My Piece of Advice

The one sentence version: Do your homework almost as soon as you get it assigned.


The longer version for those who want to know more: Do your homework as soon as you get it assigned. Sometimes the "little things" can add up. You forget to do one assignment here and another there, and soon you've got a problem on your hands. I was lucky enough not to have a class following Belisle's so I ended up just staying after class and doing my homework then. It really doesn't take very long and Belisle is just across the hall if you need her, and then you also don't have to worry about forgetting until the last minute.

My Favorite Websites

Wow. Our class really did an amazing job with their websites. I can't believe they were all made from scratch and I was inspired by everyone's ideas. My favorite websites were Kemble's, Leslie's, and Laura's. I thought Kemble's was great because of how simplistic it was. I loved her homepage and thought it looked very elegant. Leslie's was really cool because of how artsy it was. I'm still trying to figure out how she got everything to line up so well on her pages! Laura's was cool because I felt like it really told her story and there were a lot of interactive things to click on and see. Great job to everyone!! We're awesome.

My Website!

Please visit my website at www.cs.trinity.edu/~tethingt

Making my site was easier than I thought it would be. At first, I was worried that using Expression Web would be really complex, but after awhile I got the hang of it. I primarily used Expression Web, and sometimes I went in to look at the code and change things. I'm glad we learned how to hand code in the beginning! Out of all of my sections, I really like my homepage because I think it looks really nice and I like the intro and I was able to introduce a song that represents me.The one thing that I'm still trying to change is centering my Navbar on some of my pages. Hopefully I will figure it out. My biggest technical challenge was making sure that I kept all of my images and information in its original folder so they would show up on my website. My biggest design challenge was finding backgrounds that worked for my pages. I've already showed my website to people in my family and I might use it to show to future employers someday! I would definitely consider making another webage in the future because it was fun and easy!

All you need to know...

I wasn't able to make it to class the day that Larry came to talk to the class, and I'm so sad I missed it!!! By looking at my classmate's blog entries I see that he covered a lot of valuable material. I thought it was cool that he discussed how Mac's and PC's are the same on the inside. I feel like that's something that not a lot of people know. I also liked that he gave advice on how to maintain the computer you own. Battery life and cleaning techniques are all things I wanted to know about. I also thoguht it was great that he warned about backing up your files. I've had bad experiences with losing information, papers, and projects. It's great that Trinity provides us with a way to avoid those problems. I really wish I could have been there for the presentation, but maybe I can go in sometime on my own and the ITS staff can teach me their ways.

Presentations

I liked the power point presentation assignment. When thinking about my chosen field of communications, I decided to cover something in my powerpoint that most people could relate to and find useful. I covered non-verbal communication. I think I did a good job in keeping a fast pace and making things interesting. I liked my graphics and I like the song I chose to play in the background. I think I could have done better with some of my transistions and maybe have incorporated some layering of images. I didn't get to see all of the presentations because I was absent the first day, but some of my favorites were Peter's because I thought the person he profiled was interesting and also the presentation done about geology. I learned a lot from all of them!

Hide yo wife. Hide yo kids. There's a UFO in San Antonio!

For the pictures that lie assignment, I chose to doctor an image of the San Antonio skyline, inserting a space ship on the horizon. I was mostly inspired by an article I found using EBSCO that talked about how easy it is for anyone (even children) to make photos involving UFO's look believable. I used saturation levels, a grainy effect, and opacity tools on photoshop to make my photo more believable. I first saturated the picture of the San Antonio skyline and added the grain effect and then I used the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the spaceship from another photo and place it on top of the San Antonio skyline. I wanted to manipulate this photo to show just how easy it is to make  a silly idea seem believable. I suppose this image could be harmful if people took it really seriously, but my hope is that people would research the photo more to find out that it isn't actually true.

My question for you, based off of the article I read, is do you really think that people believe these photos?  My article asks, "Are these photos good evidence that extraterrestrials are visiting our planet? Or could there be other simpler explanations for them?" What do you think??

Cohen, Shoshana, and Tyson Gilmore. "How to fake UFO photos." Skeptic 6.4 (1998): 102. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 9 Nov. 2010.

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=3&hid=14&sid=79e74785-c56d-49c3-9a01-548ebf1108f5%40sessionmgr15&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=a9h&AN=1977410

DUNNA DUNNA DUNNA GOOGLE.

I wasn't able to be in class on Thursday to hear Christopher Nolan speak. However, after reading through the blog entries done by my classmates, I understand most of what was said. Nolan discussed the advantages of search engines like google. I appreciated the information about how to narrow your search using symbols like the minus sign or even quotation marks. I also thought it was interesting that you can use google as a scholarly search engine. In the past, a lot of scholars have viewed google as less helpful than EBSCO or other academic search engines, but it seems that Nolan has showed us otherwise!