Information Technology and the Insurance Industry

I am currently employed in the insurance industry, where I have worked for about seven years. My job involves processing various inquiries submitted by insurance agents or directly by our insureds, including requests for policy documents, to update coverage, and so on. All my work is done on a computer. We receive our requests through request management software that is accessed via a web browser, we communicate with coworkers via email and chat, and also use Microsoft Office programs (such as Excel and Word) for other reasons as needed.

Experimenting with Ping and Traceroute

In this blog post, I will explore using the ping and traceroute functions. Using the ping function allows you to determine if a server is online and to see how quickly you can reach it, while tracerouting provides an exact route of a ping request from your device to the server you are sending the request to.

Documenting a Day via Microsoft Office

For a college assignment, I was tasked with keeping track of all my accomplished tasks over one day. Then, we had to present our findings across three files created in three different Microsoft Office applications: Word (for word processing), Excel (for spreadsheets), and PowerPoint (for presentations). While these applications can work together in specific scenarios, they all serve different purposes, and each comes with its own benefits and shortcomings in certain contexts. I will use this blog post to discuss my experiences in completing my assignments across the Microsoft Office suite and will reflect on which application was most effective in achieving my goals.

Letterboxd for iOS: A Review

Letterboxd is a social media platform geared towards movies. With Letterboxd, a user can create a catalog of every movie they’ve seen, with the options to give each film a “like”, a star rating (from 1 star to 5 stars), or a review. Letterboxd also has a “diary” function, allowing users to keep a running, public log of the films they've seen, as well as the ability to create both public and private lists of films. Users can comment on others’ reviews and follow other users, with the actions of their followed users (diary entries, reviews, and new lists) all appearing in a centralized activity feed. Letterboxd has become increasingly popular with cinephiles worldwide, with roughly 5 million accounts currently active as of September 2023.

Using MIT's Scratch for the First Time

This week, I wrote a simple program using MIT’s Scratch programming language. In contrast to most popular programming languages, Scratch programs are coded using visual “blocks” of commands instead of by manual input. Commands can be dragged and dropped from a sidebar into one’s program, making it an effective way to teach a beginner the basic tenets of programming. Here, I will discuss my experience using Scratch for the first time and the details of my first program, and contrast Scratch with my understanding of low- and high-level programming languages and explain how a language like Scratch could be a stepping stone for novice and aspiring programmers.