A small piece of advice...

For those students taking this class in the future, have fun with it! As long as you come to class and stay on top of the homework, it's not difficult. Some of the assignments can be time consuming..but don't let yourself fall behind and it'll be just fine :)

Favorite Websites

One of my favorite websites is Leslie's. I love everything about it! The background is simplistic yet eye-catching, the colors and designs go together perfectly and the pictures are amazing. Another website I really enjoyed is Peter's. It is incredibly unique and it's always more fun to spend time browsing a website that's creative! Tommie's website was also very well done. Her navbar was especially impressive and I thought it was a really nice touch to have a different background for each page.

My Website

Please visit my website at www.cs.trinity.edu/~lamsler
The program I used to make my website was Expression Web, which I found to be the easiest to navigate. The idea of creating my own website from scratch seemed overwhelming and extremely difficult. However, once I actually began the design it wasn't too bad. Yes, it took a lot of time but I had learned and mastered all the skills that I would need. Looking back at my site, I don't think I'm particularly proud of one page. I'm actually most proud of my navbar specifically, which I designed in photoshop. I think the black and white color scheme is simple yet appealing and the combination of images and text makes it easy to know which page you are clicking on. If I could change one thing, I'd make a more complex design. It's all very simplistic which is generally ideal but for this assignment I wish I'd experimented more. I struggled with making tables, a lot. And re-sizing pictures to fit in the designated space while not appearing too pixelated. I also struggled with some design aspects, mainly the background. I didn't want it to be tiled but luckily it's not as apparent with the design I chose. I don't plan on going around and showing my website to everyone - however, maybe i'll show it to my roommate because I mention her on my Friends & Family page. Creating a website was a great skill to learn and I hope I get to make another one in the near future, particularly when I start a job. It would be a great advertising technique!

Larry Hechler

I really appreciate the fact that Larry Hechler came in to share his knowledge with our class. There was a lot about computer care that I did not know! Mr. Hechler recommended Dell laptops over other brands, which I thought was very interesting. Luckily, I happen to own a Dell but I was considering switching to a Mac. He informed us that Dell offers a 4 year complete care plan - replacing your damaged laptop no questions asked. He even told us a story about how his son "accidentally" broke his Dell laptop and the company not only replaced it free of charge, they gave him a newer version. Another tip he shared with us was about laptop batteries which, before Mr. Hechler arrived, I had no idea required special care. I learned that the best thing you can do when using your laptop on battery power is to run the battery it all the way down before before charging it back up again. He recommended to do this at least once a month, if not once a week. Good to know!

My picture that lies..

Initially, this was just a photograph of an empty attic which I found on Google images and chose to manipulate because it's so simple that there are endless possibilities for altering the scene. I decided to go in the direction of a haunted attic and added an image of a man which I altered to appear as a ghost. I used the magnetic lasso tool to remove the man from the picture's original white background. Then I dramatically reduced the opacity and saturation to create the transparent look of a ghost. This photograph merely gives off the impression that ghosts exist which is not particularly harmful, unless an individual is overly superstitious of paranormal activity like ghosts.

"Editors breach ethics as well." News Photographer 62.5 (2007):54-55. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 10 November 2010.

The above article discusses the ethics surrounding picture manipulation, but specifically for images that actually affect the public's perception on incidents. While I would say altering an image of a natural disaster causing more/less damage than it really did is unethical, my manipulation isn't on such a large scale. It does not harmfully mess with how people view the world. Therefore the alteration of the above image is not unethical, but I do agree that some editors do cross the line.

My Presentation

As a sociology major I had a wide range of possibilities for my powerpoint. I decided to narrow it down to the effect that violent television exposure has on juvenile crime, because I think criminal activity is one of the most interesting aspects of sociology. I liked the pictures that I stacked on top of each other because it was an appealing visual break from the textual slides. I also had just recently learned how to do that and it was fascinating watching it all come together so well. When putting together this presentation I learned a lot of general statistics on the amount of violent exposure that kids get from television in addition to simply figuring out how to use powerpoint more efficiently. I discovered how to work with transitions to make everything fit together nicely but one thing I might've changed would've been to include some more creative transitions or possibily insert a sound to make my presentation a little bit different.

I especially liked Leslie's presentation because of all the color and beautiful pictures. Each slide was well put together and it not only was it appealing to look at but I learned a lot! She included simple, brief amounts of text which were a nice addition to the presentation without getting in the way. I also really enjoyed Spenser's presentation. It was a very narrowed down topic and straight to the point. She kept my full attention the entire time and I particularly loved the animated GIF that she included on one of her slides. It was very creative.

Chris Nolan

After listening to Chris Nolan speak to our class about Google, I was surprised at the amount of things I did not know. I had thought that I was pretty familiar with all that Google had to offer. I had no idea that the links on the right hand side are sponsored links, in fact I have always been curious what they were doing there. They also aren't necessarily the most relevant or the best, so in the past I have typically ignored them. I also didn't know that about all the little tricks that you can type into the search engine to get better results like the minus symbol to exclude a word. One of the hints that I was particularly surprised at was the ".countrycode" at the end of any search to get results from a specific country sources. I didn't know countries even had codes that you could look up, let alone be able to use that information in a search engine like Google.