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.

Now You See It, Now You Don't

I chose the photo by the Museum of Hoaxes that shows a shark jumping out of the water at a U.S. Air Fore helicopter because I thought that it was the best doctored photo out of all of them. All of the other ones did silly and harmful things to the photos to attack political candidates or to makes people skinnier, but this photo doesn't do anything like that. They inserted a shark at the bottom of the photo, probably to make the Air Force look even more dangerous than it already is, and released it on the Internet. Now if you see a photo that is on the Internet and has been shot by the Museum of Hoaxes, there is no doubt that that picture is real. They also flipped the photo so that the helicopter is pointing the opposite way, probably so that when the real photo surfaced, they could deny that it was the same because everything was backwards. All in all though, this was not very harmful and it made a cool looking picture, unlike the awkward one where the author is holding an invisible cigarette.

What Would I do without the CLT?

Oh, Center for Learning & Technology, let me count the ways that I love you. First, you have computer workstations with both Macs and PCs and you have laser printers so that we can print off our amazing work and take it with us. You also have labs where the students can work on their various digital audio and media presentation needs as well as the Innovation studio where I can finally learn the ins and out of TLEARN. The CLT is also where the Cable Campus TV system is controlled, so that I can get my TigerTV, I'm a big fan. Also, if I felt the need to talk with someone in Hawaii, but felt that this person is deserving enough to see my face when I talk with them, then I could use the Video Conference Center, a room big enough to accommodate me and my 31 closest friends. Last but not least, the Center is sponsored by AT&T, which rhymes with CLT. The CLT has numerous resources that I didn't know could even exist and is a great help to any college student.

Copyright Law is FUN!

Copyright is important to protect the rights of the artists who make the music, movies and logos that we love. Wouldn't Mickey Mouse just not look the same without that little encircled c next to his feet. 

I also love how the RIAA, the MPAA and the other one that no one cares about specifically target college campuses in their investigations so that the only way that cheap college students can watch these movies or listen to these songs is to buy them legally. I'm all for legally, especially if it means withholding art from the world. Obviously these artists who made these works of art would rather make some money rather than actually contribute to society. Besides you could hear any of these songs on the radio for free or catch some of these movies on television for free. Whoever thought of making people pay for something that they could get for free is a genius, just like that guy who invented bottled water.

On the other hand it would really stink to have worked really hard with my band on our new song only to have some kid download it for free in between games of World of Warcraft. I didn't give that punk permission to enjoy my beautiful music and I certainly didn't give him permission to use it in a Youtube video. So I am glad as an artist that the RIAA is looking out for me and trying to stop the illegal downloading of my hard work.

In the end, it is a good idea to protect people's rights and their ideas so that they get the credit and money that they deserve.

Wireless Network

I did learn quite a lot about the wireless network, mostly about the servers. I just use my computer for word documents and homework. For the internet, I do go on Yahoo and stuff to check on my e-mail and also my school e-mail. I don't carry my computer around or anything and I most use the ethernet cable. I don't use the wireless a whole lot, and never for homework, but here is a link to a wikipedia article on wireless network, right here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_network. Hope that is helpful.

My First Entry

I'm Andrew and I am from Southlake, TX. My secret fact that I wrote down is that I was born in Chicago ( that's unique), and I did live the first 14 years of my life there. I am a first year and am part of the work-study, so I have interviewed for a couple of jobs. I love movies, I could watch any movie, no matter how bad or chick-flicky it is. I do not have any special computer skills or concerns and I have made sure that my Trinity e-mail is working. That is everything off the checklist so I am done.

E-mail me at amoritz@trinity.edu