Al-ectronics

It's Wednesday, June 3. We have five classes and three will be taught by Al Tompkins, who's been at Poynter Institute for 12 years. Tompkins has a column called "Al's Morning Meeting," which he writes to stimulate 2 to 3 story ideas for readers. Some are and some aren't sports related, but he said it does have sports implications.

But so far today, he's already taught us what many students, and people for that matter, like -- how to buy cheap stuff.

Apparently, he was once on eBay looking to expand his coin collection, but he misspelled the name of the coin he was looking for. How fortuitous.

"People will put things on eBay, misspell it and wonder why no one is bidding on it," Tompkins said.

He said he buys flip cameras for less than $60 and he recently bought a motorcycle for less than 65 percent retail.

Sounds like I might have more money this summer to pay off student loans.

UPDATE (10:41 a.m.): Tompkins is now teaching us about the various software one can buy for a smartphone to record video and audio, and edit on-site. For audio, he recommend the Poddio, which cut the average amount of editing by about 12 minutes. In this day-and-age, it's invaluable.

"It's mind boggling," said Tariq Lee, fellow 2010 SJI student.

Agreed -- except I can't stand using a smartphone with a software keyboard.

UPDATE (11:07 a.m.): I'm just gonna quickly go down the list of what other cool gadgets Tompkins showed us.

1. Vlingo - Tell your phone to send text and e-mail, make calls, search Web, and update Facebook and Twitter.
2. Posterous
3. BubbleTweet - Twitter took a new step as you can add video to your Twitter page.
4. LiveU - Streaming live videos with the "hardware" the size of a laptop inside a backpack. It has six wireless cards to get the best phone signals. It's used in war zones and floods.
5. DSLr - A camera where you can shoot high-definition video. A movie was shot with such equipment and it's very discreet too. You can find this at a Best Buy or stores of that nature.

"Hollywood is really starting to catch on to these," Tompkins said.

Now, we're on break, but fellow SJI members were impressed with these tools.

"This is the future and it's easy to get," Isis Roberts said. "For students like us, it's easy to get clips and show it off. It's easy, cheap and dependable."

UPDATE (11:24 a.m.): Go to http://www.twitter.com/sdotwoods1. We created out first BubbleTweet!

UPDATE (11:43 a.m.): After a nice break, Tompkins showed us what augmented reality is. It's taking what's real and augmenting it with digital. For example, notice the yellow first down line when watching an NFL game? That's it. Now, it's available on a smartphone.

"Sports, by far, is the easiest implication," Tompkins said.

Then, it was Soundtrack Pro, which cleans audio quickly. No more background noise.

Remember Ron Artest and Paul Pierce claiming their Twitter pages were hacked after controversial Tweets? They probably took the Tweet pronto when they realized what they said. But did anyone see it? Is there a record? With http://html-pdf-converter.com/, it can turn a webpage into a handout with no software needed. Oh, and it's free.

UPDATE (12:27 p.m.): At the risk of sounding lazy, I'm not going to divulge what we were taught the final 40 minutes. It was THAT cool. But before we left Tompkins the first time, he had a piece of advice for us.

"Don't allow people who are afraid of the future to do that to you too," he said.

If you saw our BubbleTweet earlier, we did say we are the future...