Creating your website

The website design is a fun and creative to express your life and show some details about you. Overall the key to a good website design is planning. If you have a good idea of what you want and need, you will be able to efficiently finish while making a great design. Also Creative design with backgrounds and different style elements add a creative and personal feature to your website. Lastly, just have fun with your web design. It's something that is not strict and you can have a great time playing around with your website.

Pics that Lie

I chose this picture because, I thought it would be pretty funny to actually show a punch being thrown at the president. The picture originated from three different pictures. First of all I took a picture of a woman throwing a punch at a man. The next picture ws simplay a picture of President Obama facing outward and the third picture is the background of just a crowd of people. I manipulated each one of the pictures differently using different tools. I used the magic lasso to cut the woman out of her original background and put her as the top layer in the picture. I cut the President out using the magic wand because he had a congruent background, making his manipulation very easy compared to the woman punching. I placed the crowd as the background and used the spot healing to add more grass to picture to show the main characters of the picture in the foreground. I manipulated this picutre for fun because that would never happen in real life. The president is to well surrounded and protected and to see something like that would be amusing to me no matter which President was in office. The picture was not harmful at all because it was used for fun and almost everyone would know that it would never happen.

PPT evaluation

I thoroughly enjoyed all the PowerPoint presentation in class on Tuesday. With all the great powerpoints, my two favorite were Anthony's and Garrett's presentations. I liked Garrett's PPT because of the interesting topic he picked. The business and fun side of Southwest Airlines are unique and something I have never heard about. The wonderful pictures and layers that were used throughout kept me interested and waiting for the next slide. Anthony's Power point, was very good. He gave a great presentation over Engineering and famous engineers. His slides wee very creative and unique, with great pictures and backgrounds. He never overdid his pictures and layers but there were just enough to keep me in the presentation. The addition of the sound bite at the beginning gave the presentation a unique start that no one else had. Overall everyone's PowerPoint was great but to these to were my favorite and best.

Power point

PowerPoints are easy, exciting ways to make a presentation. They can be fun but also can be tricky. These informative articles bring up some very interesting points concerning PowerPoint tricks and tools of the trade that can make every user successful. These readings help us to investigate other options and steer clear of potential problems that we see every day in PowerPoint.

1. Stay consistent and to-the-point. Although it is important to use different effects, I hate it when people use 10 different effects on one slide… because sometimes this makes it confusing and hard for people to follow.
2. Come prepared, even for the worst. I can’t even remember how many times a presentation hasn’t gone exactly as someone planned, and, because of this, the person was lost. I think you must come prepared, whether it’s free-hand notes or print-outs, be ready for anything because you never know what could happen.
3. Moderate your slides and avoid clutter. I hate it when people overload a particular slide with information. Sometimes it is hard enough to follow a presentation, and packing a slide with a lot of info just adds the difficulty to this sticky situation.
4. Integrate pictures, images, and clips. Be awarethough because just enough os these will solve your problems but too much will kill you. I think it’s important to use the capabilities that we have learned about in class, but be careful because this could make or break the flow of a presentation.
5. Finally, be confident in your work. If you have worked hard on a presentation, then act like it! We all know how difficult public speaking can be… but we all put a ton of hard work and effort into the presentations. So, in light of this, we need to be assured in our ability to convey whatever message we are bringing to class.

CLT

The trip to the CLT was a very informative experience. I knew that the CLT existed, but only because I had to be down there for an English presentation. After going down with the class, I learned alot more about the CLT and what goes on down there. When I first went I didn't pay attention to the different assortment of computers, such as Macs and PCs, or the different areas of the CLT that had different programs or special uses. I learned that there are many different programs for editing videos and pictures that are made available to me in the CLT. Now that I know more the CLT, I will definitely be down there using the different tools that are provided. For our Computer Skills class, I will definitely be using the photoshop element from the CLT. I don't have 500 or 600 dollars to spend on photoshop and since I can use photoshop for free I will take advantage of that. Another things I might use from the CLT is their checkout of cameras. I didn't have a personal camera and use of a digital or video camera may come in use for our class. As for other classes I might use different editing tools for videos as well as photoshop for different projects that I might need to use. On my own time I play the piano and sometimes I like to practice or just play for fun. I didn't know that they had the recording studio that is open to anyone. I may not be recording anything but just playing and having a place to play is all I need. Overall the I learned alot and have definitely been opened to this beautiful multi-million dollar facility all for me to use.

Excel

I really enjoyed the entire excel unit over the last three weeks or so. Coming in to the class I had relatively no knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet to do different things. I knew that lots of different things, like formulas and functions, could be used to set up a running balance or budget but didn't necessarily know how to make it work for me. I probably could have sat at a computer for hours trying to learn everything on my own; however, with as much stuff as there is to know about excel i would have been just wasting my time. I never would have learned anything on my own. The thing that I really loved about excel is the absolute and relative cell references. I never knew that a simple drag of the mouse could allow you to drag the same formula to as many different cells as you need. Before I might have to type in each formula in each different cell but this allows me to make life so much easier. I also loved all the cell formatting as well as conditional formatting. This allows me to organize different sets of data that i might need and display them in a way that anyone can understand. I have already used this different things in my biology lab in which we are using spreadsheets to organize our data from our experiment. This has helped enormously making the excel sheet very easy. I also will use excel to keep a running balance for my checking account. I like that I wouldn't have to write it out and the computer automatically does the math for me. Overall this was a great unit and I learned more in this unit than I did anywhere else before.

Chris Nolan

Since I was gone on Thursday because of a soccer trip, I happen to miss out on a very informative lecture by Chris Nolan to the rest of the class. I have read a few of my classmates blog’s and have noticed that the common theme that he lectured about was about search engines, especially Google, as well as URL’s and the significance from them. I learned from reading that the internet that was once dominated by the likes of Yahoo and AOL has been overtaken by the Google phenomenon. Many people prefer Google over any other search engine. I also learned how search engine actually works. There are many factors that influence the actual search like frequency of words and popularity if the sites that appear. It is very interesting many factors go into a search to find the best website for you. In reading other blogs, I learned that the domain names actually can have more validity than others, such as “.edu” and “.gov”. To show there validity the scholarly sources place, throughout their articles, different links to resources that they used while conducting their research. I found reading these different blogs very interesting and only wish that I could have been there to hear the lecture myself.

Lying Picture

I chose the "Fire On Ice" picture with Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan skating together. I chose this picture because it looked interesting and also after reading it has an interesting story to the picture. The picture was the cover of New York Newsday in February 1994, and was manipulated by placing two pictures together to make one combined picture to show the two girls skating together even though they are competitors. It was manipulated because only a few days before one of the associates of Harding made an attack on Kerrigan, which I'm sure led to a feud between the two. They were fierce rivals skating together the day before an event; that would never happen especially since they were angry at each other from the attacking comments a few days before. I don't think this manipulation would be harmful to anyone because it just shows the girls practicing with each other and not doing anything bad to harm each other or themselves.

Jason Hardin Copyright

First of all, I would like to thank Mr. Hardin for coming and taking the time to talk to our class about the issue of copyright. Throughout his presentation i learned many things from what is considered illegal to creative commons an the things that you can do with that kind of copyright. What I thought was interesting was the actual law for copyright. The law right now for a copyright is the author's life plus 70 years after, but what really caught my attention was the story about how the law was changed 14 years ago due to The Walt Disney Company and their strive to change the law. Is this right and ethical?
To me it isn't right. Just one company changing the entire law to suit themselves is not right in my eyes and isn't very ethical as well. Eventhough the characters that they are trying to keep under copyright, like mickey and donald duck, are very famous and can see how they would want to keep them, they cant just change the law for only one company. Since it has already been changed, I assume that in 6 years the Walt Disney company will appeal the law again to get it changed again; however, the law shouldnt be changed. It should be left as it is until there is a very viable reason to change the law.
I can see; however, the way the Walt Disney company feels about their characters and stories that are currently under copyright. When their characters go into the public domain, who knows how people will use them or what they will do, and as a leader of this company I would never want the characters as famous as the ones Walt Disney had to be used by everyone to use them as they want. I dont think however the law will change twice for these charaters and soon enough mickey mouse and others will be in the public domain.

My Network Diagram

Joe Hatch Best Tip

I thoroughly enjoyed all the information that Mr. Hatch shared with us last week. The things I learned about and used was CCleaner. It helped get rid of junk that was on my computer and was very easy to install and run. I liked it and it was overall very easy to work and use.

Introduction to Alan

What's up my name is Alan Castillejos, and I am from Odessa, TX. I am the son of Dr. Javier and Vicki Castillejos and have lived in west Texas my whole life. I grew up basically an only child even though I have two older sisters. Tania, the oldest, is 17 years older than me and Linda, the middle child is 13 years older than me. They both graduated from Texas A&M and are married living their own lives. Even though I never really grew up with them I still remain close to both of my sisters.
I love to play and watch all sports. Throughout my life I have played soccer, football, basketball, baseball, tennis, ran track and cross country. However, once I advanced through High School I had to drop all of the sports except football and soccer. I played football and soccer for the Odessa Permian Panthers, which is also known as the team from the book and movie Friday Night Lights. Now that I am in college I only play one sport for the tigers, soccer. Since I had to choose between the two, I chose the best and my favorite sport in the world.
My secret fact that not very many people know about me is that I am Guatemalan. My family is from their and even though I have never lived their I have dual citizenship between Guatemala and the U.S.A. Guatemala is a very beautiful yet a poverty stricken country. It has many beautiful views as well as over 20 volcanoes. It also has Tikal, the capital for the ancient Mayan civilization which is now extinct. Overall Guatemala is a unique country which I enjoy being a part of. Being a citizen of Guatemala allows me to play soccer for the national team. I am currently on the sub-20 national soccer team and will be qualifying next summer for the u-20 world cup 2011 in Columbia.
I have never really had any computer training other than high school classes. I like computers but have never really had a chance to learn how to use them effectively for research or other things like blogging.
If you have any questions about me or anything about this blog feel free to email me at acastil3@trinity.edu