ATTENTION ALL NEW STUDENTS

Do your homework, show up to class, and a lot of the assignments can be cool so try to have fun.

Student Websites

All of these were great websites and it was obvious that a lot of work was put into them, and in reality they are all my favorite. But the assignment calls for me to pick just three, so after agonizing over this for days here are the three that I came up with: Joy's website was great, especially the homepage. I liked how the links to her other pages were neatly placed in the picture rather than in a standard bar at the top or bottom. Ralph's website had very cool pictures and an interesting travel topic. I also liked the links that he had to the different websites throughout his own site. I also really liked Abigail's website. The photos she had on there were amazing and the backgrounds that she had on her pages were perfect because they did not distract from the awesome pictures. Those were three of my favorite websites, the link to my site is http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~amoritz.

Why You need to know HTML, if You are a web designer

It is always important for people to know what they are doing and how things work if it is their job to know such things. Web designers need to know HTML so that if something goes wrong with the web page or the program that they are using to build the web page, then they can go in and fix the problem or continue working. Plus, even though you are doing all of your work on a computer, you don't want the computer to have too much power over you, so knowing how to 'manually' do HTML can help you control your computer rather than the other way around, if you are a web designer. If web designers don't know how to do HTML, then nobody will and it would be pretty hard to make advancements in that area without knowledge of the basics.

Great Presentations in PowerPoint History

Everybody did a great job on their PowerPoints and I could really see the passion that everybody had for their subjects. I really enjoyed Ralph's and Abigail's presentations, for different reasons. Ralph's presentation on soccer and its impact on people touched on what is at the core of sports, and that is just how sport is a great sanctuary for people. How when things maybe aren't going how you want them too, then you can always just go to the soccer field or whatever field you play on and everything just feels right and makes sense. The presentation had a sort of intangible quality that made me fall in love with sports all over again. It was like the love song of presentations. Abigail's had the coolest themes with the clouds. I am just going off of my less than thorough notes here, so I have that her presentation was on "perspective". I am not sure what that means, but I think that it might have been about English. Anyway, the opening slide where all of the clouds came together was really cool and I loved all of the bright colors that were used. It was like the "Transformers" of presentations in that it looked cool and had flashy colors, but I don't remember what it was specifically about. If for some reason you read this, then sorry Abigail.

Surfing the Web with Chris Nolan

Thanks to Chris Nolan for an insightful presentation on the search engines that I use on a daily basis. If I can continue with the surfing metaphor from the title, when I had been using these search engines, I was only seeing the surface of the water. I learned that me and 60% of the other internet users surf in Google's sea and Chris Nolan showed me all of the wonderful things that live below the surface of the water. There's that fish that looks like a minus sign, and whatever you type after it is excluded from your search, also any fish that are caught in quotation marks have to appear exactly in the order that they were typed in your search. I was also taught to be on the lookout for fish that may not be reliable sources to quote in research papers. I should look to see who produced the fish and what kind of credentials they have. Maybe the coolest thing that Chris Nolan showed us was that tool that shows which fish that appear in the Google Sea also appear in the Yahoo Sea, and their importance in each sea. 

Points for PowerPoint

Powerpoint can be a very exciting tool used in the academic, business or real world. However, Powerpoints can also be very bad an unbearable. There are many things that one must do so that they do not create an unbearable PowerPoint. 

It is best to just keep it simple on Powerpoint slideshows, especially when it comes to the backgrounds. They should be there to be somewhat visually stimulating, but not so much that it takes away from the actual talking points of your presentation. Speaking of talking points, that is what they should be, points. Putting every piece of information that you know about a topic onto a slide makes it look crowded and jumbled. It also makes it hard for the audience to focus or take anything away from the presentation. It is best to put a moderate amount of information, and extend on it in your oral presentation. Also, animations and pictures should be used to enforce the points that have already been made and should be related to what the presentation is about. Those are some pointers for PowerPoint, better late than never.

In My Opinion, Excel excels!

I have learned quite a bit about excel during this unit. I never knew how many real world applications it has, and that will definitely will come in handy when the wife and kids are relying on Daddy to do the family finances. I even use it now, without the wife and kids, to send my NFL picks to my dad and we can keep track of who is better at guessing the games. I also had no idea that it was that effective at creating graphs, and from now on whenever I need a graph, I know where to go. Bottom line, for being a screen with gridlines on it, Excel gives us way more than could ever be expected.