My Website Adventure

Before I begin, please visit my website at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~lsandlin/default.htm!

First of all, making a website is no walk in the park! It is a lot harder than you would think. I used Expression Web for the creation of my website, which just happened to take forever to download on my laptop! However, in the end, I think it was worth it. I like my friends and family page the best... those people make life amazing. By far, my biggest technical challenge was formatting all the text and pictures in tables. It took me about 2 class periods to fully figure it out. My biggest desgin challenge was picking nice backgrounds that were not too confusing. The thing I would have changed was to have more gifs. I think gifs really add something cool. I will show my website to most of my friends and family. I hope they will think it is good! Also, I would consider making a website in the future. Just not in the near future!

Larry Heckler knows his stuff

On Thursday, we had Hardware Technician Supervisor Larry Heckler from Information Technology Services (ITS) talk to the class. One again, the speakers that come to the class never fail to surprise me and give me new, valuable, and interesting information. Mr. Heckler has been at Trinity for 25 years, so he has seen and heard everything that deals with computer. During his talk, he stressed the importance of backing up files on the Y-drive. I will never forget the horror story he told about a girl who was working on her senior thesis paper by the pool and the laptop fell in the water. She had lost over 600 hours of work. If it isn't already, let the Y-drive be your new best friend. 

I really enjoyed Mr. Heckler's discussion on how to maintain a healthy battery. I will definitely use his advice to help my battery power last longer. I also thought his discussion on hardware was enlightening. It surprised me that Macs and PCs are the exact same on the inside. I think if people knew that then there would be less of a battle between which computer is "better."

SpongeBob lies?

For the Pictures that Lie assignment, I decided to take the more light-hearted route. All of the pictures in the "Brief History of Photo Fakery" PowerPoint were very serious, so what better way to get un-serious than a cartoon about a sponge that lives in a pineapple? SpongeBob is my favorite cartoon and he loves Krabby Patties. The biggest lie Spongebob could ever tell is that he loves Krabby Doggies instead of Krabby Patties (a.k.a hotdogs instead of hamburgers)! So that is what I did for my assignment. I got a picture of SpongeBob from one of the cartoon's websites holding a Krabby Patty and I found a picture of a cartoon hotdog. I used the magnetic lasso tool and magic wand tool to separate Spongebob and the Krabby Patty. After that, I replaced the hamburger with the hot dog. I changed both the hue, saturation, and brightness to make SpongeBob and the hotdog darker and more vivid. Lastly, I added text with a basic drop shadow and changed the background color. I think my manipulation is harmful if one is unfamiliar with SpongeBob... if this picture was taken literally, the whole premise of the cartoon show would be altered. However, if one is familiar with the show, I would hope they would think it was pretty funny!
The article I found on Academic Search Complete was called "True Lies." The article mentions how "anyone with  a photo-editing program and some training can alter a photograph", and I realized that the author was talking about me! I was able to take new pictures and manipulate them into one that is totally untrue. Before taking this course, I never thought that I could manipulate a picture... and that is the truth!
Citation:

Wickelgren, Ingrid. "TRUE LIES. (Cover story)." Current Science 92.4 (2006): 10-12. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.

The World of PowerPoint

For my PowerPoint presentation, I chose to do a short biography on the famous news journalist and broadcaster Walter Cronkite. Since I am a Communication major and I am the News Director for Tiger TV's Newswave, I am very interested in how the news world is run, however, I realized that the news is not everyone else's interest. I decided to do the project on Cronkite because he is still well-known and changed the way Americans view television and made watching the news an intellectual experience.
Through this project, the best thing I learned was how to better use transitions. Good transitions help the PowerPoint progress smoothly. I think I used transitions pretty well and had nice graphics, but if I were to do this project again, I would add either a video or audio clip. Overall, I enjoyed this project and will use my knowledge to make professional PowerPoint presentations in the future.
My two favorite PowerPoint presentations were Leslie Green and Tommie Ethington's. They both had great colorful and professional looking designs, as well as great use of transitions. They also made their topics interesting and you could see their passion.

Google Surprises

Last Thursday, Chris Nolan, the Assistant University Librarian came to talk to the class about how to find useful and high-quality information of the web. I thought I knew a lot about Google; however Mr. Nolan showed us some very cool things. For example, if one wanted to do a search on hurricanes, but wanted no information about Katrina, the user could type Hurricanes-(minus) Katrina. The minus sign tells Google to not find any information about Hurricane Katrina. I was also very surprised about “cached.” Google actually uses cache to temporarily store data before the  webpage is updated!