Learning about Excel

As a science major, I've had to use Excel fairly often to create tables, graphs, calculate statistical relevance, etc. I feel pretty much like a pro when it comes to graphs especially. Although I thought I knew so much about Excel, I still am learning. I didn't know that you could format the cells with colorful titles and I didn't know a thing about conditional formating. It's honestly very cool and impressive what the program can do. In my future classes, I think this practice with Excel will definitely help with the ease with which I use the program - I won't have to sit and try to figure things out. And as for real life, Excel definitely helps with keeping track of financial data (I'm the daughter of an accountant - my Dad has spreadsheets galore). I feel like I can now make spreadsheets that are filled with data, formulas, and look pretty :) , and all very easily thanks to what I've learned and with our practice.

About Copyrights and Illegal Downloading. . . A sticky Issue

If you asked students on campus if they have ever illegally downloaded music, the answer will most likely be yes.  Even if they say no, most students have at one point copied a CD from a friend, or received a mixed CD – you are still receiving music that you have not personally paid for and this is illegal.

            When an artist copyrights their music, this is government assurance that they will be the ones to control the distribution of their work and they will be the beneficiaries of any monetary income resulting from their work.  A copyright allows us to take ownership of our own ideas/work.  Without copyrights, there will be less incentive for artists to share their work or ideas because there is no guarantee that it won’t be stolen.  A copyright is the closet thing we have to a guarantee. And even so, artist’s work is stolen every day as music is illegally shared and downloaded.  A single illegal download may not seem like much – the offender probably thinks that they haven’t taken much (if anything) away from the artist.  But just imagine if every student on campus illegally shared/downloaded a single song – that’s over $3000 lost to artists.  Now just think of all the users out there who have illegally downloaded thousands of songs each.  All of this adds up and can be a significant loss to an artist. Instead of illegally downloading songs of our favorite artists, we should support them by buying their music and hopefully this will help them to stick around and make more music – not all artists out there are millionaires.  

About Copyrights and Illegal Downloading. . . A sticky Issue by Betsy Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

My Trinity Network Diagram

The Tour of the Server room was very interesting - we got to see 'behind the scenes'. Now when I hear that the network will be down for several hours in the middle of the night, I will definitely think of all the poor guys working down in the server room. They really have an extremely important job and we probably don't thank them enough for what they do for us!

Trinity Mystery Spot

This is George. I walk by him every day. 

I thought he had a nice silhouette against the cloudy sky that was Trinity today

. . . at least it's not pouring!

In Picnik I made the photo black and white and cropped the bottom off.  I then added a vignette effect to create the dark edges, which i felt made the photo look old - as if taken at Trinity in the 1960s.

Hope y'all like my photo and editing job!

~Betsy

Computer Survival Skills

The best tech tip I received from Mr. Hatch's lecture was about how viruses are spread and about CCleaner. I actually downloaded CCleaner this afternoon and it took a while to scan and clean. Turns out I had over 21,000 Internet Explorer temp files/searches - what a gigantic waste of space!! I'm so glad that he told us about the program - it has made my computer work noticeably faster.

Since I have a PC that runs on Windows XP, I was quite distraught to hear that it allows programs/viruses to be downloaded without my knowledge! Scary! This makes me want a Mac even more. . . until I heard he thinks time will not be kind to Macs. I guess we'll never be able to quite out run the bad geeks and their viruses.