Advice

My advice is to go to all of the classes.  It makes things alot more simple if you learn everything in class and then you're good to go!

Favorite websites

My favorite websites included:

Jena Lynn's website - I loved her different page backgrounds, pictures and her own personal artwork.  Her site was very visually interesting!

Lynn's website - her homepage was my favorite of all the websites.  Her gif images that showed many pictures were amazing! Very creative!

Tess's website - I loved her organization and her photos! Very smooth transitions and overall just a great site!

My First Website!

Please visit my website at www.cs.trinity.edu/~eadams2

Making a website was actually not all that difficult, at least once we were able to use programs such as Kompozer or Expression Web.  Coding is very tedious and you can only produce basic webpages (at least with my level of knowledge). For my webpage, I used Expression Web and for a few things I hand coded when I couldn't figure something out.  My favorite part of my webpage is my Dallas page - I like the way I have the pictures with links at the bottom.  (Honestly I get really bored with alot of text, so lots of pictures with vivid colors is great!). I'm not sure I would have changed anything.  As a novice web designer, I think my page looks pretty good! I was really impressed by the graphics on others pages.  I know one page had gif animations of changing photos which was very impressive - I wish I had thought of this way ahead of time. My biggest technical and design challenge were the same - centering and organizing pictures and text.  I used alot of tables to help do this. I would only show my site to friends and family - those who would be interested in what I have to say.  I'm not sure if I will ever make a webpage again, but I am definitely excited that I could :) !

All about Hardware

I learned alot about computers in general in our class lecture by Larry Hechler.  Specifically, I learned alot about what is inside a computer and how important backing up your computer is.  I have always been worried about the possibility of my harddrive crashing and losing all of my music and school papers and such. I was detered from buying an external harddrive by their cost - close to about $100.  Now I am determined to do more research on external harddrives and buy one to ensure that I don't lose everything that's on my computer! I also learned about the battery life of a laptop.  I have heard that you're supposed to let the battery drain before plugging it back in but I really never paid attention to this. Now I know that you need to definitely drain the battery before replugging the computer in and also that it is important to do this at least once a month if you leave your computer constantly plugged in. Hopefully with this new knowledge I can be a better computer owner and buyer.

Pictures that Lie

I chose to manipulate an image of our beloved Tower.  As something so familiar to all of us, I find it fun to manipulate it to follow a story that is equally as familiar: King Kong.  I honestly just thought it would be a funny and entertaining idea so I went with it.  My good friend Lyndsey Johnson took this photo and I cropped it to just show the tower.  King Kong and the planes originated from a still photo from the original King Kong film.  I placed King Kong so that he was hanging from the top and I oriented the planes to surround him as is true to the original King Kong still photo (but instead the scene is now set at Trinity rather than on the Empire State Building in NYC).  Since King Kong was in black and white, I changed the Trinity photo to black and white.  I also blurred the Trinity photo and adjusted the color hue and the saturation of all layers.  This was the tricky part since both photos are of very different resolutions - I tried to match them as best as I could.  I don't find this manipulation to be harmful.  It should be taken as comical.  The manipulation is very obvious and the idea of the scene is also quite unrealistic.  This manipulation is for entertainment purposes only.
          I read an article which discussed the ethics of photo manipulaton.  The author argued that the manipulation does not always have to occur using photoshop, we manipulate a scene purely by chosing a certain snap shot.  Also, in the end of the article she proposed rules for what and when certain manipulations are ok.  I found this article to be very relevant to all of us.  Photoshop is not harmful, it is the individual use that can be harmful.  Each individual photographer, editer is responsible for what they do.

Salvo, Suzanne. "True lies." Communication World 25.5 (2008): 26-30. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.

Class Presentations

Overall, I find it a bit hard to present on a topic in 2-3 min, especially on a topic that alot of people may have no interest in whatsoever.  I chose to present on animal behavior because I find it a fascinating topic with alot of really cool examples of weird behaviors that can be explained by evolution.  It's honestly amazing what evolution has created.  In retrospect, a more narrow topic may have been easier but I still stand by my topic because it's what I'm passionate about as a PreVet, Biology major.  Also, I felt my overall verbal presentation was a bit rough and choppy.  My slides could have been more interesting.  I have always been told to keep slides very simple as to not distract from the subject, but in a computer skills class, more interesting slides would have been more impressive. 

I really liked Karla's presentation.  I have heard alot about her subject but didn't know how exactly a Ponzi scheme worked.  I really liked her graphics and overall, her presentation was very well done!

I also really liked Jena's presentation on body image and eating disorders.  Her slides were very interesting with great graphics and layout. I also really liked her video - very representative of her topic.

Finding High-Quality Information on the Web

The internet is always evolving as time goes on; and just think that it's only been around for a very, relatively short time, yet we're hooked and dependent on it already!  I realize I sound very ignorant and naive, but I honestly have never really thought about how Google organizes search results. I obviously knew key words allow for the results to show up.  I'm very impressed that Google works so hard to give us results that we want and I'm very thankful! When I do research for science papers, I know that articles that have been cited many times are often very good or ground breaking articles.  Google uses this same idea to give us the best search results: sites that are linked the most are at the top of the list.  Also I learned about the different ways you can format your search entry in order to get results you want.  "-site:.com", "site: gov" both help you limit your search results by domain.