Visit My Website

Please visit my website at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~ssteven1
To create this website, I used Expression Web because for some reason, it felt easier than Kompozer to me. I am most proud of my "Favorite Books" page because it is something I'm really passionate about and just generally excited to be able to share with the class and whoever looks at my website. I also think it's visually itneresting that I put the book covers on there because even though the old saying tells us not to, most people do judge books by their cover. If I could change something, I probably would have included more information about myself on my "Home" page becaue it seems a little too concise and perhaps doesn't give a good overall summary of my life. My biggest technical challenge was figuring out how to publish my website and few of the step by stepg problems to get my website to be visually organized exactly how I wanted it to be. I will show my site to my friends and family because most of their beautiful faces are on there in one picture or another and definitely my little brother because I know he will think it's very cool that there's a picture of him on the Internet. I think it might be beneficial to create a resume site in the future for easy access to a visually pleasing composure of my achievements and prerequisites.

Back It Up

In Larry Hechler's talk, I could not believe the story about the girl that paid 5500 dollars just to find out her harddrive was not recoverable! "If you want to keep it, back it up" might be the best computer advice I have ever heard as I have all of my pictures and all of my papers and on the same computer and the idea of losing all of that terrifies me. I also did not know that cleaning a computer with alcohol or amonia would eventually ruin the LCD monitor. As I have a Dell PC and a Mac laptop, I very much appreciated that Larry discussed the pros and cons of PC's and Mac's in a blunt and honest manner. I was also very happy to learn about how helpful Dell is to their customers when accidents happen. I was glad to learn that you should run the battery all the way down before you charge it because I do that unintentionally anyway since I lose my charger so much!  

EPISODE VII: BATTLE OF THE SIDEKICKS

I chose to create a fake movie poster for a Star Wars movie featuring R2D2 and a made up character, the King of the Monkey-Penguins because I feel that photo alteration is most common in the media. I tried to make something ridiculous that no one would believe is true so that the motive behind the manipulation is comical rather than harmful so I selected R2D2 as he is considered a "sideick" in the Star Wars episodes and created the fictional character, the Monkey-Penguin King. I selected three pictures to create my poster, a picture of a penguin, a monkey, and R2D2 that I combined on a gradient background to create the effect illusion that they are in space. I moved the monkey's head to the penguin's body and transformed R2D2 to be facing the Monkey-Penguin. After increasing the saturation and altering the hues of the characters to create a futuristic space effect, I smudged R2D2's light projection and cleaned up the Monkey-Penguin's stomach feathers and created a neon green and black gradient background. This manipulation is more comical than harmful and it could be considered a "spoof" on Star Wars as people would probably not believe there is an actual Episode VII involving something so out of place as a Monkey-Penguin King. In the article I chose, it discusses a picture of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie walking on a beach that was on the cover of a magazine that was a fabrciated photo, leading the public to belive something existed that did not, similar to my Star Wars poster. The article continued to discuss how photos are altered and keys clues for recognizing altered photos. As we have discussed in class and as is discussed in the article, photo manipulation in the media is exceedingly common as celebrities are often pohtoshopped to look "more attractive" than they actually do and people are taken out of the context of the actual to give the public false ideas. I incoroporated this idea in my photograph by creating a false movie poster that could potentially be printed in a magazine and give someone the idea that this movie actually exists.

Wickelgren, Ingrid. "TRUE LIES. (Cover story)." Current Science 92.4 (2006): 10-12. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 11 Nov. 2010.

POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS

For my Powerpoint Presentation, I decided to narrow down the field of English to the Modern Novel because it is one of my favorite eras of literature and something I have learned a lot about in my lit classes recently. I think I should have given a more definite time frame for the genre, although the list of authors adequately depicts the era if you have any previous knowledge of them and most people have read something by at least one of them. I also might have spent a bit more time explaining the drastic changes that take place in the Modern Novel. Overall though, I think I adequately expressed everything that I wanted to about the subject. One of my favorite PowerPoints was Leslie's because it was incredibly visually interesting and that coincided well with her topic. All of her visuals were incredibly well integrated and interesting in their arrangement on the slide. My other favorite powerpoint was Matthew Keath's not only because of the subject matter that I greatly enjoyed and appreciated, but also because in contrast to Leslie's, his was visually neutral and simplistic. I feel that both of these extremes function very well in Powerpoints as long as they are well organized and integrated.

CHRIS NOLAN

Although I was absent for Chris Nolan's presentation, after reading everyone else's blogs, I suspect there was a lot I did not know about Google. I would find the ".countrycode" extremely relevant and useful because often, when I am researching for an English class, I come across sources by French or Italian critics that are completely unuseful to me. I was also unaware that the links on the side of the page were sponsored links, I always dismissed them as unuseful ads, just like you see on any other webpage. Searching through the Internet for a credible source can often be tedious and frustrating so I think all of the tactics useful for narrowing search results will be incredibly helpful in all aspects of academia.

Powerful Points

I have never been a fan of PowerPoint presentations as I had awful experiences with them in seventh grade biology when our teacher created a PowerPoint for every class and all we did was copy exactly what it said until our hands hurt and the bell finally rang. Since I have been in college, however, I have discovered that PowerPoints can be helpful in classes such as my Intro to Psych class because unfortunately I went through a phase of poor studentry in regards to the class and our professor posted his PowerPoints on Tlearn so I was able to view the PowerPoints in conjunction with reading the book and get all of the information that I missed in class. Additionally, when I did go to class, it was always very full and since I had a class directly before it on another part of campus, it was difficult to find a seat other than in the back where I couldn't always necessarily hear and therefore having a PowerPoint projected at the front of the room was very helpful, especially when videos or pictures or graphs were involved. Five things I dislike about PowerPoints however are: 1) When the person presenting them simply reads what is on the PowerPoint which they could have either done without the PowerPoint or gone without presenting.2) When the Poweroint is overly artistic and distracts from the information being presented. 3)When there are unnecessary sounds that accompany the heading spinning each individual letter from the background so that it takes 30 seconds just to see what the slide is about. 4) When the slides do not go in a natural order or are difficult to follow. 5) When the appropriate amount of time is not spent on a slide.

CLT VISIT

Although I had been to CLT before, I knew very little about it. I was very surprised to discover that here are rooms available for students that I think would be incredibly useful if working on a large group project that requires different medias. CLT provides a friendly and helpful environment for students to learn how to do anything from uploading a video to editing sound clips and checking out digital cameras. Since the computers are the newest on campus and can handle the largest files, I can see how they would be very helpful to anyone working on a computer science project or otherwise creating a portfolio of some kind. I thought it was interesting to discover that if a teacher needs a certain program for a class or a certain kind of computer, scanner, or anything else is needed, CLT is the place to go. Overall, I think CLT provides a unique and interactive experience as there are both PC And Mac computers and anything you would need to be successful on a task as well as friendly and nowledgeable people to help you.