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Many people find it very difficult to balance their accounts at the end of the month, and some even pay bankers and accountants to do it for them. However balancing your account can be a very easy process. As an accounting major, and having worked at a bank for several years, I would like to share some of my knowledge and experience with you, and show you how to reconcile your account in just a few simple steps.

Firstly, you will need to set up a simple table in which you will keep a record of all your transactions. This can be done in a journal manually, or using a simple spreadsheet in excel. This table should consist of 5 columns labeled Date, Withdrawals/Debits, Deposits/Credits, Description, and Balances. Each transaction will be entered in a separate row, as a result the number of rows will vary. As soon as this is done you are ready and on your way.

The next step is to enter the balance in your account at the beginnng of the month, under the balance column in your spreadsheet or journal. Every transaction done throughout the month must be recorded, keeping a brief description of the payee, check number or place of transaction in the description column. It is very important to ensure that all transactions are entered, because the omitting of a single entry will put the account out of balance.

At the end of the month make a subtotal of all your withdrawals in the withdrawal column, and a subtotal of all the deposit in the deposit column. To find you ending balance, add the amount in the deposit column to you beginning balance and subtract the withdrawals. Alternatively the calculations can be done after every transaction, adding the deposits and subtracting the withdrawals from your ending balance respectively. If you are using an excel spreadsheet the calculations will be done for you.

You are now one step away from reconciling you account. If your balance corresponds to the balance in your bank statement at the end of the month your account is balance, but it is very likely that the balances will  differ. In many cases there will be transactions done by the bank that will not appear in you personal records. These transactions include interest, service charges, automatic payments and direct deposits from your employer. All the transactions in the deposit section of you bank statement should be added to the balance in your personal record, and all those in the debit section should be subtracted. Sometimes a few checks you issue will not be presented for payment by the end of the month, and will not appear on the bank statement. Simply subtract these amounts from the balance on the bank statement. At this point the balance in your spreadsheet/personal records should be equal to the balance in your bank statement, your account has been reconciled.

Transcoding is the direct digital to digital data conversion of one encoding to another, usually done in cases where a target device does not support the format, or has limited storage capability and mandates reduced file size. It may also be used to convert incompatible or obsolete data to a better supported or modern format. Manovich refers to transcoding as the most substantial consequence of the computerization of media. This is because he discribes this process as one in which media objects are translated into other formats, specifically the digital format in which the digitalization of the culture, subjects the culture  at large, to the concepts and rules of the computer. Manovich sees new media as having two distinct layers, the cultural layer and the computer layer. The computer layer consist of digital data or numeric codes that are processed, manipulated, and transformed by the computer. While the cultural layer is the images, files and documents that are able to be processed by the human mind.

According to Manovich, the computer layer is dynamic and constantly changing over time, as software and hardware keep evolving, and as the computer is used to perform different tasks. We can therefore asked the question, how does these changes affect new media? New media can be seen as a product of old media, or media created, distributed, and stored by computers, and as such, these changes in computer systems are sure to influence the changes and dynamics of new media. This clearly show how the cultural layer and the computer layer influence each other, and how transcoding facilitates complex relationships between the system of organizations of culture, and the means by which we affect those systems in computing.

Based on the concepts from new media, the culture layer, and the computer layer have fused to create a new computer culture, which is a blend of human and computer meanings, of traditional ways in which human culture modeled the world, and the computer’s own means of representing it. In light of this it is safe to conclude that human culture will keep evolving, and advancing, and the culture of the computer, and the media is sure to move in the same direction.

I can honestly say that I am totally fascinated by technology, and cannot over emphasize the way the advancements in new media, have changed our lives, and brought five huge continents together, in a very small global village. A few years ago I was very much involved in social networking, and spent alot of time on Hi5, Myspace, and MSN instant messenger. During this time all I did was, connected with friends, played games, and looked at what other people were doing. It was rather interesting cathing up with family members, and old friends, but it was also very time consuming.

A few years later when the other social nerworking sites like twitter, and facebook started emerging, I never felt the need or any sense of emergency to jump on board, although many of my friends were becoming fanatics. In addition I really could not figure out how social networking was making me a better person, or how it was positively impacting my life. At the same time many stories were surfacing about how people’s privacy were being violated, and I clearly remembered hearing of several incidents on TV, with individuals losing their jobs, because of conversatons they had on facebook. Conversations they thought were safe, and secured, but were published for the entire world to see.

As a result of these negatives, I chose to stay away from the major social networks, and never became part of the facebook obsession. I recently opened a twitter account, and started blogging for educational reasons, and because it was a requirement for this course.

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