it’s what you can do with those pictures and videos that’s really interesting! You can go straight from taking a picture to viewing the Gallery by tapping the image preview in the Camera app. From the Gallery, you can Share that picture through email to a friend, upload it to imgur for a quick post to reddit (if you have the imgur app), or launch Facebook to share it with your social circles for immediate judgment.

You are always logged in. Unless, of course, you explicitly sign out. The upside is that you always receive information as it happens! That’s also the downside. Having every app logged in all the time will take your battery from 100% to 0% in no time flat (I’m looking at you, Facebook for Android). Stay logged into the important things, but if possible, set a less-frequent notification refresh interval for everything else in their settings.

Android’s myriad Apps and Settings can let you customize the exact experience you want from a smartphone! Stay tuned for more tips and tricks on tech and Android from the UE. And post a comment if you have any questions!